June 17, 2024 • 37 mins
Dr Laurie is stressed, and it's harming her health. Constant worry and stress is bad for our bodies and our minds, but how can we break the cycle and relax? It turns out scientists have learned a lot from one of America's most stressed-out communities - caregivers.
Hollywood star Steve Guttenberg talks about the toughest chapter of his life - caring for his dying dad - and Dr Elissa Epel explains why some caregivers suffer badly from stress, while others seem to find ways to live with the awful situation they find themselves in daily.
And we find out how stress can be tamed and turned to our advantage with David Yeager.
Further reading:
David Yeager - 10 to 25. The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation And Making Your Own Life Easier
Steve Guttenberg - Time to Thank: Caregiving for My Hero.
Dr Elissa Epel - The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I was having my annual medical checkup. The nurse
measured my weight in blood pressure, She listened to my heart,
and then did some blood work. Most of my test
results came back fine except one. My CRP levels were
kind of high. But I didn't actually know what CRP
(00:38):
levels were, so I turned to Google. Turns out, high
CRP levels are a sign of bodily inflammation, which can
increase the risk of chronic health conditions like kidney disease, cancer, dementia,
and premature death. I'm no medical doctor, but that did
not sound good. I returned to the clinic to go
over the results. So this inflammation thing, I asked, what's
(00:59):
causing it? Inflammation? My doctor replied, can be lots of things,
but it's usually a sign that your immune system is
on the defense. But we often see levels like that
when patients are experiencing a period of intense stress. Have
you been going through any stress lately? I fidgeted, well,
I said, then launched into all the stuff on my plate.
(01:20):
I talked about how I'd cared for over five hundred
students during a pandemic while also running a lab while
also making a podcast. I admitted I hadn't been exercising
or eating well, and that I was feeling totally overwhelmed.
My doctor, a fan of the show, gave a smirk.
So the famous happiness expert has been all stressed out?
Huh yeah, yeah, I guess she has been, and apparently
(01:45):
it's making her ill. Stress is a normal bodily response.
It can be triggered by external factors like major life changes,
relationship troubles, financial worries, and troubles at work, but also
by internal things like self criticism, unrealistic expectations, and being
too busy all the time. Stress is just the body's
natural response to a perceived threat. But as I know well,
(02:08):
that response doesn't feel good. It can make us anxious, sad,
and irritable. But it also hurts us physically, causing headaches
and insomnia and digestive problems. And if we leave stress unchecked,
it can badly damage our bodies and our immune systems.
Stress is a happiness challenge that I and so many
others face on a daily basis. But is there anything
(02:30):
we can do about it for my own sake? I
really hope so. Our minds are constantly telling us what
to do to be happy. But what if our minds
are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
(02:50):
You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
At around the time I was thinking about my own
struggle with stress, a new book landed on my desk.
There seemed to be an odd mismatch between the author
and the subject matter, but after reading it, I realized
(03:11):
there was a lot I could learn from his experience.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Hey, Steve, I'm in the car because for some reason,
all the traffic lights on since sent Boulevard are out.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
When scientists studies stress, they often turn to one particular
group of very stressed out people, caregivers, and there's no
shortage of such research subjects. Around thirty percent of US
adults provide some form of care to say a child
with special needs, a sick partner, or even an aging parent.
It's around the clock job that's often really brutal. Thanks
(03:41):
so much for taking the time. Of course, the person
I wanted to talk to had a hectic life before
he took on the tough role of a caretaker, and
he's still rushing around La from meeting to meeting today
traffic allowing, of course, do you want to talk now?
Do you want to wait till you get back to
your place? What's better?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Let's start right now because I have another appointment.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
But I'm thrilled to talk to you, but not as
thrilled as I was. You see, I'm not just a
fan of Steve's book, Time to Think Caregiving for my Hero.
I'm also a fan of Steve's acting. Steve Gutenberg is
the star of some of my favorite eighties movies, Three
Men in a Baby Cocoon and Short Circuit Number Five
is a Lie, and Steve attributes much of his amazing
(04:22):
career success to his father.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
He was my hero, and my dad was really a
very tough guy who was a US Army Airborne ranger,
one of the first Jewish ones. And then my dad
became a New York City policeman and he actually went
to the New York City Police Academy. So when I
auditioned for Police Academy the movie, he said, why don't
you wear my police Academy shirt? And I said, yeah,
(04:46):
that would be great.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
The director asked about Steve's shirt and seemed impressed by
the actor's attention to detail. After all, Steve was reading
for character Kerrie Mahoney, who was also the son of
a police officer. It was a great start, but the
audition went terribly.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I called my dad and I said, Dad, you know,
I wore your shirt, but I don't think I got
this thing. You know, nobody laughed, nobody clapped, nothing. He said, well,
you never go just give it a little time. My
dad was really positive thinker. He just said it'll all
work out. Take your time with it. About ten minutes later,
my agent called and I said, oh, I feel lousy.
I did terrible. He goes, no, you got it. He
(05:23):
said what? And that was the phone call that changed
my life. And I think that my dad's lucky shir
It really helped me.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So Steve was going to star in Police Academy. What
could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Actually, my manager saw Police Academy. He said, this is
going to be the worst movie ever. I'm going to
put you in a TV series Tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Steve landed a role in a spy series made by
Blake Edwards.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
He was a great director, directed Breakfast and Tiffany's and
all the Pink Panthers.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Steve's dad was incredibly supportive of his new role and
wanted to join his son on set, but that might
have also had something to do with Blake Edward's famous wife.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
My dad wanted to come out because he thought maybe
you'd get to meet Julie.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Andrews Stanley Gutenberg. Set visit coincided with a short delay
in shooting. Steve's character was supposed to jump off a
thirty foot roof and Steve didn't want to do the
stunt himself.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
And my dad was looking up there and said to
Blake Edwards, you know I could do that, and the
director Blake Edwards said yeah, but you don't want to
do it, do you? And he said, yeah, I'll do it.
I'm airborn rajor. I jumped from airplane some thousands of feet.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Stanley made the jump, and as he was finishing up
the stunt, it became clear that he wasn't the only
visitor on the lot.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
All of a sudden, this Rose Royce pulls up and
out of it comes Julie Andrews, and my dad looks
down there and says, Julie Andrews Julia Hedgers and Julie
Andrews looked up and I guess asked who that was.
He said, oh, was a good bug. And he said,
oh my god, I wanted to meet you. He says, well,
here I am.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
So Steve's dad got to play the hero and meet
his movie.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Idol, and that was a big kick for me.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Steve's dad was a caring, positive guy who also took
great joy at his powerful physique. But age and infirmity
pay little respect to such things.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
He said, look at my thigh, Yes, look how big
my thighs are. And I would say, dad, but you're
still tough, Dad, You're still tough.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Stanley was diagnosed with kidney failure, a disease that immediately
reversed the Gutenberg family roles. Steve, along with his sister
were now cast as caregivers with all the stress that entails.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
And I was a reluctant caregiver because I didn't want
to see my dad like that.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
As many of us know, being a caregiver is very challenging.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Doctor Alissa Epple is one of many scientists studying stress
and caregivers.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
It's a job that doesn't end twenty four to seven,
and that's because we care so much, We're so connected
to another's well being, we feel responsible for it, and
that doesn't end.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Alyssa is a professor a UCSF and the author of
the Stress prescription seven Days to More Joy and Ease.
She explained that caregivers, like so many of us, are
often harmed by the very biological reaction that's supposed to
help us.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Our stress response is the only reason we're all here,
the only reason our ancestors have survived.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Thanks to those ancestors, we've inherited a unique biological control center,
the autonomic nervous system, which allows our brains to switch
instantly from normal processes like breathing or digesting food, to
the high energy fighter flight activities we need for emergencies
like sprinting away from a tiger or punching an attacker.
Whenever our brains perceive a threat, this fighter flight system
(08:39):
kicks into high gear. We breathe quicker, our hearts pump faster,
our pupils dilate, and our brains release energy rich glucose
into the blood. This response allows us to react faster,
see better, and summon the muscle power required to flee
or tackle an oncoming threat. Neuro Scientists like to think
of this fight or flight response kind of like jamming
your foot on a gas pedal, and if the brain
(09:01):
decides a particular threat isn't going away, it will keep
that response pressed to the metal. That's when we launch
a hormone cyclone orem glands release substances like cortisol, which
keep our energy up and our muscles at the ready
at least until the threat passes. And that's when our
brains finally hit the brakes. We relax, our muscles and
our bodies switch back to running the normal rest and
(09:23):
digest processes we need for everyday life. The problem is
the modern world leaves our fight or flight mode switched
on way longer than it should, which means our digestive, sexual,
and sleep functioning gets all screwed up. We up our
risk for high blood pressure and headaches. We spend our
days feeling irritable and.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Anxious, our bodies really living in a chronically aroused state
that we don't even notice anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
All this would be bad enough if we only freaked
out about our actual daily stressors, but part of.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
The problem with our stress today is that we keep
it alive with our thoughts, because things aren't always happening,
but they can be in our mind if we take
them with us and we ruminate about what's happened, or
we are worrying about what might happen next, and we're
all challenged by that to some extent, and especially right now,
(10:13):
because things are more unstable than they used to be.
We live in an unstable climate, in an unstable political world,
and then we still have our daily drama that we
need to cope with as well.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
It's a lot, and as I have definitely experienced in
my own life, we usually react to these daily mental
dramas in ways that make things even worse.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
For so many of us, it really is about rushing,
about creating a schedule that has no spaciousness in it,
that has no time for breaks, and it doesn't match
our value as usually we don't have time for people,
we don't have time for health or eating healthy meals.
We no longer want to eat normal food. We want
(10:57):
to eat highly palatable food, high sugar food, high fat food,
and for some of us, high salt food. And we
call this comfort food because it is biologically comforting to
the body and brain.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Ah comfort food, I could honestly spend a whole episode
in this series talking about this happiness challenge. When my
Yale students disappeared during lockdown, I comforted myself with whatever
sugary food looked good. I wound up putting on the
so called COVID nineteen pounds and then some But Alyssa says,
this wasn't a willpower failure. It was just my basic
(11:31):
biology at work. Take one experiment in which researchers stressed
out a bunch of rats and then gave them access
not just to their usual meals but also to human
junk food like cookies and candy. The rats switched over
to the fatty stuff, but they also changed their approach
to feeding time.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
The addition of stress on top of giving rats access
to oreos creates this craving an addiction in these rats.
So each time they get access to the oreos, they're
not just eating leisurely and saying, what a fine meal,
this feels great. They're binge eating. They will eat more,
and they'll develop greater or intro abdominal fat, and that
(12:11):
is just a little disease making machine. To have a
lot of introbdominal fat means that We're also having a
lot of lipids and our blood and insulin resistance. So
stress plus comfort food means we're becoming more apple shaped
in our body.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
But chronic stress doesn't just change the size of our
mid sections, as my own heightened CRP marker show, it
can also affect our immune systems.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Our immune cells have receptors for cortisol, but when we're
chronically stressed and cortisol gets too high, then the immune
cells are not turning off inflammation in response to cortisol,
and those cells are more prone flammatory during stress.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Chronic stress results in exactly the same inflammation profile that
I presented with at my doctor's visit. What researchers are
referring to as inflammating chronic stress also damages our DNA.
It destroys the part of our chromosomes that we need
for cell division.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
What are known as teeling telomeres are these caps at
the tips of our chromosomes and they protect our genes,
so they have this incredibly important role in the cell.
Telomeres are basically the sentinels or these guards, and when
there's too much stress in the cell, the telomeres tend
to shorten quickly. And more excessively.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Telomeres work like the plastic tip at the top of
our shoelaces, which the Internet tells me is actually called
an ag lit. Did not know that. In any case,
if you've ever had a shoelace lose it zag lit,
you know what happens next. The lease starts to fray
and fall apart. Telomeres at the top of a DNA
strand work the same way. When they get messed up,
(13:51):
our DNA winds up frayed and broken.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
And once they get too short, they start sending out
distress signals saying this cell is no longer good. We
got to call it quits. Time for this cell to
become senescent.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Dyeing sinescent cells, higher abdominal fat levels, long standing anxiety, irritability, inflammating,
and an increased risk for premature death. Apparently this is
where all my self imposed pressures over the last few
years have gotten me. At this point in my conversation
with Alyssa, things were starting to sound kind of hopeless,
but Alyssa assured me that chronic stress doesn't have to
(14:26):
be a cellular death sentence. In fact, her newest research
has shown that healthier stress responses are possible even in
a population that experiences some of the hardest possible stressors.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
We've learned more about chroduct stress from these caregiving studies
than other types of stressors.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
But what lessons can we learn from the painful experience
of stressed out caregivers. We'll find out when the Happiness
Lab returns from the break.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
When you were a caregiver, beautiful responsibility to be more
than a human being, you just do.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
When his father Stanley became ill, movie star Steve Guttenberg
was forced to trade the glamor of Hollywood for the
hard job of a long term caretaker.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
You have to be superhuman because it takes a superhuman
to clean somebody up when they go to the bathroom,
when they throw up, when they have a seizure, when
they have bouts of true darkness. You have to be
more than an average human being.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Step and his sister joined the thirty four million other
Americans offering unpaid care to an older person in need.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
I would call them angels, super angels, muscular, strong, super
powered angels, because when you're looking at somebody at two
in the morning and they have to go to the
bathroom and you have to pick them up out of
bed and they can't make it to the regular bathroom,
and you have to put them on their commode, and
(16:01):
you have to give them their privacy and their dignity
at the same time being there to help them. You're
not a human being, You're way above a human being,
because the average human being walks out of the room.
Can't do it, cannot do it. Now, I'm not going
to tell you that I didn't have my moments of
(16:22):
gagging and dry eaving, because some of it was really
hard to watch. And I feel my metal coming up
in me when I'm talking about this, because you have
to be made of metal to deal with this.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
The range of daily challenges that carers face is immense
medical bills, dealing with hospitals and insurance companies, negotiating time
off work, and that doesn't include the heartbreaking pain of
watching once healthy loved ones deteriorate.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
The reason I wrote the book is caregiving is a
really lonely occupation. You're basically sitting in the room with
that one person who's very ill, and you're looking at
them constantly, monitoring their health well and seeing what you
can do for them, and at the same time, you're
trying to figure out your own life and what you're
(17:16):
doing with it and what you have to give up
to be part of this process.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
The problems caregivers contend with can last day after day
after day, and as doctor Elyssa Epple explained earlier, such
sustained stress can be really bad for our bodies. Melissa
likes to point to one caregiver study in particular.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Showing that their wounds heal almost ten days longer than
low stress age matched older controls, And that really is
about the chronic stress response, the excesses of the exposure
to cortisol.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
It wouldn't be surprising if Steve Gutenberg's cortisol levels were
through the roof during his time as a caregiver. Steve
was living in LA when his father was diagnosed with
renal failure, so taking care of him meant regular drives
to his father's house in Arizona mile.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Round trip every week. And I started listening to podcasts
or music, but quickly I stopped and just started thinking.
So what I would think about was when my dad
was younger, and my dad was really fit and young
and healthy and enthusiastic, sitting.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Behind the wheel for long hours isn't ideal, but ruminating
about his father's physical decline during those long drives was
bound to trigger even more stress.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
My dad was in such pain, physical pain, mental pain,
he did not want to die.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Steve says his father's final years were the most depressing
period of his entire life. And Steve's not alone. It's
estimated that half of caregivers have major depression, a rate
that's twice as high as the general population. Even more shockingly,
twelve percent of dementia caregivers die before their sick loved.
One one study estimated that a caregiver's mortality risk was
(19:07):
sixty three percent higher than they're not caregiving peers. With
stats like these, it's probably not surprising that many caregivers
like Steve wind up neglecting their own self care.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
It fell by the wayside. I did not exercise for
so many years. I didn't sleep very well at all.
There was about a month before he passed where he
would be up all night, that he would be screaming
all night. So my self care did go to the side.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
But researcher Alyssa Apple has found that not all caregivers
succumbed to the effects of stress.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
The good news is that there are ways to be
with this life situation.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Alissa studied caregivers telomeres, that part of our DNA that
gets prematurely shortened by chronic stress. She found that many
of her subjects telomeres were badly affected. They showed all
the expected hallmarks of inflammating, but the telomeres of some
caregivers were fine. Even though the these people face the
same stresses as those with the shortened tail of mirrors,
(20:12):
their bodies weren't affected in the same way. How is
that possible? Alyssa discovered that one factor was the narrative
these caregivers created to explain the difficulties they were facing.
The healthier caregivers embraced what's known as radical acceptance.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I don't control outcomes. I don't control the disease course.
I don't control someone else's behavior. I can control X
and Y. So really separating out a situation to understand
there is a little bit that we can control. We
can control our response, and we can do things to
show compassion, to be with someone with a loving presence,
(20:49):
spend our time with them showing that we care. There
are ways that we can be our best self in
these uncontrollable situations that allow us to not be in
this chronically stressed state of striving, of hitting a brick wall.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
If you're a caregiver, you might be saying, well, that's
easier said than done. Radical acceptance was definitely something Steve
Gutenberg struggled with.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I was reluctant to accept the reality of the situation.
I just couldn't accept it. I wouldn't accept it. Everyone
else knew my dad was dying. I knew it, but
wouldn't accept it, so I never talked about it. I
always said, he's going to get better, He's going to
come through this, even at the very end.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Alyssa shared one strategy we can use to bring a
healthier narrative to times of stress. We can try out
what's known as expressive writing. Take time to journal about
all the crap on your plate and how it makes
you feel.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
I suggest just starting off with a massive list without
any editing or censoring, just writing down everything that you
feel bothered by, worried by, pressured by, and then thinking
about your day. You know what stresses you out most
during the day. We often don't give ourselves the opportunity
(22:05):
to step back and reflect on the level that we're carrying.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
The act of putting all your stresses down on paper
can also reveal all the things you're doing that inadvertently
add to your stress levels.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
We're very routine animals, you know. We get into this
I'll call it a daily stress routine, and we can
break that routine. We can see where we're creating unnecessary stress.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
You can then take stock of all the neglected stuff
you can control about your situation practices like sleep, or
food or time with friends. You can also take some
time to count your blessings. Gratitude, it turns out, is
a powerful tool for tackling stress. Fortunately, this was a
practice that did come naturally for caregivers. Steve Gutenberg his
dad was a gratitude role model.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Oh yeah, my dad was grateful for anything. Had told
get a cup of coffee. H coffee. My dad taught me,
you know, Stephen, enjoy your life. Enjoy your life. Be happy.
That's it. Just be happy. Everything else will come.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Steve called his book a Time to Think, because in
spite of his father's difficult illness, he still managed to
remember all the many ways in which he was fortunate.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Thank god I have a job that I could stop
and just sit there with my dad all the time.
How lucky I was that I didn't have to be
in some office hearing about my dad on the telephone.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Steve hated seeing Stanley's physical decline, but the time Steve
spent with his dad in those final months allowed him
to remember the dead of gratitude. He owed the old man.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
I think gratitude it's a verb. I think like love
is a verb. You know. My dad used to say
to me, you could either love someone or you can
love someone and show up. You know. That's that's gratitude.
That's gratitude. That's the deep part of gratitude.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Research shows that strategies like gratitude and radical acceptance can
protect us from the negative effects of chronic stress. But
as I read through a list is work, I learned
one additional way to handle stress that sounded kind of odd.
It turns out we can fight stress by looking for
new chances to get stressed out. This is the insight
behind what effective scientists call hermetic stress.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Her Medic stress is absolutely fascinating because it's so counterintuitive.
We know very well from fly studies that organisms like
a little shock of moderate repeated stress, and in fact
it's strengthening. It's like a vaccination, so it really is
(24:43):
building up biological resistance. It's exercise for our nervous system.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
What you're looking to create is a short episode of stress,
something that will get your heart racing and blood pumping,
but also an episode that you can stop so you
can train your autonomic nervous system to go back into
recovery mode. And it doesn't have to involve finding true
fight or flight danger. Hermetic stress can be way easier
than that.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
The best example, of course, is extra and we know
exercise is good for our health, but we haven't thought
about the fact that short bursts of exercise are creating
that positive hormetic stress response.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
One study found that caretakers who were asked to exercise
three to five times a week showed less short in
telomeres than those who didn't move their bodies. The blast
of stress that comes from exercise seems to slow down
and possibly even reverse the effects of inflammating Exercise was
another strategy that came easily to the Gutenberg family. When
Steve's great grandfather first came to the US, his physical
(25:41):
fitness came in handy.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
What he would do for extra money is he would
go down to the Brooklyn Bridge and he feats of strength.
He would carry people on his dock. He would carry
huge weights and at the end he had a Shetland
pony and he would pick up this little Shetland party
walk around it.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Steve's grandfather was a powerlifter who then passed on the
jim bug to his son Stanley.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
My dad started lifting weights when he was twelve years old.
My dad was a handstand king. My dad could do
a handstand for by four straight.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
As a skinny teen, Steve turned to his dad for
exercise tips. Under Stanley's tutelage, Steve was able to put
on fifty pounds of muscle. I'm building a mean, lean monster,
his dad had announced proudly. But like many stressed out folks,
Steve let his usual exercise routine slide at exactly the
time he needed it most. As Steve explained just how
(26:30):
infrequently he hit the gym during his time as a caretaker,
I felt a bit called out. I mean I rarely
make my yoga classes or hit the elliptical. What I'm
feeling frantic, but Ironically, a jolt of hermetic stress was
probably the perfect remedy for the strain I was under.
But giving our bodies additional bursts of stress to fight
stress isn't even the most surprising way we can protect
(26:52):
ourselves from chronic overwhelm. We also need to train our
brains to think differently about stress. I'll explain more when
the happiness Lab returns after the break. What someone says
they're feeling stressed, we usually assume that they're having a
bad time. My own periods of stress are accompanied by
(27:15):
yucky feelings like irritability, interrupted sleep, digestive issues, and a
sort of forehead clenching. Feeling stressed sucks, and I usually
just wish that I could avoid it.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Your heart is facing your pomps or sweaty or butterflies
in your stomach, so of course, in that circumstance, it
feels like self evidence the stress is bad.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Right, This is ut Austin psychologist David Yeager.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
Your stress could be viewed in a debilitating way that
it's a sign your body is preparing for damage and defeat.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Who wants damage and defeat? Seems like we're all agreed.
Then stress sucks. But David says that's not the whole story.
Speaker 4 (27:51):
There are lots of times when we face a stressor
and we're thrilled and excited, and that energy allows us
to show what we know. I mean, if you talk
to great athletes, right, they talk about performing at the
level of your preparation, and one of the ways they
do that is they kind of get in a zone
in their heads and they're like amped up before a performance, right.
And so in those cases, that's a much better situation
(28:12):
to be in than to have no stress at all,
where you're like about to fall asleep.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
David is an expert on the power of mindsets, the
beliefs we have about things like our abilities and how
our brains respond to challenges. David's work has shown that
how we think about things has a huge impact on
how we behave His early research focused on what's known
as the growth mindset, the belief that our abilities and
talents can improve over time if we're willing to put
(28:36):
in some work in practice. But these days David has
started thinking about a different type of mindset, the beliefs
we have about the effects of stress. If we think
about stress is terrible, we may behave in ways that
lead us to suffer. But if we greet stress as
a potential friend, couldn't improve our lives. Researchers have begun
conducting some elegant laboratory experiments to test this possibility. But
(28:59):
David's favorite illustration of the importance of our stress mindset
occurred when he was on vacation with his daughters.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Scarlet, we when water skiing in Wisconsin, and she'd never
keep She's a fourth or fifth grader, and She's sitting
there bobbing in the lake and I'm holding the back
of her skis and she says, Daddy, I'm so nervous.
I have butterflies on my stomach. I don't think I
can do this. And I was like, well, Scarlet, you
know that that's stress and that energy that's just getting
(29:25):
oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain, and those
muscles with that oxygenated blood are going to be stronger.
You can hold onto the rope a little more, and
once you do that, you're gonna pop up and just
have the most fun of your life and it's gonna
be thrilling. And what I was doing was just giving
her a different way of appraising or making meaning out
of that bodily experience. She's like, okay, and she got
(29:47):
right up and I just stayed there bobbing in the
water for I don't know, twenty minutes. Well, she just
did laughs around this lake in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Justice Scarlet initially interpreted her stress response as a signal
that she shouldn't try water skiing. David says that many
of us greet the early signs of stress the wrong way.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
In general and society, people tend to have a stress
is debilitating mindset. You see that if you just google
image s, stress and well being memes, they all take
this assumption that stress is always bad and should be avoided. Right.
It's like depleting you. It is something that you need
to suppress. Most people are convinced there's only one way
to look at stress, which is that it's always bad,
and when they do that, it spirals on itself and
(30:25):
it becomes self confirming for them. But we know from
just basic science of stress in both animals and humans
that the stress response is simply there to keep us alive,
to overcome and meet the demands that are imposed on us.
And so there's a different kind of mindset or belief
you can have about stress, which is the stress can
be enhancing mindset.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb was the first to show the
harmful effects of the wrong stress mindset. She found that
people who expected stress to be debilitating experienced more anxiety
and lower happiness ratings than people who thought stress was enhancing.
The people she studied who believed that stress was good
for them also showed more optimism, better performance at work,
and even better physical health. Crumb's work showed it's not
(31:06):
our stress that seems to be hurting us, it's how
we think about it, which got David wondering could people
shift from one stress mindset to the other, just as
he did with Scarlet at the Lake? Could David encourage
people to reframe how they saw stress.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
Could you just tell people what their physiology means one
way or the other and could that change their performance
when they're in a stressful situation.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
David and a colleague, Jeremy Jamison, recruited college students planning
to take the Jerry Exam and presented them with a
practice version of the test. Everyone was reminded that it's
normal for people to feel stressed out before an exam.
Behalf of participants were given a list of reasons why
their stress response might improve their performance.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
You know, the bodies releasing catecola means and those catacola
means are going to enhance performance. And the reason your
heart is pumping so much is because it's getting more
blood to your brain and to your muscles. It's going
to help you perform better.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
The results were striking. Students who reappraised their stress response
as beneficial showed way better scores than those in the
control condition. On some parts of the exam, their scores
were more than one hundred points higher.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
But the interesting thing is that a month later students
went and took the real gre and brought their scores back,
and they did much better. The difference is like the
difference between getting into a mid tier top fifty graduate
program or a top five graduate program.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
But GIRE exams are acute stressors. David wanted to know
whether the same mindset shift could also reduce the chronic
stress that dogs people like me day after day. So
he turned to a group of high school students from
low income backgrounds.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
And these are almost exclusively black or Latino students whose
parents had not gone to college. And we explicitly wanted
to choose this situation because we know kids experienced lots
of stressors. They might experience racial discrimination, prejudice, but also
for kids whose parents are experiencing poverty, food and security,
things like that, So could a little mindset shift have
(32:56):
an impact in that kind of population.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
David's students watched a thirty minute video that explained both
the importance of a growth mindset and why stress can
have beneficial effects on performance. Would this be enough to
change how they great stress? Would the video help students
react better to the annoying challenges of everyday life.
Speaker 4 (33:14):
So, over the course of the first semester of high
school kids completed daily diary surveys three times a day,
provided cortisol samples several times per day, And what we
find is that on days in which kids say, yeah,
this is a really stressful day, like I'm feeling judged
and evaluated by my teachers, I'm feeling left out by
my friends, kids were saying I can handle this, I'm
feeling good about myself, I feel positive. So it's by
(33:37):
definition stress resilience. And then what we see also is
just lower cortisol levels almost across the board and That's
significant because the body produces cortisol in part when the
mind expects damaged tissue, and so if you are expecting defeat,
then you see increase in cortisol. But if you're expecting
to do well to take on the challenge, then you
should see less cortisol. And that's what we see over
(33:58):
the rest of the semester.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
This is an amazing finding. By merely thinking of stress
not as a prelude to damage and defeat, but is
something helpful and useful, You can prevent your boy from
chronically releasing the very substances that cause the inflammating effects
usually experienced by stressed out people like me. That is
really cool, But there is a trick to getting the
benefits of the right stress mindset. You need to practice
(34:23):
long term. You need to carry over that positive mindset
from one situation to the next. So if you train
yourself to appreciate exam stress, you need to return to
that same positive mindset when your car breaks down, or
when you lose your wallet, or when you face a
tough meeting at work. Again, David's daughter Scarlet is there
to show us the way. Remember the mindset pep talk
David gave Scarlet before she went water skiing.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
Fast forward two years later and she's getting in the
car on the way to a cello audition. She's like, Daddy,
I'm so nervous, Like I don't know if I can
do well in this. I was like, Scarlett, you know
what I'm going to say. She's like, yeah, you're going
to say that. The butterflies on my stomach are there
just to pump, you know, good energy through my body
and give me adrenaline and oxygen et cetera, et cetera.
I was like, how did you know that? She's like, oh,
you total to me two years ago whenever we're skiing.
(35:08):
And so what I love about that is, first of all,
it's proof that at least once in my life, my
kids listen to me, which is not always happening. But
second of all, she's transferring some appraisal about her stress
to a totally different situation years later. And I think
about that a lot. With our interventions, we're often like
giving you a different mindset right before you need it,
(35:29):
and there's some stressful situation, and then you kind of
see that it works for you, and then you carry
that new mindset with you and apply it to new situations,
and I knew that from our research, but I'd never
seen that firsthand until the scarlet situation happened.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Making this episode has made me realize that I'm way
too negative about stress. I can remember lots of times
in my own life when small bursts of stress have
felt good. That rush I get before a big talk,
or that push I experienced during a tough yoga session.
The adrenaline I experience in those moments doesn't feel stressful
or debilitating. It feels exciting. A reaction's going to help
(36:08):
me perform better. I need to harness that and apply
it across other situations in life. Our daily stressors probably
aren't going away anytime soon, but that doesn't mean we're
stuck experiencing the negative health and happiness effects of chronic stress.
We can examine our feelings and create a narrative that
lets us accept the things we're not able to control,
while at the same time trying to control the stuff
(36:30):
that will help us improve our lives. All those self
care essentials like sleep, exercise, diet, and social interaction, and
like Steve Gutenberg, we can work to greet tough times
with gratitude and seize the opportunity to notice the blessings
in life. With strategies like these, I'm hopeful that my
inflammation markers will be a bit lower at my next
annual checkup, and that my doctor will have fewer opportunities
(36:53):
to mock me for not practicing what I preach. But
there are still plenty of other happiness challenges that I
still mess up. So join me next time as I
learn some new strategies for being nicer to my future self,
ones that involve a trip down memory lane and through
a ton I realized my skin would look so bad.
That's really disturbing all that next week on the Happiness
(37:17):
Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. I was having my annual medical checkup. The nurse
measured my weight in blood pressure, She listened to my heart,
and then did some blood work. Most of my test
results came back fine except one. My CRP levels were
kind of high. But I didn't actually know what CRP
(00:38):
levels were, so I turned to Google. Turns out, high
CRP levels are a sign of bodily inflammation, which can
increase the risk of chronic health conditions like kidney disease, cancer, dementia,
and premature death. I'm no medical doctor, but that did
not sound good. I returned to the clinic to go
over the results. So this inflammation thing, I asked, what's
(00:59):
causing it? Inflammation? My doctor replied, can be lots of things,
but it's usually a sign that your immune system is
on the defense. But we often see levels like that
when patients are experiencing a period of intense stress. Have
you been going through any stress lately? I fidgeted, well,
I said, then launched into all the stuff on my plate.
(01:20):
I talked about how I'd cared for over five hundred
students during a pandemic while also running a lab while
also making a podcast. I admitted I hadn't been exercising
or eating well, and that I was feeling totally overwhelmed.
My doctor, a fan of the show, gave a smirk.
So the famous happiness expert has been all stressed out?
Huh yeah, yeah, I guess she has been, and apparently
(01:45):
it's making her ill. Stress is a normal bodily response.
It can be triggered by external factors like major life changes,
relationship troubles, financial worries, and troubles at work, but also
by internal things like self criticism, unrealistic expectations, and being
too busy all the time. Stress is just the body's
natural response to a perceived threat. But as I know well,
(02:08):
that response doesn't feel good. It can make us anxious, sad,
and irritable. But it also hurts us physically, causing headaches
and insomnia and digestive problems. And if we leave stress unchecked,
it can badly damage our bodies and our immune systems.
Stress is a happiness challenge that I and so many
others face on a daily basis. But is there anything
(02:30):
we can do about it for my own sake? I
really hope so. Our minds are constantly telling us what
to do to be happy. But what if our minds
are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
(02:50):
You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
At around the time I was thinking about my own
struggle with stress, a new book landed on my desk.
There seemed to be an odd mismatch between the author
and the subject matter, but after reading it, I realized
(03:11):
there was a lot I could learn from his experience.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Hey, Steve, I'm in the car because for some reason,
all the traffic lights on since sent Boulevard are out.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
When scientists studies stress, they often turn to one particular
group of very stressed out people, caregivers, and there's no
shortage of such research subjects. Around thirty percent of US
adults provide some form of care to say a child
with special needs, a sick partner, or even an aging parent.
It's around the clock job that's often really brutal. Thanks
(03:41):
so much for taking the time. Of course, the person
I wanted to talk to had a hectic life before
he took on the tough role of a caretaker, and
he's still rushing around La from meeting to meeting today
traffic allowing, of course, do you want to talk now?
Do you want to wait till you get back to
your place? What's better?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Let's start right now because I have another appointment.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
But I'm thrilled to talk to you, but not as
thrilled as I was. You see, I'm not just a
fan of Steve's book, Time to Think Caregiving for my Hero.
I'm also a fan of Steve's acting. Steve Gutenberg is
the star of some of my favorite eighties movies, Three
Men in a Baby Cocoon and Short Circuit Number Five
is a Lie, and Steve attributes much of his amazing
(04:22):
career success to his father.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
He was my hero, and my dad was really a
very tough guy who was a US Army Airborne ranger,
one of the first Jewish ones. And then my dad
became a New York City policeman and he actually went
to the New York City Police Academy. So when I
auditioned for Police Academy the movie, he said, why don't
you wear my police Academy shirt? And I said, yeah,
(04:46):
that would be great.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
The director asked about Steve's shirt and seemed impressed by
the actor's attention to detail. After all, Steve was reading
for character Kerrie Mahoney, who was also the son of
a police officer. It was a great start, but the
audition went terribly.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I called my dad and I said, Dad, you know,
I wore your shirt, but I don't think I got
this thing. You know, nobody laughed, nobody clapped, nothing. He said, well,
you never go just give it a little time. My
dad was really positive thinker. He just said it'll all
work out. Take your time with it. About ten minutes later,
my agent called and I said, oh, I feel lousy.
I did terrible. He goes, no, you got it. He
(05:23):
said what? And that was the phone call that changed
my life. And I think that my dad's lucky shir
It really helped me.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So Steve was going to star in Police Academy. What
could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Actually, my manager saw Police Academy. He said, this is
going to be the worst movie ever. I'm going to
put you in a TV series Tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Steve landed a role in a spy series made by
Blake Edwards.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
He was a great director, directed Breakfast and Tiffany's and
all the Pink Panthers.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Steve's dad was incredibly supportive of his new role and
wanted to join his son on set, but that might
have also had something to do with Blake Edward's famous wife.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
My dad wanted to come out because he thought maybe
you'd get to meet Julie.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Andrews Stanley Gutenberg. Set visit coincided with a short delay
in shooting. Steve's character was supposed to jump off a
thirty foot roof and Steve didn't want to do the
stunt himself.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
And my dad was looking up there and said to
Blake Edwards, you know I could do that, and the
director Blake Edwards said yeah, but you don't want to
do it, do you? And he said, yeah, I'll do it.
I'm airborn rajor. I jumped from airplane some thousands of feet.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Stanley made the jump, and as he was finishing up
the stunt, it became clear that he wasn't the only
visitor on the lot.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
All of a sudden, this Rose Royce pulls up and
out of it comes Julie Andrews, and my dad looks
down there and says, Julie Andrews Julia Hedgers and Julie
Andrews looked up and I guess asked who that was.
He said, oh, was a good bug. And he said,
oh my god, I wanted to meet you. He says, well,
here I am.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
So Steve's dad got to play the hero and meet
his movie.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Idol, and that was a big kick for me.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Steve's dad was a caring, positive guy who also took
great joy at his powerful physique. But age and infirmity
pay little respect to such things.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
He said, look at my thigh, Yes, look how big
my thighs are. And I would say, dad, but you're
still tough, Dad, You're still tough.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Stanley was diagnosed with kidney failure, a disease that immediately
reversed the Gutenberg family roles. Steve, along with his sister
were now cast as caregivers with all the stress that entails.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
And I was a reluctant caregiver because I didn't want
to see my dad like that.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
As many of us know, being a caregiver is very challenging.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Doctor Alissa Epple is one of many scientists studying stress
and caregivers.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
It's a job that doesn't end twenty four to seven,
and that's because we care so much, We're so connected
to another's well being, we feel responsible for it, and
that doesn't end.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Alyssa is a professor a UCSF and the author of
the Stress prescription seven Days to More Joy and Ease.
She explained that caregivers, like so many of us, are
often harmed by the very biological reaction that's supposed to
help us.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Our stress response is the only reason we're all here,
the only reason our ancestors have survived.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Thanks to those ancestors, we've inherited a unique biological control center,
the autonomic nervous system, which allows our brains to switch
instantly from normal processes like breathing or digesting food, to
the high energy fighter flight activities we need for emergencies
like sprinting away from a tiger or punching an attacker.
Whenever our brains perceive a threat, this fighter flight system
(08:39):
kicks into high gear. We breathe quicker, our hearts pump faster,
our pupils dilate, and our brains release energy rich glucose
into the blood. This response allows us to react faster,
see better, and summon the muscle power required to flee
or tackle an oncoming threat. Neuro Scientists like to think
of this fight or flight response kind of like jamming
your foot on a gas pedal, and if the brain
(09:01):
decides a particular threat isn't going away, it will keep
that response pressed to the metal. That's when we launch
a hormone cyclone orem glands release substances like cortisol, which
keep our energy up and our muscles at the ready
at least until the threat passes. And that's when our
brains finally hit the brakes. We relax, our muscles and
our bodies switch back to running the normal rest and
(09:23):
digest processes we need for everyday life. The problem is
the modern world leaves our fight or flight mode switched
on way longer than it should, which means our digestive, sexual,
and sleep functioning gets all screwed up. We up our
risk for high blood pressure and headaches. We spend our
days feeling irritable and.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Anxious, our bodies really living in a chronically aroused state
that we don't even notice anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
All this would be bad enough if we only freaked
out about our actual daily stressors, but part of.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
The problem with our stress today is that we keep
it alive with our thoughts, because things aren't always happening,
but they can be in our mind if we take
them with us and we ruminate about what's happened, or
we are worrying about what might happen next, and we're
all challenged by that to some extent, and especially right now,
(10:13):
because things are more unstable than they used to be.
We live in an unstable climate, in an unstable political world,
and then we still have our daily drama that we
need to cope with as well.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
It's a lot, and as I have definitely experienced in
my own life, we usually react to these daily mental
dramas in ways that make things even worse.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
For so many of us, it really is about rushing,
about creating a schedule that has no spaciousness in it,
that has no time for breaks, and it doesn't match
our value as usually we don't have time for people,
we don't have time for health or eating healthy meals.
We no longer want to eat normal food. We want
(10:57):
to eat highly palatable food, high sugar food, high fat food,
and for some of us, high salt food. And we
call this comfort food because it is biologically comforting to
the body and brain.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Ah comfort food, I could honestly spend a whole episode
in this series talking about this happiness challenge. When my
Yale students disappeared during lockdown, I comforted myself with whatever
sugary food looked good. I wound up putting on the
so called COVID nineteen pounds and then some But Alyssa says,
this wasn't a willpower failure. It was just my basic
(11:31):
biology at work. Take one experiment in which researchers stressed
out a bunch of rats and then gave them access
not just to their usual meals but also to human
junk food like cookies and candy. The rats switched over
to the fatty stuff, but they also changed their approach
to feeding time.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
The addition of stress on top of giving rats access
to oreos creates this craving an addiction in these rats.
So each time they get access to the oreos, they're
not just eating leisurely and saying, what a fine meal,
this feels great. They're binge eating. They will eat more,
and they'll develop greater or intro abdominal fat, and that
(12:11):
is just a little disease making machine. To have a
lot of introbdominal fat means that We're also having a
lot of lipids and our blood and insulin resistance. So
stress plus comfort food means we're becoming more apple shaped
in our body.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
But chronic stress doesn't just change the size of our
mid sections, as my own heightened CRP marker show, it
can also affect our immune systems.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Our immune cells have receptors for cortisol, but when we're
chronically stressed and cortisol gets too high, then the immune
cells are not turning off inflammation in response to cortisol,
and those cells are more prone flammatory during stress.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Chronic stress results in exactly the same inflammation profile that
I presented with at my doctor's visit. What researchers are
referring to as inflammating chronic stress also damages our DNA.
It destroys the part of our chromosomes that we need
for cell division.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
What are known as teeling telomeres are these caps at
the tips of our chromosomes and they protect our genes,
so they have this incredibly important role in the cell.
Telomeres are basically the sentinels or these guards, and when
there's too much stress in the cell, the telomeres tend
to shorten quickly. And more excessively.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Telomeres work like the plastic tip at the top of
our shoelaces, which the Internet tells me is actually called
an ag lit. Did not know that. In any case,
if you've ever had a shoelace lose it zag lit,
you know what happens next. The lease starts to fray
and fall apart. Telomeres at the top of a DNA
strand work the same way. When they get messed up,
(13:51):
our DNA winds up frayed and broken.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
And once they get too short, they start sending out
distress signals saying this cell is no longer good. We
got to call it quits. Time for this cell to
become senescent.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Dyeing sinescent cells, higher abdominal fat levels, long standing anxiety, irritability, inflammating,
and an increased risk for premature death. Apparently this is
where all my self imposed pressures over the last few
years have gotten me. At this point in my conversation
with Alyssa, things were starting to sound kind of hopeless,
but Alyssa assured me that chronic stress doesn't have to
(14:26):
be a cellular death sentence. In fact, her newest research
has shown that healthier stress responses are possible even in
a population that experiences some of the hardest possible stressors.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
We've learned more about chroduct stress from these caregiving studies
than other types of stressors.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
But what lessons can we learn from the painful experience
of stressed out caregivers. We'll find out when the Happiness
Lab returns from the break.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
When you were a caregiver, beautiful responsibility to be more
than a human being, you just do.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
When his father Stanley became ill, movie star Steve Guttenberg
was forced to trade the glamor of Hollywood for the
hard job of a long term caretaker.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
You have to be superhuman because it takes a superhuman
to clean somebody up when they go to the bathroom,
when they throw up, when they have a seizure, when
they have bouts of true darkness. You have to be
more than an average human being.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Step and his sister joined the thirty four million other
Americans offering unpaid care to an older person in need.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
I would call them angels, super angels, muscular, strong, super
powered angels, because when you're looking at somebody at two
in the morning and they have to go to the
bathroom and you have to pick them up out of
bed and they can't make it to the regular bathroom,
and you have to put them on their commode, and
(16:01):
you have to give them their privacy and their dignity
at the same time being there to help them. You're
not a human being, You're way above a human being,
because the average human being walks out of the room.
Can't do it, cannot do it. Now, I'm not going
to tell you that I didn't have my moments of
(16:22):
gagging and dry eaving, because some of it was really
hard to watch. And I feel my metal coming up
in me when I'm talking about this, because you have
to be made of metal to deal with this.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
The range of daily challenges that carers face is immense
medical bills, dealing with hospitals and insurance companies, negotiating time
off work, and that doesn't include the heartbreaking pain of
watching once healthy loved ones deteriorate.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
The reason I wrote the book is caregiving is a
really lonely occupation. You're basically sitting in the room with
that one person who's very ill, and you're looking at
them constantly, monitoring their health well and seeing what you
can do for them, and at the same time, you're
trying to figure out your own life and what you're
(17:16):
doing with it and what you have to give up
to be part of this process.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
The problems caregivers contend with can last day after day
after day, and as doctor Elyssa Epple explained earlier, such
sustained stress can be really bad for our bodies. Melissa
likes to point to one caregiver study in particular.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Showing that their wounds heal almost ten days longer than
low stress age matched older controls, And that really is
about the chronic stress response, the excesses of the exposure
to cortisol.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
It wouldn't be surprising if Steve Gutenberg's cortisol levels were
through the roof during his time as a caregiver. Steve
was living in LA when his father was diagnosed with
renal failure, so taking care of him meant regular drives
to his father's house in Arizona mile.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Round trip every week. And I started listening to podcasts
or music, but quickly I stopped and just started thinking.
So what I would think about was when my dad
was younger, and my dad was really fit and young
and healthy and enthusiastic, sitting.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Behind the wheel for long hours isn't ideal, but ruminating
about his father's physical decline during those long drives was
bound to trigger even more stress.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
My dad was in such pain, physical pain, mental pain,
he did not want to die.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Steve says his father's final years were the most depressing
period of his entire life. And Steve's not alone. It's
estimated that half of caregivers have major depression, a rate
that's twice as high as the general population. Even more shockingly,
twelve percent of dementia caregivers die before their sick loved.
One one study estimated that a caregiver's mortality risk was
(19:07):
sixty three percent higher than they're not caregiving peers. With
stats like these, it's probably not surprising that many caregivers
like Steve wind up neglecting their own self care.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
It fell by the wayside. I did not exercise for
so many years. I didn't sleep very well at all.
There was about a month before he passed where he
would be up all night, that he would be screaming
all night. So my self care did go to the side.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
But researcher Alyssa Apple has found that not all caregivers
succumbed to the effects of stress.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
The good news is that there are ways to be
with this life situation.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Alissa studied caregivers telomeres, that part of our DNA that
gets prematurely shortened by chronic stress. She found that many
of her subjects telomeres were badly affected. They showed all
the expected hallmarks of inflammating, but the telomeres of some
caregivers were fine. Even though the these people face the
same stresses as those with the shortened tail of mirrors,
(20:12):
their bodies weren't affected in the same way. How is
that possible? Alyssa discovered that one factor was the narrative
these caregivers created to explain the difficulties they were facing.
The healthier caregivers embraced what's known as radical acceptance.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
I don't control outcomes. I don't control the disease course.
I don't control someone else's behavior. I can control X
and Y. So really separating out a situation to understand
there is a little bit that we can control. We
can control our response, and we can do things to
show compassion, to be with someone with a loving presence,
(20:49):
spend our time with them showing that we care. There
are ways that we can be our best self in
these uncontrollable situations that allow us to not be in
this chronically stressed state of striving, of hitting a brick wall.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
If you're a caregiver, you might be saying, well, that's
easier said than done. Radical acceptance was definitely something Steve
Gutenberg struggled with.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
I was reluctant to accept the reality of the situation.
I just couldn't accept it. I wouldn't accept it. Everyone
else knew my dad was dying. I knew it, but
wouldn't accept it, so I never talked about it. I
always said, he's going to get better, He's going to
come through this, even at the very end.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
Alyssa shared one strategy we can use to bring a
healthier narrative to times of stress. We can try out
what's known as expressive writing. Take time to journal about
all the crap on your plate and how it makes
you feel.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
I suggest just starting off with a massive list without
any editing or censoring, just writing down everything that you
feel bothered by, worried by, pressured by, and then thinking
about your day. You know what stresses you out most
during the day. We often don't give ourselves the opportunity
(22:05):
to step back and reflect on the level that we're carrying.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
The act of putting all your stresses down on paper
can also reveal all the things you're doing that inadvertently
add to your stress levels.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
We're very routine animals, you know. We get into this
I'll call it a daily stress routine, and we can
break that routine. We can see where we're creating unnecessary stress.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
You can then take stock of all the neglected stuff
you can control about your situation practices like sleep, or
food or time with friends. You can also take some
time to count your blessings. Gratitude, it turns out, is
a powerful tool for tackling stress. Fortunately, this was a
practice that did come naturally for caregivers. Steve Gutenberg his
dad was a gratitude role model.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Oh yeah, my dad was grateful for anything. Had told
get a cup of coffee. H coffee. My dad taught me,
you know, Stephen, enjoy your life. Enjoy your life. Be happy.
That's it. Just be happy. Everything else will come.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Steve called his book a Time to Think, because in
spite of his father's difficult illness, he still managed to
remember all the many ways in which he was fortunate.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Thank god I have a job that I could stop
and just sit there with my dad all the time.
How lucky I was that I didn't have to be
in some office hearing about my dad on the telephone.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Steve hated seeing Stanley's physical decline, but the time Steve
spent with his dad in those final months allowed him
to remember the dead of gratitude. He owed the old man.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
I think gratitude it's a verb. I think like love
is a verb. You know. My dad used to say
to me, you could either love someone or you can
love someone and show up. You know. That's that's gratitude.
That's gratitude. That's the deep part of gratitude.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Research shows that strategies like gratitude and radical acceptance can
protect us from the negative effects of chronic stress. But
as I read through a list is work, I learned
one additional way to handle stress that sounded kind of odd.
It turns out we can fight stress by looking for
new chances to get stressed out. This is the insight
behind what effective scientists call hermetic stress.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Her Medic stress is absolutely fascinating because it's so counterintuitive.
We know very well from fly studies that organisms like
a little shock of moderate repeated stress, and in fact
it's strengthening. It's like a vaccination, so it really is
(24:43):
building up biological resistance. It's exercise for our nervous system.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
What you're looking to create is a short episode of stress,
something that will get your heart racing and blood pumping,
but also an episode that you can stop so you
can train your autonomic nervous system to go back into
recovery mode. And it doesn't have to involve finding true
fight or flight danger. Hermetic stress can be way easier
than that.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
The best example, of course, is extra and we know
exercise is good for our health, but we haven't thought
about the fact that short bursts of exercise are creating
that positive hormetic stress response.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
One study found that caretakers who were asked to exercise
three to five times a week showed less short in
telomeres than those who didn't move their bodies. The blast
of stress that comes from exercise seems to slow down
and possibly even reverse the effects of inflammating Exercise was
another strategy that came easily to the Gutenberg family. When
Steve's great grandfather first came to the US, his physical
(25:41):
fitness came in handy.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
What he would do for extra money is he would
go down to the Brooklyn Bridge and he feats of strength.
He would carry people on his dock. He would carry
huge weights and at the end he had a Shetland
pony and he would pick up this little Shetland party
walk around it.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Steve's grandfather was a powerlifter who then passed on the
jim bug to his son Stanley.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
My dad started lifting weights when he was twelve years old.
My dad was a handstand king. My dad could do
a handstand for by four straight.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
As a skinny teen, Steve turned to his dad for
exercise tips. Under Stanley's tutelage, Steve was able to put
on fifty pounds of muscle. I'm building a mean, lean monster,
his dad had announced proudly. But like many stressed out folks,
Steve let his usual exercise routine slide at exactly the
time he needed it most. As Steve explained just how
(26:30):
infrequently he hit the gym during his time as a caretaker,
I felt a bit called out. I mean I rarely
make my yoga classes or hit the elliptical. What I'm
feeling frantic, but Ironically, a jolt of hermetic stress was
probably the perfect remedy for the strain I was under.
But giving our bodies additional bursts of stress to fight
stress isn't even the most surprising way we can protect
(26:52):
ourselves from chronic overwhelm. We also need to train our
brains to think differently about stress. I'll explain more when
the happiness Lab returns after the break. What someone says
they're feeling stressed, we usually assume that they're having a
bad time. My own periods of stress are accompanied by
(27:15):
yucky feelings like irritability, interrupted sleep, digestive issues, and a
sort of forehead clenching. Feeling stressed sucks, and I usually
just wish that I could avoid it.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
Your heart is facing your pomps or sweaty or butterflies
in your stomach, so of course, in that circumstance, it
feels like self evidence the stress is bad.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Right, This is ut Austin psychologist David Yeager.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
Your stress could be viewed in a debilitating way that
it's a sign your body is preparing for damage and defeat.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Who wants damage and defeat? Seems like we're all agreed.
Then stress sucks. But David says that's not the whole story.
Speaker 4 (27:51):
There are lots of times when we face a stressor
and we're thrilled and excited, and that energy allows us
to show what we know. I mean, if you talk
to great athletes, right, they talk about performing at the
level of your preparation, and one of the ways they
do that is they kind of get in a zone
in their heads and they're like amped up before a performance, right.
And so in those cases, that's a much better situation
(28:12):
to be in than to have no stress at all,
where you're like about to fall asleep.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
David is an expert on the power of mindsets, the
beliefs we have about things like our abilities and how
our brains respond to challenges. David's work has shown that
how we think about things has a huge impact on
how we behave His early research focused on what's known
as the growth mindset, the belief that our abilities and
talents can improve over time if we're willing to put
(28:36):
in some work in practice. But these days David has
started thinking about a different type of mindset, the beliefs
we have about the effects of stress. If we think
about stress is terrible, we may behave in ways that
lead us to suffer. But if we greet stress as
a potential friend, couldn't improve our lives. Researchers have begun
conducting some elegant laboratory experiments to test this possibility. But
(28:59):
David's favorite illustration of the importance of our stress mindset
occurred when he was on vacation with his daughters.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
Scarlet, we when water skiing in Wisconsin, and she'd never
keep She's a fourth or fifth grader, and She's sitting
there bobbing in the lake and I'm holding the back
of her skis and she says, Daddy, I'm so nervous.
I have butterflies on my stomach. I don't think I
can do this. And I was like, well, Scarlet, you
know that that's stress and that energy that's just getting
(29:25):
oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain, and those
muscles with that oxygenated blood are going to be stronger.
You can hold onto the rope a little more, and
once you do that, you're gonna pop up and just
have the most fun of your life and it's gonna
be thrilling. And what I was doing was just giving
her a different way of appraising or making meaning out
of that bodily experience. She's like, okay, and she got
(29:47):
right up and I just stayed there bobbing in the
water for I don't know, twenty minutes. Well, she just
did laughs around this lake in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Justice Scarlet initially interpreted her stress response as a signal
that she shouldn't try water skiing. David says that many
of us greet the early signs of stress the wrong way.
Speaker 4 (30:03):
In general and society, people tend to have a stress
is debilitating mindset. You see that if you just google
image s, stress and well being memes, they all take
this assumption that stress is always bad and should be avoided. Right.
It's like depleting you. It is something that you need
to suppress. Most people are convinced there's only one way
to look at stress, which is that it's always bad,
and when they do that, it spirals on itself and
(30:25):
it becomes self confirming for them. But we know from
just basic science of stress in both animals and humans
that the stress response is simply there to keep us alive,
to overcome and meet the demands that are imposed on us.
And so there's a different kind of mindset or belief
you can have about stress, which is the stress can
be enhancing mindset.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb was the first to show the
harmful effects of the wrong stress mindset. She found that
people who expected stress to be debilitating experienced more anxiety
and lower happiness ratings than people who thought stress was enhancing.
The people she studied who believed that stress was good
for them also showed more optimism, better performance at work,
and even better physical health. Crumb's work showed it's not
(31:06):
our stress that seems to be hurting us, it's how
we think about it, which got David wondering could people
shift from one stress mindset to the other, just as
he did with Scarlet at the Lake? Could David encourage
people to reframe how they saw stress.
Speaker 4 (31:20):
Could you just tell people what their physiology means one
way or the other and could that change their performance
when they're in a stressful situation.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
David and a colleague, Jeremy Jamison, recruited college students planning
to take the Jerry Exam and presented them with a
practice version of the test. Everyone was reminded that it's
normal for people to feel stressed out before an exam.
Behalf of participants were given a list of reasons why
their stress response might improve their performance.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
You know, the bodies releasing catecola means and those catacola
means are going to enhance performance. And the reason your
heart is pumping so much is because it's getting more
blood to your brain and to your muscles. It's going
to help you perform better.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
The results were striking. Students who reappraised their stress response
as beneficial showed way better scores than those in the
control condition. On some parts of the exam, their scores
were more than one hundred points higher.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
But the interesting thing is that a month later students
went and took the real gre and brought their scores back,
and they did much better. The difference is like the
difference between getting into a mid tier top fifty graduate
program or a top five graduate program.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
But GIRE exams are acute stressors. David wanted to know
whether the same mindset shift could also reduce the chronic
stress that dogs people like me day after day. So
he turned to a group of high school students from
low income backgrounds.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
And these are almost exclusively black or Latino students whose
parents had not gone to college. And we explicitly wanted
to choose this situation because we know kids experienced lots
of stressors. They might experience racial discrimination, prejudice, but also
for kids whose parents are experiencing poverty, food and security,
things like that, So could a little mindset shift have
(32:56):
an impact in that kind of population.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
David's students watched a thirty minute video that explained both
the importance of a growth mindset and why stress can
have beneficial effects on performance. Would this be enough to
change how they great stress? Would the video help students
react better to the annoying challenges of everyday life.
Speaker 4 (33:14):
So, over the course of the first semester of high
school kids completed daily diary surveys three times a day,
provided cortisol samples several times per day, And what we
find is that on days in which kids say, yeah,
this is a really stressful day, like I'm feeling judged
and evaluated by my teachers, I'm feeling left out by
my friends, kids were saying I can handle this, I'm
feeling good about myself, I feel positive. So it's by
(33:37):
definition stress resilience. And then what we see also is
just lower cortisol levels almost across the board and That's
significant because the body produces cortisol in part when the
mind expects damaged tissue, and so if you are expecting defeat,
then you see increase in cortisol. But if you're expecting
to do well to take on the challenge, then you
should see less cortisol. And that's what we see over
(33:58):
the rest of the semester.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
This is an amazing finding. By merely thinking of stress
not as a prelude to damage and defeat, but is
something helpful and useful, You can prevent your boy from
chronically releasing the very substances that cause the inflammating effects
usually experienced by stressed out people like me. That is
really cool, But there is a trick to getting the
benefits of the right stress mindset. You need to practice
(34:23):
long term. You need to carry over that positive mindset
from one situation to the next. So if you train
yourself to appreciate exam stress, you need to return to
that same positive mindset when your car breaks down, or
when you lose your wallet, or when you face a
tough meeting at work. Again, David's daughter Scarlet is there
to show us the way. Remember the mindset pep talk
David gave Scarlet before she went water skiing.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
Fast forward two years later and she's getting in the
car on the way to a cello audition. She's like, Daddy,
I'm so nervous, Like I don't know if I can
do well in this. I was like, Scarlett, you know
what I'm going to say. She's like, yeah, you're going
to say that. The butterflies on my stomach are there
just to pump, you know, good energy through my body
and give me adrenaline and oxygen et cetera, et cetera.
I was like, how did you know that? She's like, oh,
you total to me two years ago whenever we're skiing.
(35:08):
And so what I love about that is, first of all,
it's proof that at least once in my life, my
kids listen to me, which is not always happening. But
second of all, she's transferring some appraisal about her stress
to a totally different situation years later. And I think
about that a lot. With our interventions, we're often like
giving you a different mindset right before you need it,
(35:29):
and there's some stressful situation, and then you kind of
see that it works for you, and then you carry
that new mindset with you and apply it to new situations,
and I knew that from our research, but I'd never
seen that firsthand until the scarlet situation happened.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Making this episode has made me realize that I'm way
too negative about stress. I can remember lots of times
in my own life when small bursts of stress have
felt good. That rush I get before a big talk,
or that push I experienced during a tough yoga session.
The adrenaline I experience in those moments doesn't feel stressful
or debilitating. It feels exciting. A reaction's going to help
(36:08):
me perform better. I need to harness that and apply
it across other situations in life. Our daily stressors probably
aren't going away anytime soon, but that doesn't mean we're
stuck experiencing the negative health and happiness effects of chronic stress.
We can examine our feelings and create a narrative that
lets us accept the things we're not able to control,
while at the same time trying to control the stuff
(36:30):
that will help us improve our lives. All those self
care essentials like sleep, exercise, diet, and social interaction, and
like Steve Gutenberg, we can work to greet tough times
with gratitude and seize the opportunity to notice the blessings
in life. With strategies like these, I'm hopeful that my
inflammation markers will be a bit lower at my next
annual checkup, and that my doctor will have fewer opportunities
(36:53):
to mock me for not practicing what I preach. But
there are still plenty of other happiness challenges that I
still mess up. So join me next time as I
learn some new strategies for being nicer to my future self,
ones that involve a trip down memory lane and through
a ton I realized my skin would look so bad.
That's really disturbing all that next week on the Happiness
(37:17):
Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
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