Glen Phillips, frontman of acclaimed rock band TOAD THE WET SPROCKET sits in with Brett Newski to chat about overcoming depression, self-criticism, meditation styles, and finding optimism in the near future.
More on Glen: https://www.glenphillips.com/
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Glen Phillips and Brett Newski live
EXCERPT:
Glen: I have a friend who described different drugs and medicines by asking, are they taking something from the future? With coffee, the caffeine is taking this afternoon’s energy.
Brett: Ahh.
Glen: Taking it from then and giving it to you now. So there’s this balance, how much energy do you want to pull from your future to feel it in the morning. You negotiate these things. And for alcohol, it was the greatest description. What alcohol does, is it takes a little bit of tomorrow’s happiness, and it gives it to you in that first thirty minutes.
Brett: “Borrowing from tomorrow,” that’s good.
Glen: You get this little serotonin blast in the first thirty minutes, even hour of alcohol. It lasts for a little while—you get this high, and then you hit tomorrow. If you’re not drinking every day and are fairly full on happiness, you can afford to tipple a little off the top, then let it refill over the next few days.
And then you’re full again, and you’re good. And then maybe, you know, once a week, maybe have another drink, and then it goes down, and back up. But if you’re doing it every day, the reserve goes down until you hit zero. And then there you are. And you keep drinking hoping to get tomorrow’s happiness back, and you’re done, you’re out. You don’t have that reserve.
My girlfriend is really good about that. She likes her wine when she has her wine, but she’s a teacher, a mother, likes to be present, she has a deep yoga practice, she doesn’t want anything to get in the way of those things.
In the two+ years we’ve been together, any time she’s had alcohol twice in a row, she’s like, “Shit.” It’s only happened twice, and she totally feels the difference. So she has her wine on Friday and that’s it. She enjoys it, and then lets it fill up again.
Brett: The morale-o-meter. What would you call it? Do you have a name for the “meter”?
Glen: Morale-o-meter works for me. Because it also sounds like something that reminds me of “platypus.”
Brett: I love the word “morale” and I use it daily. I wish I would have known about the morale-o-meter in my 20s. Because any time that I’m feeling way up here, I know I’ll have to pay for it later. I’ll have to pay the feelgood tax.
That was something I never realized as a younger person. Running out of your dopamine, and not realizing that you need to take care of your physical health to take care of your mental health.
It’s great to be aware of the morale-o-meter. It’s like the yin and yang of Chinese medicine. It’s so true! You're gonna have to pay for the highs, and on the other side, the lows are temporary and won’t last forever. And I find comfort in that. *full audio episode above
