Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Law and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: you dread anything, see anything in your life that you
Speaker 1: just truly, opinically dread on a sort of permanent basis, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in a day in, day out kind of a thing,
Speaker 1: or even in a on on a very short term scale,
Speaker 1: like are you dreading our move from the fifteenth floor
Speaker 1: to the eleventh? Now? I celebrate it a new beginning. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm positive way to look at but yeah, I think
Speaker 1: you just you know, we're gonna release ourselves from the
Speaker 1: shackles of the past whatever that means. No, for me,
Speaker 1: it's more I don't I don't dread that. It's more
Speaker 1: like I'll have these sort of clouds of existential dread
Speaker 1: every once in a while, meaning that it could be
Speaker 1: the most beautiful day with this clear blue sky, everything
Speaker 1: could be going right, but somewhere in the world I
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, there's this general unease about something
Speaker 1: not going well, possibly in the future. So for me,
Speaker 1: it's not usually a defined dread. What about you, um
Speaker 1: dread well? Yes, we so we discussed in paper tigers. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's easy to begin to have these these fight
Speaker 1: or flight fears about things that have have have have
Speaker 1: no power to really harmss. Like when I was going
Speaker 1: through a lot of a lot of paperwork for adoption
Speaker 1: or or every year with taxes, I get that sense
Speaker 1: of dread, you know, like I've got to I've got
Speaker 1: to do this paperwork and it's gonna be dreadful on
Speaker 1: some level, and I feel like it's a physical threat
Speaker 1: to me. But but of course it isn't. And if
Speaker 1: I stopped to analyze it enough, I realized, no, this
Speaker 1: is not necessarily life for death. Yeah. But I was
Speaker 1: thinking about this that we have been trained, at least
Speaker 1: here in the United States, UM, in various ways to
Speaker 1: dread something off will happening to you. And it begins
Speaker 1: very you know, at a young age. We're taught to
Speaker 1: anticipate these various tragedies, whether or not it's a hurricane
Speaker 1: or tornado or some other sort of natural disaster. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know how about the whole like stop, drop
Speaker 1: and roll, um, all the sorts of alarms and emergency
Speaker 1: uh routines that we go through and that's good because
Speaker 1: it helps to prepare you need you need to be prepared,
Speaker 1: and so we'll have very real life examples of that
Speaker 1: where if there's a fire, you stop dropping roll. And
Speaker 1: then we have uh, you know, in our fairy tales
Speaker 1: and the stories we tell each on the fictions, I
Speaker 1: mean by the very nature that you need the narrative
Speaker 1: to be engaging. It's fiction, it's storytelling. You need there
Speaker 1: to be a threat. You need something to happen that
Speaker 1: is bad so that the characters can navigate through it,
Speaker 1: around it, or what have you. So people wander into
Speaker 1: the woods and they're abducted by witches and which is
Speaker 1: trying to cook them. Things of that nature happened, as
Speaker 1: it means to try and remind children, hey, don't go
Speaker 1: walking into candy houses just because they're made out of candy.
Speaker 1: You might wind up being eaten by a cannibal woman, right.
Speaker 1: Stranger danger really what we're talking about. So you do
Speaker 1: have to create this database of dangers in order to
Speaker 1: better survive. But then you have sort of this minutia
Speaker 1: of minor threats or perceived threats or just stand ins
Speaker 1: for threats that aren't really dangerous, but they begin to
Speaker 1: take over in your imagination more real pressing threats. And
Speaker 1: that's where this idea of dread anxiety and in some
Speaker 1: ways just generalized anxiety disorders take over. Stranger danger is
Speaker 1: a great example of that because on one, on a
Speaker 1: very basic level, yes, there's their children need to be
Speaker 1: on guard, they need to stay around their parents, and
Speaker 1: there are individuals out there who will harm them. It's
Speaker 1: just you know, statistically they exist. However, if you go
Speaker 1: overboard and you start thinking that every stranger is a danger,
Speaker 1: if you start, even as a culture began to just
Speaker 1: go on like a NonStop witch hunt of potential people
Speaker 1: who are a danger to children, then you get into
Speaker 1: an entirely weird and problematic area. Well, let me layer
Speaker 1: one more thing over that. Then you begin to read
Speaker 1: things like it shouldn't be a stranger that you're concerned about,
Speaker 1: because the majority of abductions take place by people that
Speaker 1: you actually know, and so you have to sort of
Speaker 1: reframe that conversation with your child. So what the point
Speaker 1: is is that there's all there's all these sort of
Speaker 1: real and perceived threats such as pile up one on
Speaker 1: top of the other. Whereas humans, particularly in the day
Speaker 1: and age that we live in. When there's so much
Speaker 1: data in front of us, you have to sort through
Speaker 1: it and try to figure out what you truly should
Speaker 1: be anxious about. And sometimes the you know, the wiring
Speaker 1: gets crossed, yeah, which makes us to something called general
Speaker 1: anxiety disorder or or GAD or or as I like
Speaker 1: to read it, God. And so general anxiety disorder is severe,
Speaker 1: ongoing anxiety that interferes with your day to day activities. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about symptoms such as panic disorder, ob
Speaker 1: sensive compulsive disorder, other types of anxiety that kind of
Speaker 1: get uh sucked into the fold, and they're they're varying
Speaker 1: at different levels of this condition. Yeah, And it's generally
Speaker 1: involves thoughts of uncontrollability and unpredictability of upcoming personally selling
Speaker 1: an events or shifting attention, of our inability to cope,
Speaker 1: memory of negative aspects of certain events, and negative emotion.
Speaker 1: And people with this disorder they can't relax, They startle easily,
Speaker 1: and they have difficulty concentrating, and a lot of times
Speaker 1: they have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep.
Speaker 1: And the National Institute of Mental Health says that the
Speaker 1: physical Symptoms that accompany this include, of course, fatigue, headaches,
Speaker 1: muscle tension, muscle aches, difficulty swallowing, trembling, twitching, irritabilities, wedding, nausea, lightheadedness,
Speaker 1: and having to go to the bathroom frequently. I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting. Now now luckily it's it's very treatable for
Speaker 1: the most part via medications and and or therapy, so
Speaker 1: it's not not necessarily a permanent life condition. But it's
Speaker 1: it's again, it's it's like you say, it's these these
Speaker 1: in xieties build up in our lives. Um. I like
Speaker 1: to think of like a cave with stalactites and stalacmites
Speaker 1: forming until eventually they're just all the sharpened cave to
Speaker 1: teeth everywhere and uh, and they can be cleared out,
Speaker 1: but you've got to sort of stop and have some
Speaker 1: sort of level of self awareness either come out of
Speaker 1: you or or have it imposed upon you, to realize
Speaker 1: what's real and what's not well. And I think the
Speaker 1: reasons why they can, even if you brush them away,
Speaker 1: they they continue to build back up is because at
Speaker 1: the very heart of this is this this knowledge that
Speaker 1: one day we will all die, right, this is so
Speaker 1: you know, every last one of us. So this is
Speaker 1: that sort of I always think about it as this
Speaker 1: um sort of double edged blade of consciousness, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's great that you're conscious, were humans are conscious,
Speaker 1: and we can enjoy so many different things. At the
Speaker 1: same time we realize that, you know, our time um
Speaker 1: in our physical bodies is going to come to a close,
Speaker 1: right yeah, and that you know, there's a very good
Speaker 1: chance that the last few chapters of that book might
Speaker 1: be a little less happy the middle one, right, and
Speaker 1: everything beyond that is the great unknown. So it's sort
Speaker 1: of you know, that's that's a lot for a brain,
Speaker 1: a conscious brain, to sort of taking, even if you
Speaker 1: pick it apart, which I sometimes do, and you know,
Speaker 1: I remind myself, well, death everybody does it. Everybody's every
Speaker 1: everybody's doing it, and look at some of the people
Speaker 1: who do it. It couldn't there couldn't be that much
Speaker 1: to it, right, But on one hand you can sort
Speaker 1: of this man like that, But then you remind yourself
Speaker 1: exactly what it entails, not just a mirror cutting off
Speaker 1: of life, but a well in some cases it's that,
Speaker 1: but but in other cases a decline of life and
Speaker 1: a decline of the quality of life that terminates in
Speaker 1: this of this well, I was thinking about probably one
Speaker 1: of the best films that deals with this topic, and
Speaker 1: for me, it's a serious man five the Coen Brothers.
Speaker 1: It is. It's probably a little bit leaker than some
Speaker 1: of their films that it's definitely it's it's probably one
Speaker 1: of the Cohen Brothers films. It's easier to overlook. And
Speaker 1: just in case you know you're listening and you don't
Speaker 1: know or have a context of this film, Um, it
Speaker 1: is kind of a slow mo existential train wreck of
Speaker 1: this character's life. His name is Larry Gopnick, and it
Speaker 1: gets a clean bill of health. This is how the
Speaker 1: movie starts out with and then everything just kind of
Speaker 1: falls apart from there, and um, every relationship in his
Speaker 1: life falls apart, which is again this sort of dread
Speaker 1: that we all have, like are we tending to this person?
Speaker 1: Is this happening? Is this is the machine still moving
Speaker 1: along in the ways that it's supposed to, And for
Speaker 1: Larry Gopnick, it doesn't. It begins to fall apart, and
Speaker 1: he even begins to receive angry calls from a Columbia
Speaker 1: record club debt collector, which I think is really brilliant
Speaker 1: because if you've ever been plagued by anxiety, then you
Speaker 1: know that these minor infringements from your past are things
Speaker 1: that bubble to the surf us every once in a
Speaker 1: while that you worry about. So this, you know, past
Speaker 1: record club collection calling him and nagging him is a
Speaker 1: nice stand in for that. Yeah. I mean, like we've
Speaker 1: discussed the power of closing loops in your life and
Speaker 1: how an unclosed loop is instantly at least a pinpoint
Speaker 1: of anxiety in your in your mind. And so that's
Speaker 1: a great example because the Columbia Records is not going
Speaker 1: to come and break your thumbs, you know, maybe, well
Speaker 1: it depends, it depends which Columbia Records, if they're actually
Speaker 1: based out of Columbia, I don't know, but but but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's totally a paper tiger. It's totally a closed loop,
Speaker 1: I mean, an unclosed loop anxiety working on this character.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up the loop thing because that's
Speaker 1: something that what we can talk about later in terms
Speaker 1: of trying to um, you know, keep this anxiety disorder
Speaker 1: in check. But I think we should talk about how
Speaker 1: America is a very anxious country. It turns out and
Speaker 1: that Americans really suffer from anxiety disorders more of than
Speaker 1: any other culture in the world. Yeah, because you think
Speaker 1: about what what sort of has become the I don't
Speaker 1: know about the predominant, but a but a very common
Speaker 1: American story. Uh. And I imagine you have this as
Speaker 1: well as I. What happened in your life At one point,
Speaker 1: you moved away from your parents house? Where do you move?
Speaker 1: You moved to the big city where you're surrounded by people,
Speaker 1: but you're less close to any of the people around you.
Speaker 1: You know, you you, you know, you you have maybe
Speaker 1: your your your spouse and or your child with you.
Speaker 1: But then you increasingly you have all this social media
Speaker 1: creeping into your life and this becomes the means by
Speaker 1: which you connect to other people. And uh and and
Speaker 1: then meanwhile this uh, the families be moved away from
Speaker 1: They may be across the country, they may be on
Speaker 1: you know, in some cases, they may be on the
Speaker 1: other side of the globe. And so we're more and
Speaker 1: more distant from people and uh and we're more cut off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. And uh. I just wanted to point out
Speaker 1: that according to the World Health Organization, that the United
Speaker 1: States has something like a nearly a third of the
Speaker 1: Americans UH suffering from anxiety problem albums in their lifetime,
Speaker 1: So a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetime.
Speaker 1: And the National Institute of National Health says that in
Speaker 1: any given year, ninetent of the population suffers from anxiety.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen and two thousand and four, Americans more than
Speaker 1: doubled their spending on anti anxiety medications like sanics and value,
Speaker 1: so that industry went from nine hundred million to two
Speaker 1: point one billions. So what we're seeing here is this
Speaker 1: idea that our anxiety has not just always been an
Speaker 1: American thing, but it tends to uh or we tend
Speaker 1: to see an increase in it over the last couple
Speaker 1: of decades. So, as you had mentioned, you know, there
Speaker 1: are a couple of factors to them. One is just
Speaker 1: sort of chasing that job around various different parts of
Speaker 1: the country and resettling and losing some of the connections
Speaker 1: to your family and friends. And some of that is
Speaker 1: um that you have an increased amount of data and information,
Speaker 1: but it's more in the way that it's presented. And
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this because uh, I've been rowing
Speaker 1: at the gym a lot lately, and this I find
Speaker 1: to be a very zen activity. It's great, But then
Speaker 1: I'll look up at the TV and at the ticker
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the news program will have some
Speaker 1: sort of horrible thing about some child, some something just
Speaker 1: unimaginable happening to the child, just running over and over
Speaker 1: again and so again it. You know, the way that
Speaker 1: this information is presented and consumed by us sort of
Speaker 1: adds to that feeling, because here I am feeling like
Speaker 1: I'm imagining myself on a on a lake rowing and
Speaker 1: now now I'm thinking about a dead child. Yeah. I've
Speaker 1: never understood the need to have that kind of ticker
Speaker 1: going on in places like a gym, where shouldn't the
Speaker 1: focus be on getting out of my head and getting
Speaker 1: into my body? Like why am I watching this horrible news?
Speaker 1: Or I've seen the same TV sets blaring over jacuzzis
Speaker 1: uh and or within earshot of a sauna like why
Speaker 1: why why they're oh? And then of course the big
Speaker 1: one is airports. You know, Like, I'm very much of
Speaker 1: the mindset that we need to have we if the
Speaker 1: TVs are on, okay, have the TV is on to
Speaker 1: distract people, but have it tuned into kittens and puppies playing.
Speaker 1: Have the for the audio, just have it be Brian
Speaker 1: ENO's music for airports. We don't need to watch ticker
Speaker 1: tape about um, you know, child murders, train rex plane
Speaker 1: crashes and what have you. It just seems like like
Speaker 1: like why continue to sprinkle that kind of horrible topic. Well,
Speaker 1: it is inescapable and um, as Taylor Clark in the
Speaker 1: article It's not the job Market from Slant Magazine says, UM,
Speaker 1: a lot of this is reported in a fear based fashion,
Speaker 1: so it's not balanced in the sense that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: the good natured stories tend to hit the news, it's
Speaker 1: usually the ones that are bleeding and awful attention. Part
Speaker 1: of that is the virtue of the twenty four hour
Speaker 1: news cycle. You gotta you gotta find something, you gotta
Speaker 1: put it up there, and then you gotta milk it
Speaker 1: for everything it's worth. Now, Taylor does say that UM
Speaker 1: compounding this is an intolerance for negative feelings. So Taylor says,
Speaker 1: we reject situations that could make us feel discomfort. We
Speaker 1: try to bury or reverse our feelings through shopping, alcohol
Speaker 1: or drug use, or entertainment and psychologist Stephen Hayes who
Speaker 1: uses an acceptance and commitment therapy rather than drug therapy,
Speaker 1: or maybe he uses an in conjunction. Said Americans are
Speaker 1: victims of feel goodism, the false idea that bad feelings
Speaker 1: ought to be annihilated, controlled, or erased by a pill.
Speaker 1: So some of this is that idea of this pursuit
Speaker 1: of happiness, right, Like, we're all entitled to be happy,
Speaker 1: and if we're not happy at this very moment, something
Speaker 1: is wrong and not feeling settled without discomfort that everybody feels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it comes it comes back to the end of
Speaker 1: the idea of balance in one's life, you know that,
Speaker 1: and to to get you know, to to dip my
Speaker 1: toes in a little of Buddhism here for a second.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the idea that it's from the from
Speaker 1: the human realm. It's from this, this realm of peace
Speaker 1: that one is able to ascend above that cycle of suffering.
Speaker 1: It's not from an extreme of pain and worry. It's
Speaker 1: not from extreme of happiness and pleasure, Like those are
Speaker 1: both kind of not really dead ends, but those are
Speaker 1: not the extremes from which liberation life you have. If
Speaker 1: it's it's through this middle ground and an understanding that
Speaker 1: those are extremes that when I'm happy and when I'm
Speaker 1: when I'm having just an awesome time, that cannot be
Speaker 1: the norm. You know, not sustainable, and if you try
Speaker 1: to sustain it, it's like stretching a rubber band. You're
Speaker 1: going to crash down to the other end of the hallway. Now,
Speaker 1: there there are some other factors. According to Red Curves
Speaker 1: University researcher. To this Seabear, poor mothers are more likely
Speaker 1: to be classified as having the mental illness of anxiety
Speaker 1: disorder or generalized anxiety is disorder because they live in poverty,
Speaker 1: not because they're suffering from a psychiatric disorder. And so
Speaker 1: that's where some of this area gets, you know, a
Speaker 1: little bit gray, because there are some people who are
Speaker 1: priest predisposed genetically to have anxiety disorders UM. And then
Speaker 1: sometimes it's just the environmental factors that are pressed upon you.
Speaker 1: And it was nature and nurture, both environment and genetics
Speaker 1: playing a role here. Yeah, And what I thought was
Speaker 1: interesting about this is we already talked about how UM
Speaker 1: in the United States in particular, migrating from one airing
Speaker 1: to another is pretty typical, and so we don't usually
Speaker 1: have the support systems of our families or our communities. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean some of us do. Some some people have
Speaker 1: lived for you know, their families have lived for generations
Speaker 1: in one area. And some people, you know, like in
Speaker 1: Atlanta for instances, is the great transient city, have lived
Speaker 1: here for only five years, and so they're still putting
Speaker 1: their roots down. But if you have had a huge
Speaker 1: economic loss in your life, and you are a single mother,
Speaker 1: then it would make sense that you begin to have
Speaker 1: these sort of anxieties creeping in at all times because
Speaker 1: one of the basic bedrocks of your existence, um, your
Speaker 1: access to healthcare, food is jeopardized. I was thinking about
Speaker 1: this a lot when I was Me and my wife
Speaker 1: were recently in China to adopt our son, the because
Speaker 1: you know, over there, we had had a really good guide,
Speaker 1: uh in in in the city of Nanning, and her
Speaker 1: name was Jane, and she was taking a song should
Speaker 1: point out things about the culture while we were there,
Speaker 1: and she pointed out, you'll see a lot of grandparents
Speaker 1: with the children during the day because you know, it's
Speaker 1: very family wise, very conservative culture and uh and so
Speaker 1: the grandparents will live with with the with the with
Speaker 1: the family and then they'll look after the kid during
Speaker 1: the day while the mom and dad work. And it's
Speaker 1: so at the same time, I'm you know, we're thinking, oh, well,
Speaker 1: here we are alone, you know, in this cult in
Speaker 1: this country, and we're about to to to get our son,
Speaker 1: and then that our grandparents units are on the other
Speaker 1: side of the world. You know, we positioned the center
Speaker 1: of the earth between us and them, and even when
Speaker 1: we return home, those those grandparents are still in uh
Speaker 1: in cities that are you know, four or seven hours away.
Speaker 1: Well see, and that's some really interesting is that's a discrepancy.
Speaker 1: That's that's the reason why in some third world countries
Speaker 1: you don't see these anxiety disorders being as prevalent as
Speaker 1: in the United States. Um, even though the conditions you know,
Speaker 1: in the access to food and healthcare could could be
Speaker 1: far worse than in the United States, because they have
Speaker 1: supports them in place. All Right, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick breaking when we come back, we will discuss tail
Speaker 1: and all and anxiety. All right, we're back and we're
Speaker 1: about to to lay on some information on you guys
Speaker 1: about ten at all about emotional pain and David Lynch, Yes,
Speaker 1: this is in case you were wondering, is there a
Speaker 1: study out there that involves let's see dental procedures, prostitutes, um,
Speaker 1: the Fear of death, and David Lynch's rabbits. Well, yes
Speaker 1: there is, Yes, we have that study for you. First though,
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention that we have talked about emotional
Speaker 1: pain and physical pain being processed basically by the same circuitry,
Speaker 1: and UM. That was fascinating to me because it turns
Speaker 1: out that, um, they're so closely related that if someone
Speaker 1: say hurts your feelings or there's some other emotional pain
Speaker 1: that you have, it literally does hurt you in that way.
Speaker 1: I mean you're not presumably you're not sitting there feeling
Speaker 1: as though daggers are in your skin, but there's but
Speaker 1: that's the sort of looney Tunes vision of it. It's
Speaker 1: like they stabbed me in the back with that statement.
Speaker 1: That was like, yes, your pures my heart when you
Speaker 1: said that, your brain is taking that as a threat.
Speaker 1: And um, this was particularly pointnant when we were talking
Speaker 1: about the teenage brain and why when when you're a
Speaker 1: teenager and if you're if you feel like you're shunned,
Speaker 1: it feels like the end of the world and it's
Speaker 1: not because a teen is being dramatic. It just turns
Speaker 1: out that that part of their brain is more amped
Speaker 1: up and they're getting many more signals from their brain
Speaker 1: that they are they're threatened because it's it's very much
Speaker 1: about attach yourself to a group, find your place, because
Speaker 1: that survival. Even though that model doesn't necessarily make as
Speaker 1: much sense uh in a modern sense and a very
Speaker 1: an organism level sense, it works. It does right, And
Speaker 1: researchers are really looking at this whole physical pain and
Speaker 1: social pain and looking at some of the same chemicals
Speaker 1: and neural processes that they share. And so these conditions
Speaker 1: really are kind of two sides of the same coin here,
Speaker 1: And so they have struck on this idea of tile
Speaker 1: a all not so much like, hey, let's use talent
Speaker 1: all to to really dial down any sort of anxiety,
Speaker 1: dread or emotional pain, but more in the sense of
Speaker 1: let's look at tilen al and see how it's working
Speaker 1: in conjunction with emotional It's more about, let's by giving
Speaker 1: talent the subjects in this experiment, we're able to highlight
Speaker 1: the connectedness between physical and emotional pain. So this do
Speaker 1: we want to talk about this study. We do. All right,
Speaker 1: So what do you do if you are Daniel Randall's
Speaker 1: a doctoral students psychology at the University of British Columbia. Well,
Speaker 1: what you do is you get a hundred twenty college
Speaker 1: students and you randomly assigned them to take either a
Speaker 1: thousand milligrams of a tail and all brand, a set
Speaker 1: amenta thing or a po cibo you know, a sugar pill. Uh,
Speaker 1: And that's the control group. And then one group of
Speaker 1: participants you instruct to write to barrack paragraphs about what
Speaker 1: would happen to their body if they die and how
Speaker 1: they would feel about it. And then the others you
Speaker 1: asked them to write about dental pain, which according to
Speaker 1: the paper would not be unpleasant but likely wouldn't invoke
Speaker 1: any existential anxieties, which I take some issue with. We'll discuss.
Speaker 1: But and then all the students then had to read
Speaker 1: a hypothetical or rest report about a prostitute and set
Speaker 1: the bail on a scale of zero to nine hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: And then finally there's there's there's some viewing of David
Speaker 1: Lynch's Rabbits. Yeah, tell us more, have you seen Rabbits?
Speaker 1: I haven't seen, but the still that I saw from
Speaker 1: it seems just in line with every other David Lynch
Speaker 1: film that I've seen in which there is a human
Speaker 1: with an animal head on in a domestic setting, and um,
Speaker 1: from from what they describe in this study, the domestic
Speaker 1: setting um is made even earier by the fact that
Speaker 1: not only is there a rabbit headed humans standing there,
Speaker 1: but there's a soundtrack that is very foreboding, and there
Speaker 1: are sort of the non sequiturs that are said by
Speaker 1: these rabbit humans that have no context, and then a
Speaker 1: laugh track that accompanies them. And what I thought was
Speaker 1: so brilliant about this is that Lynch is so good
Speaker 1: at sort of bringing up these very vague notions of
Speaker 1: unease in actual just like wrongness, that he's the perfect
Speaker 1: choice for trying to exacerbate this conditions and show a
Speaker 1: video of somebody like just hitting themselves in the knee
Speaker 1: with a sledgehammer. I'm sure that our film exists somewhere, um,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, this this walks the line in a
Speaker 1: very possibly effective manner. So from my understanding that they
Speaker 1: were made to watch this clip and then sort of
Speaker 1: um way again their reasoning in terms of death or
Speaker 1: even um what sort of punitive damages these prostitutes would pay,
Speaker 1: right right. So what's interesting here is looking at the
Speaker 1: way that Taile and all is affecting there their emotional response,
Speaker 1: their their their anxiety level regarding physical pain in terms
Speaker 1: of this dental um procedure that they're supposed to write about,
Speaker 1: in terms of the notion of inevitable physical death, and
Speaker 1: also their possible empathy for this, uh, this prostitute, this
Speaker 1: hypothetical prostitute that's been arrested. So of course the people
Speaker 1: that took the tunnel, well, they didn't seem to be
Speaker 1: as bothered by this idea of death, and they weren't
Speaker 1: as um I guess you could say, um, maybe their
Speaker 1: their value system for the prostitutes were a bit kinder
Speaker 1: and they didn't feel like they needed to pay as
Speaker 1: much as their counter approach who took the sugar pill,
Speaker 1: and they're dental pain they didn't feel was you know,
Speaker 1: quite as awful as they had imagined. So I mean
Speaker 1: that's telling you that this this tiel is sort of
Speaker 1: what they think, is that it is taking this emotional pain,
Speaker 1: processing and recasting it for people, and perhaps they're not
Speaker 1: feeling it is as much as they would have if
Speaker 1: they hadn't taken it. Now, again we have to underline
Speaker 1: once more, don't go taking a lot of time and
Speaker 1: all expecting to to treat your own anxiety levels. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wanted to also point out that, as the researchers
Speaker 1: pointed out, this is not something that they said, oh,
Speaker 1: take time and all if you have anxiety. Um, this
Speaker 1: was just again them trying to figure out how time
Speaker 1: all works on the brain. With emotion and a large
Speaker 1: amount of time all can actually lead to liver problems.
Speaker 1: So there's a whole Now. I do disagree with them
Speaker 1: about the whole um, the whole idea that oh, and
Speaker 1: thinking about dental pain is not going to cause you
Speaker 1: any kind of existential dread, because I tend to find,
Speaker 1: uh quite the opposite that if I think about dental pain,
Speaker 1: if I think about dental procedures, then I'm inevitably thinking
Speaker 1: about people getting older and people aging and the long
Speaker 1: of certain road to death. I always come back to
Speaker 1: Tina Fey's quote that the mouth dies first. You know
Speaker 1: that as you get older, you suddenly find yourself realizing, Hey,
Speaker 1: I I actually have to work a little harder to
Speaker 1: maintain everything in this cavity that is so damningly close
Speaker 1: to my brain and the center of being. Uh and
Speaker 1: and and then you end up having to get these procedures, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And uh And I find that it is a center
Speaker 1: of existential dread that I can dial down if I
Speaker 1: think about it enough and realize, all right, well, there's
Speaker 1: plenty of stuff I can do. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of fault establishing a plan and following
Speaker 1: it and trusting in your health care procedures that they're
Speaker 1: possibly more interested in maintaining your dental health and selling
Speaker 1: you a bunch of jumps. Well, I think that most
Speaker 1: people when they think about going to the dentist, they
Speaker 1: know that there's some mild discomfort, right, they might have
Speaker 1: their you know, gum lines bleed, so and so forth.
Speaker 1: But for other people, like maybe you and I who
Speaker 1: have had procedures, it really is there's a lot of
Speaker 1: angst because for me, going to the dentist is finding
Speaker 1: out that you have a problem. But then they go
Speaker 1: in and then they find even more problems that so
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, I'm peeling the onion and the
Speaker 1: existential dread of you know, are we ever going to
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of this awfulness. Now you're erecting
Speaker 1: a tiny village in my mouth with all sorts of materials. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the feeling like if I do everything you say,
Speaker 1: I'm still gonna wind up having to get something done.
Speaker 1: You know. It's so so Yeah. Maybe other people are different.
Speaker 1: You'll have to write in and let's know about that.
Speaker 1: But but I find it kind of an area of
Speaker 1: existential dread, possibly confounded for me personally since my deceased
Speaker 1: father was a dentist, so I probably have some additional
Speaker 1: baggage loaded on that train as well. It's possible. Yeah. UM.
Speaker 1: I wanted to point out that a second experiment of
Speaker 1: two hundred and seven participants in this same sort of
Speaker 1: structure where you have the Thailand all and you have
Speaker 1: the sugar pill and you have David Lynch, and this
Speaker 1: time you have the Simpsons UM as they control UM
Speaker 1: was shown to those two hundred and seven participants, and
Speaker 1: after watching the clip, the students looked at footage from
Speaker 1: the two thousand and eleven Vancouver hockey riots sparked by
Speaker 1: the Canucks loss and their bid for the Stanley Cup,
Speaker 1: and they are asked how harshly the rioters should be
Speaker 1: punished for vandalism. And again, uh, those who took tin
Speaker 1: all before they watched Rabbits that David Lynch films seem
Speaker 1: to feel more lenient, as did all the students who
Speaker 1: watched The Simpsons. So uh, you know, it's good that
Speaker 1: they check that out again. Again, this is you know,
Speaker 1: this idea of thailand all and emotional well being either
Speaker 1: early studies, they're not a lot of them, so it'll
Speaker 1: be interesting to see, but it does cast some interesting
Speaker 1: light on the connectedness of physical pain and anxiety. It's
Speaker 1: casts an interesting light on how anxious people behave towards
Speaker 1: other people, you know, they're they're how it affects their empathy, uh,
Speaker 1: and their severity and judging others. Well, it's interesting you
Speaker 1: say that because I read about trickle down anxiety and
Speaker 1: there's a small study of parent child pears that was
Speaker 1: conducted by John's Hopkins, and they looked at the relationship
Speaker 1: between anxiety ridden parents and their children and they found
Speaker 1: that parents with particularly in particular, social anxiety disorder, are
Speaker 1: more likely than parents with other types of anxiety to
Speaker 1: engage in behaviors that put their children at risk for
Speaker 1: developing angst of their own. And we're talking about sixty
Speaker 1: six anxious parents and their sixty six children ages seven
Speaker 1: to twelve, and they had to do this activity together.
Speaker 1: And what they found is that using a scale of
Speaker 1: one to five, that those again as kids that had
Speaker 1: the parents with social anxieties were criticized a lot more
Speaker 1: during this act um the parents expressed a lot more doubt,
Speaker 1: and then the kids sort of took that on again.
Speaker 1: So they were again trying to get to the bottom
Speaker 1: of you know, how much of this is nature and nurture,
Speaker 1: and you know how much of this do we actually
Speaker 1: pass on to our children. The other thing about anxiety,
Speaker 1: besides just being you know, very uncomfortable and for some
Speaker 1: people debilitating, is that for some people, particularly women, older women,
Speaker 1: it may shorten your telomeres. Now telomeres are those DNA
Speaker 1: proteins at the end of the chromosomes, and it's really
Speaker 1: important because telomeres, the longer you have them, presumably the
Speaker 1: lengthier of your life will be um or at least,
Speaker 1: you know, the less disease you may end up having,
Speaker 1: which would be great because presumably you would live longer
Speaker 1: if you have less disease. So a study by researchers
Speaker 1: that Brigham and Women's Hospital showed that a common form
Speaker 1: of anxiety, known as phobic anxiety was associated with shorter
Speaker 1: telomeres and middle age and older women, and um that
Speaker 1: suggested that phobic anxiety is a possible risk factor for
Speaker 1: accelerating age. So we're talking about blood samples from five
Speaker 1: thousand women, more than five thousand women ages forty two
Speaker 1: to sixty nine. And they used those samples and they
Speaker 1: analyze the telomere length as well as the participant's concurrent
Speaker 1: self reports regarding their phobic symptoms. And you know, this
Speaker 1: is the story again that these environmental factors in our
Speaker 1: internal states are going to affect the way that our
Speaker 1: body responds and how healthy it can be. So again,
Speaker 1: this is a this is a small study, and this
Speaker 1: is just this one group of women from those ages,
Speaker 1: but I think it's very telling on the sort of
Speaker 1: damage that sustained anxiety disorders can due to our bodies
Speaker 1: and minds. Ye, fear as the mind killer, all right,
Speaker 1: So we should probably everyone's thinking about anxiety now, we've
Speaker 1: been talking about it all of those podcasts. You're probably
Speaker 1: pinpointing examples of anxiety in your own life. So we
Speaker 1: should probably try and send everybody home semi happy and
Speaker 1: discuss some basic methods to cut down on the anxiety
Speaker 1: in your life. Uh, let's start with that with just
Speaker 1: talking about the body itself, fear in the body, anxiety
Speaker 1: and the body. What can you do to to bolster
Speaker 1: your your physical response to anxiety. Well, already know that
Speaker 1: when you are feeling anxious or stressed, that you're breathing
Speaker 1: patterns change and they're essentially telegraphing to your body, Hey
Speaker 1: there's a problem here. So gaining your breath and becoming
Speaker 1: aware of that is hugely important. And we've talked about
Speaker 1: that in terms of meditation, yoga, Yeah, stopping to breathe,
Speaker 1: basically any kind of any kind of basic breathing exercise
Speaker 1: out there, and there are many, Uh, they can have
Speaker 1: just I don't know about phenomenal, but they can have
Speaker 1: very nosable effects on your immediate level of the axone. Um,
Speaker 1: some basic stuff here, just sort of mom kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Eat right, you know, stuff you know, eat, eat balanced meals.
Speaker 1: Eat Eat some things that are good for you, not
Speaker 1: just junk food. Avoid alcohol, nicotine, sugar, and caffeine. Because
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking about UM, we're talking about things
Speaker 1: that the depressed or stimulate the body. Again, you know,
Speaker 1: talking about that hallway. On one end of the hallway,
Speaker 1: there's uh, there's worry and fear. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: and there's happiness and you know, and crazy excitement. And
Speaker 1: in the middle of the hallway that's where the pieces,
Speaker 1: that's where the balance is and you can't make you're
Speaker 1: not going to maintain one extreme without without ricocheting back
Speaker 1: to the other. So when you're taking these uh you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying don't you know, drink alcohol or don't
Speaker 1: have a cup of coffee, but know that your skyrocketing
Speaker 1: yourself in one direction or the other, and it's you're
Speaker 1: potentially turning into this pin pall ball of anxiety, zipping
Speaker 1: up and down the hallway. UM. Exercise is great for
Speaker 1: a variety of reasons, including, as we mentioned earlier, getting
Speaker 1: out of your head and into your body. You know,
Speaker 1: there's if you're you're straining yourself into a pose in yoga,
Speaker 1: or if you're you're punishing yourself on the rowing machine
Speaker 1: at the gym, then as long as CNN isn't on
Speaker 1: in the background, there's a good chance that you're gonna
Speaker 1: be able to get out of your mind and get
Speaker 1: into your body. Um, taking care of yourself, getting a
Speaker 1: good night's sleep. This was something that I really woke
Speaker 1: up to on the adoption trip when when we came back,
Speaker 1: especially and everybody was jet lagged, including the toddler of course,
Speaker 1: is that if you don't have enough sleep, everything gets crazier.
Speaker 1: And it's something I already knew from our podcasts and
Speaker 1: and and our research, but really drove home for me
Speaker 1: that if you don't have enough sleep, then the anxiety
Speaker 1: is really gonna crank up. And then also finally considered
Speaker 1: that hormonal changes may be occurring as well. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: And I think like a British person, yeah yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're a if you're an American listening to this, uh
Speaker 1: not someone buried all down, but um, this idea and
Speaker 1: you already kind of touched on this is that happiness
Speaker 1: and you know extremes are not sustainable. And so if
Speaker 1: you look at it a culture, if you look at
Speaker 1: the UK culture in terms of pursuit of happiness, that's
Speaker 1: not quite as rapid as it is in the United States,
Speaker 1: Like the expectations are a little bit more pragmatic in
Speaker 1: terms of what we should expect for ourselves. Yeah, don't
Speaker 1: buy into the product that most commercials are selling saying
Speaker 1: you can be happy all of the time with this product.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, there you go.
Speaker 1: We've discussed discussed anxiety, general anxiety, dread in your life
Speaker 1: and the lives of those around you. Hopefully we've uh
Speaker 1: we forced you to at the very least sort of
Speaker 1: turn the camera back around and look at anxiety written
Speaker 1: and sort of get some perspective on it in your
Speaker 1: own life and realize that a little bit what's going
Speaker 1: on there, and you know, maybe we even covered a
Speaker 1: few of the tools you may begin to use to
Speaker 1: correct it. But if, again, if you are experiencing this
Speaker 1: kind of general anxiety that we've discussed, if anxiety is
Speaker 1: really playing a debilitating role in your life, even just
Speaker 1: a little bit, do consider getting some sort of professional help. Help,
Speaker 1: go to a doctor, tell them what's going on. You know,
Speaker 1: don't don't feel like you're alone in this. And this
Speaker 1: is just a personal battle between you and your deane.
Speaker 1: All right, So hey, you want to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us, You want to talk about anxiety, about fear,
Speaker 1: about dread about all these things. You can find us
Speaker 1: in all the usual places, uh stuff to bow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where our blogs, videos, podcast,
Speaker 1: et cetera may be found. You can also find us
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: on all of those, and you can also find us
Speaker 1: on mind Stuff Show for our YouTube clips and Julie
Speaker 1: put and they find us for a good old fashioned
Speaker 1: email correspondence. You can send that to blow the mind
Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com