Pushkin. Hey, it's Maya. We're back Monday, February twentieth with a brand new season of A Slight Change of Plans. This season will hear personal stories of change, as well as conversations with scientific experts who teach us how we can live happier and healthier lives. We kick off the season with social scientists from Dupe Akinola, who challenges us to reframe our stress as something that can actually be
good for us. Our dominant model and narrative is that we should deny, reduce, and avoid stress, and that is not always the case. Every single person I know can tell of the time where their stress helps him. I also talk with comedian Hussan Minhaj, who reveals that having a job that is so dependent on whether or not people like him is making him reconsider his future in comedy. Do you like me? How many millions of people like me? So I can hopefully continue doing this? Man, I don't
want to participate? And science journalists Florence Williams describes how when her twenty five year marriage came to a sudden end, she was inspired to go on a quest to understand why heartbreak can have such a devastating impact on our minds and bodies when the person you consider sort of your safety net, when they're suddenly gone. It's so disorienting in a way that's kind of like a deep freakout,
and you feel it emotionally. And it turns out our immune systems and our bodies, our nervous systems are really paying very close attention to that sense of freakout. We'll hear from an expert on friendship who teaches us to think differently about the role of friends play in our lives, and from a psychologist who tells us how empathy is actually a skill we can build with effort. We used to think of our personalities as totally fixed, but it turned out that people do change. In fact, the only
thing that you can't do is stop changing. I can't wait for you to hear these powerful conversations. In the meantime, you can get a backstage past the show on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.