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I’m sitting here today across from someone who has had hundreds of conversations about psychology and mental health, and all of the things that happen in our brain. Today I have Sana Qadar with me, host of the ABC’s All in the Mind podcast, and I am a huge fan of this podcast, so this episode is something I was so excited to do.

Now Sana’s not a therapist or a psychologist. She’s actually a journalist, but for the last five or so years she’s been interviewing some of the best minds in psychology and neuroscience, and I wanted to get her take on all of it. Not as an expert necessarily, but as someone who’s absorbed almost more mental health content than anyone out there, and who’s honest enough to admit when maybe some of it doesn’t actually change what you do and how you do it, because at the end of the day, we’re all human just trying to figure this out together.

There’s a lot that we cover in this one. What’s actually shifted in how we talk about mental health over the last few years. Some of the words and phrases that get lost along the way and [00:01:00] become almost so overly used that they become meaningless. And some of the parenting strategies that has actually changed her life overnight.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re drowning in mental health content and still somehow think you’re not doing anything different, this episode’s for you. Here is my conversation with Sana Qadar, host of ABC’s All in the Mind podcast.

Marie: Welcome to the podcast. Today I have with me Sana Qadar from the All in the Mind podcast. Welcome.

Sana: Thanks for having me.

Marie: I thought you’d be such a great person to have on the show to talk about what you’ve been listening to and absorbing, and someone who’s not a psychologist or therapist, but very much reporting on and doing research on how we think and the brain and all of these things that come with it.

Did it surprise you that you ended up doing this work, this type of journalism?

Sana: When I first started out as a 17-year-old in journalism school in Canada, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and I wanted to be a war reporter, which is a cliché of every little journalism student. But I spent [00:02:00] 10 years working in international news and went around the world with that, and then got really depressed by news ’cause it’s all bad news. And so I started to think, “What else do I wanna do?” I knew I wanted to do longer form stuff. But psychology, mental health was never on the radar. I started doing a bit of arts. I did a bit of business. This opportunity came to me. I still had to pitch for it, but they approached me, and I thought, “Hang on, actually that’s a fascinating subject area to get to cover,” and I love it. I’m really thrilled.

Marie: Has it changed anything about yourself? You’re researching people or topics, and you’re pulling things together, you’re doing interviews. How has it changed your life or your mind on something?

Sana: It’s definitely made me more aware of a whole lot of issues in the mental health space and what can go wrong and how to encourage wellbeing. I will say my husband is also a psychiatrist, so this wasn’t completely foreign territory to me. How has it changed me?

I’m still scrolling on my phone at hours I shouldn’t be. But it’s every [00:03:00] time I do an interview about social media use, for example, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s a reminder. Have a healthier relationship to your phone.”

Marie: It tells you something, right? If someone who is presenting on this and is a smart, capable person who’s educated and doesn’t need to be sold on the idea still struggles to implement some of these things, it makes you human.

Sana: Yes, I think I’m definitely human.

Marie: So if there’s any conspiracies out there about an alien race taking over the ABC it’s not true. Something must have landed, especially around relationships or emotional maturity and parenting. I hear you talk about some of those things, and little seeds of self-observation come up.

Sana: Yeah, the parenting stuff in particular has been really helpful to cover, ’cause I have a little one, and he’s got plenty of big feelings, and I haven’t always known how to handle them.

I still don’t always know how to handle them. But talking to the various experts we have, like Dr. Billy Garvey, who’s a developmental [00:04:00] paediatrician, talking to most recently Dr. Lindsay Gibson, who’s a psychologist in the States who wrote a book about emotionally immature parents. She’s written a new one about how to raise emotionally mature children, and some of the parenting strategies she spoke about, those I’ve deployed. To answer your question, the parenting stuff has definitely landed and helped a lot. But sometimes I’m still like, “Wait, what? How am I supposed to maintain my composure when I have a deadline, and the kid’s screaming, and you’re never supposed to yell?” Sometimes it feels like a lot.

Marie: It’s what’s good enough, right? And that’s a real challenge to try and figure that out. As someone who digests all that content as well, I’m a big fan of the All in the Mind podcast and several others, it can feel overwhelming. And the irony is you try to find some of these things to reduce your anxiety, then you get anxious about not doing the things that are supposed to reduce your anxiety or keep you healthier.

Sana: Ah, yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Marie: How do you sift through it? As a journalist interviewing people, how do you know what bits you’re going to take on?

Sana: Whatever hits me with an oof, where I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I [00:05:00] should really do that,” is what I’ll take into my life. Take the yelling advice from Dr. Lindsay Gibson, for example. In her latest book she talks about some of her must-do rules, and one of them was to keep yelling to a minimum. Which initially I was like, “How, what parent gets through parenting without yelling? What are you talking about?” But she talked about how to come up with strategies to avoid getting to the point where you might end up yelling. And so I did that for our morning routine with my little one, and it worked actually.

Marie: I asked what lands for you, what you take away. And you said those things that just go oof.

Sana: That’s one example. And another one, I can’t remember what the episode was, but the person we were speaking to talked about how one of the best exercises you can do for mental health and just in general, is actually dance. And I remember thinking, “Oh, thank God she said dance and not running,” ’cause I hate running and I don’t do it, and dance sounds like fun.

And that little seed has always stayed with me, but I haven’t started dancing yet because there are no dance studios nearby, and between work and the child and life, I’m like, “When the heck would I get to the dance studio?” But it’s [00:06:00] on my list of things to do. I’m like, “Okay, that is something that would be really fun and I’d love to do, and I will do one day.”

Marie: I’ve actually just started dancing with my partner, and it ticks a double box ’cause we feel good after.

Sana: Yeah.

Marie: You have to brave the discomfort of learning something new as an adult, and if you push through, ’cause you pay for a whole term package, it’s like I have to show up ’cause I’ve spent the money.

And it’s such a good connecting thing, like we’re spending time together fumbling through something and it’s not on a device or just over dinner.

Sana: Exactly.

Marie: How do you find the balance of what to share about your own personal life without it being other people’s stories?

Some of your guests have such great nuggets of wisdom, and it can be such a pull to think, I want to share something personal, but it might disclose something that’s not my story to tell.

Sana: I think a lot about how much of my life to share and how often in the episodes, ’cause I never want to come across too navel-gazey and too self-obsessed and annoying. I think too much would be annoying. People have listened to me, many of them, for years, and podcasting is a really intimate medium, [00:07:00] and so they feel like they have a relationship with me. And so I do wanna share some elements of myself because it’s also just natural in a conversation to do that. But I am constantly thinking about “Okay, in this episode, maybe I cut my little bit out because we’ve heard enough from me in the last couple of weeks.”

And I’m often asking the producers on the show “Can I get your take? Is it too much or are you liking this bit of personal reflection?” So that’s something I’m very mindful of.

Marie: I think it’s very nice to hear those personal stories, ’cause it does highlight how human it is and not just an academic speaking to a topic.

Sana: There’s plenty of podcasts where it becomes the host’s show and it’s all about the host and sometimes I find that annoying as a listener too, and I’m like, “Can you just let your guest do their thing? Butt out for a moment.” So yeah, I’m constantly striking that balance in my head.

Marie: Okay, so we’ll make it about you, not me. I won’t share.

Sana: We can totally make it about you.

Marie: No, it is interesting. They’re different audiences, some people are their brand, and it’s about them and their life.

For other people, what they share punctuates a story.

Sana: Yeah, I wanna be punctuation. I don’t wanna be the main thread.

Marie: Have you [00:08:00] ever taken something home straight away and actioned it? ‘Cause I’m sure you pre-record things, but sometimes it can be so tempting to be like, “Guess what?” and want to just change something in someone or forward them the interview straight away.

Sana: Probably the quickest change I made was going back to Lindsay Gibson. I keep saying this one ’cause it literally aired in the last couple of weeks, so she’s sticking around in my head for now. But literally the week I interviewed her and she talked about her anti-yelling strategies, I went home and I was like, “I need to fix this morning routine ’cause it ain’t working.” And I started doing something differently right then and there, and it worked right away.

Marie: Yeah, I really liked that episode. I think she was calling it the non-negotiables, and it was save yelling for emergencies or something like that.

Sana: Yeah.

Marie: I know people will be like, “How am I supposed to do that?” And there are some things that are inevitable, but when you hear the logic of that, that it’s almost like the boy who cried wolf story.

It’s like if everything is yelling, there’s no difference between, “Put your shoes on, we’re running late,” and,

Sana: Yeah.

Marie: “Don’t cross the road.”

Sana: Yeah, exactly. And I will say, I don’t think we were quite that bad. It was more the asking a million times and then the final time being like, “Get your [00:09:00] shoes on.” And I thought, “You need to circumvent this entire routine and do something different,” and that’s what I did.

Marie: Is it still working a few weeks later?

Sana: Yeah, it is.

Marie: That’s so cool.

Sana: We made a game out of the mornings. It’s very simple. He had a visual list of the tasks he had to do, and he would just never follow them. And so instead I put each task on a piece of paper and cut them up and put them in a basket, and it was a game where he draws what he does. And I put some funny ones in there “Do a silly dance,” “Brush your teeth,” “Put your uniform on.” All that kind of stuff, and so he quite likes drawing them out now.

Marie: That’s so fun.

Sana: Yeah, it was desperation that gave birth to that idea.

Marie: That’s really cool. How long have you been hosting All in the Mind?

Sana: I started in February 2020 just before COVID, and I did an eight-month stint then. At the time I was just filling in for the previous host, Lynne Malcolm, while she was on long service leave, then I went off on mat leave. She came back, and then she decided she was going to retire while I was on mat leave.

And so I came back I think in early 2021, [00:10:00] and I’ve been hosting full-time since then.

Marie: Okay, so we’ve got five years post-lockdown era.

What have you noticed change in the discourse or how we talk about emotions or mental health or psychology? I know you’re not a therapist, but you talk to people. You’re out in the world. You’re with other parents and friends and family. Do you notice things changing?

Sana: People are fluent in a lot of the jargon of mental health and psychology speak now. Definitely more so than five years ago ’cause it’s only become more ever-present on TikTok and social media. So there’s that. That’s changed. What else has changed? I suppose the biggest change is the language and the fluency.

Marie: Have you noticed things being misused? Do you have some favourites?

Sana: I think the throwing around of trauma online is a little bit troublesome. Like I said, I’m not an expert. I’m not a therapist, so I don’t have super strong feelings about it. I’m more curious about it. I notice it, I watch it, and I think, “Oh, maybe this is worth interrogating and covering and finding out why.”

And we have done that previously. We’ve done episodes about therapy speak and concept creep [00:11:00] and stuff like that. I view it as an outsider being like that’s interesting. Let’s analyse that.”

Marie: The trauma one is definitely one that I struggle with as well.

Sana: ADHD stuff as well, everything being an ADHD symptom.

Marie: I know people want to belong, and I saw something recently talking about what’s the benefit of a diagnosis? And it’s nice to know that you’re a zebra, not just a strange horse. So if you’re a horse who’s black and white and you’re thinking, “Hang on, I don’t fit in with the other horses.”

But if someone diagnoses you and says you’re a zebra, then you know your people. So I can understand the value of fitting in and understanding.

Sana: Yeah.

Marie: I do think sometimes it’s a catchall phrase and people don’t recognise what it means. For years before I studied this I didn’t know that OCD was a mental illness.

You just thought it was being super organised, right? So you would say “Oh, I’m just a bit OCD about these things,” and not think twice about it.

Sana: That’s been really interesting, and it can become a crutch for some people too when they wield those labels.

Marie: How about narcissism?

Sana: [00:12:00] Yeah.

Marie: Every ex-parent.

Sana: It’s a topic I still want to cover. We haven’t done, I don’t think, an episode on narcissism specifically. We’ve touched on it in various different episodes, but I’d still love to do an episode about narcissism, and who actually is a narcissist and how do you know, and who’s just annoying.

Marie: Do you get any of what we call vicarious trauma? Just hearing some of the stories or some of the examples, especially maybe with that forensic series, does it ever weigh on you? You started off wanting to do war correspondent international stuff, and that’s a big area for people to have vicarious trauma or to even be there and be traumatised by not just someone’s story, but what they witness and see even in the aftermath.

Sana: No, no vicarious trauma from the stories I’ve heard on this show. Some stories have stayed with me a lot more and freaked me out a lot more. We did an episode titled Why We Don’t Label Kids Psychopaths, and it was about callous-unemotional traits and how those emerge in [00:13:00] childhood, and they don’t always necessarily lead to psychopathy.

We spoke to a woman whose son had callous-unemotional traits as a child, and from memory, he is diagnosed with psychopathy now as an adult, and his behaviour is really extreme. She was so generous with her story. She was so honest with her family’s experience, and it sounded really devastating in many ways. That really stayed with me because at that point, my son was, I think, maybe two or three. And I’d been anxious about childhood cancer and him getting hit by a car and all these physical things that could go wrong.

I did not think about this as a potential thing that could happen in a family. And so that just seeded in my brain for a while, being like, “Oh my gosh, how early does it emerge?” Toddlerhood is, I think we mentioned in that episode, that toddlerhood is the most violent stage for most people because they’re completely uninhibited. And so while he was a toddler, I was like, “Is this normal? Is this the beginning of something?” It stayed in the back of my mind because I had never spoken to anyone who’d had that experience before, so it was so fresh to me [00:14:00] that, yeah, it just lingered in my mind for a while.

Marie: That is a bit intense, especially when you picture toddlers, ’cause I’ve seen kids play.

Sana: Vicious.

Marie: Yeah, they’ve got dinosaurs and trucks.

Sana: And they’re punching when they’re that tiny and they really haven’t learned anything yet.

Marie: I’m pretty sure there’s a movie, is it The Good Son, with Macaulay Culkin?

Sana: I haven’t seen it, but there’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, I think.

Marie: Oh, that sounds about the same.

Sana: Anyway.

Marie: Yeah.

Sana: I might be getting it wrong. Yes, these are scary things to think about.

Marie: So it does educate you, and there are things that land for you. Any changes that you’ve made? I know you said when we look at the social media stuff, you’re like, “Oh, but I’m still scrolling through my phone.” But is there anything more in that self-awareness bit? There’s what we can regurgitate and there’s what we take in and do differently.

And especially when you’re talking about relationships, sometimes when it’s not you under the microscope, when you’re not the one being interviewed, you’re just observing, something might land. You’re like, “Oh, I didn’t realise I’m that friend who didn’t do X, Y, Z.”

Have [00:15:00] you had moments where you think, “Okay, I could do something different here. I’m taking the advice and picking up what you’re putting down”?

Sana: In terms of my relationships with others?

Marie: Yeah.

Sana: We’ve done stuff about relationships. Plenty of stuff about relationships, but I’m thinking romantic relationships as well as friendships, not just parent-child relationships. One thing that’s coming to mind that’s not about relationships, but with my own thinking, various episodes we’ve done on this show have made me much more aware of how my own brain works and my vast capacity for rumination and how that’s not always very helpful, and how active and imaginative and ruminative my mind can be and how that’s something I need to watch.

Marie: So all the creative ways you catastrophize something happening?

Sana: Yeah. and we’ve done episodes about how some people don’t have visual imagery in their heads. I think it’s called aphantasia?

Marie: Yeah, I remember that episode. That was quite interesting.

Sana: That was the first time I realised that was a thing, and I was like, “Oh, I have a very vivid internal thinking system.”

I see stuff, I can sometimes smell stuff, I hear stuff, all of that. That’s been fascinating to hear [00:16:00] how other people’s minds work and how mine does in relation to them.

Marie: I’m a bit like you, I have such a vivid inner world. Have you ever seen Scrubs? You know how he would daydream and picture something really weird playing out? I can have those moments where I can picture a whole imaginative scene and be like, “Oh, okay,” but snap back to reality.

Sana: Definitely.

Marie: One of the things I’ve noticed, and therapists have this, but I wonder if journalists feel the same, is that you’re a naturally curious person. Your job has been to pull out stories. Do you find it hard to be in an environment where you have to take up space? You’re not the one there to be curious about others.

It’s your turn to share or to be listened to. Do you find it hard being on the other side of that, either in an interview like this or just day to day?

Sana: This is weird for me ’cause I am never the guest. I’m the interviewer, and I haven’t done this very much. I find it really weird, also because I feel like I’m not an expert on this topic. I cover it with intense curiosity as an outsider, and so I feel weird being interviewed like this [00:17:00] because I’m like, “What do I bring to it?”

I just ask the questions. What do I have to say?

Marie: You don’t have to be an expert. You’re a contributor, you’ve got your finger on the pulse, and the conversations you have are very extensive and have spanned over a few years on a range of topics. That counts for something too.

Sana: Yeah, it does.

Marie: That’s probably an honorary qualification of some kind, ’cause each episode is the length of a lecture.

Sana: Yeah.

Marie: When you think about it, if you’re reading some of those guests’ books and you’re engaging with that, don’t disregard what value that can bring as a reporter.

Sana: An honorary…

Marie: PhD? Yeah, for sure.

Sana: In psychology?

Marie: Yeah, anyone listening who wants to get behind that, I think that would be really cool.

Sana: That’d be fun.

Marie: So you’re resisting the urge to flip the interview back and just start asking questions?

Sana: You’re holding court. This is your show. This is your thing.

Marie: I don’t wanna be a narcissist and make it all about me.

Sana: Not at all.

Marie: Is there anything that you wish you knew before you started learning about the brain? Is there something you think, “I wish I knew that back in [00:18:00] 2020 when I took over that mat leave position”?

Sana: Mainly just wishing I had ever done a course in psychology or neuroscience. It would’ve been helpful. I’ve literally never taken a class on psychology or neuroscience, and so I feel like that would’ve been helpful. But also I don’t think it harmed me.

I’ve never had any major complaints or factual errors about the show. As journalists, when you are covering a wide range of stuff, you’re not a specialist to begin with, you have to get good at, if you’re a good journalist, verifying stuff, like knowing how to find sources that are proper and are worth their weight and not fluff on the internet. I was able to bring all those skills to it and my outsider curiosity, and so I think it still made for a good show early on, and that’s only gone on from there.

Marie: Have you ever thought of a career change and moving into that field?

Sana: No, I’d be a terrible therapist.

Marie: Why?

Sana: It’s so weird because I love hearing people’s stories. And I love the two-way interaction I get with the audience when they write in. I’m a broadcaster even though I do podcasts. I don’t [00:19:00] think I’m mature enough to handle people’s individual problems and I’m responsible for helping them fix it.

I can talk to you about it, I can ask you questions, I can turn it into a beautiful story, but I don’t know if I’ve got the skills to want to or be good at helping people fix their lives. I also feel like I need help myself. I’ve got issues I’ve got to work out first before I help anyone else.

Marie: Fair enough. When people listen to episodes, what are you hoping they’ll take away? If you had a kind of mini purpose or mission behind the topics you cover, what are you hoping to leave people with?

Sana: I really do want to help people. I really do find it immensely gratifying when people write in about a particular episode and say that really shifted something in their thinking, that it helped them understand.

Marie: No, it’s different. One’s one-on-one, one’s larger scale.

Sana: That is really moving when I hear from people who say something really helped them, or that our shows inspired them to go and study psychology. That’s always really wonderful to hear as well.

I hope people learn about themselves. I hope people have more compassion for others and the experiences they go [00:20:00] through. What I love about being in this role, as opposed to being an individual therapist, is that I feel like I’m a soup of all different people’s experiences and giving portions to lots of different people and helping.

I feel like I’m a conduit for information, which I find really gratifying and it’s lovely to hear from people from walks of life I would never interact with otherwise if I didn’t have this platform. I could be a therapist in my part of Eastern Sydney, and I would get a particular clientele, but with this show, I hear from people…

Literally, we did an audience survey about a year ago, and I have farmers and sparkies who listen to me, and I have therapists who listen to me and surgeons. It’s just such a wide array of humanity and people from all over the world as well and I think, how could I not love that?

That’s amazing to me. So it’s a huge privilege, and I love it.

Marie: I really love that. It’s a bit of self-help, a bit of education, and there’s the exposure to other people’s stories that I think as a listener you get a lot of value out of hearing, “I’m not the only one,” or, “I never [00:21:00] thought of it that way.”

Sana: You’re making me think. The other reason I think I’d be not so great as a therapist, but I love doing this, is that I love how immensely creative it is. I do all the fine edits for the show. Our producers will do the rough edit and they’ll put some music suggestions in.

They might do a little bit of sound design, but I do a lot of the sound design and a lot of the music selection. I’m splicing tracks and looping sections and holding the beat drop to the moment I want it to punctuate what the person said. I’m so in the edit and creating the entire narrative and audio scope of it that I love that.

That’s an element the listening audience wouldn’t really get, and it’s a lot of fun as well.

Marie: Anything that you would like listeners to take away from your experience listening to all of these stories and research?

Sana: I suppose the way I’d answer that is how we approach the people we interview, which is to look for people who know what they’re talking about to some degree. We get a lot of [00:22:00] pitches from people who might call themselves coaches or kind of alternative practitioners, and that’s fine if that’s your jam.

My show is housed within the science unit at the ABC, so we need to have a solid science undercurrent for anything that we’re doing. We’re pretty scrupulous about who we will have on the show. That’s not to say that we would never speak to someone who’s an influencer in this space, for example. It might be more to interrogate that whole strand of how mental health is talked about. We just try to make sure that people have the actual qualifications to be talking about what they talk about.

Marie: So being careful about the background of someone giving you advice.

Sana: There’s just so much online coming from all sorts of people, and sometimes I’ll look up someone who’s a big influencer in the mental health space and I’ll be like, “What actually are your qualifications?” And then you’ll find out sometimes it’s solid, sometimes it’s a little bit flimsy.

And that’s not to [00:23:00] say that necessarily what they’re saying is incorrect either. Sometimes they might be pretty good about what they’re talking about. You’ve just got to parse through who it is and what it is.

Marie: I find that particularly difficult because as a registered professional we have particular guidelines, ethical requirements, and even registration requirements about what we can and can’t say, what we can and can’t share, and so many things require nuance.

If someone says, “Well, what do you think of this?” I’m like, “I can’t say. It depends.” It depends would probably have to be the thing I say the most. And they’re like, “Is this right or wrong?” Well, it depends. What’s the context?

Sana: And to qualify my coach comment, we have done an episode about coaching psychology and looked at how that is not a protected term, so anyone can call themselves a coach. But coaching is also a legitimate field that people can study, but it’s murky, right? It’s totally murky.

And so if we do get approached by a coach, for example, [00:24:00] I will look at what their background is. Often these mindset coaches might just have a background in business or whatever else, and I’m like, that’s fine for a certain kind of show. It’s not really going to be fine for us necessarily.

We have spoken to mindset coaches on the show before. There was someone who’s a sports psychology coach, although he did have a background in psychology. Basically I’m saying it’s not a hard and fast rule, but they’ve got to have some scientific something going on.

Marie: So as a content absorber, be discerning with what information you get from which sources.

Sana: Yeah, exactly.

Marie: One of the things I talk a lot about on my podcast is the intersection of mental health and relationships. How do you see relationships, whether that’s as a parent, as a partner, as a daughter?

How does that fit in with your broader topic, All in the Mind and sitting within the sciences?

Sana: Well, I think it was Esther Perel, who we had on the show not too long ago, who [00:25:00] says, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your relationships,” or some version of that. Relationships probably are at the core of good mental health really. Everything comes back to relationships.

I don’t think you can have good mental health without good relationships. So yeah, I suppose the show in a sense is really about relationships, ’cause we talk about that in terms of parenting, we talk about it in terms of annoying colleagues at work, we talk about it in terms of dating and romantic relationships. They’re at the core of everything. Even if we’re doing an episode about, here’s an example, we did an episode about being a carer, specifically I think for someone with dementia. We spoke to this beautiful older man who’d cared for his wife until she died, and it was, I think it was actually more about the neuroscience of dementia, and then he was the kind of personal story in the episode. And on the surface, you could say that’s a story about neuroscience and the brain and what [00:26:00] goes wrong in the brain during dementia, but it was absolutely a relationship story. His emotional thread of how he cared for his wife and how difficult that was, all of it absolutely was the heart of that story. The show really is about relationships.

Marie: Even as you’re saying that I was getting goosebumps ’cause that’s what people remember. They remember the story.

Sana: They do. You can talk about the various bits of the brain, but until you bring it back into how that impacts a person’s behaviour and their relationships, it doesn’t necessarily connect, especially if you’re a listener who isn’t in the field. If you’re a truck driver that’s listening, or someone who’s not in the business, you kind of need that.

Marie: I might wrap it up with one more question. You have such empathy for other people’s stories. Do you flip that back, that same kindness back on yourself, or is your inner critic a little bit harsher?

Sana: Oh my God, what a [00:27:00] question to end on. It depends on the day. Some days I can be more self-compassionate and kind to myself, and other days not so much. I’m trying to be kinder overall, but yeah, still working on that one.

Marie: I’ve been asking people this a lot lately around the self-reflection, but what makes you hard to live with or work with?

Sana: Oh my God. My husband would have so much to say.

Marie: We’re so good at talking about what other people should do to change, and so I’ve been trying to get people to think about what makes them really impossible or difficult to live with, work with.

Sana: Okay, this is gonna be really funny. In terms of living with me, my husband’s main complaint has always been that I’m not very self-reflective or emotionally attuned, and I don’t have a huge vocabulary for my emotions. He used to joke that if he asked me how I was, I’d say, “Good, bad, sad, mad,” and that was kind of it.

And I was always like, “Well, that’s [00:28:00] the gist of it. I don’t have a million layers of what’s going on,” whereas he had a million layers. That’s according to him, but I think it is true. Sometimes I’m probably not as self-reflective as other people are, which might be strange to hear.

I’m also really messy, and he’s a neat freak, so that kinda drives him crazy. And then at work too, my desk is quite messy, and I sit right next to our senior producer, James, who’s so tidy. Oh my God, his desk is spotless, and then mine is just an explosion of books and paper and stuff.

Marie: It’s just a different filing system. I’m on your side.

Sana: Yeah, exactly.

Marie: People can’t see it from the camera, but I have Post-it Notes and highlighters everywhere.

Sana: Amazing.

Marie: The self-reflective bit is interesting because the therapist bit in me comes out. When someone says to someone, “You’re not being self-reflective,” they’re actually missing a vulnerability bit in themselves.

They’re not able to say, “I feel disconnected ’cause you’re not [00:29:00] sharing something.” If someone’s just saying, “You’re not self-reflective,” they’re deflecting from a need that they have. I’d be curious to ask, “What’s behind that? Is it that you missed a bid for connection?”

Sana: I think that’s it.

Marie: Yeah.

Sana: He was wanting to connect at a level that I didn’t really realise.

Marie: You didn’t catch the bid.

Sana: Yeah, exactly.

Marie: Maybe it’s time for an episode on couples therapy.

Sana: Exactly.

Marie: Thanks so much. This has been amazing, and I know you don’t think you’re an expert, but you’re definitely a huge contributor to the discourse here and internationally as well. Go ABC All in the Mind.

Sana: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Marie: I’ll put links to where people can find you, and if they have questions that they want to explore on the podcast, where can they reach out to you or find you?

Sana: allinthemind@abc.net.au

Marie: Fantastic. Thank you.

Sana: Thanks.

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this conversation, it’s that there is a lot of information out there, and sometimes it [00:30:00] goes in one ear and out the other. And sometimes there’s a little nugget of wisdom or a pearl of wisdom that you think, “I’m going to try that.” Just like Sana did with her son’s behaviour and the fight around the shoes, and having to say a million times, “Just put your shoes on,” a few small and creative changes helped her stay calm in the moment and make what was a chaotic and stressful morning into a game.

That can be so powerful. She changed the structure around it, and so staying calm was actually possible. And there’s a difference between willpower and a system, and it shows up in more ways than we can imagine. It’s the kinds of conversations I have on my podcast, and we talk about all these things that we can control and we can do different.

I really hope you enjoyed this interview with Sana Qadar, someone who has a lot of exposure to conversations around mental health and psychology and all the things that happen in our brain. And I really [00:31:00] recommend her podcast.

It’s a really great listen. Thanks for listening today. And if this one resonated with you, send it to someone who needs to hear it. I’ll catch you next week.