Miley Cyrus FaceTimes Zane Lowe on Apple Music to share how she’s coping with the Coronavirus pandemic and discusses her ways to stay active while helping others. She also goes into details about how social distancing made her feel more connected and hopes that she can bring the values she has learnt in isolation to the outside world when it’s safe to do so and more.
On How Social Distancing Has Made Her Feel More Connected…
We get so numb to people opening the door for us and saying, "Good morning. How are you?" What would we give right now for it to be safe to open the door for somebody, but right now when we open the door, we think, oh, where's my glove, let me get my hoodie. I'm not allowed to look at you. Get six feet away from me. And so I miss that human connection. I miss opening the door for somewhere and having the door open for me. There's two girls that work at the cafe near my house that I get cappuccino from them every day, and I love them. They make my day. They always draw little smiling faces or put my initials in my cappuccino. I miss that. I miss that connection with my daily routine. But when it comes to communication and connection, I've been more connected from the social distancing perspective in isolation quarantine than I have actually outside in the world, and I want to take all of these philosophies that I'm learning inside my house outside of my house when it's safe to do so.
On Feeling At Peace and Fulfilled…
Honestly, what's really crazy is, and I know that I'm in a very individualised, unique position and I have no misunderstanding of how fortunate I am, but this is the most at peace and fulfilled that I've been in the last few years. I think I miss the safety of being able to be around my family. I miss the right now in the back of my mind, like I've wanted to see my mom a couple times, but my mom's in her 50s and she visits her mom daily, and so it just hasn't felt responsible for me to be around my mom. So I miss my mom the most and I miss my dad the most. But besides actually like what do I miss of the outside world, of going to the studio or whatever, I don't really miss that, because connecting with my fans every day is something that I really have been missing probably since Hannah Montana.
The thing I loved about Hannah Montana was once a week I would connect, and there would always be a message, and that was at a time where you couldn't do this live, like how you and I are communicating now. Even you and I just having this chat feels less alone, I feel like I connected more with the outside world inside than I did on the outside.
On Staying Connected Through FaceTime…
We've been doing a lot of FaceTimes, and for people that can't do FaceTime, I think maybe take this time to write what you would want to say if you get on FaceTime, and then when it's safe for us all to be together again, telling our grandparents things that we haven't, because I can't really remember the last time I felt the way that I feel about my grandparents now and to protect them. But also now that we're getting more information that it's also time for me to protect my 20, 30 year old brothers and sisters, because apparently this isn't something that just attacks the elderly or the immune compromised. This is something that's jeopardising young people's health also.
On Dedicating Time To Learning New Skills Versus Getting Lost in the News…
Well you know, the D in Bright Minded is about dedicating our time and what we dedicate our time to. So rather than taking that extra 30 minutes to obsess over the news, one of the things on the list that I can't change, take that 15 minutes to learn a new skill. So I have the time to get better at my crafting, which this is a perfect time to do so. So taking lessons from Jeremy, I always wanted to be able to sew. Costuming is such a big part of my life, but then also dedicating time and you can put it in your calendar of the dedicated time that you're going to allow yourself to look at the news.
So whether that's 10 minutes three times a day, five minutes five times a day, put the time allowed on your phone. Actually, on your iPhone you can set that time limit. Set a time limit to your Safari and to your news app and don't allow yourself to do it, especially before you go to sleep, because that will just give you nightmares and keep you up all night. And it's just things that are out of our control, and this is a time where a lot of it will be about the biggest battle I guess besides the virus itself is within our own head.
On Her Dog, DJ Emu, and Encouraging Creativity and Imagination…
My dogs are totally failing at it, flopping at it, but he's here today. I made him a little DJ booth where he can spin his tracks. Obviously, we have some time on our hands right now, some time that I usually wouldn't have, and I've had time to encourage my followers and fans to get creative in the space they're in, no matter how big or how small. There's ways that we can get creative. I was actually talking about maybe having an idea this week on my show of finding old scarves or socks or T-shirts you don't want anymore and creating a garland out of it and decorating a space, so when you're feeling trapped or confined to a space that gets dull and it feels like every day is repetitive and the same day, they could make their space look a little different every day. So you feel like you're creating a new world by using your imagination.
And I was thinking about how much fun I used to have when I was younger, playing imagination with my brothers and my sisters. We would create. My mom wouldn't let us have sleepovers for a really long time, because there was five of us so there was already enough screaming and kids in the house. So we would create these characters that would come over and hang out with us. And the great thing about hanging out with those characters was they could be anything we wanted them to be.
On How Her Anxiety and OCD Inspired Her To Create Her Show Bright Minds…
Well, I was sitting one night outside and I was looking up at the stars, and it was the one place where I was able to be outside of my house and be able to feel really safe. So I was laying out in the grass and I was just looking up at the stars, and thinking about how fortunate and lucky I am that I live in a space where I can still go out and I can take a walk. And the weather has been a little rainy, but it's been nice to cuddle up with my dog on the couch on the days that it felt good and I have enough space where I can go outside and just enjoy nature and feel a little less crap.
But I was thinking about how everyone doesn't have that space. Because just having that change of scenery and being a part of something so beautiful, like the colors of trees or the night sky, was just so inspiring to me to create that inside for the days where I actually got stuck inside my house like everybody else. And so I started having this fear and anxiety and panic, and I actually started giving myself really cold feet. My feet started going really cold, my hands going really cold, and I realised I was actually having a full-on anxiety attack. And so I remembered this exercise called bright minds that my psychiatrist has used for the past 10 years. Of course we have these great tools. We never use them in the times of crisis. We know them, but they're when we're positive that we want to have a bright mind, but when things go to sh*t, we're like f*ck exercise, I'm going to just do it my way. I'm just going to let myself totally go into panic and fear.
So I called him, and I wanted to be reminded of the bright mind exercise. I am very organised. Like, at one point my entire closet was alphabetised. So I have really crazy OCD. So I was realising that his bright mind exercise wasn't an acronym. So I couldn't understand why B would mean take your vitamins, but his were just the 11 steps. So I thought as a fun project, I would go through and I would make my mind into this easy exercise. So you go B, a blessing and curse of social media. R, reliability. I, immune support. So I thought I would go through and do this. And as I did it, I realised how much it helped me, that I realised that I just had to share it. And so then I started thinking of the most inspiring people I knew, like Demi Lovato or Ellen DeGeneres, or my good friends Rita Ora, Jeremy Scott. So I started creating this really amazing list of people that were willing to come be on my show.
On Keeping Busy and Learning About Pet Care…
This is the way that I've been doing it. This is kind of the busiest I've been, strangely, in the past like year or two because I'm my own booker. So I go to all the talent myself and go with my idea. And so I book the talent. I write all my intros and skits, and I kind of write all the topics and I reach out to different foundations of what they need. The episode is about pet care this time, because as much as we want to encourage adopting and fostering, financially that's actually not realistic for a lot of people right now. It's hard enough to feed yourself, feed your kid, pay your bills, and now a lot of people are filing for unemployment. So actually it's about relieving the stress of animal care also.
So a lot of families, as hard as it will be, will have to surrender their pets and their animals because financially it's just not the right time to care for anyone but their immediate family. And so talking to LA Animal Services, talking to Boutique, a non-kill shelter, the more that we free up space for them, the more that they can get animals out of the kill shelter and bring them in. I think the thing that helped me the most actually was writing down what I can control and what I can't, and then taking 10, 15 minutes to accept what I can't, and even if that means crying over it for a little while or screaming at the paper or ripping it up at the end, just accepting the what I can't control page and then taking what I can control, putting it on your mirror, seeing it every day, and the times where you feel your heart fluttering a little faster, you feel the blood running from your feet, grab that note and go in and start activating the things that you can control.
On Talking To Hillary Swank About Coming On Her Show For “Doing Planks With Skank”…
But I actually just talked to Hilary Swank this morning about doing planks with Swank on my show, because she can hold like a three minute plank, and I'm over here like shaking, and so exercise, it does not take more than your own body to get down to a plank, do some crunches, do some push ups, and get rid of some of that extra energy. Otherwise, it's just going to take you into the night. And also as much as you can try to avoid, which I did not do the first week, gnarly reality TV. I got totally in and addicted to a reality TV show.
On The Malibu Fires and Focusing On Her Activism…
Yeah, I've thought a lot about the Malibu fires, and we had lost our house in the Malibu fires, and I didn't really deal with that at the time because I was filming Black Mirror and came back and I had the same attitude as I do now, which was make a list of what I can change, what I can't, and accept it. And I couldn't change that the house burned down, but I could make some changes to focus points of my activism, which is talking about climate change more, talking about, you know, I know some of us have seen the viral videos of bluer skies, dolphins in waters that we haven't seen them in. So Mother Nature, not only are we taking a break right now, but she's getting a little bit of relief, because there's way less cars on the freeway. People aren't working every day, so we aren't vomiting onto Mother Nature's beauty every single day.
And we're starting to see what it would look like if we actually started treating the world more responsibly, so getting this little kind of breath of fresh air and a little vision for us to actually see physically what would happen if we actually really focused on climate change. So the fires did that for me. I got to focus on that. I got to focus on things that worked out and things that didn't, and what I did or could've done or didn't do. So I just, I've really been thinking a lot about my choices and how I got to where I'm sitting right now. And not all my choices are the finest, but I would do them again. I would do them again because they got me right where I am, and right now I'm connecting with people on a level that's really fulfilling, and I can't say that I've really had that over the last few years consistently. This has been consistent fulfillment.
