Strengthen Your Emotional Fitness – Dr. Emily Anhalt
The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
Building Emotional Fitness
This chapter explores the parallels between emotional and physical fitness, emphasizing the need for ongoing effort in emotional health. It highlights the role of curiosity and feedback in fostering resilience and personal growth.
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How much time do you spend working out your body versus working out your emotional health? Physical fitness requires daily practice—hitting the gym once won’t deliver the results you want. But when it comes to our emotions, we often think we’ll “deal with that later” or assume we don’t need to actively work on our emotional well-being.
Emily Anhalt, clinical psychologist and author of Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness, knows this approach doesn’t work. She’s developed a framework for “emotional fitness”—an ongoing, proactive practice of strengthening your mental and emotional health through small, consistent habits that build resilience, curiosity, and communication skills before you need them.
In this conversation, Emily shares how emotionally fit people approach life differently, why playfulness is a valuable health practice (with research to back it up), and practical strategies you can implement today. Her insights are particularly valuable and timely for those navigating retirement transitions, when stress doesn’t disappear—it simply changes form.
Emily Anhalt joins us from California.
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We Discuss
- Why emotional fitness requires daily practice, just like physical fitness
- How curiosity transforms defensiveness into opportunities for growth
- Why playfulness can increase creativity, collaboration, and longevity
- The hidden stress of retirement: identity, relationships, and meaning
- Setting boundaries: every “yes” is also a “no” to something else
- The power of “Relationship Retros” for proactive connection
- Using emojis strategically to improve communication and reduce misunderstandings
- Building new friendships through your existing network
- The monthly feedback message that can transform your relationships
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Bio
Dr. Emily Anhalt is the author of Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness. She is a clinical psychologist, author, and cofounder of Coa, the gym for mental health.
For the past fifteen years, Dr. Anhalt has worked clinically with executives, founders, and tech employees, and has conducted extensive research with prominent psychologists and entrepreneurs about how leaders can improve their emotional health.
Dr. Anhalt has collaborated with companies like Google, Salesforce, NBCUniversal, NASDAQ, and the NBA.
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For More on Dr. Emily Anhalt
Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness
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Podcast Conversations You May Like
Ditch Your Baggage – Dr. Bob Rosen
Retire Happy – Dr. Catherine Sanderson
The Emotionally Intelligent Retirement – Kate Schroeder & Nick Wignall
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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.
About Retirement Wisdom
I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.
Schedule a call today to discuss how the Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one — on your own terms.
About Your Podcast Host
Joe Casey is an executive coach who helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.
Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.
In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.6 million downloads. Business Insider recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.
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Wise Quotes
On Emotional Fitness
“Emotional fitness is an ongoing proactive practice of strengthening your mental and emotional health. It’s all about small, consistent reps that strengthen skills like resilience, curiosity, communication, before you need them so that you are emotionally strong and can handle whatever life throws at you.”
On Growth vs. Avoidance
“Emotionally fit people don’t avoid uncomfortable emotions and situations. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t feel sad about this,‘ they might ask themselves, ‘what is my sadness trying to tell me? What is it pointing to?'”
On Playfulness as Medicine
“There was one study I read that showed that playfulness increases creativity, collaboration, and connection all around. And there was another study I read that showed that people who play regularly live longer by a significant number of years than people who don’t play regularly. That’s how important it is to our well-being.”
On Boundaries and Empathy
“A lot of people think that empathy and boundaries are mutually exclusive but they’re actually very important to each other. The stronger your boundaries, the more connected and empathetic you’ll be able to be with people because you won’t get resentful or frustrated over time.”
On Retirement Transitions
“Stress doesn’t just vanish in retirement. It kind of changes shape. Instead of deadlines or performance reviews, the stress might be about identity—who am I now without my job? The stress might be about relationships—how do I spend more time with my partner without driving each other crazy? Or the stress might be about meaning—what is my purpose?”
On Curiosity
“Curiosity can mean a lot of things, but when I talk about emotional fitness, I define it as moving us from a place of defensiveness to a place of understanding. When someone comes to you with difficult feedback, a curious person is going to ask questions, they’re going to stay committed to growth.”
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