The Nine Rooms of Happiness

Welcome to this special episode of DermTV. Today I have a guest, Lucy Danziger, Editor and Chief of Self Magazine. So much of what I do every day is about helping women feel better about themselves. I usually do it by helping them look better—I sort of do it from the outside in. Lucy has just written a book, The Nine Rooms of Happiness, and in this book, she enables women to feel better about themselves and to find happiness, but she does it in a different way. Lucy, please tell us.

Lucy Danziger: Thank you Dr. Schultz. Well, I used to stress about a lot of little things and it would eat me up inside, so I would stress eat or I’d get pimples. And one day, I decided to stop stressing about all the little things in life, and I approached Catherine Birndorf, who is a psychiatrist, a women’s mental health specialist, and she writes a column on happiness for Self, and I said, ‘Let’s write a book together.” So we came up with this concept of your emotional life as a great house full of rooms. The bedroom is for sex, the kitchen is for chores, the bathroom is where body image and vanity are dealt with, and the kids' room for parenting. And we deal with each of your issues in all of these different rooms of your emotional house.

Dr. Schultz: Lucy, tell me about a strategy in any room.

Lucy: OK, so one of the things we do, is once you get to the right room and you’re dealing with a problem, you can have a strategic way of approaching it that’s very, very helpful. So one of my favorites is A+B=C—we call it the relationship equation. If I’m having a fight with my mom, and she’s B, I’m A, but I can change the outcome. I can change C just by changing me. Catherine says a woman walks into her office and says, “My mom’s driving me crazy.” She said, “Good news, she’s not my patient, you are. By changing you, you’re going to change the dynamic.” So we give you ways to do that. So the relationship equation changes everything for you, and we have nine of these strategies and they all work really well.

Dr. Schultz: This comes home to me in my practice when a beautiful woman with gorgeous eyes, great hair, great features, comes into the office because she has one cyst on her chin, and that one cyst ruins her whole day, takes away the importance of all of the rest of her beauty, and this is very similar to what this book is trying to empower women to overcome.

Lucy: So if you try the strategies in the book, and you like them or they work for you, go to the website, ninerooms.com, you spell out “nine,” ninerooms.com, and share the strategies and tell us what’s working for you because we really want to be helpful to other women from what we’ve learned in our lives. So Catherine Birndorf is this brilliant psychiatrist. She helped me be happier and, of course, Neal, Dr. Schultz, helps me look better from the outside in. So thank you Dr. Schultz.

Dr. Schultz: Thank you very much Lucy. The Nine Rooms of Happiness, available at Amazon and in book stores. Get a copy. Feel better about yourself. Find happiness and thanks for being with us today.