I'm Shankar Vedantam here to tell you about a great mystery.

That mystery is you.

As the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain,

I explore big questions about what it means to be human.

Questions like, where do our emotions come from?

Why do so many of us feel overwhelmed by modern life?

How can we better understand the people around us? Discover your hidden brain.

Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey How to be Fine listeners. My name is Zach Rosen. I host a show called The Best Advice Show.

I'm not giving the advice. I'm receiving it. Every episode I invite on a different guest to give me a piece of advice.

If you like Kristen and Jollanta's episode about being alone where they were trying

Dr. Jeremy Nobel's tips from Project Un Lonely, I think you might like today's

episode. It's from writer and poet Holly Rens Spalding.

It's advice she gave me a couple years ago, and I think it's some of the most important advice I've gotten on my show.

The advice? Create your own autonomous zone. In other words, to have free spaces in your life, free of other people, the profit motive, you know, the pressure to be earning a living during that time,

free of interruption, free of social media,

of duties and obligations that impinge on,

for one thing, the imagination.

And the way in which this is practiced in my life most diligently is in the morning hours, which from 7 to 10 a.m. I treat as sacrosaint.

There's no appointments, no email, no social media,

no interaction with family members, that's my writing time.

Do you think for people that don't have a... family members that's my writing time.

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