Season 3 #5 Dr Julie Smith

How To Be Sad with Helen Russell

Today’s guest has 2.8M Followers on TikTok, 420 thousand on Instagram and 30.5M Likes but she’s not your typical social media influencer. Dr Julie Smith is the first mental health professional to start using TikTok as a platform for therapy. She’s the clinical psychologist and former NHS staffer who now works as an online educator - and her daily posts have become a lifeline for many during the pandemic.

She says now: “while there are lots of ways to reduce the intensity of anxiety, you must be willing to experience it. When you can’t stop fear, take it with you. That thing you want to do? Do it scared. Because, she says: The things you do the most become your comfort zone.”

Here, we talk about:

• how to cope with anxiety and ‘keep standing’ in the waves
• why therapy should be accessible to all (and funny!)
• the four signs of loneliness and what to do about them
• busting therapy jargon (from CBT to ACT, SFBT, Motivational Interviewing and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy)
• what we can do now to be sad, well

Follow Dr Julie @drjuliesmith on Tik Tok or @drjulie on Instagram and look out for her debut book, published January 2021, entitled (excellently): Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? Follow Helen on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @MsHelenRussell Read more about Helen’s new book, How To Be Sad (Waterstones , Amazon UK or anywhere you like to buy books) Get in touch with the show at [e-mail] And as ever, BIG thanks to Joel Grove for production and to Matt Clacher at HarperCollins for making this podcast happen.