October 3, 2013 • 35 mins
What is dread and how are we supposed to cope with it? Why do we let it control our lives so much? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Law and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
you dread anything, see anything in your life that you
just truly, opinically dread on a sort of permanent basis, Yeah,
(00:27):
like in a day in, day out kind of a thing,
or even in a on on a very short term scale,
like are you dreading our move from the fifteenth floor
to the eleventh? Now? I celebrate it a new beginning. Yeah, yeah,
I'm positive way to look at but yeah, I think
you just you know, we're gonna release ourselves from the
shackles of the past whatever that means. No, for me,
(00:47):
it's more I don't I don't dread that. It's more
like I'll have these sort of clouds of existential dread
every once in a while, meaning that it could be
the most beautiful day with this clear blue sky, everything
could be going right, but somewhere in the world I
feel like, you know, there's this general unease about something
(01:08):
not going well, possibly in the future. So for me,
it's not usually a defined dread. What about you, um
dread well? Yes, we so we discussed in paper tigers. Uh.
It's it's easy to begin to have these these fight
or flight fears about things that have have have have
no power to really harmss. Like when I was going
(01:30):
through a lot of a lot of paperwork for adoption
or or every year with taxes, I get that sense
of dread, you know, like I've got to I've got
to do this paperwork and it's gonna be dreadful on
some level, and I feel like it's a physical threat
to me. But but of course it isn't. And if
I stopped to analyze it enough, I realized, no, this
is not necessarily life for death. Yeah. But I was
(01:52):
thinking about this that we have been trained, at least
here in the United States, UM, in various ways to
dread something off will happening to you. And it begins
very you know, at a young age. We're taught to
anticipate these various tragedies, whether or not it's a hurricane
or tornado or some other sort of natural disaster. Uh.
(02:13):
And you know how about the whole like stop, drop
and roll, um, all the sorts of alarms and emergency
uh routines that we go through and that's good because
it helps to prepare you need you need to be prepared,
and so we'll have very real life examples of that
where if there's a fire, you stop dropping roll. And
then we have uh, you know, in our fairy tales
(02:33):
and the stories we tell each on the fictions, I
mean by the very nature that you need the narrative
to be engaging. It's fiction, it's storytelling. You need there
to be a threat. You need something to happen that
is bad so that the characters can navigate through it,
around it, or what have you. So people wander into
the woods and they're abducted by witches and which is
trying to cook them. Things of that nature happened, as
(02:54):
it means to try and remind children, hey, don't go
walking into candy houses just because they're made out of candy.
You might wind up being eaten by a cannibal woman, right.
Stranger danger really what we're talking about. So you do
have to create this database of dangers in order to
better survive. But then you have sort of this minutia
of minor threats or perceived threats or just stand ins
(03:17):
for threats that aren't really dangerous, but they begin to
take over in your imagination more real pressing threats. And
that's where this idea of dread anxiety and in some
ways just generalized anxiety disorders take over. Stranger danger is
a great example of that because on one, on a
very basic level, yes, there's their children need to be
(03:39):
on guard, they need to stay around their parents, and
there are individuals out there who will harm them. It's
just you know, statistically they exist. However, if you go
overboard and you start thinking that every stranger is a danger,
if you start, even as a culture began to just
go on like a NonStop witch hunt of potential people
(04:00):
who are a danger to children, then you get into
an entirely weird and problematic area. Well, let me layer
one more thing over that. Then you begin to read
things like it shouldn't be a stranger that you're concerned about,
because the majority of abductions take place by people that
you actually know, and so you have to sort of
reframe that conversation with your child. So what the point
(04:21):
is is that there's all there's all these sort of
real and perceived threats such as pile up one on
top of the other. Whereas humans, particularly in the day
and age that we live in. When there's so much
data in front of us, you have to sort through
it and try to figure out what you truly should
be anxious about. And sometimes the you know, the wiring
gets crossed, yeah, which makes us to something called general
(04:41):
anxiety disorder or or GAD or or as I like
to read it, God. And so general anxiety disorder is severe,
ongoing anxiety that interferes with your day to day activities. Uh.
And we're talking about symptoms such as panic disorder, ob
sensive compulsive disorder, other types of anxiety that kind of
get uh sucked into the fold, and they're they're varying
(05:02):
at different levels of this condition. Yeah, And it's generally
involves thoughts of uncontrollability and unpredictability of upcoming personally selling
an events or shifting attention, of our inability to cope,
memory of negative aspects of certain events, and negative emotion.
And people with this disorder they can't relax, They startle easily,
and they have difficulty concentrating, and a lot of times
(05:25):
they have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep.
And the National Institute of Mental Health says that the
physical Symptoms that accompany this include, of course, fatigue, headaches,
muscle tension, muscle aches, difficulty swallowing, trembling, twitching, irritabilities, wedding, nausea, lightheadedness,
and having to go to the bathroom frequently. I thought
(05:45):
was interesting. Now now luckily it's it's very treatable for
the most part via medications and and or therapy, so
it's not not necessarily a permanent life condition. But it's
it's again, it's it's like you say, it's these these
in xieties build up in our lives. Um. I like
to think of like a cave with stalactites and stalacmites
forming until eventually they're just all the sharpened cave to
(06:08):
teeth everywhere and uh, and they can be cleared out,
but you've got to sort of stop and have some
sort of level of self awareness either come out of
you or or have it imposed upon you, to realize
what's real and what's not well. And I think the
reasons why they can, even if you brush them away,
they they continue to build back up is because at
(06:29):
the very heart of this is this this knowledge that
one day we will all die, right, this is so
you know, every last one of us. So this is
that sort of I always think about it as this
um sort of double edged blade of consciousness, you know,
like it's great that you're conscious, were humans are conscious,
(06:50):
and we can enjoy so many different things. At the
same time we realize that, you know, our time um
in our physical bodies is going to come to a close,
right yeah, and that you know, there's a very good
chance that the last few chapters of that book might
be a little less happy the middle one, right, and
everything beyond that is the great unknown. So it's sort
(07:10):
of you know, that's that's a lot for a brain,
a conscious brain, to sort of taking, even if you
pick it apart, which I sometimes do, and you know,
I remind myself, well, death everybody does it. Everybody's every
everybody's doing it, and look at some of the people
who do it. It couldn't there couldn't be that much
to it, right, But on one hand you can sort
(07:31):
of this man like that, But then you remind yourself
exactly what it entails, not just a mirror cutting off
of life, but a well in some cases it's that,
but but in other cases a decline of life and
a decline of the quality of life that terminates in
this of this well, I was thinking about probably one
of the best films that deals with this topic, and
(07:54):
for me, it's a serious man five the Coen Brothers.
It is. It's probably a little bit leaker than some
of their films that it's definitely it's it's probably one
of the Cohen Brothers films. It's easier to overlook. And
just in case you know you're listening and you don't
know or have a context of this film, Um, it
is kind of a slow mo existential train wreck of
(08:17):
this character's life. His name is Larry Gopnick, and it
gets a clean bill of health. This is how the
movie starts out with and then everything just kind of
falls apart from there, and um, every relationship in his
life falls apart, which is again this sort of dread
that we all have, like are we tending to this person?
Is this happening? Is this is the machine still moving
(08:38):
along in the ways that it's supposed to, And for
Larry Gopnick, it doesn't. It begins to fall apart, and
he even begins to receive angry calls from a Columbia
record club debt collector, which I think is really brilliant
because if you've ever been plagued by anxiety, then you
know that these minor infringements from your past are things
(08:59):
that bubble to the surf us every once in a
while that you worry about. So this, you know, past
record club collection calling him and nagging him is a
nice stand in for that. Yeah. I mean, like we've
discussed the power of closing loops in your life and
how an unclosed loop is instantly at least a pinpoint
of anxiety in your in your mind. And so that's
(09:19):
a great example because the Columbia Records is not going
to come and break your thumbs, you know, maybe, well
it depends, it depends which Columbia Records, if they're actually
based out of Columbia, I don't know, but but but yeah,
it's totally a paper tiger. It's totally a closed loop,
I mean, an unclosed loop anxiety working on this character.
(09:40):
I'm glad you brought up the loop thing because that's
something that what we can talk about later in terms
of trying to um, you know, keep this anxiety disorder
in check. But I think we should talk about how
America is a very anxious country. It turns out and
that Americans really suffer from anxiety disorders more of than
(10:00):
any other culture in the world. Yeah, because you think
about what what sort of has become the I don't
know about the predominant, but a but a very common
American story. Uh. And I imagine you have this as
well as I. What happened in your life At one point,
you moved away from your parents house? Where do you move?
You moved to the big city where you're surrounded by people,
but you're less close to any of the people around you.
(10:22):
You know, you you, you know, you you have maybe
your your your spouse and or your child with you.
But then you increasingly you have all this social media
creeping into your life and this becomes the means by
which you connect to other people. And uh and and
then meanwhile this uh, the families be moved away from
They may be across the country, they may be on
you know, in some cases, they may be on the
other side of the globe. And so we're more and
(10:43):
more distant from people and uh and we're more cut off. Yeah,
that's true. And uh. I just wanted to point out
that according to the World Health Organization, that the United
States has something like a nearly a third of the
Americans UH suffering from anxiety problem albums in their lifetime,
So a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetime.
(11:03):
And the National Institute of National Health says that in
any given year, ninetent of the population suffers from anxiety.
Between nineteen and two thousand and four, Americans more than
doubled their spending on anti anxiety medications like sanics and value,
so that industry went from nine hundred million to two
point one billions. So what we're seeing here is this
(11:25):
idea that our anxiety has not just always been an
American thing, but it tends to uh or we tend
to see an increase in it over the last couple
of decades. So, as you had mentioned, you know, there
are a couple of factors to them. One is just
sort of chasing that job around various different parts of
the country and resettling and losing some of the connections
(11:47):
to your family and friends. And some of that is
um that you have an increased amount of data and information,
but it's more in the way that it's presented. And
I was thinking about this because uh, I've been rowing
at the gym a lot lately, and this I find
to be a very zen activity. It's great, But then
I'll look up at the TV and at the ticker
(12:08):
at the bottom of the news program will have some
sort of horrible thing about some child, some something just
unimaginable happening to the child, just running over and over
again and so again it. You know, the way that
this information is presented and consumed by us sort of
adds to that feeling, because here I am feeling like
(12:29):
I'm imagining myself on a on a lake rowing and
now now I'm thinking about a dead child. Yeah. I've
never understood the need to have that kind of ticker
going on in places like a gym, where shouldn't the
focus be on getting out of my head and getting
into my body? Like why am I watching this horrible news?
Or I've seen the same TV sets blaring over jacuzzis
(12:52):
uh and or within earshot of a sauna like why
why why they're oh? And then of course the big
one is airports. You know, Like, I'm very much of
the mindset that we need to have we if the
TVs are on, okay, have the TV is on to
distract people, but have it tuned into kittens and puppies playing.
Have the for the audio, just have it be Brian
ENO's music for airports. We don't need to watch ticker
(13:15):
tape about um, you know, child murders, train rex plane
crashes and what have you. It just seems like like
like why continue to sprinkle that kind of horrible topic. Well,
it is inescapable and um, as Taylor Clark in the
article It's not the job Market from Slant Magazine says, UM,
a lot of this is reported in a fear based fashion,
(13:35):
so it's not balanced in the sense that, um, you know,
the good natured stories tend to hit the news, it's
usually the ones that are bleeding and awful attention. Part
of that is the virtue of the twenty four hour
news cycle. You gotta you gotta find something, you gotta
put it up there, and then you gotta milk it
for everything it's worth. Now, Taylor does say that UM
(13:56):
compounding this is an intolerance for negative feelings. So Taylor says,
we reject situations that could make us feel discomfort. We
try to bury or reverse our feelings through shopping, alcohol
or drug use, or entertainment and psychologist Stephen Hayes who
uses an acceptance and commitment therapy rather than drug therapy,
(14:18):
or maybe he uses an in conjunction. Said Americans are
victims of feel goodism, the false idea that bad feelings
ought to be annihilated, controlled, or erased by a pill.
So some of this is that idea of this pursuit
of happiness, right, Like, we're all entitled to be happy,
and if we're not happy at this very moment, something
is wrong and not feeling settled without discomfort that everybody feels. Yeah,
(14:40):
well it comes it comes back to the end of
the idea of balance in one's life, you know that,
and to to get you know, to to dip my
toes in a little of Buddhism here for a second.
You know, it's the idea that it's from the from
the human realm. It's from this, this realm of peace
that one is able to ascend above that cycle of suffering.
It's not from an extreme of pain and worry. It's
not from extreme of happiness and pleasure, Like those are
(15:02):
both kind of not really dead ends, but those are
not the extremes from which liberation life you have. If
it's it's through this middle ground and an understanding that
those are extremes that when I'm happy and when I'm
when I'm having just an awesome time, that cannot be
the norm. You know, not sustainable, and if you try
to sustain it, it's like stretching a rubber band. You're
(15:25):
going to crash down to the other end of the hallway. Now,
there there are some other factors. According to Red Curves
University researcher. To this Seabear, poor mothers are more likely
to be classified as having the mental illness of anxiety
disorder or generalized anxiety is disorder because they live in poverty,
not because they're suffering from a psychiatric disorder. And so
(15:47):
that's where some of this area gets, you know, a
little bit gray, because there are some people who are
priest predisposed genetically to have anxiety disorders UM. And then
sometimes it's just the environmental factors that are pressed upon you.
And it was nature and nurture, both environment and genetics
playing a role here. Yeah, And what I thought was
interesting about this is we already talked about how UM
(16:09):
in the United States in particular, migrating from one airing
to another is pretty typical, and so we don't usually
have the support systems of our families or our communities. Um,
I mean some of us do. Some some people have
lived for you know, their families have lived for generations
in one area. And some people, you know, like in
Atlanta for instances, is the great transient city, have lived
(16:31):
here for only five years, and so they're still putting
their roots down. But if you have had a huge
economic loss in your life, and you are a single mother,
then it would make sense that you begin to have
these sort of anxieties creeping in at all times because
one of the basic bedrocks of your existence, um, your
access to healthcare, food is jeopardized. I was thinking about
(16:53):
this a lot when I was Me and my wife
were recently in China to adopt our son, the because
you know, over there, we had had a really good guide,
uh in in in the city of Nanning, and her
name was Jane, and she was taking a song should
point out things about the culture while we were there,
and she pointed out, you'll see a lot of grandparents
with the children during the day because you know, it's
(17:15):
very family wise, very conservative culture and uh and so
the grandparents will live with with the with the with
the family and then they'll look after the kid during
the day while the mom and dad work. And it's
so at the same time, I'm you know, we're thinking, oh, well,
here we are alone, you know, in this cult in
this country, and we're about to to to get our son,
(17:36):
and then that our grandparents units are on the other
side of the world. You know, we positioned the center
of the earth between us and them, and even when
we return home, those those grandparents are still in uh
in cities that are you know, four or seven hours away.
Well see, and that's some really interesting is that's a discrepancy.
That's that's the reason why in some third world countries
(17:56):
you don't see these anxiety disorders being as prevalent as
in the United States. Um, even though the conditions you know,
in the access to food and healthcare could could be
far worse than in the United States, because they have
supports them in place. All Right, we're gonna take a
quick breaking when we come back, we will discuss tail
and all and anxiety. All right, we're back and we're
(18:23):
about to to lay on some information on you guys
about ten at all about emotional pain and David Lynch, Yes,
this is in case you were wondering, is there a
study out there that involves let's see dental procedures, prostitutes, um,
the Fear of death, and David Lynch's rabbits. Well, yes
(18:46):
there is, Yes, we have that study for you. First though,
I wanted to mention that we have talked about emotional
pain and physical pain being processed basically by the same circuitry,
and UM. That was fascinating to me because it turns
out that, um, they're so closely related that if someone
(19:08):
say hurts your feelings or there's some other emotional pain
that you have, it literally does hurt you in that way.
I mean you're not presumably you're not sitting there feeling
as though daggers are in your skin, but there's but
that's the sort of looney Tunes vision of it. It's
like they stabbed me in the back with that statement.
That was like, yes, your pures my heart when you
(19:30):
said that, your brain is taking that as a threat.
And um, this was particularly pointnant when we were talking
about the teenage brain and why when when you're a
teenager and if you're if you feel like you're shunned,
it feels like the end of the world and it's
not because a teen is being dramatic. It just turns
(19:52):
out that that part of their brain is more amped
up and they're getting many more signals from their brain
that they are they're threatened because it's it's very much
about attach yourself to a group, find your place, because
that survival. Even though that model doesn't necessarily make as
much sense uh in a modern sense and a very
an organism level sense, it works. It does right, And
(20:14):
researchers are really looking at this whole physical pain and
social pain and looking at some of the same chemicals
and neural processes that they share. And so these conditions
really are kind of two sides of the same coin here,
And so they have struck on this idea of tile
a all not so much like, hey, let's use talent
(20:35):
all to to really dial down any sort of anxiety,
dread or emotional pain, but more in the sense of
let's look at tilen al and see how it's working
in conjunction with emotional It's more about, let's by giving
talent the subjects in this experiment, we're able to highlight
the connectedness between physical and emotional pain. So this do
(20:57):
we want to talk about this study. We do. All right,
So what do you do if you are Daniel Randall's
a doctoral students psychology at the University of British Columbia. Well,
what you do is you get a hundred twenty college
students and you randomly assigned them to take either a
thousand milligrams of a tail and all brand, a set
amenta thing or a po cibo you know, a sugar pill. Uh,
(21:20):
And that's the control group. And then one group of
participants you instruct to write to barrack paragraphs about what
would happen to their body if they die and how
they would feel about it. And then the others you
asked them to write about dental pain, which according to
the paper would not be unpleasant but likely wouldn't invoke
any existential anxieties, which I take some issue with. We'll discuss.
(21:42):
But and then all the students then had to read
a hypothetical or rest report about a prostitute and set
the bail on a scale of zero to nine hundred dollars.
And then finally there's there's there's some viewing of David
Lynch's Rabbits. Yeah, tell us more, have you seen Rabbits?
I haven't seen, but the still that I saw from
it seems just in line with every other David Lynch
(22:05):
film that I've seen in which there is a human
with an animal head on in a domestic setting, and um,
from from what they describe in this study, the domestic
setting um is made even earier by the fact that
not only is there a rabbit headed humans standing there,
but there's a soundtrack that is very foreboding, and there
(22:27):
are sort of the non sequiturs that are said by
these rabbit humans that have no context, and then a
laugh track that accompanies them. And what I thought was
so brilliant about this is that Lynch is so good
at sort of bringing up these very vague notions of
unease in actual just like wrongness, that he's the perfect
(22:49):
choice for trying to exacerbate this conditions and show a
video of somebody like just hitting themselves in the knee
with a sledgehammer. I'm sure that our film exists somewhere, um,
but but yeah, this this walks the line in a
very possibly effective manner. So from my understanding that they
were made to watch this clip and then sort of
(23:12):
um way again their reasoning in terms of death or
even um what sort of punitive damages these prostitutes would pay,
right right. So what's interesting here is looking at the
way that Taile and all is affecting there their emotional response,
their their their anxiety level regarding physical pain in terms
of this dental um procedure that they're supposed to write about,
(23:35):
in terms of the notion of inevitable physical death, and
also their possible empathy for this, uh, this prostitute, this
hypothetical prostitute that's been arrested. So of course the people
that took the tunnel, well, they didn't seem to be
as bothered by this idea of death, and they weren't
as um I guess you could say, um, maybe their
(23:58):
their value system for the prostitutes were a bit kinder
and they didn't feel like they needed to pay as
much as their counter approach who took the sugar pill,
and they're dental pain they didn't feel was you know,
quite as awful as they had imagined. So I mean
that's telling you that this this tiel is sort of
what they think, is that it is taking this emotional pain,
(24:21):
processing and recasting it for people, and perhaps they're not
feeling it is as much as they would have if
they hadn't taken it. Now, again we have to underline
once more, don't go taking a lot of time and
all expecting to to treat your own anxiety levels. Yeah.
I wanted to also point out that, as the researchers
(24:42):
pointed out, this is not something that they said, oh,
take time and all if you have anxiety. Um, this
was just again them trying to figure out how time
all works on the brain. With emotion and a large
amount of time all can actually lead to liver problems.
So there's a whole Now. I do disagree with them
about the whole um, the whole idea that oh, and
thinking about dental pain is not going to cause you
(25:04):
any kind of existential dread, because I tend to find,
uh quite the opposite that if I think about dental pain,
if I think about dental procedures, then I'm inevitably thinking
about people getting older and people aging and the long
of certain road to death. I always come back to
Tina Fey's quote that the mouth dies first. You know
(25:25):
that as you get older, you suddenly find yourself realizing, Hey,
I I actually have to work a little harder to
maintain everything in this cavity that is so damningly close
to my brain and the center of being. Uh and
and and then you end up having to get these procedures, etcetera.
And uh And I find that it is a center
(25:46):
of existential dread that I can dial down if I
think about it enough and realize, all right, well, there's
plenty of stuff I can do. And you know, it's
just a matter of fault establishing a plan and following
it and trusting in your health care procedures that they're
possibly more interested in maintaining your dental health and selling
you a bunch of jumps. Well, I think that most
people when they think about going to the dentist, they
(26:07):
know that there's some mild discomfort, right, they might have
their you know, gum lines bleed, so and so forth.
But for other people, like maybe you and I who
have had procedures, it really is there's a lot of
angst because for me, going to the dentist is finding
out that you have a problem. But then they go
in and then they find even more problems that so
it's like, you know, I'm peeling the onion and the
(26:28):
existential dread of you know, are we ever going to
get to the bottom of this awfulness. Now you're erecting
a tiny village in my mouth with all sorts of materials. Yeah,
and the feeling like if I do everything you say,
I'm still gonna wind up having to get something done.
You know. It's so so Yeah. Maybe other people are different.
You'll have to write in and let's know about that.
But but I find it kind of an area of
(26:50):
existential dread, possibly confounded for me personally since my deceased
father was a dentist, so I probably have some additional
baggage loaded on that train as well. It's possible. Yeah. UM.
I wanted to point out that a second experiment of
two hundred and seven participants in this same sort of
structure where you have the Thailand all and you have
the sugar pill and you have David Lynch, and this
(27:12):
time you have the Simpsons UM as they control UM
was shown to those two hundred and seven participants, and
after watching the clip, the students looked at footage from
the two thousand and eleven Vancouver hockey riots sparked by
the Canucks loss and their bid for the Stanley Cup,
and they are asked how harshly the rioters should be
punished for vandalism. And again, uh, those who took tin
(27:35):
all before they watched Rabbits that David Lynch films seem
to feel more lenient, as did all the students who
watched The Simpsons. So uh, you know, it's good that
they check that out again. Again, this is you know,
this idea of thailand all and emotional well being either
early studies, they're not a lot of them, so it'll
be interesting to see, but it does cast some interesting
(27:56):
light on the connectedness of physical pain and anxiety. It's
casts an interesting light on how anxious people behave towards
other people, you know, they're they're how it affects their empathy, uh,
and their severity and judging others. Well, it's interesting you
say that because I read about trickle down anxiety and
(28:16):
there's a small study of parent child pears that was
conducted by John's Hopkins, and they looked at the relationship
between anxiety ridden parents and their children and they found
that parents with particularly in particular, social anxiety disorder, are
more likely than parents with other types of anxiety to
engage in behaviors that put their children at risk for
developing angst of their own. And we're talking about sixty
(28:40):
six anxious parents and their sixty six children ages seven
to twelve, and they had to do this activity together.
And what they found is that using a scale of
one to five, that those again as kids that had
the parents with social anxieties were criticized a lot more
during this act um the parents expressed a lot more doubt,
(29:00):
and then the kids sort of took that on again.
So they were again trying to get to the bottom
of you know, how much of this is nature and nurture,
and you know how much of this do we actually
pass on to our children. The other thing about anxiety,
besides just being you know, very uncomfortable and for some
people debilitating, is that for some people, particularly women, older women,
(29:22):
it may shorten your telomeres. Now telomeres are those DNA
proteins at the end of the chromosomes, and it's really
important because telomeres, the longer you have them, presumably the
lengthier of your life will be um or at least,
you know, the less disease you may end up having,
which would be great because presumably you would live longer
(29:42):
if you have less disease. So a study by researchers
that Brigham and Women's Hospital showed that a common form
of anxiety, known as phobic anxiety was associated with shorter
telomeres and middle age and older women, and um that
suggested that phobic anxiety is a possible risk factor for
accelerating age. So we're talking about blood samples from five
(30:02):
thousand women, more than five thousand women ages forty two
to sixty nine. And they used those samples and they
analyze the telomere length as well as the participant's concurrent
self reports regarding their phobic symptoms. And you know, this
is the story again that these environmental factors in our
(30:24):
internal states are going to affect the way that our
body responds and how healthy it can be. So again,
this is a this is a small study, and this
is just this one group of women from those ages,
but I think it's very telling on the sort of
damage that sustained anxiety disorders can due to our bodies
and minds. Ye, fear as the mind killer, all right,
(30:46):
So we should probably everyone's thinking about anxiety now, we've
been talking about it all of those podcasts. You're probably
pinpointing examples of anxiety in your own life. So we
should probably try and send everybody home semi happy and
discuss some basic methods to cut down on the anxiety
in your life. Uh, let's start with that with just
talking about the body itself, fear in the body, anxiety
and the body. What can you do to to bolster
(31:09):
your your physical response to anxiety. Well, already know that
when you are feeling anxious or stressed, that you're breathing
patterns change and they're essentially telegraphing to your body, Hey
there's a problem here. So gaining your breath and becoming
aware of that is hugely important. And we've talked about
that in terms of meditation, yoga, Yeah, stopping to breathe,
(31:31):
basically any kind of any kind of basic breathing exercise
out there, and there are many, Uh, they can have
just I don't know about phenomenal, but they can have
very nosable effects on your immediate level of the axone. Um,
some basic stuff here, just sort of mom kind of stuff.
Eat right, you know, stuff you know, eat, eat balanced meals.
Eat Eat some things that are good for you, not
(31:52):
just junk food. Avoid alcohol, nicotine, sugar, and caffeine. Because
you know, we're talking about UM, we're talking about things
that the depressed or stimulate the body. Again, you know,
talking about that hallway. On one end of the hallway,
there's uh, there's worry and fear. On the other hand,
and there's happiness and you know, and crazy excitement. And
in the middle of the hallway that's where the pieces,
(32:14):
that's where the balance is and you can't make you're
not going to maintain one extreme without without ricocheting back
to the other. So when you're taking these uh you know,
I'm not saying don't you know, drink alcohol or don't
have a cup of coffee, but know that your skyrocketing
yourself in one direction or the other, and it's you're
potentially turning into this pin pall ball of anxiety, zipping
(32:35):
up and down the hallway. UM. Exercise is great for
a variety of reasons, including, as we mentioned earlier, getting
out of your head and into your body. You know,
there's if you're you're straining yourself into a pose in yoga,
or if you're you're punishing yourself on the rowing machine
at the gym, then as long as CNN isn't on
in the background, there's a good chance that you're gonna
(32:57):
be able to get out of your mind and get
into your body. Um, taking care of yourself, getting a
good night's sleep. This was something that I really woke
up to on the adoption trip when when we came back,
especially and everybody was jet lagged, including the toddler of course,
is that if you don't have enough sleep, everything gets crazier.
And it's something I already knew from our podcasts and
(33:19):
and and our research, but really drove home for me
that if you don't have enough sleep, then the anxiety
is really gonna crank up. And then also finally considered
that hormonal changes may be occurring as well. Yeah, that's true.
And I think like a British person, yeah yeah, if
you're a if you're an American listening to this, uh
(33:40):
not someone buried all down, but um, this idea and
you already kind of touched on this is that happiness
and you know extremes are not sustainable. And so if
you look at it a culture, if you look at
the UK culture in terms of pursuit of happiness, that's
not quite as rapid as it is in the United States,
Like the expectations are a little bit more pragmatic in
(34:03):
terms of what we should expect for ourselves. Yeah, don't
buy into the product that most commercials are selling saying
you can be happy all of the time with this product.
That's right. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, there you go.
We've discussed discussed anxiety, general anxiety, dread in your life
and the lives of those around you. Hopefully we've uh
we forced you to at the very least sort of
(34:25):
turn the camera back around and look at anxiety written
and sort of get some perspective on it in your
own life and realize that a little bit what's going
on there, and you know, maybe we even covered a
few of the tools you may begin to use to
correct it. But if, again, if you are experiencing this
kind of general anxiety that we've discussed, if anxiety is
(34:46):
really playing a debilitating role in your life, even just
a little bit, do consider getting some sort of professional help. Help,
go to a doctor, tell them what's going on. You know,
don't don't feel like you're alone in this. And this
is just a personal battle between you and your deane.
All right, So hey, you want to get in touch
with us, You want to talk about anxiety, about fear,
(35:07):
about dread about all these things. You can find us
in all the usual places, uh stuff to bow your
Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where our blogs, videos, podcast,
et cetera may be found. You can also find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Stuff to Blow your Mind
on all of those, and you can also find us
on mind Stuff Show for our YouTube clips and Julie
put and they find us for a good old fashioned
email correspondence. You can send that to blow the mind
(35:30):
at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Law and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
you dread anything, see anything in your life that you
just truly, opinically dread on a sort of permanent basis, Yeah,
(00:27):
like in a day in, day out kind of a thing,
or even in a on on a very short term scale,
like are you dreading our move from the fifteenth floor
to the eleventh? Now? I celebrate it a new beginning. Yeah, yeah,
I'm positive way to look at but yeah, I think
you just you know, we're gonna release ourselves from the
shackles of the past whatever that means. No, for me,
(00:47):
it's more I don't I don't dread that. It's more
like I'll have these sort of clouds of existential dread
every once in a while, meaning that it could be
the most beautiful day with this clear blue sky, everything
could be going right, but somewhere in the world I
feel like, you know, there's this general unease about something
(01:08):
not going well, possibly in the future. So for me,
it's not usually a defined dread. What about you, um
dread well? Yes, we so we discussed in paper tigers. Uh.
It's it's easy to begin to have these these fight
or flight fears about things that have have have have
no power to really harmss. Like when I was going
(01:30):
through a lot of a lot of paperwork for adoption
or or every year with taxes, I get that sense
of dread, you know, like I've got to I've got
to do this paperwork and it's gonna be dreadful on
some level, and I feel like it's a physical threat
to me. But but of course it isn't. And if
I stopped to analyze it enough, I realized, no, this
is not necessarily life for death. Yeah. But I was
(01:52):
thinking about this that we have been trained, at least
here in the United States, UM, in various ways to
dread something off will happening to you. And it begins
very you know, at a young age. We're taught to
anticipate these various tragedies, whether or not it's a hurricane
or tornado or some other sort of natural disaster. Uh.
(02:13):
And you know how about the whole like stop, drop
and roll, um, all the sorts of alarms and emergency
uh routines that we go through and that's good because
it helps to prepare you need you need to be prepared,
and so we'll have very real life examples of that
where if there's a fire, you stop dropping roll. And
then we have uh, you know, in our fairy tales
(02:33):
and the stories we tell each on the fictions, I
mean by the very nature that you need the narrative
to be engaging. It's fiction, it's storytelling. You need there
to be a threat. You need something to happen that
is bad so that the characters can navigate through it,
around it, or what have you. So people wander into
the woods and they're abducted by witches and which is
trying to cook them. Things of that nature happened, as
(02:54):
it means to try and remind children, hey, don't go
walking into candy houses just because they're made out of candy.
You might wind up being eaten by a cannibal woman, right.
Stranger danger really what we're talking about. So you do
have to create this database of dangers in order to
better survive. But then you have sort of this minutia
of minor threats or perceived threats or just stand ins
(03:17):
for threats that aren't really dangerous, but they begin to
take over in your imagination more real pressing threats. And
that's where this idea of dread anxiety and in some
ways just generalized anxiety disorders take over. Stranger danger is
a great example of that because on one, on a
very basic level, yes, there's their children need to be
(03:39):
on guard, they need to stay around their parents, and
there are individuals out there who will harm them. It's
just you know, statistically they exist. However, if you go
overboard and you start thinking that every stranger is a danger,
if you start, even as a culture began to just
go on like a NonStop witch hunt of potential people
(04:00):
who are a danger to children, then you get into
an entirely weird and problematic area. Well, let me layer
one more thing over that. Then you begin to read
things like it shouldn't be a stranger that you're concerned about,
because the majority of abductions take place by people that
you actually know, and so you have to sort of
reframe that conversation with your child. So what the point
(04:21):
is is that there's all there's all these sort of
real and perceived threats such as pile up one on
top of the other. Whereas humans, particularly in the day
and age that we live in. When there's so much
data in front of us, you have to sort through
it and try to figure out what you truly should
be anxious about. And sometimes the you know, the wiring
gets crossed, yeah, which makes us to something called general
(04:41):
anxiety disorder or or GAD or or as I like
to read it, God. And so general anxiety disorder is severe,
ongoing anxiety that interferes with your day to day activities. Uh.
And we're talking about symptoms such as panic disorder, ob
sensive compulsive disorder, other types of anxiety that kind of
get uh sucked into the fold, and they're they're varying
(05:02):
at different levels of this condition. Yeah, And it's generally
involves thoughts of uncontrollability and unpredictability of upcoming personally selling
an events or shifting attention, of our inability to cope,
memory of negative aspects of certain events, and negative emotion.
And people with this disorder they can't relax, They startle easily,
and they have difficulty concentrating, and a lot of times
(05:25):
they have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep.
And the National Institute of Mental Health says that the
physical Symptoms that accompany this include, of course, fatigue, headaches,
muscle tension, muscle aches, difficulty swallowing, trembling, twitching, irritabilities, wedding, nausea, lightheadedness,
and having to go to the bathroom frequently. I thought
(05:45):
was interesting. Now now luckily it's it's very treatable for
the most part via medications and and or therapy, so
it's not not necessarily a permanent life condition. But it's
it's again, it's it's like you say, it's these these
in xieties build up in our lives. Um. I like
to think of like a cave with stalactites and stalacmites
forming until eventually they're just all the sharpened cave to
(06:08):
teeth everywhere and uh, and they can be cleared out,
but you've got to sort of stop and have some
sort of level of self awareness either come out of
you or or have it imposed upon you, to realize
what's real and what's not well. And I think the
reasons why they can, even if you brush them away,
they they continue to build back up is because at
(06:29):
the very heart of this is this this knowledge that
one day we will all die, right, this is so
you know, every last one of us. So this is
that sort of I always think about it as this
um sort of double edged blade of consciousness, you know,
like it's great that you're conscious, were humans are conscious,
(06:50):
and we can enjoy so many different things. At the
same time we realize that, you know, our time um
in our physical bodies is going to come to a close,
right yeah, and that you know, there's a very good
chance that the last few chapters of that book might
be a little less happy the middle one, right, and
everything beyond that is the great unknown. So it's sort
(07:10):
of you know, that's that's a lot for a brain,
a conscious brain, to sort of taking, even if you
pick it apart, which I sometimes do, and you know,
I remind myself, well, death everybody does it. Everybody's every
everybody's doing it, and look at some of the people
who do it. It couldn't there couldn't be that much
to it, right, But on one hand you can sort
(07:31):
of this man like that, But then you remind yourself
exactly what it entails, not just a mirror cutting off
of life, but a well in some cases it's that,
but but in other cases a decline of life and
a decline of the quality of life that terminates in
this of this well, I was thinking about probably one
of the best films that deals with this topic, and
(07:54):
for me, it's a serious man five the Coen Brothers.
It is. It's probably a little bit leaker than some
of their films that it's definitely it's it's probably one
of the Cohen Brothers films. It's easier to overlook. And
just in case you know you're listening and you don't
know or have a context of this film, Um, it
is kind of a slow mo existential train wreck of
(08:17):
this character's life. His name is Larry Gopnick, and it
gets a clean bill of health. This is how the
movie starts out with and then everything just kind of
falls apart from there, and um, every relationship in his
life falls apart, which is again this sort of dread
that we all have, like are we tending to this person?
Is this happening? Is this is the machine still moving
(08:38):
along in the ways that it's supposed to, And for
Larry Gopnick, it doesn't. It begins to fall apart, and
he even begins to receive angry calls from a Columbia
record club debt collector, which I think is really brilliant
because if you've ever been plagued by anxiety, then you
know that these minor infringements from your past are things
(08:59):
that bubble to the surf us every once in a
while that you worry about. So this, you know, past
record club collection calling him and nagging him is a
nice stand in for that. Yeah. I mean, like we've
discussed the power of closing loops in your life and
how an unclosed loop is instantly at least a pinpoint
of anxiety in your in your mind. And so that's
(09:19):
a great example because the Columbia Records is not going
to come and break your thumbs, you know, maybe, well
it depends, it depends which Columbia Records, if they're actually
based out of Columbia, I don't know, but but but yeah,
it's totally a paper tiger. It's totally a closed loop,
I mean, an unclosed loop anxiety working on this character.
(09:40):
I'm glad you brought up the loop thing because that's
something that what we can talk about later in terms
of trying to um, you know, keep this anxiety disorder
in check. But I think we should talk about how
America is a very anxious country. It turns out and
that Americans really suffer from anxiety disorders more of than
(10:00):
any other culture in the world. Yeah, because you think
about what what sort of has become the I don't
know about the predominant, but a but a very common
American story. Uh. And I imagine you have this as
well as I. What happened in your life At one point,
you moved away from your parents house? Where do you move?
You moved to the big city where you're surrounded by people,
but you're less close to any of the people around you.
(10:22):
You know, you you, you know, you you have maybe
your your your spouse and or your child with you.
But then you increasingly you have all this social media
creeping into your life and this becomes the means by
which you connect to other people. And uh and and
then meanwhile this uh, the families be moved away from
They may be across the country, they may be on
you know, in some cases, they may be on the
other side of the globe. And so we're more and
(10:43):
more distant from people and uh and we're more cut off. Yeah,
that's true. And uh. I just wanted to point out
that according to the World Health Organization, that the United
States has something like a nearly a third of the
Americans UH suffering from anxiety problem albums in their lifetime,
So a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetime.
(11:03):
And the National Institute of National Health says that in
any given year, ninetent of the population suffers from anxiety.
Between nineteen and two thousand and four, Americans more than
doubled their spending on anti anxiety medications like sanics and value,
so that industry went from nine hundred million to two
point one billions. So what we're seeing here is this
(11:25):
idea that our anxiety has not just always been an
American thing, but it tends to uh or we tend
to see an increase in it over the last couple
of decades. So, as you had mentioned, you know, there
are a couple of factors to them. One is just
sort of chasing that job around various different parts of
the country and resettling and losing some of the connections
(11:47):
to your family and friends. And some of that is
um that you have an increased amount of data and information,
but it's more in the way that it's presented. And
I was thinking about this because uh, I've been rowing
at the gym a lot lately, and this I find
to be a very zen activity. It's great, But then
I'll look up at the TV and at the ticker
(12:08):
at the bottom of the news program will have some
sort of horrible thing about some child, some something just
unimaginable happening to the child, just running over and over
again and so again it. You know, the way that
this information is presented and consumed by us sort of
adds to that feeling, because here I am feeling like
(12:29):
I'm imagining myself on a on a lake rowing and
now now I'm thinking about a dead child. Yeah. I've
never understood the need to have that kind of ticker
going on in places like a gym, where shouldn't the
focus be on getting out of my head and getting
into my body? Like why am I watching this horrible news?
Or I've seen the same TV sets blaring over jacuzzis
(12:52):
uh and or within earshot of a sauna like why
why why they're oh? And then of course the big
one is airports. You know, Like, I'm very much of
the mindset that we need to have we if the
TVs are on, okay, have the TV is on to
distract people, but have it tuned into kittens and puppies playing.
Have the for the audio, just have it be Brian
ENO's music for airports. We don't need to watch ticker
(13:15):
tape about um, you know, child murders, train rex plane
crashes and what have you. It just seems like like
like why continue to sprinkle that kind of horrible topic. Well,
it is inescapable and um, as Taylor Clark in the
article It's not the job Market from Slant Magazine says, UM,
a lot of this is reported in a fear based fashion,
(13:35):
so it's not balanced in the sense that, um, you know,
the good natured stories tend to hit the news, it's
usually the ones that are bleeding and awful attention. Part
of that is the virtue of the twenty four hour
news cycle. You gotta you gotta find something, you gotta
put it up there, and then you gotta milk it
for everything it's worth. Now, Taylor does say that UM
(13:56):
compounding this is an intolerance for negative feelings. So Taylor says,
we reject situations that could make us feel discomfort. We
try to bury or reverse our feelings through shopping, alcohol
or drug use, or entertainment and psychologist Stephen Hayes who
uses an acceptance and commitment therapy rather than drug therapy,
(14:18):
or maybe he uses an in conjunction. Said Americans are
victims of feel goodism, the false idea that bad feelings
ought to be annihilated, controlled, or erased by a pill.
So some of this is that idea of this pursuit
of happiness, right, Like, we're all entitled to be happy,
and if we're not happy at this very moment, something
is wrong and not feeling settled without discomfort that everybody feels. Yeah,
(14:40):
well it comes it comes back to the end of
the idea of balance in one's life, you know that,
and to to get you know, to to dip my
toes in a little of Buddhism here for a second.
You know, it's the idea that it's from the from
the human realm. It's from this, this realm of peace
that one is able to ascend above that cycle of suffering.
It's not from an extreme of pain and worry. It's
not from extreme of happiness and pleasure, Like those are
(15:02):
both kind of not really dead ends, but those are
not the extremes from which liberation life you have. If
it's it's through this middle ground and an understanding that
those are extremes that when I'm happy and when I'm
when I'm having just an awesome time, that cannot be
the norm. You know, not sustainable, and if you try
to sustain it, it's like stretching a rubber band. You're
(15:25):
going to crash down to the other end of the hallway. Now,
there there are some other factors. According to Red Curves
University researcher. To this Seabear, poor mothers are more likely
to be classified as having the mental illness of anxiety
disorder or generalized anxiety is disorder because they live in poverty,
not because they're suffering from a psychiatric disorder. And so
(15:47):
that's where some of this area gets, you know, a
little bit gray, because there are some people who are
priest predisposed genetically to have anxiety disorders UM. And then
sometimes it's just the environmental factors that are pressed upon you.
And it was nature and nurture, both environment and genetics
playing a role here. Yeah, And what I thought was
interesting about this is we already talked about how UM
(16:09):
in the United States in particular, migrating from one airing
to another is pretty typical, and so we don't usually
have the support systems of our families or our communities. Um,
I mean some of us do. Some some people have
lived for you know, their families have lived for generations
in one area. And some people, you know, like in
Atlanta for instances, is the great transient city, have lived
(16:31):
here for only five years, and so they're still putting
their roots down. But if you have had a huge
economic loss in your life, and you are a single mother,
then it would make sense that you begin to have
these sort of anxieties creeping in at all times because
one of the basic bedrocks of your existence, um, your
access to healthcare, food is jeopardized. I was thinking about
(16:53):
this a lot when I was Me and my wife
were recently in China to adopt our son, the because
you know, over there, we had had a really good guide,
uh in in in the city of Nanning, and her
name was Jane, and she was taking a song should
point out things about the culture while we were there,
and she pointed out, you'll see a lot of grandparents
with the children during the day because you know, it's
(17:15):
very family wise, very conservative culture and uh and so
the grandparents will live with with the with the with
the family and then they'll look after the kid during
the day while the mom and dad work. And it's
so at the same time, I'm you know, we're thinking, oh, well,
here we are alone, you know, in this cult in
this country, and we're about to to to get our son,
(17:36):
and then that our grandparents units are on the other
side of the world. You know, we positioned the center
of the earth between us and them, and even when
we return home, those those grandparents are still in uh
in cities that are you know, four or seven hours away.
Well see, and that's some really interesting is that's a discrepancy.
That's that's the reason why in some third world countries
(17:56):
you don't see these anxiety disorders being as prevalent as
in the United States. Um, even though the conditions you know,
in the access to food and healthcare could could be
far worse than in the United States, because they have
supports them in place. All Right, we're gonna take a
quick breaking when we come back, we will discuss tail
and all and anxiety. All right, we're back and we're
(18:23):
about to to lay on some information on you guys
about ten at all about emotional pain and David Lynch, Yes,
this is in case you were wondering, is there a
study out there that involves let's see dental procedures, prostitutes, um,
the Fear of death, and David Lynch's rabbits. Well, yes
(18:46):
there is, Yes, we have that study for you. First though,
I wanted to mention that we have talked about emotional
pain and physical pain being processed basically by the same circuitry,
and UM. That was fascinating to me because it turns
out that, um, they're so closely related that if someone
(19:08):
say hurts your feelings or there's some other emotional pain
that you have, it literally does hurt you in that way.
I mean you're not presumably you're not sitting there feeling
as though daggers are in your skin, but there's but
that's the sort of looney Tunes vision of it. It's
like they stabbed me in the back with that statement.
That was like, yes, your pures my heart when you
(19:30):
said that, your brain is taking that as a threat.
And um, this was particularly pointnant when we were talking
about the teenage brain and why when when you're a
teenager and if you're if you feel like you're shunned,
it feels like the end of the world and it's
not because a teen is being dramatic. It just turns
(19:52):
out that that part of their brain is more amped
up and they're getting many more signals from their brain
that they are they're threatened because it's it's very much
about attach yourself to a group, find your place, because
that survival. Even though that model doesn't necessarily make as
much sense uh in a modern sense and a very
an organism level sense, it works. It does right, And
(20:14):
researchers are really looking at this whole physical pain and
social pain and looking at some of the same chemicals
and neural processes that they share. And so these conditions
really are kind of two sides of the same coin here,
And so they have struck on this idea of tile
a all not so much like, hey, let's use talent
(20:35):
all to to really dial down any sort of anxiety,
dread or emotional pain, but more in the sense of
let's look at tilen al and see how it's working
in conjunction with emotional It's more about, let's by giving
talent the subjects in this experiment, we're able to highlight
the connectedness between physical and emotional pain. So this do
(20:57):
we want to talk about this study. We do. All right,
So what do you do if you are Daniel Randall's
a doctoral students psychology at the University of British Columbia. Well,
what you do is you get a hundred twenty college
students and you randomly assigned them to take either a
thousand milligrams of a tail and all brand, a set
amenta thing or a po cibo you know, a sugar pill. Uh,
(21:20):
And that's the control group. And then one group of
participants you instruct to write to barrack paragraphs about what
would happen to their body if they die and how
they would feel about it. And then the others you
asked them to write about dental pain, which according to
the paper would not be unpleasant but likely wouldn't invoke
any existential anxieties, which I take some issue with. We'll discuss.
(21:42):
But and then all the students then had to read
a hypothetical or rest report about a prostitute and set
the bail on a scale of zero to nine hundred dollars.
And then finally there's there's there's some viewing of David
Lynch's Rabbits. Yeah, tell us more, have you seen Rabbits?
I haven't seen, but the still that I saw from
it seems just in line with every other David Lynch
(22:05):
film that I've seen in which there is a human
with an animal head on in a domestic setting, and um,
from from what they describe in this study, the domestic
setting um is made even earier by the fact that
not only is there a rabbit headed humans standing there,
but there's a soundtrack that is very foreboding, and there
(22:27):
are sort of the non sequiturs that are said by
these rabbit humans that have no context, and then a
laugh track that accompanies them. And what I thought was
so brilliant about this is that Lynch is so good
at sort of bringing up these very vague notions of
unease in actual just like wrongness, that he's the perfect
(22:49):
choice for trying to exacerbate this conditions and show a
video of somebody like just hitting themselves in the knee
with a sledgehammer. I'm sure that our film exists somewhere, um,
but but yeah, this this walks the line in a
very possibly effective manner. So from my understanding that they
were made to watch this clip and then sort of
(23:12):
um way again their reasoning in terms of death or
even um what sort of punitive damages these prostitutes would pay,
right right. So what's interesting here is looking at the
way that Taile and all is affecting there their emotional response,
their their their anxiety level regarding physical pain in terms
of this dental um procedure that they're supposed to write about,
(23:35):
in terms of the notion of inevitable physical death, and
also their possible empathy for this, uh, this prostitute, this
hypothetical prostitute that's been arrested. So of course the people
that took the tunnel, well, they didn't seem to be
as bothered by this idea of death, and they weren't
as um I guess you could say, um, maybe their
(23:58):
their value system for the prostitutes were a bit kinder
and they didn't feel like they needed to pay as
much as their counter approach who took the sugar pill,
and they're dental pain they didn't feel was you know,
quite as awful as they had imagined. So I mean
that's telling you that this this tiel is sort of
what they think, is that it is taking this emotional pain,
(24:21):
processing and recasting it for people, and perhaps they're not
feeling it is as much as they would have if
they hadn't taken it. Now, again we have to underline
once more, don't go taking a lot of time and
all expecting to to treat your own anxiety levels. Yeah.
I wanted to also point out that, as the researchers
(24:42):
pointed out, this is not something that they said, oh,
take time and all if you have anxiety. Um, this
was just again them trying to figure out how time
all works on the brain. With emotion and a large
amount of time all can actually lead to liver problems.
So there's a whole Now. I do disagree with them
about the whole um, the whole idea that oh, and
thinking about dental pain is not going to cause you
(25:04):
any kind of existential dread, because I tend to find,
uh quite the opposite that if I think about dental pain,
if I think about dental procedures, then I'm inevitably thinking
about people getting older and people aging and the long
of certain road to death. I always come back to
Tina Fey's quote that the mouth dies first. You know
(25:25):
that as you get older, you suddenly find yourself realizing, Hey,
I I actually have to work a little harder to
maintain everything in this cavity that is so damningly close
to my brain and the center of being. Uh and
and and then you end up having to get these procedures, etcetera.
And uh And I find that it is a center
(25:46):
of existential dread that I can dial down if I
think about it enough and realize, all right, well, there's
plenty of stuff I can do. And you know, it's
just a matter of fault establishing a plan and following
it and trusting in your health care procedures that they're
possibly more interested in maintaining your dental health and selling
you a bunch of jumps. Well, I think that most
people when they think about going to the dentist, they
(26:07):
know that there's some mild discomfort, right, they might have
their you know, gum lines bleed, so and so forth.
But for other people, like maybe you and I who
have had procedures, it really is there's a lot of
angst because for me, going to the dentist is finding
out that you have a problem. But then they go
in and then they find even more problems that so
it's like, you know, I'm peeling the onion and the
(26:28):
existential dread of you know, are we ever going to
get to the bottom of this awfulness. Now you're erecting
a tiny village in my mouth with all sorts of materials. Yeah,
and the feeling like if I do everything you say,
I'm still gonna wind up having to get something done.
You know. It's so so Yeah. Maybe other people are different.
You'll have to write in and let's know about that.
But but I find it kind of an area of
(26:50):
existential dread, possibly confounded for me personally since my deceased
father was a dentist, so I probably have some additional
baggage loaded on that train as well. It's possible. Yeah. UM.
I wanted to point out that a second experiment of
two hundred and seven participants in this same sort of
structure where you have the Thailand all and you have
the sugar pill and you have David Lynch, and this
(27:12):
time you have the Simpsons UM as they control UM
was shown to those two hundred and seven participants, and
after watching the clip, the students looked at footage from
the two thousand and eleven Vancouver hockey riots sparked by
the Canucks loss and their bid for the Stanley Cup,
and they are asked how harshly the rioters should be
punished for vandalism. And again, uh, those who took tin
(27:35):
all before they watched Rabbits that David Lynch films seem
to feel more lenient, as did all the students who
watched The Simpsons. So uh, you know, it's good that
they check that out again. Again, this is you know,
this idea of thailand all and emotional well being either
early studies, they're not a lot of them, so it'll
be interesting to see, but it does cast some interesting
(27:56):
light on the connectedness of physical pain and anxiety. It's
casts an interesting light on how anxious people behave towards
other people, you know, they're they're how it affects their empathy, uh,
and their severity and judging others. Well, it's interesting you
say that because I read about trickle down anxiety and
(28:16):
there's a small study of parent child pears that was
conducted by John's Hopkins, and they looked at the relationship
between anxiety ridden parents and their children and they found
that parents with particularly in particular, social anxiety disorder, are
more likely than parents with other types of anxiety to
engage in behaviors that put their children at risk for
developing angst of their own. And we're talking about sixty
(28:40):
six anxious parents and their sixty six children ages seven
to twelve, and they had to do this activity together.
And what they found is that using a scale of
one to five, that those again as kids that had
the parents with social anxieties were criticized a lot more
during this act um the parents expressed a lot more doubt,
(29:00):
and then the kids sort of took that on again.
So they were again trying to get to the bottom
of you know, how much of this is nature and nurture,
and you know how much of this do we actually
pass on to our children. The other thing about anxiety,
besides just being you know, very uncomfortable and for some
people debilitating, is that for some people, particularly women, older women,
(29:22):
it may shorten your telomeres. Now telomeres are those DNA
proteins at the end of the chromosomes, and it's really
important because telomeres, the longer you have them, presumably the
lengthier of your life will be um or at least,
you know, the less disease you may end up having,
which would be great because presumably you would live longer
(29:42):
if you have less disease. So a study by researchers
that Brigham and Women's Hospital showed that a common form
of anxiety, known as phobic anxiety was associated with shorter
telomeres and middle age and older women, and um that
suggested that phobic anxiety is a possible risk factor for
accelerating age. So we're talking about blood samples from five
(30:02):
thousand women, more than five thousand women ages forty two
to sixty nine. And they used those samples and they
analyze the telomere length as well as the participant's concurrent
self reports regarding their phobic symptoms. And you know, this
is the story again that these environmental factors in our
(30:24):
internal states are going to affect the way that our
body responds and how healthy it can be. So again,
this is a this is a small study, and this
is just this one group of women from those ages,
but I think it's very telling on the sort of
damage that sustained anxiety disorders can due to our bodies
and minds. Ye, fear as the mind killer, all right,
(30:46):
So we should probably everyone's thinking about anxiety now, we've
been talking about it all of those podcasts. You're probably
pinpointing examples of anxiety in your own life. So we
should probably try and send everybody home semi happy and
discuss some basic methods to cut down on the anxiety
in your life. Uh, let's start with that with just
talking about the body itself, fear in the body, anxiety
and the body. What can you do to to bolster
(31:09):
your your physical response to anxiety. Well, already know that
when you are feeling anxious or stressed, that you're breathing
patterns change and they're essentially telegraphing to your body, Hey
there's a problem here. So gaining your breath and becoming
aware of that is hugely important. And we've talked about
that in terms of meditation, yoga, Yeah, stopping to breathe,
(31:31):
basically any kind of any kind of basic breathing exercise
out there, and there are many, Uh, they can have
just I don't know about phenomenal, but they can have
very nosable effects on your immediate level of the axone. Um,
some basic stuff here, just sort of mom kind of stuff.
Eat right, you know, stuff you know, eat, eat balanced meals.
Eat Eat some things that are good for you, not
(31:52):
just junk food. Avoid alcohol, nicotine, sugar, and caffeine. Because
you know, we're talking about UM, we're talking about things
that the depressed or stimulate the body. Again, you know,
talking about that hallway. On one end of the hallway,
there's uh, there's worry and fear. On the other hand,
and there's happiness and you know, and crazy excitement. And
in the middle of the hallway that's where the pieces,
(32:14):
that's where the balance is and you can't make you're
not going to maintain one extreme without without ricocheting back
to the other. So when you're taking these uh you know,
I'm not saying don't you know, drink alcohol or don't
have a cup of coffee, but know that your skyrocketing
yourself in one direction or the other, and it's you're
potentially turning into this pin pall ball of anxiety, zipping
(32:35):
up and down the hallway. UM. Exercise is great for
a variety of reasons, including, as we mentioned earlier, getting
out of your head and into your body. You know,
there's if you're you're straining yourself into a pose in yoga,
or if you're you're punishing yourself on the rowing machine
at the gym, then as long as CNN isn't on
in the background, there's a good chance that you're gonna
(32:57):
be able to get out of your mind and get
into your body. Um, taking care of yourself, getting a
good night's sleep. This was something that I really woke
up to on the adoption trip when when we came back,
especially and everybody was jet lagged, including the toddler of course,
is that if you don't have enough sleep, everything gets crazier.
And it's something I already knew from our podcasts and
(33:19):
and and our research, but really drove home for me
that if you don't have enough sleep, then the anxiety
is really gonna crank up. And then also finally considered
that hormonal changes may be occurring as well. Yeah, that's true.
And I think like a British person, yeah yeah, if
you're a if you're an American listening to this, uh
(33:40):
not someone buried all down, but um, this idea and
you already kind of touched on this is that happiness
and you know extremes are not sustainable. And so if
you look at it a culture, if you look at
the UK culture in terms of pursuit of happiness, that's
not quite as rapid as it is in the United States,
Like the expectations are a little bit more pragmatic in
(34:03):
terms of what we should expect for ourselves. Yeah, don't
buy into the product that most commercials are selling saying
you can be happy all of the time with this product.
That's right. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, there you go.
We've discussed discussed anxiety, general anxiety, dread in your life
and the lives of those around you. Hopefully we've uh
we forced you to at the very least sort of
(34:25):
turn the camera back around and look at anxiety written
and sort of get some perspective on it in your
own life and realize that a little bit what's going
on there, and you know, maybe we even covered a
few of the tools you may begin to use to
correct it. But if, again, if you are experiencing this
kind of general anxiety that we've discussed, if anxiety is
(34:46):
really playing a debilitating role in your life, even just
a little bit, do consider getting some sort of professional help. Help,
go to a doctor, tell them what's going on. You know,
don't don't feel like you're alone in this. And this
is just a personal battle between you and your deane.
All right, So hey, you want to get in touch
with us, You want to talk about anxiety, about fear,
(35:07):
about dread about all these things. You can find us
in all the usual places, uh stuff to bow your
Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where our blogs, videos, podcast,
et cetera may be found. You can also find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Stuff to Blow your Mind
on all of those, and you can also find us
on mind Stuff Show for our YouTube clips and Julie
put and they find us for a good old fashioned
email correspondence. You can send that to blow the mind
(35:30):
at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.