One Question with Leah Farmer

One Question with Leah Farmer

by Leah Farmer
Self-ImprovementMental Health
Season 2
What Am I Ready to Let Go Of? | The Final Episode of One Question
This is the final episode of One Question. After asking many questions over the past year, I am taking my own medicine and asking the question I have been quietly sitting with for some weeks: what am I ready to let go of? The honest answer turned out to be this show. Not because it stopped being good — but because it stopped being good for me to keep doing. The energy ledger stopped balancing, and I have come to believe that fun but not worth what it costs is a perfectly grown-up reason to end something while it is still in good standing. Drawing on Annie Duke's Quit (her landmark argument that quitting is a skill, not a failure), the behavioural economics of the sunk cost fallacy, and Mary Oliver's In Blackwater Woods — which has been quietly running in my head as I made this decision. Thank you for listening. The questions don't expire. Take any of them with you.
S2 · E22
Jun 14, 2026
8:07
What Makes Me Feel Warm Inside? | The Body Reading Behind a Familiar Word
Every language on earth uses the same word for the temperature of a fire and the quality of a friend. Warm. This is not a coincidence, and it is not a metaphor. It is a body fact. This week's One Question takes a quiet, tender look at the word warm — and the surprisingly precise neuroscience underneath it. Drawing on Williams and Bargh's landmark 2008 Yale study on embodied cognition (the one where holding a warm cup made participants rate a stranger as more generous), Stephen Porges' polyvagal work on co-regulation — including inter-species co-regulation, which is why a cat on your chest is doing something genuinely biological — and Mary Oliver's line about the soft animal of the body. With a small story about Lucy, my staple in the middle of the night. What makes you feel warm inside?
S2 · E21
Jun 7, 2026
7:33
What Am I Tolerating? | The Question That Made Modern Coaching
This week's One Question is one of the oldest, sharpest tools in the modern coaching tradition — a question made central in the early 1990s by Thomas Leonard, who is often credited as the founder of professional coaching as a discipline. His instruction to his clients was deceptively simple: list — not five, not ten, but fifty to a hundred — of the small, medium, and large things you are tolerating in your daily life. The list is meant to feel ridiculous. That is part of the point. Drawing on Leonard's framework, Bruce McEwen's neuroscience of allostatic load (the cumulative wear-and-tear of low-grade chronic stress), the sociology of how we are trained — especially as women — to widen our window of tolerance, and a small story involving a broken cabinet hinge that I tolerated for nearly two years. What am I tolerating?
S2 · E20
May 31, 2026
8:07
What Guilty Pleasure Do I Not Actually Feel Guilty About? | The Quiet Tax on Joy
A lighter, slightly subversive question this week. The phrase guilty pleasure is doing more work than we usually notice — it's a small linguistic apology we lodge into our sentence before mentioning anything we love that we're not "supposed" to love. This week's episode is an invitation to perform an honest audit. Of the pleasures you have been calling guilty, how many are you actually guilty about? Or have you just been paying the cultural tax out of habit? Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste, Paul Bloom on the neurology of pleasure, and a personal confession involving cult documentaries, a knitting project, and a great deal of unrepentant judgment of strangers on screen.
S2 · E19
May 24, 2026
8:15
Are You Okay? | Asking the Question We Usually Skip — for Mental Health Awareness Wee
This week marks the final day of Mental Health Awareness Week 2026 in the UK, organised by the Mental Health Foundation. The theme this year is Action — a recognition that awareness, on its own, is no longer enough. So this week's episode offers the smallest, bravest action I can think of: a single, sincere question, asked of yourself and of the people you love. The kind of question my friend Jen once asked me, on a couch in my own house, years ago — and changed my life. Drawing on Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger's research on social pain, Stephen Porges' polyvagal work on co-regulation, and current UK statistics from the Mental Health Foundation, this episode explores why being asked sincerely matters so much — and what it takes to receive the answer when someone says no, I'm not okay. Support: 🇬🇧 UK: Samaritans, free, 24/7 — 116 123. SHOUT text service: text SHOUT to 85258. Emergency: 999 or NHS 111, option 2. 🇺🇸 US: 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988 (free, 24/7). 🌍 Anywhere else in the world: A quick online search will find the crisis line for your country.
S2 · E18
May 17, 2026
10:04
What Page Do I Need to Turn? | The Stories We've Read Too Many Times
We talk about our lives in the language of books — chapters, pages, narratives, storylines. It is one of the oldest, truest metaphors we have, because we are quite literally narrating ourselves all day long. This week's One Question explores what happens when we read the same page about ourselves so many times that we stop noticing it is a page. Drawing on the neuroscience of the default mode network, Hebbian learning ("neurons that fire together, wire together"), Erving Goffman's sociology of the co-authored self, the science of memory reconsolidation, and Joan Didion's foundational line on storytelling, this episode is an invitation to lift the corner of the page you have been re-reading — and decide whether it is still the story you want to be inside. What page do you need to turn?
S2 · E17
May 10, 2026
8:25
What Intention Am I Setting? | The Neuroscience Behind a Simple Daily Practice
Setting an intention has been dismissed for years as a "woo-woo" practice — but a growing body of neuroscience suggests it may be one of the most quietly powerful daily acts available to us. This week's episode draws on the research of Stanford neurosurgeon James Doty (Mind Magic) to explore why a single, specific, embodied intention can shift the texture of your entire day — not by changing what happens, but by changing what your brain is wired to notice. Plus a brief mention of the small intention-setting app I built along the way: Wild369.com This week's question is: What intention am I setting?
S2 · E16
May 3, 2026
6:38
Who Do I Want to Be in This Moment? | Choosing Character Over Winning
What if the most important question you can ask in any difficult moment isn't what should I do — but who do I want to be while I do it? This week's episode is an invitation to step out of reaction and back into authorship of your own character. Drawing on Aristotle's idea of practical wisdom, Viktor Frankl's teaching on the space between stimulus and response, and Eugene Gendlin's somatic philosophy of the felt sense, Leah explores how a single internal question — asked before we respond — can change not only the moment, but the kind of person we are slowly becoming inside it.
S2 · E15
Apr 26, 2026
6:28
What Is My Anger Trying to Tell Me? | Anger as Messenger, Not Enemy
What if anger isn't a lapse in your composure — but one of the most reliable signals you have about what you value? This week's episode opens with the new Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet, and the justified rage so many of us have felt watching it, as the starting point for a deeper question: what is my anger actually trying to tell me? Drawing on Aristotle's ethics of anger, Myisha Cherry's philosophy of clean rage (building on Audre Lorde's landmark 1981 speech), and modern emotion research that treats anger as a moral signal, Leah explores how the emotion we're most often told to suppress can be our clearest compass toward what we truly love. This episode is an invitation to stop running from your anger — and start listening to what it's trying to name.
S2 · E14
Apr 19, 2026
7:52
Where Do You Feel the Weight of the World? | On Holding Fear You Can't Fix
Earlier this week, Leah had a plan: go to sleep. The decision about whether the United States would bomb Iran was not hers to make or to stop. She was exhausted. She got into bed. And then she lay there in the dark for hours, caught in a loop — what will this mean, what will this mean, what will this mean — until the timeline passed and the decision was made. She went to sleep with a pit in her stomach and woke up feeling almost hungover from the anxiety she'd been carrying through the night. This episode is for anyone who had a week like that. Drawing on neuroscience of the stress response and why the body cannot distinguish between immediate and distant threat, psychological research on productive versus unproductive worry, and the evidence base for co-regulation and somatic awareness as genuine tools for navigating collective fear, this episode explores what we actually do with a fear we can't fix. Not how to make it go away. How to hold it without being held by it. This week's question: Where do you feel the weight of the world?
S2 · E13
Apr 12, 2026
11:11
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