You Can Get Through It: How to Handle the Hardest Things That Will Ever Happen to You | Dr. Lucy Hone

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hey, hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. When I think back at the times in my life when I've experienced the most anxiety and the deepest depression, they're really during times of either transition or setbacks. So a transition is like going to college or graduating from college or enduring a breakup with a girlfriend and setbacks like problems at work or the health decline of my parents. I really get thrown off in these periods. So I'm very interested to speak to my guest today, Dr. Lucy Hone, about the science and skill of resilience. Dr. Hone has written a book called How Will I Ever Get Through This? Evidence Based Tools to Help You Heal From Hardship, Grief and Loss. Dr. Hone, welcome to the show.

**Lucy Hone** (0:55)
Hello, Dan and hello to all of your listeners. It's a complete privilege to be with you here today.

**Dan Harris** (1:01)
I do want to acknowledge that you come to this work the hard way, due to some extremely painful personal experience. Are you comfortable talking about that?

**Lucy Hone** (1:13)
Yes, I am.
In truth, I was already studying psychological flourishing. I was actually in the last throes of my Ph.D. research when our beautiful 12-year-old daughter, Abby, was killed in a car accident one unsuspecting Saturday afternoon, along with her best friend, Ella, and Ella's mum, Sally, who was a really good friend of mine. So I went from that kind of academic understanding of resilience, thrown into the, well, buckle up, honey, because here it is at your doorstep.

**Dan Harris** (1:54)
I'm so sorry. When was this?

**Lucy Hone** (1:57)
So a long time ago now, 2014
So we've just actually passed that milestone of 12 years that she was alive 12 years, and now, dear thing, she's been dead for 12 years. So, yeah, two lives.

**Dan Harris** (2:17)
Was this your only child?

**Lucy Hone** (2:19)
No. Fortunately for us, we have two beautiful boys who, as I speak to you today, are 28 and 26, two brothers who are on a two-month-long surf trip in Mexico together at the moment, which is, you know, as a mom, this is kind of my peak life moment. My boys chose to go away together.

**Dan Harris** (2:42)
That's beautiful. Well, my younger brother is still my best friend to this day. A wrenching loss, no question about it.
And you were, as you said, you were studying human flourishing. Did this provoke you to take a deeper dive into resilience itself?

**Lucy Hone** (2:58)
I love the fact that so many of your listeners will be so familiar with many of the concepts that I was studying at the time. And obviously you too, Dan. And the biggest, I think, challenge for me was that, so my PhD was in conceptualizing, measuring flourishing, working out what do we actually mean by flourishing. And from an academic point of view, what do you have to have to be able to be categorized as flourishing. And so back in 2014, and still today, you pretty much have to be experiencing high levels of positive emotion and high levels of life satisfaction, as well as meaning, purpose, resilience, optimism, strong supportive relationships, accomplishment, engagement, all of those things.
And my biggest beef after the girls died and my biggest realization and reckoning was how absurd it was to expect people to have high levels of positive affect and life satisfaction, given how many of us are going through some major life transition or event, which, as you said at the beginning, has a huge impact on how we feel.

**Dan Harris** (4:25)
I think you call them BFTs.

**Lucy Hone** (4:27)
I do call them BFTs. Do you swear on your show? I think you do, don't you, Dan?

**Dan Harris** (4:32)
I know you. I've heard you swear. Yes, yes, yes.

**Lucy Hone** (4:35)
Hell yeah.
So it's a family saying that came from many years ago, where we call a big life event or just something that is most vexing a BFT which stands for bloody effing thing. In my professional career nowadays, I try not to swear, but because I'm British, that's quite hard.

**Dan Harris** (4:59)
I want to just repeat that this is a safe place for you to do so, but if you comport yourself, however, makes you most comfortable. If I understand the thrust of your work correctly, it's not, I mean, you went through what, what in my opinion would be the hardest of all possible BFTs, but it's a spectrum that would include the things I was listening before, like graduating from college and not knowing what you're going to do next, or going through a breakup, etc, etc. Or a garden variety BFTs.