How To Be Less Old Podcast · How To Be Less Old

Ready to Give Up On Dating? This Is a Must Listen 🎙️

·53 min·3 clips

Self-validation means saying, “Of course you would feel this way,” before you swipe or drink wine.

1. How To Be Less Old Podcast focuses on dating anxiety, hypnosis, and Shonda Howard’s approach to romance. 2. Deanna Chang and Emily Foster host the conversation, and Shonda Howard appears as a dating coach and hypnotherapist who works with clients on love. 3. The episode asks what happens when dating stops being a chase for validation and becomes a practice of self-regulation. 4. Shonda says she certified in hypnotherapy in 2018 after using it to move from a “waging hot mess” to meeting “the love of my life five months later.” 5. She describes hypnosis as a tool she uses for many issues, including her relationship to sugar, which she says changed after one session. 6. Emily Foster and Deanna Chang share their own dating experiences, including feeling “thirsty” and treating every man as a possible option. 7. Shonda reframes that behavior as fear-based energy and says the softer move is to stay present and curious in the first two dates. 8. She says typical clients want marriage, a family, and help with dating apps that they experience as “an absolute nightmare.” 9. She explains that her work is not matchmaking, but changing self-worth and confidence so clients approach apps from a different place. 10. Shonda identifies “releasing the past” as the first major step, especially for people who keep dating emotionally unavailable partners or men who ghost. 11. She says hypnotherapy turns down the “critical thinking mind,” relaxes the nervous system, and allows a conversation with the subconscious. 12. She says the subconscious can keep someone safe by repeating patterns such as attachment to men who leave after three months. 13. She tells a client story about a woman who stopped attracting flaky men, got a birthday text from an old dating-app match, and later married him. 14. Shonda says she believes people can find a soulmate on a dating app, but only after a six-to-eight-week break from dating while their mindset changes. 15. She recommends blocking profiles with red flags and compares dating-app use without a plan to “throwing spaghetti at the wall.” 16. She says older women in their late forties and early fifties can still find love, and she repeats that “love is possible at any age.” 17. The conversation stays conversational and direct, with Deanna and Emily interrupting, laughing, and testing Shonda’s ideas against their own stories. 18. Shonda speaks in a coaching style that mixes plain-language examples, nervous-system language, and specific rules about timing and attachment. 19. Listeners who want practical dating advice, self-worth work, or hypnotherapy language will likely find this useful. 20. Listeners wanting a quick celebrity-style chat or no talk of apps may skip it.

As heard by us

A calm reset for dating when rejection and loneliness start steering the wheel.

Dating advice works best here because it starts with rejection and loneliness instead of trying to sound tidy. Deanna Chang and Emily Foster bring on Shonda Howard to talk through the urge to swipe after feeling rejected, lonely, or afraid on Valentine's Day, then steer the…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Need a dating reset for the hour after rejection, loneliness, or Valentine's Day panic?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from How To Be Less Old Podcast