Bite Your Tongue: The Podcast
Did you ever expect being the parent of an adult child would be so difficult? Introducing "Bite Your Tongue," a look at exploring that next chapter in parenting: building healthy relationships with adult children. From money and finance to relationships and sibling rivalry, we cover it all. Even when to bite your tongue! Join your host Denise Gorant as she brings together experts, parents and even young adults to discuss this next phase of parenting. We will chat, have some fun and learn about ourselves and our kids along the way! RSSVERIFY
Bite Your Tongue: The Podcast
Just Do Nothing: Parenting Better by Doing Less
Send us your feedback here: biteyourtonguepodcast@gmail.com or give us a ring at 719-347-1106. Tell us what is on your mind.
Now on to today's episode:
What if the hardest part of parenting adult children isn’t knowing what to do—but knowing when to stop?
In this episode of Bite Your Tongue, Denise sits down with licensed therapist and author Joanna Hardis to unpack her counterintuitive but powerful philosophy: doing nothing can be one of the most supportive things a parent does.
Joanna introduces the concept of distress tolerance—our ability to sit with discomfort without reacting—and explains why parents so often over-function, over-talk, over-explain, and over-apologize when their adult children struggle. While it may feel helpful in the moment, those reactions are often driven by our own anxiety rather than our child’s actual needs.
Together, Denise and Joanna explore:
- Why parents confuse love with action—and how that backfires
- How “doing nothing” is not abandonment, but emotional regulation
- The difference between responding thoughtfully vs. reacting emotionally
- Why swooping in sends the message “I don’t trust you”
- How over-talking and people-pleasing quietly erode connection
- The shift from doing mode to being mode in parenting
- Practical, small “weight-lifting” exercises to build distress tolerance
Joanna offers concrete tools parents can start using today—beginning with something surprisingly simple: putting your phone down and sitting with discomfort.
This conversation is a must-listen for parents who love deeply, worry constantly, and want healthier, calmer relationships with their adult children—without losing themselves in the process.
Guest Resources: 🌐 JoannaHardis.com
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719-347-1106.
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Huge thanks to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer.
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So if my kid is upset, I've pissed my kid off. I feel like I have to overexplain. The function of my overexplaining is because I'm so upset that I've pissed them off. Function is purely to get rid of my distress. I am trying to get rid of a feeling inside of me that I've hurt someone that is so uncomfortable. Not responding to the situation. The situation is that they needed a limit. It was okay that I said no. The feeling inside of me was uncomfortable, and I have reacted to my feeling, which is never a good thing to do.
SPEAKER_02:Hey everyone, welcome to Bite Your Tongue the podcast. Join me, your host, Denise Gorant, as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children. Together we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories, and get timely advice, addressing topics that matter most to you. Get ready to dive deep and learn to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children. And of course, when to bite our tongues. So let's get started. Hello everyone, and welcome to a new year and a new episode of Bite Your Tongue the podcast. We're starting off right this year because we're doing nothing. That's right, we're talking to someone who's gonna help us maybe bite our tongues even more and just do nothing. Think about it. How hard is it for you to sit with discomfort when your child struggles? Do you have an urge to text or even call them just to see how they're doing? You think to yourself, I'm not butting in, I'm just just seeing how they're doing. We're gonna learn about this distress tolerance, how to stop, even when our children are doing things we don't like or we're uncomfortable with or even worried about. So let's get started. Today's guest is Joanna Hardist. She's a licensed independent social worker and cognitive behavioral therapist from Ohio. She's the author of the book called Just Do Nothing for Parents: How to Parent Better by Doing Less. Her work focuses on helping parents manage this discomfort, reduce overactivity, and build resilience through distress tolerance. Lord knows I need that. Sometimes when things go wrong with my kids, I just walk around nervous all day, hoping everything turns out. And it's hard to do nothing. We often think good parenting means doing more, more advice, more involvement, more fixing. But Joanna challenges that idea. What if the best way to support our adult children and ourselves is to do less? I certainly believe that, but I'd like the tools to know how. We need to learn to pause, breathe, and strengthen our ability to tolerate this discomfort. We'll talk about how parents develop emotional armor, why just doing nothing doesn't always mean disengaging, and how learning to tolerate distress can help us build healthier, even calmer relationships with our adult children. So instead of doing nothing right now, we're going to do something and we're going to welcome Joanna Hardis. Joanna, we're so happy to have you with us today. We're not doing nothing, we're having you as a guest. I'm so happy to be here. Your book is titled Just Do Nothing, and it's very counterintuitive. What inspired you to write it? And what does doing nothing really mean for parents, particularly those of adult children?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, sure. So that is like a three-part question. Okay. Answer it in three parts. Yep. Okay. So it is a paradoxical approach. Which one should I answer first? Whatever you feel comfortable with. You're the guest. Yes. I love it. Oh, wow. I'm the guest. Okay. So the first book, which was Just Do Nothing, a paradoxical approach to getting out of your way, which kind of started the whole thing, was inspired by a really personal moment in my life when I had gotten ghosted by someone that I had dated right before we were supposed to go on vacation together. Oh my gosh. I know. I'm a single mom and got divorced when my kids were very, very young and had gotten back into dating and got ghosted. So I went on vacation by myself for a week and really had to do what I tell clients all the time, which is you have to just do nothing with the stuff in your head. You got to leave that stuff in your head alone. Like stop fixating on how you feel and the stuff in your head. That vacation, I had to resist the urge to overthink, ruminate, try and figure out why he did what he did. And I had to take all those emotions I was feeling the sadness, the rejection, the anger, all of them with me as I tried, as I hiked, as I played pickleball, as I did yoga, and like really practice what I preach. And during the course of that week, I had the inspiration, like, oh, you know, this could be a book. I really had never had plans to write a book. I'm a therapist full-time, but that's the inspiration for that first book. Then the second book, which was just released for parents, that really came to me because, as a parent, between my own mishaps as a parent, because my own emotions get in the way of parenting, or all the parents with whom I've worked for decades, it really was just so top of mind to me. And it is so paradoxical what we have to do.
SPEAKER_02:You're absolutely right. You talk in your book about distress tolerance. And you kind of mentioned that when you're going on this vacation, and you know, your urge, whether it be your adult kid, your boyfriend, whatever it might be, is to text him, call him, talk to a friend about it. What have I done wrong? How am I going to deal with this? I think I'll have two hamburgers tonight because I can't handle this. Um, why is this such a critical skill for parents? And I think especially those of adult children, because when the kids are little, I feel like the stakes are not as high, i.e., a kid can fail a test and still do fine in life. When you watch an adult child make what looks like a serious mistake, the stakes are very high as you watch it. So, how do we begin today to build that armor that you talk about to help step back and do nothing with our adult children?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Okay. So let's first I want to define, because I'm sure no one in this audience knows what distress tolerance is.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I want to define it and then kind of nerd out for a second and talk about why it's so important.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:The high-level definition of it is the ability to proceed in goal-directed activities despite aversive internal states.
SPEAKER_02:That makes perfect sense. Oh, I think that I understand that completely. The the the ability to go forward, live your life, do things, even though things are haunting you that are terrible in the background. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Sort of. Okay. What it means is the ability to feel emotional discomfort or the perception that you can feel and experience emotional discomfort without avoiding it or making it worse.
SPEAKER_02:Emotional discomfort without avoiding it or making it worse. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:We're not talking about the one-off time where, oh, I felt so overwhelmed with worry that I blew up my adult child's phone. Okay. Because we've all had that, we've all had that moment where we had an instance of not being able to tolerate our own discomfort and we behaved perhaps irrationally. We're talking about a pattern of behavior where we get hijacked by our own fear, our own shame, our own embarrassment, our own guilt, our own boredom. Most people may say, that doesn't happen to me. But here's the thing: I agree with you that I that as the kids get older, it gets harder. But these patterns, my guesses, have been going on since the kids were little. Absolutely. This is where I want parents to really listen with curiosity and compassion for themselves. Because anytime we talk about parenting, no matter what, people's armor goes up and people get really defensive. And so, in order to look at ourselves, I think we have to approach it with curiosity and compassion toward ourselves. So I want to preface it with none of us, especially the older we are, learned how to navigate these challenging emotions well. None of us. We all learned to cope with them in a way that helped us keep moving, but but most of us didn't learn how to how to move through them and get through it well. We may have learned how to just people please. We may have learned to just avoid them. We may have learned just to get really defensive. We may have learned to just evade completely. We may have learned to just numb out in some way. We may have learned that we're going to be the good girl or the nice person. We may have learned that we just work, work, work, work, work and achieve and be super perfect.
SPEAKER_02:I sort of get it. It's more complicated than it is. It is. It's much more complicated than I thought because I think a lot of it has to do also with self-control. And I'd like to figure out how self-control ties into it. But let's let's get to a specific example. Yes. I'm freaking out, let's say my adult child's in a situation that truly causes me distress. It might be financial irresponsibility, poor relationship choices, or even the fear of estrangement. What do I do now? It's haunting me. I'm struggling with, oh my gosh, they're going to buy this house, they don't have enough money, or they're spending too much money, or they're going to marry this person. And maybe you're watching this person be abusive to your daughter or son and you're scared.
SPEAKER_01:What do you think? So let's take the relationship. Let's take the relationship choice. Because I hear that one all the time. Okay. The relationship choice. Every time we have to look at the situation because when we're in conversation with our child, my guess is what happens is that we get really reactive to our distress. And so, yes, we have to separate the situation, which is yeah, like it's distressing. There are concerns about the situation. However, when we have conversations with our child, what may happen is that we get so reactive to our own fears and our own distress that something happens that we can't have productive conversations. That makes perfect sense. So how do we control that? I'm slowing it down a little bit. What happens is we probably go into what's called like an amygdala hijack, which means you go right into like fight or flight and you start reacting to your feelings. And so you might talk too much, you don't listen, you lecture. And ultimately that pulls you away from your child, and your child shuts down and they're not even listening. And so what we want to do is we want to help the person build their tolerance so they're not so reactive to their own feelings. Now, ultimately, do they have much control over who their child marries? Possibly not. But you also whatever they're doing may be moving them further away from their relationship with their child. What I'm suggesting in the book is being able to build a skill set to build that, it's not a muscle, but to be able to build that muscle for building your distress tolerance. The way that I do it is say being able to have that conversation with your child is think of it in terms of weight training. Being able to have conversations with your child may be like analogous to a 25-pound weight. It's like a bicep curl. Think of it like a bicep curl. That's a 25-pound weight. So I have to be able to teach the person the skills and start them at a three-pound weight to be able to tolerate discomfort because my guess is they may not be able to do it with a three-pound weight. Let's look at other situations where you may feel discomfort and how are you reacting there?
SPEAKER_02:So don't start with the tough part. The 25-pound weight might be with your adult child, the three-pound weight might be your neighbor.
SPEAKER_01:Or yeah. How do you respond if you hear feedback you don't like at work? At work, right? Yeah. My guess is, and I don't understand. Obviously, I have to understand in that person. And in the book, we talk about there's a whole chapter on building that person's awareness about what happens for you when you start to get overwhelmed. What happens when you start to feel distressed? How do you how do you respond? Because that person has to understand their process. Do you shut down? Do you get defensive? Do you underreact? Do you overreact? Do you just immediately go to people please? Do you go and and you can't stop talking because you have to? Do you immediately interrupt? What is your personal style when you feel distressed? And we take that and then we figure out okay, what's your weight training plan to microdose discomfort?
SPEAKER_02:First, I'm going to say something about the people pleasing, because I think this plays a lot into it, even if you're down with your three-pound weight. Um for parents, especially mothers, we've spent years people pleasing. And this is interfering then because as we started people pleasing at our work, in our parenting with kids' friends, we want everyone to be happy. So the minute you hear someone's not happy with you, you do somersaults to get them happy. Well, some people, like you said, they either shut down, they talk too much, they interrupt, they call friends and talk about it, they can't let go of it. So, what's our first step in starting to identify? Well, let's start with someone who can't shut up. Because typically the person who can't shut up, I think, is going to be the person that's going to be the most damaged to the adult child relationship. So you notice at work, something bad happens, you can't stop talking about it. You go to the office next door. Why did John say this about me? I turned that in on time, blah, blah, blah. How do you then handle that discomfort?
SPEAKER_01:What's my first step? We see a behavior, someone who talks too much. We have to figure, it may not be that they're distress intolerant.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe they have poor impulse control because we don't know. So, in this is why in the in the book, I talk about we have to understand what is the function of the behavior. So, part of what I want to do for parents is help them determine, and this is one of the most important questions. What is the function of my behavior? Give me an example. Okay. Of course. Yeah, of course. Like with my kids, I am an over-talker. So if my kid is upset, I've pissed my kid off, which I do all the time. I feel like I have to overexplain why I pissed them off. Because the function of my overexplaining is because I'm so upset that I've pissed them off. Function is purely to get rid of my distress. I don't have an impulse control problem. I have an anxiety problem. I am trying to get rid of a feeling inside of me that I've hurt someone that is so uncomfortable. Yes. Not responding to the situation. Situation is that they needed a limit. It was okay that I said no. The feeling inside of me was uncomfortable. And I have reacted to my feeling, which is never a good thing to do. So we have to understand what is the function of the behavior. If the person at work is talking too much, we have to understand. Are they talking too much because they're trying to get rid of a feeling inside? Do they have an impulse control problem? Are they like trying to stir up drama? Like, we don't know.
SPEAKER_02:Once we've identified that, let's go to your situation because I think you're one in one million parents that would react that same way. You've pissed off your kid in many ways. It could be you said something you shouldn't have said. You said something to their spouse, you gave their child sugar, whatever it might be, and you're just harboring this guilt. Okay. What are my steps now? Now I know I have anxiety. I want this to go away. How do I help myself? This is the paradoxical approach.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, do nothing. The feeling isn't the problem. Yeah, I get it now. This is where it's building my tolerance for that feeling. The feeling isn't the problem. The problem is me trying to get rid of it by talking too damn much.
SPEAKER_02:You probably should start with, I'm sorry, when they tell you you screwed up and then stop. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you're done.
SPEAKER_01:And then I'm done. And in my work is to be able to acknowledge, yeah, I feel, you know, it it's so hard to disappoint. It is so hard.
SPEAKER_02:I get this so much now. Okay, you put it in a way that I really get it now, because there are many times you think, oh, I shouldn't have said that, or uh, maybe I should have invited them to this, blah, blah, blah. And yes, fess up, you screwed up. Oh, gosh, I'm sorry that upset you, or whatever it might be, and then you're done.
SPEAKER_01:Or it's really hard to see you hurting. And I trust that you can figure it out.
SPEAKER_02:I don't want to put it back on them because it was it was my issue, I think. I would be more apt to just say, it's really hard to see you hurting. I'm sorry I contributed to that and move on. Or could I not say that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it depends what the situation is. It really depends. But sometimes saying no is okay. If you didn't deliver it in the best of ways, which I'm typically guilty of, then sure, like my delivery could have been better. Absolutely. But oftentimes, parents just struggle to say no.
SPEAKER_02:But you're right, all of us do. I mean, it's very, very hard. And that's all about people pleasing and making them like us. Why are we so concerned that they like us? We've given them everything their whole life. We've been as we think as kind as we can be. Why are we so concerned about them liking us?
SPEAKER_01:I think that that is also the distress and time like that can be part of what makes it hard. And it's okay to acknowledge that fear in us and say, this is a feeling, and I don't need to engage in it. It's a fear, it's a feeling, and I need to just do nothing and keep moving. Fixate on our feelings. It is so problematic.
SPEAKER_02:As I used to tell kids when they were growing up, you're in charge of your feelings, and we're in charge of our feelings, but we let them get the most of us.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. How many times in my life have I said, my kid is okay? I'm not.
SPEAKER_02:Always. This makes perfect sense. I think the hardest part is that you love them so much. Sometimes you feel like doing nothing is neglectful or not being helpful.
SPEAKER_01:Here's something too. Okay, because this came up for me recently. It's the whole idea of parents swooping in, which they still do with their adult children. Always. Always. When we swoop in, it also communicates that we don't trust that they can solve things.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. I've started to realize that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I got called out on this recently because my adult son in the federal shutdown, he wasn't getting paid. My instinct was to offer him money because he wasn't getting paid. And I thought, you know, I'll offer him money. I didn't, and he is the one. If you've, you know, you read the book. I have a really hard time if he's upset. I thought, no, this is okay. Like, I'm not reacting to my feelings. And someone called me out on it. And they were like, why would you do that? He'll figure it out. And I was like, no, he's not getting paid. And they were like, Joanna, he'll figure it out. So I really thought about it and then I decided not to do it. And I told him I was going to offer you money, but then someone called me out on it. And he was like, Thank God you didn't, Mom. I want to be an adult. And of course I'll figure it out. Does he have a family? Does he have children or no? No, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_02:Because I think there's a difference in this kind of situation too. Because if I had a friend that wasn't getting paid during the federal shutdown, I might say, Is there any way I can help you? I'm happy to give you a loan during this time. Why is it different for me to say that to a friend rather than to my adult child? What different message am I giving?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think it's context-specific. There aren't any like hard and fast. But for him, me swooping in sends the message to my child. I don't trust that he'll figure it out. I personally always think I can do it better, which is really wrong. Right. So I think parents, when we do that, and I thought of this when they were growing up. I was really like, you figure it out. Now I'm kind of like forget that somehow. It sends a message. Like we don't trust that they'll figure it out or they'll develop the skill set. I think we have to think about this. Is just another question. There are nuances. Like, and again, it's context specific.
SPEAKER_02:Right. It's very context specific.
SPEAKER_01:So we have to think as parents, if I do this, and I always encourage parents to not be so on autopilot. Think about if I do this, what message does it send? What skills do I rob them of developing? I love that. Yeah, because I think, especially with this generation of kids that are coming up, they're missing a lot of skills.
SPEAKER_02:What skill set do I rob them of developing? That's really good.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, with adult children, especially, we really have so little control. None.
SPEAKER_02:Especially when they're financially responsible for themselves, have their own families and everything, we shouldn't have any really. We should have none. Yet, because we raise them, we think we have some. We really have none. And it's interesting because as you're saying this, I'm also thinking of situations when I do say something, they feel things coming from a parent, even if it's not judgmental, as judgmental. Even if we're making just a comment about something, we would have been served better off by saying nothing and doing nothing.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I love what you said because it's the difference between, and this always gets messed up. The difference between our intent, our intent may be one thing, but the outcome and what they hear is always another. And that's really hard to fix.
SPEAKER_02:You said something in your book that I thought was really good. Parents fear making mistakes or disappointing their kids. So they overfunction, they over-apologize, and they overshare. And really, that's what's disconnecting them with their adult children.
SPEAKER_01:Unpack that for me a little bit. When we feel distressed, one of the things that can happen is that we get hijacked by that emotion and everything feels so important and so urgent, then we just talk too much, we overshare, and we're reacting again. That's one of the ways we react to our feelings.
SPEAKER_02:So true.
SPEAKER_01:Because when we're reacting to high emotional intensity, we don't think clearly. And so we may think that oversharing and talking a lot is gonna bring us closer, but what it inevitably always does is it moves us away from what's important because it's often not being responsive to the situation, which is what our kids need. Our kids don't really want to hear about us.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And that brings me to my very favorite part of the book, okay? Shifting from doing mode to being mode. And I think this is one of the hardest things for all parents. There was a big article about estrangement. Oprah Rinfrey wrote she interviewed lots of adult children and why they're estranged. The number one thing is that they don't feel listened to. We're spending too much time talking and not enough time listening. Tell us about what you write about in moving from the doing mode to the being mode.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, okay, this is a big concept in anxiety recovery because when we feel especially anxious, our impulse is to do because we feel like we need to do something to get rid of that feeling. And so we will go into problem solving, we will go into micromanaging, we will go into controlling, we will go into figuring it out, we will go into do do do because many high-achieving people that has been our superpower. However, it really doesn't work with emotion. If we're feeling a lot, the more you do to get rid of it, the more and the stronger that emotion is gonna be. It's like rocket fuel for an emotion. So if you're feeling something and you're and you're trying to problem solve it or figure it out, it's just gonna make the emotion bigger. So what we really have to learn is what we were talking about before, if you're feeling guilt, if you're feeling something, to just let that feeling be, or else you're gonna make that situation so much worse.
SPEAKER_02:And do you suggest meditation or anything when you need to let that feeling be?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, that is sort of implying that meditation is a technique to get rid of a feeling. And so, no, that's just like gonna make it worse. I mean, meditation is fantastic as a process by which we can become more observant of our internal process of what goes on in our internal life, but it is not a technique to mitigate difficult emotions. But you talk a lot about self-compassion.
SPEAKER_02:Does that help? Yeah. So does that help mitigate some of that feeling of guilt?
SPEAKER_01:We can't mitigate because here's what happens. If I tell you, okay, don't think about this phone, what's gonna happen?
SPEAKER_02:All I'm gonna think about is the phone. Yeah, I get that.
SPEAKER_01:Don't if I tell you, get rid of this phone, all you're gonna do is think about that phone. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, it's really important. So we're not getting rid of it, we're learning to sit with it.
SPEAKER_01:So you're learning to function with it. So instead of saying I have to get rid of this guilt, I have to get rid of this guilt, I have to get rid of this guilt. We're saying, okay, the guilt can be there. I don't have to do anything with it. Yes, it's it's really hard to feel, but I don't have to do anything with it. It can be there as I go and chop these vegetables for my dinner. It can be there as I go walk the dog. And it does, and I don't have to make it the focus of my attention. I will take it with me, just as I did on my my solo vacation after getting ghosted, as I try and do these other activities. Yeah, it's gonna pop up, it's gonna wanna become the focus because that's what I'm used to doing, but I will then redirect my attention to whatever else I'm doing.
SPEAKER_02:And you just have to develop this slowly, like you mentioned, the weights. Yes. So when something small happens, try to keep going and not let it. Is it am I using the wrong words if I say let it bother you? Because it's still bothering you, but you have to not react to it. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, and you compassionately say, Yeah, this is hard. I'm like learning a new skill. I'm like learning how to lift a five-pound weight when I'm only learn used to lifting a three-pound, and I'm gently going to redirect my attention. This is really hard. It's very hard.
SPEAKER_02:All of this is very hard, but very important, it seems to me, not only with our adult children, but I would think in life.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, absolutely. Because we're so used to making our feelings the focal point of our way of being. Absolutely. This is very paradoxical because we're saying, no, what I'm not making the this the shit in my head, my feelings and my thoughts so dominant for my life. I'm making what I do that what's so important. And this stuff is not because you can't trust it either.
SPEAKER_02:I'm gonna just tell my listeners, you might have to listen to this podcast twice and also by the book, because this is a lot to unpack. I have another I appreciate that. Okay, I have another question. Yes, and I'm gonna try to answer it myself. Okay, good after this, since we've been talking. So I had a question about how do we balance doing nothing while staying emotionally connective and supportive? And I'm gonna guess the less we do and the less we say, the more emotionally attached we will become. Is that right? Yes. So I'm not really balancing it. I'm I'm staying emotionally connected by learning to have our emotions without acting on them. Yes.
SPEAKER_01:So I think I got it maybe. Yes, Denise. Yes, because you're you're not as hijacked by what's in your head. So you can more easily attune to someone else and what's going on for them.
SPEAKER_02:You're right.
SPEAKER_01:And that goes back to the being mode rather the do than the doing mode. Yes, you're actually not as like kind of like in you're not as like self-absorbed. I don't want to use self-absorbed.
SPEAKER_02:No, self-absorbed is right.
SPEAKER_01:But it that sounds very judgmental because I don't believe that people are intentionally being self-absorbed. Okay, okay. I think I don't believe it's intentional. No, that's true.
SPEAKER_02:It's that's right.
SPEAKER_01:That's the outcome. Like we said, it's not the intent to be self-absorbed, but that becomes the outcome because we get so hijacked by our own distress that we it's very hard to attune. That's why we can't adequately listen and be with our adult kids' distress, because we get so like by our own distress and our own shame or guilt or or whatever.
SPEAKER_02:So I want to say tomorrow someone wants to start working on this. Can you give them a weight to live, something small in their life that they can begin with?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, let's just start with something that I bet everyone in this audience. If you're at a stoplight, if you're at the grocery store, if you're waiting for friends someplace at the gym or at a restaurant, don't pick up your phone. First, just allow yourself to feel uncomfortable. Instead of like, oh, I hate this so much, can you get curious about the discomfort and try and soften into the discomfort? Because your urge is, oh my gosh, I gotta pick up my phone, because I suspect people are habitually picking up their phone all the time. All the time. Can you interact differently with that discomfort? Because your brain is gonna say automatically, I've got to check it. Your brain has been trained unintentionally to perceive the whoosh as, oh my gosh, it's something urgent. I have to check. What if it's danger? And so you have to retrain your brain, and this is in the book, why we have to retrain the brain that this is not dangerous. I'm uncomfortable and I can handle discomfort. And I'm gonna relax into the discomfort, I'm gonna be uncomfortable, and I'm gonna go do something else. And it's 20 minutes. Nothing is crucial in 20 minutes.
SPEAKER_02:The way we are today, we think everything's crucial in a second.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And that's why we need to do this.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Okay, so we're gonna wrap up. I always ask my guests to leave our audience with two or three takeaways.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, can you do that for me, please? Yes. Okay, so takeaway number one: I want people to instead of trying to make uncomfortable situations comfortable, get better at being uncomfortable. That's one. That's like my mission for people. The second is let's think about the function of behavior. So let's ask yourself, what is the function or what is the intent of me doing this? So am I responding to the situation or am I trying to get rid of an uncomfortable feeling? My third is self-compassion, it's a skill that we have to practice. So it's not intuitive, which is why we all really suck at it. We've gotta practice it just like we practice physical fitness. We practice it's a mental fitness skill. All of this is mental fitness.
SPEAKER_02:That's the hardest. It's much easier to lift a weight. Well, because you've been doing it. Right, exactly. Thank you so much, Joanna. This was great. It's a really interesting concept, and I really encourage listeners to get this book, look at it, and try. I'm gonna try. And maybe we'll play around on social media with how many of us were able to do it because it's pretty tough. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Well, that's a wrap. Joanna, thanks so much for joining us today. And reminding us that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is nothing. But it's not just about doing nothing, it's about becoming comfortable with our distress and taking it slowly. I hope all of us will do the first step that Joanna suggested today. Sit without your phone for a while. But it's also a relief to hear that doing less doesn't mean giving up the relationship. It means learning to tolerate our discomfort, trust our kids' process, and stay grounded when things get messy. For those listening, Joanna's book, Just Do Nothing for Parents, How to Parent Better by Doing Less, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. You can also learn more about her work at Joannahardis.com and follow her thoughtful writing on psychology today. If this conversation resonated with you today, share it with another parent who might need permission to just do nothing today. Thank you so much to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer. For all of our listeners, please take a moment and follow us on social media, Instagram, and Facebook. It really helps build our brand. And if you can't do that, visit our website, biteyourtonguepodcast.com, and click the support tab. For as little as$5, you can help us pay some of our bills. It's the start of the new year, guys, 2026. Time to set your resolution. Stop, wait, and remember that sometimes you just have to bite your tongue.
