January 31, 2023 • 49 mins
It’s part of the human condition, to feel the pain of sorrow, loss, embarrassment. But isn’t it kind of weird that an overwhelming emotion can cause you physical discomfort or even pain? Turns out that depends on how you think about the mind and the body.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, and we're all feeling
rather chipper today. And this is stuff you should not know.
Not emotionally painful is not at all true. I'm just
(00:24):
really good at masking mine. Oh how about you. I'm
feeling pretty good today. I'm glad man in this moment.
But this is a This is an interesting topic because,
as we'll see when we cover our history section here
at the beginning. And thanks to Olivia for helping out
with this one, right, wouldnt Olivia? Yeah? This was she
(00:46):
wrote this right around Christmas. Kind of bad. Yeah, it's
like one of puppies next right, Uh. We will soon
learn and there's probably no surprise that things like emotional
pain in and mental distress have quite often and still
quite often take a back seat in the West and
(01:07):
then the medical world. And it's just sort of that's
sort of it's incredibly sad that that's the case. Yeah,
And just to do it just a brief sketch, emotional
pain is exactly what you've always thought it was. There's nothing,
you know, there's no new concept to it that you
was gonna be like, oh, that's emotional pain. Anytime you
felt like heartache, sadness, embarrassment, something where you felt like
(01:30):
your body was responding to a sudden emotion, that's that's
emotional pain, right, um. And it's just a part of life.
People have said it's a part of life for a
very long time. If you're a Buddhist, it is definitely
a part of life. Same with Christians. It's just kind
of how people have approached it. But you said something
that I didn't realize that here in the West. I mean,
(01:52):
I guess I realized this part here in the West.
If you go to a doctor and you say I'm
having emotional pain, they're like, actually, no, you're not. It's
it's real pain and your leg is missing right now
and I need to sew it up. And you're like no,
but I'm emotionally affected by this. They'd be like, shut up,
that doesn't matter. And there's a reason for that. And
you can trace it all the way back to Decartes,
(02:12):
that's right. I studied decart in college a bit um
and the and this was a big deal. But in
the seventeenth century, Renee Decart proposed the idea of dualism
with the mind and body, and you think, like, okay,
you know, great, that kind of makes sense in a way,
especially in the seventeenth century. But that was a big
deal that really it was sort of a sea change
(02:34):
in in a fundamental split that happened, which in which
European medical science, uh was was trying to separate from
the Church as far as their oversight goes. But what
the real effect was was what I was talking about was,
you know, mental illnesses were really good distinct separate thing
from physical maladies. Yeah, and still today in the in
(02:58):
in Western medicine, we do not combine those two, which is,
you know, there's other cultures like traditional Chinese medicine, um,
Indian I are Vedic medicine that they see mental and
physical pain as pretty much, at the very least deeply connected,
not too completely separate things, one of which may or
(03:19):
may not exist like we believe in Western medicine. And
to to be able to trace it back to like
this point where um, the early medical doctors were like
I call body and the Church is like I call mind,
and they just kind of went their separate ways. I
just find that fascinating, and it's landed us in this
problem where we are in the United States and other
(03:39):
Western countries where we don't we really give short shrift
to emotional pain. But we're learning more and more that
it is just as real and just as sometimes unbearable
as physical pain, sometimes worse because there's not a lot
of recognized treatments for it. Yet when they called mind
and body, who was shirts and who was skinned? Uh
(04:01):
they were both skins. Oh yeah, it was a sixty
day Uh. People like Sigmund Freud. You know, it's not
like no one ever talked about emotional pain in the West,
or it was studied or anything like that. It's just
that separation. Freud he did write about psychological pain, as
did a lot of people that followed Freud or you know,
(04:21):
not sorry acolytes of Floyd, but people that followed after him. Um,
and you know kind of wrote about, you know, more
in the terms of like mourning, like mourning someone's death
or maybe a big romantic loss or something. And this
emptiness or loneliness or sadness you might feel. But that's
still not where we're what we're talking about today, which
(04:44):
is this mind body connection where and as we'll see
where study after study kind of um. And again it's
a very hard thing to kind of prove outright, but
strong correlations between physical conditions and emotional distress. Yeah, And
I think Freud was still talking about it. He was saying, like, yes,
you actually feel pain when you suffer a loss, like
(05:07):
a death or a breakup or something like that. But
it's become a little more a lot more sophisticated since
Freud's time. Um, there's a term called psychic that a
guy named Edwin Schneidman coin and m is psychic. It's
so nineties. That is a nineties term, psychic all one word, right,
(05:31):
And Edwin Schneidman, Um, he did coin in ninety three
and um he he basically said it's a it's a
it's just another term for psychological anguish um and that
he and he was a suicideologist, UM. And he believed
that psychic was essentially behind every single um suicide that
was ever attempted or completed. UM. And he kind of
(05:52):
chalked it up to a few different things. And you'll
kind of see in the nineties and then kind of
expanding today, it's kind of expanded in contracted until we
finally arrived at a decent definition. But all of it
has to do with you are suddenly experiencing a terrible
discrepancy between the way you think things should be and
(06:13):
the way they suddenly are. And you are, you are,
you're you feel like you yourself are at fault somehow. Yeah,
and there's you know again. And as we'll see, it's
a very hard thing to study. Uh, it's pain period
as super subjective. As we all know, physical pain is subjective.
Emotional pain maybe, well it's probably about equally subjective now
(06:36):
that I think about it. But there's not, as Olivia
points out, there's not a one to one relationship between
like an event and what he refers to his psychic Like,
somebody may be really good at getting over stuff like
that a lot better than someone else. Um, the level
of the event may not necessarily always correlate to a
(06:59):
level of emotional pain and any given individual. Um, some
people maybe can process somebody's passing or death really really
well because uh, they just get drunk all the time.
That's a joke, but we will talk about that. That's
a big component of all this stuff, definitely, But the
point is like what Freud was talking about is something
(07:19):
like an event happens or a loss happens. We realize
over the years that it's not always just that, and
there can be chronic, a chronic emotional pain that people
feel that's UH tied to certain disorders of obviously depression
UH can be a big factor. But all these things
aren't mutually exclusive either now and the other thing that
(07:40):
emerges is what we've all always known. All of us
experience emotional pain to some degree or another, like you said,
at different times, and some people chronically unfortunately, And they finally,
I guess in the last ten years maybe have come
up with a consensus definition for what I can tell.
(08:01):
They say that emotional pain, which by the way, is
interchangeable with psychological pain, psychical pain, psychic it's all the
same thing. But emotional pain is a lasting, unsustainable and
unpleasant feeling resulting from negative appraisal of an inability or
deficiency of the self. So that the basic emotion of
(08:24):
psychic pain, psychological pain, emotional pain is self disappointment because
you're in an adversive state where you have a high
self awareness of inadequacy, and that that is what you
can kind of trace all of it back to yeah,
and we'll talk about physical symptoms. There can be very
specific things at times, like upset stomach or you know,
(08:46):
things that might be brought on by what you might
think of his stress. But if you experience sort of
h chronic mental anguish and emotional pain, a lot of
times it is just a an oh, we're all um
body uh wounded nous that you might feel that you
can't specifically, And that's sort of one of the issues
(09:09):
is it's you don't walk into a doctor in America
and say, my, I just my whole body feels off
because I'm an emotional distress. They're gonna say, you've called
the wrong doctor right here, take these sugar pills at home,
but also give me five thousand dollars and I'm sorry
about the weight. So they're not really sorry about the way.
(09:30):
They may say that chuck, but they don't mean it.
What's a social pain? Social pain is either the same
thing as emotional pain, or it's kind of a subset
of it. But it's they seem to strictly um. They
say it's strictly from social interactions like rejection, being dumped, um,
damage to your social connections. I saw m fomo that
(09:55):
would be one. Yeah, it's like a joke that people say,
but that that is very real with some people now, right,
And so like when you when you feel fomo, right,
you you feel bad? You don't it's not just in
your head. It's so hard to get across, and it's
almost totally unnecessary to get across because all of us
have experienced emotional pain at some time or another. But
(10:17):
if you've ever stopped and thought about it, why why
would your body feel at all weird? Why wouldn't it
just be strictly in your emotions are strictly in your
head or strictly in your mind, like I've got this
problem and I can't stop thinking about it instead or
in addition to that, because that definitely happens to your
body actually feels bad, wrong, off, pain, tense because of
(10:41):
this emotional pain. And they actually believe this, to me,
is the fact of the podcast. They believe that emotional
pain came along as a result of our increasing socialization
from the time we were primates up until now, and
it piggybacked on our existing uh physical pain system. And
(11:02):
because social bonds were so important to um survival that
it was. It became a thing where you felt pain
when those social bonds were threatened or broken. Right Like, uh,
took took very sore from long hunt today, but took
(11:22):
took feel especially painful today because Took Took not invited
the main fire. It took. Took doesn't use prepositions, should he?
I don't know. It depends if he's like unfrozen caveman lawyer. Yes. So.
(11:42):
So the thing is is what took Tuk would have
learned from their chuck from that experiences, I need to, like,
I need to pay attention to this. There's something I'm
doing wrong, There's something somebody else is doing wrong, and
I need to remedy. I need to do something different
in the future. And then in that way my social
connections will be stronger. And when a saber tooth tired
(12:04):
comes along, I'll have my crew to take care of
it rather than its just making a meal out of me. Yeah,
this is a great setup, I think so too. Should
we take a break, Yes, let's all right. We'll be
right back to talk more and hopefully make a few
other little jokes about emotional pain. This is a tough
(12:49):
one to joke. About. Yeah, no it is, but I
think more than anything, to me, it's a tough one
to talk about, and I don't I don't understand why.
Maybe it's because it's not fully understood. Yeah, yeah, so
I'm having trouble understanding or explaining it, you know. Yeah.
And when I say joke about, of course I mean
joke alongside. Uh. None of this is is joke worthy.
(13:13):
But we're a part part comedy show, so we try
to work in these angles when we can, right. Yes,
the funniest is when we explained that making jokes about
it and why why we really should know that they
don't really count. I think new people come along. Uh,
did you see somebody was very upset about your awesome,
awesome Midwest joke for which one from Edmond Fitzgerald podcast.
(13:39):
Somebody wrote in and I didn't even remember because we
recorded a lot to get ahead for Christmas, but I
didn't even remember the joke. Somebody was very offended, and
I said, well, what happened? I said, I feel like
it was probably a joke that I could explain, but
just let me know what happened and then rot back
and it was a great joke, I said. I was
trying to think of the game, the card game yuker.
(14:00):
Oh no, it's in tarot tarot cards. And I said,
what was that game? I said that Midwesterners often played,
and you get me out of here. And then this person,
as I said, it was just a joke, of course,
and that you're from the Midwest, you can say that
in this person, I think felt a little bad, even
which I then felt bad about. Uh, And that's no
(14:22):
good for anyone. Now the rest of us feel bad
because you shared it, and we all feel bad for
you and the other person. All right, Can we talk
about how mental pain affects the body? Yes, because here's
the point. It's not just that mental pain exists. It
actually is real pain. And thanks to our friend the
Wonder Machine, the f m R, I, we actually know
(14:45):
that the same parts of your brain that are responsible
for experiencing different types of physical pain, uh, they light up,
they become active in the presence of emotional pain. And
they did this by basically inflicting emotional pain poor participant
studies and then seeing what their brains did. Yeah, and
here's the thing with a lot of these studies, what's
(15:06):
important I think to know is that uh, it wasn't
necessarily in an an exact in an exact time of crisis,
like you know, we wanted to gather up people who
had been dumped the day before, because of course you're
going to be in that sort of state of mind
at the time. Like most of these studies, you'll you'll
see it's like studying your brain during resting rates or
(15:28):
your heart during resting rates, and it's you know, it
feels like it's more. And I'm not saying, you know,
they're all in emotional pain still, but they didn't like
juice these studies by getting just these like recently devastated people,
I guess is what I'm trying to say right at first.
And some of the techniques they use is just take
(15:49):
an average person off the street and say we want
to inflict emotional pain on you. They would um, in
the experiment, they would be playing a game with other subjects,
and um they would exclude the actual study participant from
the game, or they would tell them that one of
the other participants um admitted to not liking them and
(16:10):
and they would show him rejection theme pictures stuff like that,
and it was coming up with some pretty tepid results.
But then there was a guy named Ethan Cross from
University of Michigan. Yeah, he'll make you jump jump for
his study results. I wonder if he wears his clothes backwards.
When those kids made like a million dollars from wearing
(16:34):
their clothes backwards at the mall once, just to go
out there and do that. That's how they I mean, no,
that's how they. That's how they were discovered at the
mall discovered them. Yeah, it is a world. But anyway,
back to Ethan Criss Cross. He used the Wonder Machine,
but he did recruit people who were in an intense
(16:57):
negative emotional state who had just been recently dumped and
we're not taking it very well. And he put them
in the Wonder machine and he said, hey, here's a
picture about your ex that just dumped you. For a
picture of them. Now think about some memory of them
dumping you and how bad it feels. And then he
sat there with a clipboard and a pencil and went
(17:19):
very interesting, I see, and watched their brains do different
things and they said, how did you get that picture?
Don't ask about that. They give him a zap when
they asked too many questions. Uh yeah, And I think
there were about forty people in this study. Uh, and
again he eventually used he used the fm R I eventually, right, Yes,
(17:42):
And what he he found out was that the negative
emotional state uh lit up the sensory and effective brain
areas just like putting like hot heat on their arms.
So this physical heat and this sort of made a
little sense to me as far as like if you
get like, if I get really really intensely upset about something,
(18:05):
I feel like my head is on fire. Uh, So
that I think there's something about heat, and then maybe
that's why I used it. But they would like I
don't think they would burn them, burn them, but they
would put what was called a painful heat on their forearm.
And found that the FMR I lit up just the
same as with the emotional pain. Yeah. And so that
supported something that he had also found in a review
(18:27):
of existing literature that, um, they're the brain regions associated
with our effective experience about the aversive quality of pain,
which is, um, we like, if you hurt yourself physically, right, Um,
you are you're suffering. That suffering is your desire for
that pain to stop. You wanted to go away. It's
(18:49):
like hurting you um existentially, it goes beyond just the
actual physical experience, the sensory experience of it. That's them,
that's the effective experience of physical pain. And that region
of the brain definitely lights up the same for emotional
pain and physical pain, because we're suffering from both equally.
(19:10):
But what Cross said or showed was that, no, your
actual sensory experience, like what your body feels when you're
physically in pain, is the same when you're in emotionally
in pain. So he said, ipso facto, my research shows
emotional pain and physical pain, as far as the body
is concerned, is the same thing. It's really just your
(19:32):
doctor in the United States that is having trouble admitting
this whole thing. All the evidence is showing your body
is fully aware that they're the same. Yeah, And it's
I don't know, it's so frustrating because, like I said,
when I think everybody, when they get really emotionally upset,
the first thing that happens is your body is going
to start physically reacting. Like I said, my head gets
(19:55):
flush and hot, and like the heart races, and it's
this almost like this fear response in me. Uh So
it's hard to believe that you know, something like fight
or flight, it's just so universally accepted. But something like this,
which to me is the same thing going on, it
can still be pooh pooed. Yeah, poop poo for now,
(20:16):
but not much longer, I predict and for me, chuck,
since we're throwing out our own stories. If I suffer
some sort of emotional injury or whatever, right usually like
embarrassment or something like that, it washes over me. Is
the best way I can put it, basically, from the
back of my head down the front and then through
my chest and abdomen. And I actually saw research that
(20:39):
suggested UM the vagus nerve that connects the brain through
the chests and your abdomen and into your I believe
your JOHNK area because it's activated during orgasms. From our
orgasm episode, you'rs back. I think the medical term is
your bits, but they okay, so they they they found
(20:59):
that the anterior singular cortex activates the vegas nerve, which
UM can over become overstimulated in the presence of a
huge jolt of emotion, which can transfer to the vegas nerve,
which can make you feel in your chest and abdomen
like there's some sort of discomfort or sensation. Again, an
(21:20):
emotion created a physical response. You're not You're not crazy,
you really are feeling that way. Yeah, And like I
remember feeling this stuff from the time I even knew
what feelings were. You know, nobody likes to be picked last.
As far as the social pain, Uh no, one likes
to be embarrassed in front of people. But that stuff
(21:42):
doesn't stop, you know, um, the social thing. Like when
we were talking about it, it might sound like, um,
obviously something you will experience an adolescence and growing up,
but that stuff doesn't go away. Uh No, it really doesn't.
Me No, no, same here. I thought about making that joke,
but then I pulled it back from the edge. I mean,
(22:05):
maybe some people have really squared themselves away such, but
to me, it's just seems like part of in you know,
a bunch of the history that we kind of truncated
at the beginning. Talked about it being part of the
human condition, and I just think that's so obviously true,
It's totally true. I think people who don't have to
deal with that are really just dealing with it less
(22:26):
than other people. I don't think anybody's ever managed to
eradicate emotional pain from their lives, you know, But in
the people that seem like they've got it all together
could be suffering the worst. You never know, they might
just be really good at at burying that stuff or
what have you, like Flanders types exactly. There's one other
(22:47):
thing about the the comparison, though, of physical pain and
emotional pain, that really is a difference, and that is
that when you're experiencing physical pain, there's usually something you
can do to kind of stem it off immediately. Do
you put your hand like a hot of it, You
can pull your hand away. But if you experience like
an emotional injury, uh, and you feel emotional pain, you
(23:08):
can't like hold your hand, you can't run it underwater,
you can't. There's nothing you can do right then to
stop it except for essentially self soothed as best you
can until it subsides. Whereas with physical pain there's often
stuff you can do to kind of treat it immediately. Yeah,
what I think, and that's an acute thing, I totally agree.
(23:28):
But what I think it's interesting is that like evolutionarily speaking,
emotional pain is a signal, just like a physical pain
is a signal to like tend to yourself in some
way and whenever. And we get a lot of emails
from people that are suffering great deals of emotional pain,
like listeners, you would not believe some of the emails
(23:51):
we get of people that are in such distress. And
I always try to say the same thing, which is
like and usually it's in reference to the podcast, kind
of help can calm them down in some way, which
is really nice to hear. But always tell people the
same way as which is like, hey, listen, get some
help and treat yourself right, like drink a lot of water,
(24:11):
go for a walk, Like these are literal physical things
that you can do that will it's not a cure,
but it will certainly help alleviate acute symptoms. You know,
self soothe. Yeah, but it's it's more than self suit
to me, because it's like it's it's like, no, you
need to treat it like there's a physical problem, Like
that's why you should drink a lot of water and
(24:33):
go outside, and uh, it's soothing, but it's also doing
something to your body. And interestingly, we'll talk about things
you can do and you just nailed a bunch of them.
But apparently walking outside in nature, um is a really
great way to, um, I guess, alleviate emotional pain. And like,
(24:54):
if you have a forest, great, walk around the forest.
If you have a meadow, walk around the meadow. If
you have a public park, walk around the park. Just
getting outside can help a tremendous amount. Yeah, I agreed.
I think that's a really nice thing that you say
to people that chuck My pat responses, hey, man, keep
on trucking? Is hey just like that mud flap says Yeah,
(25:15):
no one ever writes back, although or if they do,
they're like even matter than they were before, They're more
upset than before. It's weird. People are strange. Uh. Do
you want to talk about drugs? Yeah, this is really
interesting to me. Uh, this first bit on a seat
a menafin because they and I had no idea about
any of this, but they have found out through studies
(25:37):
that a seeda menafin like thailand are or other types
of you know, generic pain killers, it actually can dull
you emotionally. UM. I'm wondering about to what degree, because
they say it can dull that like the social pain
that you might feel if your pomoed or left out
of something, Uh, it can emotionally blunt your reactions that
(26:00):
other Like if somebody tells you about something bad, you
can be I guess less empathetic if you're taking a
seat a menafin, And that was really surprising. The converse
is true too, You're because you're less empathetic, you experience
fewer positive emotions too. So the weird thing is is
it's not like it affects your brain or your processing
(26:22):
of events you're fully aware of, Like, this is a
really great thing my friends telling me, and I understand
that my friend is uh is proud, reasonably proud for this,
but I don't feel at all happy for them because
of the sea a menafin. That's a really weird effect.
I wonder how much and how pronounced, Like I don't know, Yeah,
I need to I want to follow up on that guy.
(26:44):
I don't really ever take that stuff that much. But
but I feel like, even you know, just a few
times you have taken it, if it was a pronounced effect,
you probably would have noticed it. Probably, you know what
I'm saying, Like if you're if your hand is suddenly
making trails of itself, even though that's the first time
I mean you've taken this, you noticed that that happened.
I would because it was a pronounced effect. Same thing
(27:06):
with you know, emotions being blunted with a Sina benefit
probably good point. Opioids obviously is something we can't not
talk about, uh such an you know, we we should
probably tackle bits and pieces of the opioid epidemic in
full episodes. But uh, opioids are interesting in that sometimes
you might be taking them for a real physical malady
(27:29):
and you happen upon the um the emotional relief that
all of a sudden feels good to you when you
take an opioid, whereas other people that is exactly what
they're seeking when they're like med seeking or buying pills
on the black market or whatever. Yeah, which is a
huge problem. And it's you know, obviously not just opioids,
but alcohol and food, um, basically, anything that can give
(27:52):
you some sort of positive feeling can be you know,
used to stave off emotional pain. That that is not
the way to do it, though, but you know a
lot of people do do it that way, and it's
tough to blame them, especially if they haven't found a
better way yet to deal with them. So you know,
I mentioned before that pain, all kinds of pain is
(28:15):
very subjective, and especially emotional pain, and obviously because of that,
it's a really hard thing to to quantify. Uh. We've
talked about the physical pain scale that was developed, but
there have been various attempts over the years at mental
pain scales, and they've never really all agreed like, hey,
(28:36):
this is the really really good one because there's scores
of data behind it, and they talked with a bunch
of people who live with mental pain and at all
they kind of signed off on it. It's weird that
they haven't really done that, but they've The long story
short is they've never been able to land on a
really great one, although I think one they do kind
of use, right, the Orbach one. Yeah, they used the
(28:58):
Orbach and michaelins Or mental pain scale pretty frequently. But
the problem is there was a review of ten major
scales that are used around the world, um that was
published in two in the British Medical Journal, and they
said none of these seem to be valid, Like they're
all they might as well all be like tea leaves
and lizard guts, like that's that's as as good as
(29:21):
they are. At really nailing down emotional pain or quantifying it.
So they said, don't we shouldn't give up or anything
like that. We just need to figure out how to
do it better. So essentially the upshot is there's no
way at the moment to accurately measure emotional pain, and
then I guess figure out how to treat it depending
on the measurement from there. Why else would you want
(29:43):
to measure it? Yeah, I guess so, Because I was
about to say why, I feel like sometimes a discipline
can get so hung up on something like this that
it thwarts progress. Uh. So I hope that's not the case.
It's called getting wonky. Uh. It's no surprise. We mentioned
a little bit earlier about other conditions related to mental pain.
(30:07):
I guess code morbidities for lack of a better word.
But heartbreak you mentioned is obviously one of the big ones.
What I found interesting in this is that some people
have UM like in heartbreak two drug withdrawal. And it
makes a lot of sense because when you are in
love UM and especially if you've ever been sort of
(30:30):
that new love, if you've ever been newly in love,
but that really flamed out fast, and it's taken away
from you. UM, that's sort of like drug withdrawal, because
you've got all sorts of uh dopamine and oxytocin and
things firing when you have that fresh new love happening,
and if that's taken away, then it's like taking away
a feel good drug. Yeah, welcome to six to ninth grade,
(30:56):
six ninth man boy through through college. Okay, sure, fair enough.
Welcome to sixth grade through the rest of your life.
About that, the thing is is, because you're experiencing this,
and because you're experiencing stress, like when you when you
undergo rejection or a sense of betrayal or a sense
of loss, your body actually does reliefs cortissolve, So you
(31:18):
actually are experiencing stress, and you actually can have physical
symptoms from that, like digestive problems, tough to sleep, your
immune system is down, you might get sick. And then
we did an episode a long time ago UM called
can you die of a broken Heart? And then yes
you can. There's something called taco subo cardiomyopathy, which is
(31:41):
a sudden emotional or physical stressor basically weakens the heart
and you basically have a heart attack from it, possibly
from being dumped. If it's bad enough. I knew that
sounded super familiar. I say, before we go any further, Chuck,
we take our last break. How about that, let's do
it so. I think, UM, one of the first things
(32:26):
people think about when they think of emotional pain is depression,
Like there's you know, there are people out there who
have depression, and you can make an argument that with
depression you're suffering chronic emotional pain. What they found, though,
is that people with emotional pain, if you if people
(32:46):
with depression, if you have really high levels of emotional pain,
it's not necessarily correlated with the UM the largest burden
of depression. So if you put ten people together, you've
got one guy who's the most suppressed of all, he's
not necessarily the person with the greatest levels of emotional pain,
which suggests that depression, UM and emotional pain are not
(33:09):
one and the same. Depressions its own thing has other symptoms.
It's just correlates very strongly with emotional pain, which seems
to be one of the leading symptoms of depression, but
not with depression. Is they're not interchangeable. Yeah, and and
a lot of these that we're talking about here, like
they're weaving in and out of each other all the
(33:29):
time in some cases. And but I think the distinction
is still important to make though you know it, rather
than just lumping it in as all one kind of thing. Um.
And eating disorders to a lot of people are like,
you've got any disorder, you really like the food, huh.
And most people who treat eating disorders are aware that
it has very little to do with food. Food just
(33:50):
happens to be something that, um, these people can use
to cope, that they can use to uh feel better
about themselves or forget or distract themselves for a little while.
But really what they're doing, it's dealing with um, emotional
pain that they don't have a better way to deal with,
so they turn to food. That's what eating disorders are. Yeah,
there was a study in that I'm surprised it wasn't higher, honestly,
(34:12):
that found that of disordered eating patients experienced significant mental
pain compared to six percent of the control So that's
quite a jump. Yeah, I mean that's huge. It's pretty
much all you need to sing, uh, well, we've got
well this is sort of the big one. Um. I
mean they're all big, but borderline personality disorder bp D. UM.
(34:36):
This maybe sort of at the top of the ladder
as far as what might cause the most consistent and
the worst kind of mental pain that someone UH might
suffer because a lot of times, for many reasons, but
a lot of times, UH, you suffer from bp D
because of childhood abuse or childhood neglect. Uh. Sometimes it's genets.
(34:59):
There's some gener edics thrown in there, but you know,
this is stuff that's very very deeply rooted in somebody. Yeah,
And so the it's chronic mental pain UM, especially those
related to narcissistic wounds, where you feel a sense of
rejection in It just completely undermines your sense of self
worth and pride. But the way that it manifests itself
(35:21):
and people with borderline personality disorder is that they might
have inappropriate anger, They might UM dissociate from themselves or reality.
They might feel emptiness. UM there are emotionally unstable in
most cases. And what I saw it UM ascribed to
is that essentially because of that childhood neglect or abuse
(35:44):
or trauma of some sort there, they become so afraid
of being abandoned that they actually alienate people with their behavior.
That's that, which that sounds to be like a old
medieval curse essentially, like the more you try to keep
people around, the further way they're going to get and
you're really gonna want them to be around you. That
sounds about as awful and affliction as you can have. Really. Yeah,
(36:08):
and you know, you shouldn't be surprised that if you
suffer from borderline personality disorder, uh, you're way more likely
to abuse or missuse substances. Uh, maybe suffer from that
eating disorder we were talking about, have obviously anxiety depression, uh,
and even be at risk or suicide. Yeah, that's I
(36:28):
think we should do a BPD episode someday. Yeah, there's
a lot there, for sure. There's also something called non
suicidal self injury and it is a fairly new diagnosis
as far as the d s M is concerned. UM,
and it can be its own symptom, it can be
a symptom of other things. Like people with BPD, UM
often engage in non suicidal self injury. But essentially what
(36:51):
it is is self cutting, UM, punching a wall like
a bunch of times. UM. What you're what they've frequently
thought was that they they're these people are overcome with
emotions and the only way to release that tension from
that emotion is to cut themselves or punch that wall.
And more recent research has found that actually they think
(37:13):
that what they're what they've stumbled upon is this kind
of innate mechanism humans have where when you experience a
painful stimulus, when it subsides, you don't just go back
to how you felt right before the painful stimulus, You
actually have a bit of a sense of euphoria, and
that they're actually doing they're actually going for that sense
(37:33):
of relief in euphoria by cutting themselves or by punching
the wall or whatever self injurious behavior. They're engaged and
that that's really what's behind it. But that what differentiates
them from people who um don't engage in that behavior
that they feel like they deserve it, they deserve punishment,
or they're defective, there's something wrong with them. So that's
why they respond in that manner where they hurt themselves
(37:57):
to kind of cope, rather than say turning to food
or something. Yeah, it's just devastating, And that's that sense
of self that it seems like we just keep going
back to when it comes to this emotional pain. It's
something is wrong with me, and maybe I deserve this.
It's just I've never had these kind of feelings, and
I just my heart breaks to think about someone walking
(38:19):
around feeling this way. You know. UM, rejection sensitive dysphoria
is something that I had never heard of, because it
seems like it's really sort of on the leading edge
of what's being studied. Now that's that. In fact, that
phrase rejection sensitive dysphoria isn't even part of the medical community. Um,
(38:43):
Like they haven't even UM. I guess what would you
call that? Well, the medical community a lot of it,
except that it's it exists, but it's not in the
d s M. So it's technically not an actual diagnosis.
Is that what it is? Yeah, that's my understanding, all right,
And this is UM and this, you know, obviously go
along with some other neurodivergences, other mood disorders. Like we said,
(39:05):
a lot of these are sort of criss cross each other,
but they might experience mental pain or discomfort and feel,
you know, this rejection that we keep talking about. And
the other thing that really stood out to me or
interpret like something ambiguous as rejection, right, so when they're
when they're rejected. When you feel rejected and you have
(39:27):
rs D, you have a full body sense of being
overwhelmed by the emotions that you feel. Nobody likes to
be rejected. Now take that feeling of being rejected and
amplify it a million times so that it completely saturates
every fiber in your being, and then make it so
that just about anything anyone says to you is a
(39:49):
form of rejection. Correcting you for something that you you
you misspoke about, UM, telling you that you're doing something wrong,
anything like like breaking plans with you because you have
to take your ailing mother to the hospital. Like, all
of that is considered rejection, and all of it is
met or responded to by this overwhelming flood of negative emotion.
(40:11):
UH suicide We've talked about UM kind of here and
there throughout the episode. UM. Obviously that's a big risk
if you're suffering from depression and uh bp D. But
emotional pain, and again this is something that we want
to draw distinction. Emotional pain is a real major factor
(40:31):
and it's not everyone, but many Many people who have
died by suicide or attempted suicide had reported previously that
they it was a psychological pain that they were trying
to escape from or end. Right. One thing that I
hadn't thought about but makes total senses. There's some suicidal
(40:51):
ideation um and that that that can be a coping
mechanism for people who are UM risk at risk of
suicide UM, and that they're they're basically saying, like, I can,
I can keep making it. It's not quite bad enough yet.
And I always have that out of taking my own
life if things get too bad, and that suicidal ideation,
(41:11):
and some people just use that to get by um
and get through emotional pain, to just remind themselves that,
you know, it's not that bad yet. Right. Well, I
had not heard of that, but I mean I get
I get the basis of it. It's very very saddening,
but I get the strange logic behind it, you know,
yeah for sure. Um. All right, So we would love
(41:32):
to end on a bit more of a positive note,
which is there are treatments for these things. Uh. Like
we mentioned it, it is an evolutionary signal when you're
feeling emotional pain too uh to do something about it.
It is your body saying, hey, this is uh not
just this is no way to live. But like, this
(41:53):
is dangerous for you, and you need to take care
of yourself and self soothe and do all those things,
but also seek treatment. And there are quite a few
treatments that are that are out there for you. Right. Yeah,
there's cognitive behavioral therapy, which basically says, you, Um, we
don't know why you're feeling the way you're feeling. Who knows,
(42:15):
We might never uncover it. The point of what we're
trying to do is to teach you how to live
a better life with being saddled with these negative emotions,
learn to deal with them better, learn to think of
them as less powerful than they are. And CBT has
been around for a while and it is probably the
most successful, UM psycho psychological therapy there is, and it's
(42:36):
kind of given birth to some subsets of it, and
a couple of them are really specifically geared towards treating
emotional pain. Once called dialectical behavioral therapy, it's been around
since the seventies. A psychologist named Marcia Linahan UM came
up with it. Yeah, this one's interesting, UM, And they
say that this is one of the best treatments if
(42:57):
you suffer from borderline personality disorder to undergo and uh,
if you everyone experiences emotional pain, but if you experience
these things really, really really intensely, then this, uh DBT
might be for you. It's called dialectical because, um, it's
(43:18):
about sort of accepting your behaviors, accepting your situation that
you're in, but trying to change them. So the acceptance
part is a big is a big piece to DBT
as well as a c T Acceptance and commitment therapy. Right. Yeah,
Dialectical means like things that are concepts that are in
(43:38):
logical opposition to one another. And then this one makes
a lot of sense. I thought it was pretty cool. Um.
They Also one of the big things about DBT is
there's group therapy and you practice your skills in it,
so you're like, watch this emotional regulation everybody, you know.
I'm not quite sure what the groups are like, but
I saw that it was more akin to a classrooms
(44:00):
setting than a group therapy setting. There's also acceptance and
commitment therapy. It has a lot of the same ideas
behind it. Basically that you need to um accept that
you feel emotional pain and and kind of move on
without and move on with it make make make the
best of your life using mindfulness techniques typically, and both
(44:23):
of those things they center on the idea of, um,
you have emotional pain, there's not a lot you like,
you're never going to free yourself from emotional pain. So
let's teach you, the person, how to deal with emotional
pain better. And that makes a lot of sense, and
it actually is effective for a lot of people. But
there's also another school of thought that says, like they're
(44:45):
those things are wrong because they're coming from a premise
that you have emotional pain, you just have to accept
it and deal with it. There's a guy named um
Mark Rigo. He's a psychiatrist at Yale, and he's on
the other side and says, we need to figure how
to treat emotional pain. You're not gonna get any great
signals or any great understanding from your emotional pain. We
(45:05):
need to get rid of it however we can, um.
And that's a kind of controversial because people are like, well,
you're pathologizing maybe emotional pain that everybody has, and he's saying,
not necessarily, some people have way more acute or way
more chronic emotional pain that's actually debilitating and rather than them,
you know, going to group and practicing their skills. Let's
(45:28):
figure out some medications to help them get back on
their feet, and then they can go to like CBT
or DBT or a c T H and work it out.
But they're they're so far beyond that. We need to
bring them back to the place where that therapy can
actually help. Yeah, I mean, I guess if that helps you,
that's great. I think I identify a little more with
the um the previous ones we were talking about, the
(45:52):
acceptance because it kind of ties into the whole I
am not my behaviors line of thought, Um, like I
can be this and also be something else totally, which
is I think could be very empowering. I mean, I've
learned a tremendous amount for my therapy and it's essentially
geared towards that of like you said, I'm not my behaviors,
(46:13):
I'm not my thoughts, are not my feelings, like I
am the kind of the sum total of all of
those things. And also just um, you know, learning not
to be such a negative nelly. Same here, my friend,
you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Well,
if you want to know more about emotional pain, sit
(46:35):
back and wait because it'll come sooner or later. And
since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Oh no, no,
it's time for listener phone call. What first ever um
our old or old pal? John Hodgman, friend of the
show and friend of ours in real life, ye called
(46:58):
me as he still listens to our show some really yeah,
which made me feel really good. I doubt if he
listens to him all. He probably sturfs through and skips
around and listens to what might appeal to him. But he, uh,
he listened to the episode on the word and phrase origins,
which you know, John of course is in talented orator
(47:18):
and wordsmiths, so it's not surprising that when jumped out
at him. But he called because he wanted to talk
about the peu remember when something stinks, And he said,
I think that might have come about And it made
sense to me when because that's sort of the sound
you make when you spit something out that might be
(47:40):
bad for you. So like evolutionarily, if you put something
in your mouth, it's like super bitter, which evolutionary and
speaking means it could be poisonous. You go to you know,
like like spit something out and he thinks, p you
may have evolved from that. I saw other places that
it's kind of a nuanced version of the where like
when you get smacked in the face by a disgusting smell,
(48:04):
Like the exclamation you make involuntarily is like pure kind
of that kind of thing. It makes sense and just
something I think you'll enjoy. I've been holding out on
this to tell you, he said. And by the way,
he said, did I ever tell you, Chuck that for
the first couple of years I listened to the show
before I knew you guys, I thought you had a ponytail. Oh,
(48:29):
that just tickled me. I would pay good money to
see you with a ponytail. Yeah, I thought that was
good stuff. This Halloween's coming up, Chuck, you never so
thanks to Hodgi. Good good guy, good friend. Yeah, great guy.
Thanks a lot, Hodgi for the first ever listener phone call.
And if you want to be like Hodgman, see if
(48:50):
you can find Chuck's phone number and give him a call. Uh.
In the meantime, you can also send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(49:11):
favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, and we're all feeling
rather chipper today. And this is stuff you should not know.
Not emotionally painful is not at all true. I'm just
(00:24):
really good at masking mine. Oh how about you. I'm
feeling pretty good today. I'm glad man in this moment.
But this is a This is an interesting topic because,
as we'll see when we cover our history section here
at the beginning. And thanks to Olivia for helping out
with this one, right, wouldnt Olivia? Yeah? This was she
(00:46):
wrote this right around Christmas. Kind of bad. Yeah, it's
like one of puppies next right, Uh. We will soon
learn and there's probably no surprise that things like emotional
pain in and mental distress have quite often and still
quite often take a back seat in the West and
(01:07):
then the medical world. And it's just sort of that's
sort of it's incredibly sad that that's the case. Yeah,
And just to do it just a brief sketch, emotional
pain is exactly what you've always thought it was. There's nothing,
you know, there's no new concept to it that you
was gonna be like, oh, that's emotional pain. Anytime you
felt like heartache, sadness, embarrassment, something where you felt like
(01:30):
your body was responding to a sudden emotion, that's that's
emotional pain, right, um. And it's just a part of life.
People have said it's a part of life for a
very long time. If you're a Buddhist, it is definitely
a part of life. Same with Christians. It's just kind
of how people have approached it. But you said something
that I didn't realize that here in the West. I mean,
(01:52):
I guess I realized this part here in the West.
If you go to a doctor and you say I'm
having emotional pain, they're like, actually, no, you're not. It's
it's real pain and your leg is missing right now
and I need to sew it up. And you're like no,
but I'm emotionally affected by this. They'd be like, shut up,
that doesn't matter. And there's a reason for that. And
you can trace it all the way back to Decartes,
(02:12):
that's right. I studied decart in college a bit um
and the and this was a big deal. But in
the seventeenth century, Renee Decart proposed the idea of dualism
with the mind and body, and you think, like, okay,
you know, great, that kind of makes sense in a way,
especially in the seventeenth century. But that was a big
deal that really it was sort of a sea change
(02:34):
in in a fundamental split that happened, which in which
European medical science, uh was was trying to separate from
the Church as far as their oversight goes. But what
the real effect was was what I was talking about was,
you know, mental illnesses were really good distinct separate thing
from physical maladies. Yeah, and still today in the in
(02:58):
in Western medicine, we do not combine those two, which is,
you know, there's other cultures like traditional Chinese medicine, um,
Indian I are Vedic medicine that they see mental and
physical pain as pretty much, at the very least deeply connected,
not too completely separate things, one of which may or
(03:19):
may not exist like we believe in Western medicine. And
to to be able to trace it back to like
this point where um, the early medical doctors were like
I call body and the Church is like I call mind,
and they just kind of went their separate ways. I
just find that fascinating, and it's landed us in this
problem where we are in the United States and other
(03:39):
Western countries where we don't we really give short shrift
to emotional pain. But we're learning more and more that
it is just as real and just as sometimes unbearable
as physical pain, sometimes worse because there's not a lot
of recognized treatments for it. Yet when they called mind
and body, who was shirts and who was skinned? Uh
(04:01):
they were both skins. Oh yeah, it was a sixty
day Uh. People like Sigmund Freud. You know, it's not
like no one ever talked about emotional pain in the West,
or it was studied or anything like that. It's just
that separation. Freud he did write about psychological pain, as
did a lot of people that followed Freud or you know,
(04:21):
not sorry acolytes of Floyd, but people that followed after him. Um,
and you know kind of wrote about, you know, more
in the terms of like mourning, like mourning someone's death
or maybe a big romantic loss or something. And this
emptiness or loneliness or sadness you might feel. But that's
still not where we're what we're talking about today, which
(04:44):
is this mind body connection where and as we'll see
where study after study kind of um. And again it's
a very hard thing to kind of prove outright, but
strong correlations between physical conditions and emotional distress. Yeah, And
I think Freud was still talking about it. He was saying, like, yes,
you actually feel pain when you suffer a loss, like
(05:07):
a death or a breakup or something like that. But
it's become a little more a lot more sophisticated since
Freud's time. Um, there's a term called psychic that a
guy named Edwin Schneidman coin and m is psychic. It's
so nineties. That is a nineties term, psychic all one word, right,
(05:31):
And Edwin Schneidman, Um, he did coin in ninety three
and um he he basically said it's a it's a
it's just another term for psychological anguish um and that
he and he was a suicideologist, UM. And he believed
that psychic was essentially behind every single um suicide that
was ever attempted or completed. UM. And he kind of
(05:52):
chalked it up to a few different things. And you'll
kind of see in the nineties and then kind of
expanding today, it's kind of expanded in contracted until we
finally arrived at a decent definition. But all of it
has to do with you are suddenly experiencing a terrible
discrepancy between the way you think things should be and
(06:13):
the way they suddenly are. And you are, you are,
you're you feel like you yourself are at fault somehow. Yeah,
and there's you know again. And as we'll see, it's
a very hard thing to study. Uh, it's pain period
as super subjective. As we all know, physical pain is subjective.
Emotional pain maybe, well it's probably about equally subjective now
(06:36):
that I think about it. But there's not, as Olivia
points out, there's not a one to one relationship between
like an event and what he refers to his psychic Like,
somebody may be really good at getting over stuff like
that a lot better than someone else. Um, the level
of the event may not necessarily always correlate to a
(06:59):
level of emotional pain and any given individual. Um, some
people maybe can process somebody's passing or death really really
well because uh, they just get drunk all the time.
That's a joke, but we will talk about that. That's
a big component of all this stuff, definitely, But the
point is like what Freud was talking about is something
(07:19):
like an event happens or a loss happens. We realize
over the years that it's not always just that, and
there can be chronic, a chronic emotional pain that people
feel that's UH tied to certain disorders of obviously depression
UH can be a big factor. But all these things
aren't mutually exclusive either now and the other thing that
(07:40):
emerges is what we've all always known. All of us
experience emotional pain to some degree or another, like you said,
at different times, and some people chronically unfortunately, And they finally,
I guess in the last ten years maybe have come
up with a consensus definition for what I can tell.
(08:01):
They say that emotional pain, which by the way, is
interchangeable with psychological pain, psychical pain, psychic it's all the
same thing. But emotional pain is a lasting, unsustainable and
unpleasant feeling resulting from negative appraisal of an inability or
deficiency of the self. So that the basic emotion of
(08:24):
psychic pain, psychological pain, emotional pain is self disappointment because
you're in an adversive state where you have a high
self awareness of inadequacy, and that that is what you
can kind of trace all of it back to yeah,
and we'll talk about physical symptoms. There can be very
specific things at times, like upset stomach or you know,
(08:46):
things that might be brought on by what you might
think of his stress. But if you experience sort of
h chronic mental anguish and emotional pain, a lot of
times it is just a an oh, we're all um
body uh wounded nous that you might feel that you
can't specifically, And that's sort of one of the issues
(09:09):
is it's you don't walk into a doctor in America
and say, my, I just my whole body feels off
because I'm an emotional distress. They're gonna say, you've called
the wrong doctor right here, take these sugar pills at home,
but also give me five thousand dollars and I'm sorry
about the weight. So they're not really sorry about the way.
(09:30):
They may say that chuck, but they don't mean it.
What's a social pain? Social pain is either the same
thing as emotional pain, or it's kind of a subset
of it. But it's they seem to strictly um. They
say it's strictly from social interactions like rejection, being dumped, um,
damage to your social connections. I saw m fomo that
(09:55):
would be one. Yeah, it's like a joke that people say,
but that that is very real with some people now, right,
And so like when you when you feel fomo, right,
you you feel bad? You don't it's not just in
your head. It's so hard to get across, and it's
almost totally unnecessary to get across because all of us
have experienced emotional pain at some time or another. But
(10:17):
if you've ever stopped and thought about it, why why
would your body feel at all weird? Why wouldn't it
just be strictly in your emotions are strictly in your
head or strictly in your mind, like I've got this
problem and I can't stop thinking about it instead or
in addition to that, because that definitely happens to your
body actually feels bad, wrong, off, pain, tense because of
(10:41):
this emotional pain. And they actually believe this, to me,
is the fact of the podcast. They believe that emotional
pain came along as a result of our increasing socialization
from the time we were primates up until now, and
it piggybacked on our existing uh physical pain system. And
(11:02):
because social bonds were so important to um survival that
it was. It became a thing where you felt pain
when those social bonds were threatened or broken. Right Like, uh,
took took very sore from long hunt today, but took
(11:22):
took feel especially painful today because Took Took not invited
the main fire. It took. Took doesn't use prepositions, should he?
I don't know. It depends if he's like unfrozen caveman lawyer. Yes. So.
(11:42):
So the thing is is what took Tuk would have
learned from their chuck from that experiences, I need to, like,
I need to pay attention to this. There's something I'm
doing wrong, There's something somebody else is doing wrong, and
I need to remedy. I need to do something different
in the future. And then in that way my social
connections will be stronger. And when a saber tooth tired
(12:04):
comes along, I'll have my crew to take care of
it rather than its just making a meal out of me. Yeah,
this is a great setup, I think so too. Should
we take a break, Yes, let's all right. We'll be
right back to talk more and hopefully make a few
other little jokes about emotional pain. This is a tough
(12:49):
one to joke. About. Yeah, no it is, but I
think more than anything, to me, it's a tough one
to talk about, and I don't I don't understand why.
Maybe it's because it's not fully understood. Yeah, yeah, so
I'm having trouble understanding or explaining it, you know. Yeah.
And when I say joke about, of course I mean
joke alongside. Uh. None of this is is joke worthy.
(13:13):
But we're a part part comedy show, so we try
to work in these angles when we can, right. Yes,
the funniest is when we explained that making jokes about
it and why why we really should know that they
don't really count. I think new people come along. Uh,
did you see somebody was very upset about your awesome,
awesome Midwest joke for which one from Edmond Fitzgerald podcast.
(13:39):
Somebody wrote in and I didn't even remember because we
recorded a lot to get ahead for Christmas, but I
didn't even remember the joke. Somebody was very offended, and
I said, well, what happened? I said, I feel like
it was probably a joke that I could explain, but
just let me know what happened and then rot back
and it was a great joke, I said. I was
trying to think of the game, the card game yuker.
(14:00):
Oh no, it's in tarot tarot cards. And I said,
what was that game? I said that Midwesterners often played,
and you get me out of here. And then this person,
as I said, it was just a joke, of course,
and that you're from the Midwest, you can say that
in this person, I think felt a little bad, even
which I then felt bad about. Uh, And that's no
(14:22):
good for anyone. Now the rest of us feel bad
because you shared it, and we all feel bad for
you and the other person. All right, Can we talk
about how mental pain affects the body? Yes, because here's
the point. It's not just that mental pain exists. It
actually is real pain. And thanks to our friend the
Wonder Machine, the f m R, I, we actually know
(14:45):
that the same parts of your brain that are responsible
for experiencing different types of physical pain, uh, they light up,
they become active in the presence of emotional pain. And
they did this by basically inflicting emotional pain poor participant
studies and then seeing what their brains did. Yeah, and
here's the thing with a lot of these studies, what's
(15:06):
important I think to know is that uh, it wasn't
necessarily in an an exact in an exact time of crisis,
like you know, we wanted to gather up people who
had been dumped the day before, because of course you're
going to be in that sort of state of mind
at the time. Like most of these studies, you'll you'll
see it's like studying your brain during resting rates or
(15:28):
your heart during resting rates, and it's you know, it
feels like it's more. And I'm not saying, you know,
they're all in emotional pain still, but they didn't like
juice these studies by getting just these like recently devastated people,
I guess is what I'm trying to say right at first.
And some of the techniques they use is just take
(15:49):
an average person off the street and say we want
to inflict emotional pain on you. They would um, in
the experiment, they would be playing a game with other subjects,
and um they would exclude the actual study participant from
the game, or they would tell them that one of
the other participants um admitted to not liking them and
(16:10):
and they would show him rejection theme pictures stuff like that,
and it was coming up with some pretty tepid results.
But then there was a guy named Ethan Cross from
University of Michigan. Yeah, he'll make you jump jump for
his study results. I wonder if he wears his clothes backwards.
When those kids made like a million dollars from wearing
(16:34):
their clothes backwards at the mall once, just to go
out there and do that. That's how they I mean, no,
that's how they. That's how they were discovered at the
mall discovered them. Yeah, it is a world. But anyway,
back to Ethan Criss Cross. He used the Wonder Machine,
but he did recruit people who were in an intense
(16:57):
negative emotional state who had just been recently dumped and
we're not taking it very well. And he put them
in the Wonder machine and he said, hey, here's a
picture about your ex that just dumped you. For a
picture of them. Now think about some memory of them
dumping you and how bad it feels. And then he
sat there with a clipboard and a pencil and went
(17:19):
very interesting, I see, and watched their brains do different
things and they said, how did you get that picture?
Don't ask about that. They give him a zap when
they asked too many questions. Uh yeah, And I think
there were about forty people in this study. Uh, and
again he eventually used he used the fm R I eventually, right, Yes,
(17:42):
And what he he found out was that the negative
emotional state uh lit up the sensory and effective brain
areas just like putting like hot heat on their arms.
So this physical heat and this sort of made a
little sense to me as far as like if you
get like, if I get really really intensely upset about something,
(18:05):
I feel like my head is on fire. Uh, So
that I think there's something about heat, and then maybe
that's why I used it. But they would like I
don't think they would burn them, burn them, but they
would put what was called a painful heat on their forearm.
And found that the FMR I lit up just the
same as with the emotional pain. Yeah. And so that
supported something that he had also found in a review
(18:27):
of existing literature that, um, they're the brain regions associated
with our effective experience about the aversive quality of pain,
which is, um, we like, if you hurt yourself physically, right, Um,
you are you're suffering. That suffering is your desire for
that pain to stop. You wanted to go away. It's
(18:49):
like hurting you um existentially, it goes beyond just the
actual physical experience, the sensory experience of it. That's them,
that's the effective experience of physical pain. And that region
of the brain definitely lights up the same for emotional
pain and physical pain, because we're suffering from both equally.
(19:10):
But what Cross said or showed was that, no, your
actual sensory experience, like what your body feels when you're
physically in pain, is the same when you're in emotionally
in pain. So he said, ipso facto, my research shows
emotional pain and physical pain, as far as the body
is concerned, is the same thing. It's really just your
(19:32):
doctor in the United States that is having trouble admitting
this whole thing. All the evidence is showing your body
is fully aware that they're the same. Yeah, And it's
I don't know, it's so frustrating because, like I said,
when I think everybody, when they get really emotionally upset,
the first thing that happens is your body is going
to start physically reacting. Like I said, my head gets
(19:55):
flush and hot, and like the heart races, and it's
this almost like this fear response in me. Uh So
it's hard to believe that you know, something like fight
or flight, it's just so universally accepted. But something like this,
which to me is the same thing going on, it
can still be pooh pooed. Yeah, poop poo for now,
(20:16):
but not much longer, I predict and for me, chuck,
since we're throwing out our own stories. If I suffer
some sort of emotional injury or whatever, right usually like
embarrassment or something like that, it washes over me. Is
the best way I can put it, basically, from the
back of my head down the front and then through
my chest and abdomen. And I actually saw research that
(20:39):
suggested UM the vagus nerve that connects the brain through
the chests and your abdomen and into your I believe
your JOHNK area because it's activated during orgasms. From our
orgasm episode, you'rs back. I think the medical term is
your bits, but they okay, so they they they found
(20:59):
that the anterior singular cortex activates the vegas nerve, which
UM can over become overstimulated in the presence of a
huge jolt of emotion, which can transfer to the vegas nerve,
which can make you feel in your chest and abdomen
like there's some sort of discomfort or sensation. Again, an
(21:20):
emotion created a physical response. You're not You're not crazy,
you really are feeling that way. Yeah, And like I
remember feeling this stuff from the time I even knew
what feelings were. You know, nobody likes to be picked last.
As far as the social pain, Uh no, one likes
to be embarrassed in front of people. But that stuff
(21:42):
doesn't stop, you know, um, the social thing. Like when
we were talking about it, it might sound like, um,
obviously something you will experience an adolescence and growing up,
but that stuff doesn't go away. Uh No, it really doesn't.
Me No, no, same here. I thought about making that joke,
but then I pulled it back from the edge. I mean,
(22:05):
maybe some people have really squared themselves away such, but
to me, it's just seems like part of in you know,
a bunch of the history that we kind of truncated
at the beginning. Talked about it being part of the
human condition, and I just think that's so obviously true,
It's totally true. I think people who don't have to
deal with that are really just dealing with it less
(22:26):
than other people. I don't think anybody's ever managed to
eradicate emotional pain from their lives, you know, But in
the people that seem like they've got it all together
could be suffering the worst. You never know, they might
just be really good at at burying that stuff or
what have you, like Flanders types exactly. There's one other
(22:47):
thing about the the comparison, though, of physical pain and
emotional pain, that really is a difference, and that is
that when you're experiencing physical pain, there's usually something you
can do to kind of stem it off immediately. Do
you put your hand like a hot of it, You
can pull your hand away. But if you experience like
an emotional injury, uh, and you feel emotional pain, you
(23:08):
can't like hold your hand, you can't run it underwater,
you can't. There's nothing you can do right then to
stop it except for essentially self soothed as best you
can until it subsides. Whereas with physical pain there's often
stuff you can do to kind of treat it immediately. Yeah,
what I think, and that's an acute thing, I totally agree.
(23:28):
But what I think it's interesting is that like evolutionarily speaking,
emotional pain is a signal, just like a physical pain
is a signal to like tend to yourself in some
way and whenever. And we get a lot of emails
from people that are suffering great deals of emotional pain,
like listeners, you would not believe some of the emails
(23:51):
we get of people that are in such distress. And
I always try to say the same thing, which is
like and usually it's in reference to the podcast, kind
of help can calm them down in some way, which
is really nice to hear. But always tell people the
same way as which is like, hey, listen, get some
help and treat yourself right, like drink a lot of water,
(24:11):
go for a walk, Like these are literal physical things
that you can do that will it's not a cure,
but it will certainly help alleviate acute symptoms. You know,
self soothe. Yeah, but it's it's more than self suit
to me, because it's like it's it's like, no, you
need to treat it like there's a physical problem, Like
that's why you should drink a lot of water and
(24:33):
go outside, and uh, it's soothing, but it's also doing
something to your body. And interestingly, we'll talk about things
you can do and you just nailed a bunch of them.
But apparently walking outside in nature, um is a really
great way to, um, I guess, alleviate emotional pain. And like,
(24:54):
if you have a forest, great, walk around the forest.
If you have a meadow, walk around the meadow. If
you have a public park, walk around the park. Just
getting outside can help a tremendous amount. Yeah, I agreed.
I think that's a really nice thing that you say
to people that chuck My pat responses, hey, man, keep
on trucking? Is hey just like that mud flap says Yeah,
(25:15):
no one ever writes back, although or if they do,
they're like even matter than they were before, They're more
upset than before. It's weird. People are strange. Uh. Do
you want to talk about drugs? Yeah, this is really
interesting to me. Uh, this first bit on a seat
a menafin because they and I had no idea about
any of this, but they have found out through studies
(25:37):
that a seeda menafin like thailand are or other types
of you know, generic pain killers, it actually can dull
you emotionally. UM. I'm wondering about to what degree, because
they say it can dull that like the social pain
that you might feel if your pomoed or left out
of something, Uh, it can emotionally blunt your reactions that
(26:00):
other Like if somebody tells you about something bad, you
can be I guess less empathetic if you're taking a
seat a menafin, And that was really surprising. The converse
is true too, You're because you're less empathetic, you experience
fewer positive emotions too. So the weird thing is is
it's not like it affects your brain or your processing
(26:22):
of events you're fully aware of, Like, this is a
really great thing my friends telling me, and I understand
that my friend is uh is proud, reasonably proud for this,
but I don't feel at all happy for them because
of the sea a menafin. That's a really weird effect.
I wonder how much and how pronounced, Like I don't know, Yeah,
I need to I want to follow up on that guy.
(26:44):
I don't really ever take that stuff that much. But
but I feel like, even you know, just a few
times you have taken it, if it was a pronounced effect,
you probably would have noticed it. Probably, you know what
I'm saying, Like if you're if your hand is suddenly
making trails of itself, even though that's the first time
I mean you've taken this, you noticed that that happened.
I would because it was a pronounced effect. Same thing
(27:06):
with you know, emotions being blunted with a Sina benefit
probably good point. Opioids obviously is something we can't not
talk about, uh such an you know, we we should
probably tackle bits and pieces of the opioid epidemic in
full episodes. But uh, opioids are interesting in that sometimes
you might be taking them for a real physical malady
(27:29):
and you happen upon the um the emotional relief that
all of a sudden feels good to you when you
take an opioid, whereas other people that is exactly what
they're seeking when they're like med seeking or buying pills
on the black market or whatever. Yeah, which is a
huge problem. And it's you know, obviously not just opioids,
but alcohol and food, um, basically, anything that can give
(27:52):
you some sort of positive feeling can be you know,
used to stave off emotional pain. That that is not
the way to do it, though, but you know a
lot of people do do it that way, and it's
tough to blame them, especially if they haven't found a
better way yet to deal with them. So you know,
I mentioned before that pain, all kinds of pain is
(28:15):
very subjective, and especially emotional pain, and obviously because of that,
it's a really hard thing to to quantify. Uh. We've
talked about the physical pain scale that was developed, but
there have been various attempts over the years at mental
pain scales, and they've never really all agreed like, hey,
(28:36):
this is the really really good one because there's scores
of data behind it, and they talked with a bunch
of people who live with mental pain and at all
they kind of signed off on it. It's weird that
they haven't really done that, but they've The long story
short is they've never been able to land on a
really great one, although I think one they do kind
of use, right, the Orbach one. Yeah, they used the
(28:58):
Orbach and michaelins Or mental pain scale pretty frequently. But
the problem is there was a review of ten major
scales that are used around the world, um that was
published in two in the British Medical Journal, and they
said none of these seem to be valid, Like they're
all they might as well all be like tea leaves
and lizard guts, like that's that's as as good as
(29:21):
they are. At really nailing down emotional pain or quantifying it.
So they said, don't we shouldn't give up or anything
like that. We just need to figure out how to
do it better. So essentially the upshot is there's no
way at the moment to accurately measure emotional pain, and
then I guess figure out how to treat it depending
on the measurement from there. Why else would you want
(29:43):
to measure it? Yeah, I guess so, Because I was
about to say why, I feel like sometimes a discipline
can get so hung up on something like this that
it thwarts progress. Uh. So I hope that's not the case.
It's called getting wonky. Uh. It's no surprise. We mentioned
a little bit earlier about other conditions related to mental pain.
(30:07):
I guess code morbidities for lack of a better word.
But heartbreak you mentioned is obviously one of the big ones.
What I found interesting in this is that some people
have UM like in heartbreak two drug withdrawal. And it
makes a lot of sense because when you are in
love UM and especially if you've ever been sort of
(30:30):
that new love, if you've ever been newly in love,
but that really flamed out fast, and it's taken away
from you. UM, that's sort of like drug withdrawal, because
you've got all sorts of uh dopamine and oxytocin and
things firing when you have that fresh new love happening,
and if that's taken away, then it's like taking away
a feel good drug. Yeah, welcome to six to ninth grade,
(30:56):
six ninth man boy through through college. Okay, sure, fair enough.
Welcome to sixth grade through the rest of your life.
About that, the thing is is, because you're experiencing this,
and because you're experiencing stress, like when you when you
undergo rejection or a sense of betrayal or a sense
of loss, your body actually does reliefs cortissolve, So you
(31:18):
actually are experiencing stress, and you actually can have physical
symptoms from that, like digestive problems, tough to sleep, your
immune system is down, you might get sick. And then
we did an episode a long time ago UM called
can you die of a broken Heart? And then yes
you can. There's something called taco subo cardiomyopathy, which is
(31:41):
a sudden emotional or physical stressor basically weakens the heart
and you basically have a heart attack from it, possibly
from being dumped. If it's bad enough. I knew that
sounded super familiar. I say, before we go any further, Chuck,
we take our last break. How about that, let's do
it so. I think, UM, one of the first things
(32:26):
people think about when they think of emotional pain is depression,
Like there's you know, there are people out there who
have depression, and you can make an argument that with
depression you're suffering chronic emotional pain. What they found, though,
is that people with emotional pain, if you if people
(32:46):
with depression, if you have really high levels of emotional pain,
it's not necessarily correlated with the UM the largest burden
of depression. So if you put ten people together, you've
got one guy who's the most suppressed of all, he's
not necessarily the person with the greatest levels of emotional pain,
which suggests that depression, UM and emotional pain are not
(33:09):
one and the same. Depressions its own thing has other symptoms.
It's just correlates very strongly with emotional pain, which seems
to be one of the leading symptoms of depression, but
not with depression. Is they're not interchangeable. Yeah, and and
a lot of these that we're talking about here, like
they're weaving in and out of each other all the
(33:29):
time in some cases. And but I think the distinction
is still important to make though you know it, rather
than just lumping it in as all one kind of thing. Um.
And eating disorders to a lot of people are like,
you've got any disorder, you really like the food, huh.
And most people who treat eating disorders are aware that
it has very little to do with food. Food just
(33:50):
happens to be something that, um, these people can use
to cope, that they can use to uh feel better
about themselves or forget or distract themselves for a little while.
But really what they're doing, it's dealing with um, emotional
pain that they don't have a better way to deal with,
so they turn to food. That's what eating disorders are. Yeah,
there was a study in that I'm surprised it wasn't higher, honestly,
(34:12):
that found that of disordered eating patients experienced significant mental
pain compared to six percent of the control So that's
quite a jump. Yeah, I mean that's huge. It's pretty
much all you need to sing, uh, well, we've got
well this is sort of the big one. Um. I
mean they're all big, but borderline personality disorder bp D. UM.
(34:36):
This maybe sort of at the top of the ladder
as far as what might cause the most consistent and
the worst kind of mental pain that someone UH might
suffer because a lot of times, for many reasons, but
a lot of times, UH, you suffer from bp D
because of childhood abuse or childhood neglect. Uh. Sometimes it's genets.
(34:59):
There's some gener edics thrown in there, but you know,
this is stuff that's very very deeply rooted in somebody. Yeah,
And so the it's chronic mental pain UM, especially those
related to narcissistic wounds, where you feel a sense of
rejection in It just completely undermines your sense of self
worth and pride. But the way that it manifests itself
(35:21):
and people with borderline personality disorder is that they might
have inappropriate anger, They might UM dissociate from themselves or reality.
They might feel emptiness. UM there are emotionally unstable in
most cases. And what I saw it UM ascribed to
is that essentially because of that childhood neglect or abuse
(35:44):
or trauma of some sort there, they become so afraid
of being abandoned that they actually alienate people with their behavior.
That's that, which that sounds to be like a old
medieval curse essentially, like the more you try to keep
people around, the further way they're going to get and
you're really gonna want them to be around you. That
sounds about as awful and affliction as you can have. Really. Yeah,
(36:08):
and you know, you shouldn't be surprised that if you
suffer from borderline personality disorder, uh, you're way more likely
to abuse or missuse substances. Uh, maybe suffer from that
eating disorder we were talking about, have obviously anxiety depression, uh,
and even be at risk or suicide. Yeah, that's I
(36:28):
think we should do a BPD episode someday. Yeah, there's
a lot there, for sure. There's also something called non
suicidal self injury and it is a fairly new diagnosis
as far as the d s M is concerned. UM,
and it can be its own symptom, it can be
a symptom of other things. Like people with BPD, UM
often engage in non suicidal self injury. But essentially what
(36:51):
it is is self cutting, UM, punching a wall like
a bunch of times. UM. What you're what they've frequently
thought was that they they're these people are overcome with
emotions and the only way to release that tension from
that emotion is to cut themselves or punch that wall.
And more recent research has found that actually they think
(37:13):
that what they're what they've stumbled upon is this kind
of innate mechanism humans have where when you experience a
painful stimulus, when it subsides, you don't just go back
to how you felt right before the painful stimulus, You
actually have a bit of a sense of euphoria, and
that they're actually doing they're actually going for that sense
(37:33):
of relief in euphoria by cutting themselves or by punching
the wall or whatever self injurious behavior. They're engaged and
that that's really what's behind it. But that what differentiates
them from people who um don't engage in that behavior
that they feel like they deserve it, they deserve punishment,
or they're defective, there's something wrong with them. So that's
why they respond in that manner where they hurt themselves
(37:57):
to kind of cope, rather than say turning to food
or something. Yeah, it's just devastating, And that's that sense
of self that it seems like we just keep going
back to when it comes to this emotional pain. It's
something is wrong with me, and maybe I deserve this.
It's just I've never had these kind of feelings, and
I just my heart breaks to think about someone walking
(38:19):
around feeling this way. You know. UM, rejection sensitive dysphoria
is something that I had never heard of, because it
seems like it's really sort of on the leading edge
of what's being studied. Now that's that. In fact, that
phrase rejection sensitive dysphoria isn't even part of the medical community. Um,
(38:43):
Like they haven't even UM. I guess what would you
call that? Well, the medical community a lot of it,
except that it's it exists, but it's not in the
d s M. So it's technically not an actual diagnosis.
Is that what it is? Yeah, that's my understanding, all right,
And this is UM and this, you know, obviously go
along with some other neurodivergences, other mood disorders. Like we said,
(39:05):
a lot of these are sort of criss cross each other,
but they might experience mental pain or discomfort and feel,
you know, this rejection that we keep talking about. And
the other thing that really stood out to me or
interpret like something ambiguous as rejection, right, so when they're
when they're rejected. When you feel rejected and you have
(39:27):
rs D, you have a full body sense of being
overwhelmed by the emotions that you feel. Nobody likes to
be rejected. Now take that feeling of being rejected and
amplify it a million times so that it completely saturates
every fiber in your being, and then make it so
that just about anything anyone says to you is a
(39:49):
form of rejection. Correcting you for something that you you
you misspoke about, UM, telling you that you're doing something wrong,
anything like like breaking plans with you because you have
to take your ailing mother to the hospital. Like, all
of that is considered rejection, and all of it is
met or responded to by this overwhelming flood of negative emotion.
(40:11):
UH suicide We've talked about UM kind of here and
there throughout the episode. UM. Obviously that's a big risk
if you're suffering from depression and uh bp D. But
emotional pain, and again this is something that we want
to draw distinction. Emotional pain is a real major factor
(40:31):
and it's not everyone, but many Many people who have
died by suicide or attempted suicide had reported previously that
they it was a psychological pain that they were trying
to escape from or end. Right. One thing that I
hadn't thought about but makes total senses. There's some suicidal
(40:51):
ideation um and that that that can be a coping
mechanism for people who are UM risk at risk of
suicide UM, and that they're they're basically saying, like, I can,
I can keep making it. It's not quite bad enough yet.
And I always have that out of taking my own
life if things get too bad, and that suicidal ideation,
(41:11):
and some people just use that to get by um
and get through emotional pain, to just remind themselves that,
you know, it's not that bad yet. Right. Well, I
had not heard of that, but I mean I get
I get the basis of it. It's very very saddening,
but I get the strange logic behind it, you know,
yeah for sure. Um. All right, So we would love
(41:32):
to end on a bit more of a positive note,
which is there are treatments for these things. Uh. Like
we mentioned it, it is an evolutionary signal when you're
feeling emotional pain too uh to do something about it.
It is your body saying, hey, this is uh not
just this is no way to live. But like, this
(41:53):
is dangerous for you, and you need to take care
of yourself and self soothe and do all those things,
but also seek treatment. And there are quite a few
treatments that are that are out there for you. Right. Yeah,
there's cognitive behavioral therapy, which basically says, you, Um, we
don't know why you're feeling the way you're feeling. Who knows,
(42:15):
We might never uncover it. The point of what we're
trying to do is to teach you how to live
a better life with being saddled with these negative emotions,
learn to deal with them better, learn to think of
them as less powerful than they are. And CBT has
been around for a while and it is probably the
most successful, UM psycho psychological therapy there is, and it's
(42:36):
kind of given birth to some subsets of it, and
a couple of them are really specifically geared towards treating
emotional pain. Once called dialectical behavioral therapy, it's been around
since the seventies. A psychologist named Marcia Linahan UM came
up with it. Yeah, this one's interesting, UM, And they
say that this is one of the best treatments if
(42:57):
you suffer from borderline personality disorder to undergo and uh,
if you everyone experiences emotional pain, but if you experience
these things really, really really intensely, then this, uh DBT
might be for you. It's called dialectical because, um, it's
(43:18):
about sort of accepting your behaviors, accepting your situation that
you're in, but trying to change them. So the acceptance
part is a big is a big piece to DBT
as well as a c T Acceptance and commitment therapy. Right. Yeah,
Dialectical means like things that are concepts that are in
(43:38):
logical opposition to one another. And then this one makes
a lot of sense. I thought it was pretty cool. Um.
They Also one of the big things about DBT is
there's group therapy and you practice your skills in it,
so you're like, watch this emotional regulation everybody, you know.
I'm not quite sure what the groups are like, but
I saw that it was more akin to a classrooms
(44:00):
setting than a group therapy setting. There's also acceptance and
commitment therapy. It has a lot of the same ideas
behind it. Basically that you need to um accept that
you feel emotional pain and and kind of move on
without and move on with it make make make the
best of your life using mindfulness techniques typically, and both
(44:23):
of those things they center on the idea of, um,
you have emotional pain, there's not a lot you like,
you're never going to free yourself from emotional pain. So
let's teach you, the person, how to deal with emotional
pain better. And that makes a lot of sense, and
it actually is effective for a lot of people. But
there's also another school of thought that says, like they're
(44:45):
those things are wrong because they're coming from a premise
that you have emotional pain, you just have to accept
it and deal with it. There's a guy named um
Mark Rigo. He's a psychiatrist at Yale, and he's on
the other side and says, we need to figure how
to treat emotional pain. You're not gonna get any great
signals or any great understanding from your emotional pain. We
(45:05):
need to get rid of it however we can, um.
And that's a kind of controversial because people are like, well,
you're pathologizing maybe emotional pain that everybody has, and he's saying,
not necessarily, some people have way more acute or way
more chronic emotional pain that's actually debilitating and rather than them,
you know, going to group and practicing their skills. Let's
(45:28):
figure out some medications to help them get back on
their feet, and then they can go to like CBT
or DBT or a c T H and work it out.
But they're they're so far beyond that. We need to
bring them back to the place where that therapy can
actually help. Yeah, I mean, I guess if that helps you,
that's great. I think I identify a little more with
the um the previous ones we were talking about, the
(45:52):
acceptance because it kind of ties into the whole I
am not my behaviors line of thought, Um, like I
can be this and also be something else totally, which
is I think could be very empowering. I mean, I've
learned a tremendous amount for my therapy and it's essentially
geared towards that of like you said, I'm not my behaviors,
(46:13):
I'm not my thoughts, are not my feelings, like I
am the kind of the sum total of all of
those things. And also just um, you know, learning not
to be such a negative nelly. Same here, my friend,
you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Well,
if you want to know more about emotional pain, sit
(46:35):
back and wait because it'll come sooner or later. And
since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Oh no, no,
it's time for listener phone call. What first ever um
our old or old pal? John Hodgman, friend of the
show and friend of ours in real life, ye called
(46:58):
me as he still listens to our show some really yeah,
which made me feel really good. I doubt if he
listens to him all. He probably sturfs through and skips
around and listens to what might appeal to him. But he, uh,
he listened to the episode on the word and phrase origins,
which you know, John of course is in talented orator
(47:18):
and wordsmiths, so it's not surprising that when jumped out
at him. But he called because he wanted to talk
about the peu remember when something stinks, And he said,
I think that might have come about And it made
sense to me when because that's sort of the sound
you make when you spit something out that might be
(47:40):
bad for you. So like evolutionarily, if you put something
in your mouth, it's like super bitter, which evolutionary and
speaking means it could be poisonous. You go to you know,
like like spit something out and he thinks, p you
may have evolved from that. I saw other places that
it's kind of a nuanced version of the where like
when you get smacked in the face by a disgusting smell,
(48:04):
Like the exclamation you make involuntarily is like pure kind
of that kind of thing. It makes sense and just
something I think you'll enjoy. I've been holding out on
this to tell you, he said. And by the way,
he said, did I ever tell you, Chuck that for
the first couple of years I listened to the show
before I knew you guys, I thought you had a ponytail. Oh,
(48:29):
that just tickled me. I would pay good money to
see you with a ponytail. Yeah, I thought that was
good stuff. This Halloween's coming up, Chuck, you never so
thanks to Hodgi. Good good guy, good friend. Yeah, great guy.
Thanks a lot, Hodgi for the first ever listener phone call.
And if you want to be like Hodgman, see if
(48:50):
you can find Chuck's phone number and give him a call. Uh.
In the meantime, you can also send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts, my heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(49:11):
favorite shows. H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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