Episode 114: The Let Down Reflex

This week, the girls talk to Maia Szalavitz; a neuroscience journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction. Maia specializes in covering the intersection between brain and behavior and how social factors like inequality get under the skin. She is the author or co-author of six other books and writes for major publications including the Guardian, TIME, the New York Times, Scientific American Mind, the Washington Post, VICE and Pacific Standard.

The episode where the girls talk about their favorite things right now (books, music, tech, news apps, self-care), but first, talk about the Enneagram and Instagram for an hour.

Happy New Year! If the best part about 2018 is that it means 2017 is over, that's enough. In this even-longer-than-usual episode, the girls check-in on their love, sobriety, work, and home lives and do a little hoping and wishing for 2018.

In the last episode of 2017, Jeff DeFlavio returns to HOME. Jeff is the founder and CEO of Groups, a company that provides affordable, modernized treatment for opiate use. This episode is a mashup of talk about the opiate epidemic, politics, keeping focus and heart when the battle is so big, and some book reviews (wherein Jeff mistakes Hillbilly Elegy for Dreamland for most of the episode), and more.

Laura and Holly met the Hawkins sisters (Janet and Julie) at a workshop. When they began telling their story, Laura and Holly immediately asked them to come on the show. In this episode, the sisters beautifully and candidly share their family's story of drinking addiction, their individual and overlapping journeys to sobriety, and the complicated mix of feelings that they've each experienced along the way.

In this episode, the girls respond to two letters. The first, from a new mom who's worried about how much she's been drinking in the first months of her baby's life while breastfeeding, and the second from a girl grieving the loss of two long friends that don't support her new sobriety. This episode is about the let downs: things we think we "should" be able to do, like choose people we love over alcohol, and the ways our relationships change despite us wishing they wouldn't.

This week the girls talk to Allison Micco about the "A" word: anxiety. Like so many people, Allison struggled with anxiety long before she knew what it was and at a certain point assumed it was a fault of hers or just something she'd have to learn to contend with forever. In college, she was prescribed a medication to cope with it that she later became addicted to and after years of searching and frustration, she finally got to the root of her anxiety, including its connection to alcohol. Allison shares her story and provides incredible insight into a condition that's so widely misunderstood and downplayed in society.

This week, the girls talk to Kate Northrup. Kate is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, mother, and activist. She's the author of Money: A Love Story, is currently writing her second book, and her work has been featured everywhere from The Today Show to Glamour magazine. The girls talk about privilege, the personal responsibility of activism, the surprising wakeup of motherhood, and the power of seeing our energy, work, and bodies as cyclical. Kate is such a fresh, real, powerful voice and she shares herself so honestly in this episode. More about Kate and her work can be found at www.katenorthrup.com.

It's the 111th episode of HOME, recorded on 11/11! In this ep, the girls mix it up and ask each other 11 random questions from Danielle LaPorte's "Conversation Starters" app. Some answers are full of light and love, and some not so much.

In this ep, the girls catch up on their love lives, sobriety, home life and work, including a tricky discussion about serving alcohol at parties (or not), lessons that just keep repeating themselves and digging less chaos.