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Today I’m excited to share my conversation with Melody Glenn, an emergency medicine doc, addiction physician, and Associate Professor at University of Arizona, who just published her first book: Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis. It’s an important story that reveals how we got into our current mess of a treatment system and challenges some foundational myths about addiction that are deeply ingrained in our cultural history. Ultimately, it’s an inspiring biography of a pioneer who was able totally transform care, even during troubled times.

Check out my Substack post for more about Melody's work!

Sign up for my newsletter and immediately receive my own free guide to the many pathways to recovery, as well as regular updates on new interviews, material, and other writings.

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My guest on the show today is Diana Hill, psychologist and ACT expert, whose new book Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy Where it Matters Most comes out in September and deserves your attention—particularly if you're drawn to the intersection of behavioral science, modern psychotherapies, and contemplative wisdom. Diana is a leading voice in psychological flexibility, known for making complex ideas both practical and grounded.

Our conversation focuses on one of my major preoccupations: effort, right effort, wise effort--what makes effort wise and how to cultivate the wisdom to discern what you can't change from what you can. She has done wonderful work on psychological flexibility and the art of directing our finite energies toward what actually matters.

We also talk about the deeper aspects of that question: how we make peace with the fundamental difficulty of being human, how to be with discomfort, how to navigate traditional treatment versus other practices in the messiness of life.

Diana was very kind to share her own experience with anorexia and the limitations of traditional treatment, and how that shaped not just her therapeutic approach, but her psychological perspective. We explore how the conventional idea of fighting against our difficulties is often precisely what keeps us stuck, and what it looks like to work with our psychology rather than against it.

We alo talk about attachment patterns, values clarification, the wisdom of the body, couples work and intimacy, and even touch on artificial intelligence. I found it personally very helpful and enlightening and I hope you do too!

Check out my Substack posts for more links to Diana's work.

Sign up for my newsletter and immediately receive my own free guide to the many pathways to recovery, as well as regular updates on new interviews, material, and other writings.

Sign up for my newsletter and immediately receive my free guide to the many pathways to recovery, as well as regular updates on new interviews, material, and other writings.

As promised, here's a quick follow-up to my conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer. We got so caught up in the core science and models of self-control and anxiety that we completely forgot to talk about what he actually came on to share: his new nonprofit, Mindshift Recovery!

So we hopped back the mic on to cover the details—their courses and group models, of course, but also more about how he puts into practice his core approach to working with habitual, addictive behavior. We also dive a bit more into his model of how awareness (not willpower) creates lasting change. It's fascinating work that's worth knowing about, and perhaps trying, if you're interested in how contemplative approaches can be applied to addiction recovery.

Finally, we close with a bonus meditation: an inquiry into the nature of craving itself.

For a short episode, it's surprisingly rich. The meditation alone is worth the listen.

As always, let me know what you think!

Check out my Substack posts for more links to Jud's work and our previous conversation.

Sign up for my newsletter and immediately receive my own free guide to the many pathways to recovery, as well as regular updates on new interviews, material, and other writings.