Downtime With: Manoush Zomorodi

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Manoush Zomorodi is a journalist, host, author and mom of two living in New York City. She is out with a fascinating new book, Body Electric, and writes musings at her Manoush Minutes Substack. You are probably familiar with her voice, as she is a vet of WNYC and has since 2020 hosted NPR’s TED Radio Hour (not to be confused with TED Talks Daily, which is the show I host). She is a trusted colleague and a friend. So I can personally attest that Manoush is indefatigable.

Below, Manoush shares the secret to her high energy at midlife, shows us the “box” she works in each day, and offers recommendations for books that reflect on womanhood and our climate present.

Manoush’s 3 Good Things

1. Take movement breaks during long days at your laptop.

   For the last three years, I’ve been researching how living in a world designed around screens and sitting affects our physical health and what we can do about it. The number one thing? Take regular 5-minute movement breaks. March in place, clean the house, take a lap around the block, ideally 4-5 times a day. It will keep chronic health problems at bay, improve your mood and restore your ability to concentrate.

2. Get customized computer glasses made for yourself.

   If you wear glasses, whether you’re nearsighted or farsighted (I’m both!), they aren’t optimized for working on a screen. Treat yourself to getting prescription glasses that are made just for looking at your screen while you work (about 20 inches, but measure it for yourself.) I was holding my head in a funny way so I could see the screen clearly and my eyes were so tired at the end of the day that I was getting headaches. These solved the problem. Oh and don’t bother with blue-light blocking filters. No eye doctor I’ve talked to thinks they do anything.

3. Brew yourself a cup of Decaf PG Tips.

   I drink coffee until noon and then, for some strange reason, I don’t love the taste of it anymore. It’s like my tastebuds cut me off! So I stop caffeinating and switch to tea. These are the best black tea bags I’ve found that won’t make you jittery or unable to sleep. Multiple mugs of this with some oat milk keep me going.

Downtime With: Manoush Zomorodi

Talk to us about where you’re from and what you do?

I grew up near Princeton, NJ with a Swiss mom and an Iranian dad who are both retired doctors. After spending a decade in Washington, D.C. and Berlin and London, I ended up in Brooklyn in 2002 and have been here ever since. I do a lot of things (make videos, podcasts, write etc) but essentially, I’m a journalist and have been for over 30 years (whoa, that’s crazy). Today, I host TED Radio Hour, write a Substack, and am in the midst of getting my latest book out into the world. Basically, I’ve got one foot in legacy media and the other in the more indie online arena. I love having a mix of both.

How did you end up in the work that you do now?

I had no idea what I wanted to do in college, but I thought I might like to work on documentaries, so I called the BBC’s news bureau in Washington, D.C. Lucky for me, the bureau chief picked up. He’d never heard of “interns” but agreed to let me come in and be one, after I explained it to him. I ended up working for the BBC for the next decade — first as a producer and later as a reporter. When my kids were born, I worked part time, first as a business reporter for Reuters TV and then as a consultant helping nonprofits learn to make their own journalism. In 2012, I started making a radio show for New York Public Radio that eventually became Note to Self, a podcast about technology for normal people, asking questions like Why do I feel so distracted? That’s where I started creating large-scale interactive projects with listeners. One of them, Bored and Brilliant, was about the value of boredom and mind-wandering and making sure you spend less time on your phone and more time just thinking. It became my first book and then a TED Talk about boredom, attention, and creativity.