This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KFI AM six forty the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome to the Doctor Wendy Welsh Show on KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I'm doctor Wendy Walsh. If you're new to my show. I have a PhD in clinical psychology. I'm a professor, not a therapist, and I am obsessed, you know that, obsessed with the science of love. I read
new studies all the time. You know. Some of my followers send me emails and notes on social media, and one guy sent me a thing this week. He goes, could it be possible that they could be experimenting with a vaccine that makes people like not cheat, a cheating vaccine? And I'm like, that's a good, good idea, because guess what, it's already
in development. There's actually they're testing on men and oxytocin no spray or no spray laced with oxytocin the bonding hormone, and in studies, when men use it, they find their own partner far more attractive than other people, just saying, hey, but you should know that everything I do. That I've written three books on relationships, and if you've read them, you know me better than I know me is used as an act of catharsis, as I
am experientially going through what you're going through. So guess what, Well, you know, I'm engaged, I'm getting married, I'm a woman of a certain age. I'm going to tell you what age. It's up there, all right. I have been a single mom for almost twenty years, and I decided to put my kids first. Now it's not for everybody, but I decided to not really date, and if I did, it was little romantic compartments that my kids never knew about when they were away or camp or
whatever. But I didn't really expose my children to any potential, you know, bad romantic choice that I might make. And so now I feel like it's my time. In fact, I used to say to friends, don't worry, Someday I'm gonna have a kick ass retirement relationship. Well, nobody's retiring, but at least we're gonna. We're gonna get there. So during the beginning of COVID, I met the man in my dreams and we are planning a wedding for this summer. I have become quite aware about I have
become a little bit of a bridezilla. Now I understand the whole moniker of bridezilla. What it is is this, we want our day or days. If you're doing a destination wedding like we are with it goes on for days. We want everything to be perfect. Now, I am a natural planner, so you should. I should let you know. I have spreadsheets going already. I have contact lists, I have budgets, I have crazy things.
I have you know, Pinterest boards. I am so organized. But the question is will I be able to handle it if it doesn't go as expected? Well, I turned to the authority on all of this, brides dot Com, of course, and got a little bit of advice from them that I'd like to share with you. If you are planning your own way, we if you are planning a wedding for an adult daughter or son,
let's talk about what we need to do. Focus on priorities, Okay, instead of spending a lot of mental energy like I've been nitpicking on every detailed, detailed detail. I look at the bouquet, right, I'm going to do this flower wholesaler and do a DIY thing. But I have pictures and pictures and pictures of how I want it to be. I've taken pictures of the mock up place, setting of the table I am. So you know what, let's just think about the stuff that's the non negotiables. So,
in other words, our budgets are budget. We're not going over our budget, right, that's it. That means we take things away. We don't add things on because we get excited, and obviously we want everyone to have some food, so food should come first. So the best advice is focus on priorities, focus on just what matters, and don't fall down the rabbit's hole of trying to make everything hype detailed. But there's a big communication piece.
Weddings are community events, whether there are parents pitching in money, friends pitching in money paying for things. I have my two best friends. If you can imagine this, how loved I am and honored I feel. My two best friends are paying for the welcome party. They are literally buying the
wine and the charcotere boards and everything. So I have an open line of communication with them where I clearly told them, you know, anything over this budget I am going to pick up, So don't think it's going to get out of hand. If it does, if people order more or whatever, it's on me. Have good communication with all those people. Be very clear. Now here's the thing. When people pay for something, they want to have a little control too, So you're going to have to have a conversation
about what they can and cannot control. My girlfriends are totally cool. They're just like, where do we send the chat? Co're fine, We're good. Whatever you want to do. Also break it down into small steps. I do that. Some days I'm just working on food. Food, sometimes invitation lists, sometimes accommodation. I've been really busy on the accommodation part. I want to make sure everybody's got a bed, But don't try to get overwhelmed by all the details. That's a good one. And also choose the
right support system. So, okay, this is how detail oriented I am. We only have an hour before we get to the venue to set up the tables. Can you imagine? And I'm going to be off somewhere looking in a mirror fixing my eyelashes. I'm not going to be able to do those tables the way I envision them, So, of course I set up a mock table. I took very detailed pictures of it, and I'm going to have twelve bins for twelve tables, and it's going to have the centerpieces
in it. It's going to have the wineglasses in it, the place setting is going to have it, the name cards, everything. And so I found twelve friends and I'm gonna go. You're each in charge of a table, and one of them is an interior decorator, another one's a professional wedding planner, so they can do the final eyeball of the room to make sure everything's not crooked, the table claws and whatever. I literally said, would you be a table decorator? I found that team and they're going to do
it. The other thing Bride's Magazine suggests is we hire a wedding planner. I can't afford to do that. But I have a friend who is on her part time in her private life, a wedding planner for people, and she says she would never do it for money because she could never make enough money to do it with the amount of work it is. She only does it for love. So the day of she's in charge, I mean Basically, I have to take my fingers off the controls. That's all I have
to do. Get off the controls and let her take all over. The other bit of advice that Bride's Magazine gives that I need to hear is continue to date your partner while your busy wedding planning. If the only conversation is have you done this? Have you paid for this? Is this happening? Then you're going to be at each other's throats, you know. My sweet Julio said the other day, he said, we should go for a picnic some Sunday like we used to do doing during COVID. Our whole dating started
with picnics because we're all outdoors. Wasn't that romantic? So I think I'm gonna have to pack up picnic. We didn't do it today, We'll have to do it next Sunday. Why not? Why not? Hey? When we come back. I mentioned that I was a single mother for almost twenty years and that I didn't date, and I tried to date a little bit here and there without my kids knowing about it, but it never worked out because a lot of those guys were not prepared to date a single parent,
a single parent. If you're a good parent, your kids should come first. So when we come back, let's talk about when you should not date. A single parent should not. Here are the signs you're not ready for it. You're listening to The Doctor Andndywall Show and KFI AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty. Welcome back to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show
six forty, Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I want to tell you a story. One time, my kids were getting older and I thought I would dip my toe into the dating world. I know, because there's a bunch of guys out there are going to be like, what do you mean You didn't date for eighteen years? Remember that dinner I paid for? I tried. Okay, I tried, but my kids always came first. And when you're a single parent, you can't just pick up and run away for
a romantic weekend because dinner dates have to go somewhere at some point. And if I did, then the way my children would punish me when I came back, it was just not worth it. And the money I would have to pay for childcare. It wasn't worth it anyway. At a certain age, my kids were getting older. I think my youngest one was ten and my oldest one was fifteen, And so I had a dinner date planned with a guy, and it was decided that we would go in my neighborhood where
we could literally walk out to the restaurant. We had some nice restaurants near the place. So we have a dinner. It's a really lovely dinner. Have appetizers, we have main course, we have dessert. We're just in the middle of dessert, and my phone rings. Now at this point, it's probably like nine thirty, quarter to ten. The ten year old is home by herself, but I'm around the corner and she goes, Mom,
when are you coming home? Are you almost finished? And I did things bombs are supposed to say, Yeah, we're just on dessert, honey, we just have to get the check. I'll be a few minutes. You're okay by yourself, And I watched my date's face fall literally like, ugh, I guess this date's over paid for dinner for nothing, right. I could just see I could see what he was thinking at that time. He had no concept of what a big deal it was to even go around the
corner and leave a ten year old alone for two hours. It was a big event for us. I actually expected her fifteen year old sister to be home on time, but she was late, and you know how it happens. So let's talk about if you're thinking of dating a single parent, what you need to know. And this comes up. Actually, we have a couple people in my Zoom group that meets on Wednesday night and they ask this question a lot about it. They meet people who have children and how do
they negotiate that? Right? So number one, if you are jealous of their kids, you should not be dating them. Look, we don't like to share a partner. Nobody likes to share your partner with somebody else, and some people are more jealous than others. Right, but I will tell you that a good parent, and I assume if you want to potentially have a long term relationship with this person, you'd want them to be a good parent because you will eventually be their next child or you'll have a child together.
Right, they're gonna look, come on, I'll be your mommy if you be my daddy. That's kind of what relationships are, right, So nobody likes sharing. But if you're completely jealous that they put their kids first, then you're gonna have a really hard time. I will say you should stop and acknowledge. I think the feeling of jealousy is one of the most
dangerous feelings. If we don't acknowledge it, experience it, and even express it and talk about it and just come clean about our feelings, we might be able to get through it. But hey, if you're jealous of their kids, don't date them. All right. Oh here's another big one. All you like spontaneity in a relationship, you want to just surprise them at work with some flowers and say I'm taking you out to dinner tonight, or you just say, hey, I got tickets for us to go to this
other city this weekend. Let's go to this show that's taken place in Phoenix or Portland or whatever. Let's just go. No, it doesn't work with a single parent, no way. Spontaneity. Everything has to be planned. Childcare needs to be planned, driving to all their sports events on weekends needs to be planned. There's so much that needs to happen. So if you're somebody who wants to be a jet setter or grab a quick romantic lunch out of the blue. No, not gonna happen with a single parent. You
can't surprise them. Can't surprise them. Oh here's a big, big one. This comes up a lot in my parenting. My parenting no they're not parenting grows my Patreon group where we talk about people who are in relationships with people who have kids, and they may both have kids, maybe a blended family, etc. If you resent the fact that you have to bite your tongue about parenting issues, then you should not be dating a single parent.
Now I have a couple examples. So, my younger brother, when his boys were teenagers, met a woman who had teenage boys, and the sense of kids were all round the same age, and they were heading towards the end of high school. Before you know it, they moved in together. I think they got married, maybe when the very last one was a senior in high school or something, and they moved them all in together, and they made a decision that they would form a blended family, and that they
would never refer to the kids as my kids. They would refer to the kids always as our kids, and they would continue to present a unified front, so they would have private conversations in their own room about how to discipline one of their four kids. Okay, so that works for only a few couples. The rest of them, it works better to say, look, I'm in charge of my kids, you're in charge of yours, or you don't have kids and you don't parent, so how would you know what we've
been through? You know. Like one of the things I say to Julio all the time is he'll be like, you know, maybe he'll be criticizing something about one of my kids, and I'll say, you know, you weren't here the last twenty years. You didn't see that this actually is progress, that this is actually a step forward. She's doing better than she was doing before. But you know, a relationship between a parent and child takes years to build, and a stranger can't just step in there and start being
a director. So you better learn to bite your tongue. Also, along the same lines of Spon teneity, that you want to control the timing of the relationship. So I remember one time a friend of mine, he had three kids and she had one, I think, and they were young adult in high school age, and they were planning, you know, they were going to date for this amount of time, then they were going to live together for this amount of time, and then they're going to get married on
this date. Well it all fell apart. They ended up living together for longer, they ended up planning the wed and canceling it twice. And as he said, there are six people in this decision, four young adults in us, and everybody's lives are getting in the way. And so eventually they did marry and they are happy, and the nest got empty. But you can't control the timing when there are the needs of other people involved. Maybe one is going to end up spending an extra year at school, maybe one
needs more parenting for a little longer before they launch. And here's probably the biggest reason why you should not date a single parent. If you just don't like kids. I mean, there are people out there who don't like kids. I don't know. If you watch Bill Maher, it's I mean, I think his comedy is great, but I just cringe every time he talks
about how much he hates kids. You know, he was a kid, and you know he became a comedian because he had a bad childhood and that's why he hates kids, because he doesn't you know, his memories of his childhood are bad. I can guarantee it. I'll just diagnose him publicly. Why not. So if you don't like kids, please don't date somebody with children, please please. This is not a good idea. All right,
when we come back, let's talk about stress. I am also a professor of health psychology, and I'm going to teach you how to activate your vegas nerve. No, it's not what you think. You're listening to the Doctor Wendywall Show on k I AM six forty one Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty Welcome back to the Doctor Wendywall Show on KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the
iHeartRadio app. So. I teach a number of things at cal State Channel Islands. One of the is I am honored to teach, and probably my favorite one actually is called Psychology of Health Counseling. I'm actually teaching it by zoom this summer. So if any of my students are listening. You can still sign up because let's just get through it this summer, shall we? It'll be fun. One of the sections I teach in how psychology is coping with stress. You know, what is a stress war, what a stress
due to the body, and what kind of anxiety does it create? I feel, in some ways post COVID that we as a culture have entered an age of anxiety. So many people experience chronic anxiety right now, and it is so correlated with our health outcomes. Now we know that what anxiety does is it triggers our body's stress response, and when that happens, our body
releases stress hormones. You probably heard of them, Adrenaline, cortisol, really important stress hormones that you need if you're running from a lion or a bear. Okay, but you don't need it. If you're sitting in traffic, you don't need it. If you're sitting at a computer, you don't need it. If you're trying to get to sleep and you're ruminating about why he didn't call back, that is a stress you don't need. You don't need
that cortisol or adrenaline. So what happens is chronic anxiety starts to prolong the exposure to these hormones, and that can result in health issues. So here are the big ones. When you have chronic anxiety, you can get suppression of the immune system. So if you're constantly getting colds and flus could be anxiety related. You could get psychosomatic disorders like stomach aches, chest pains, headaches. And I want to stop and remind everybody, especially my students who
might have gotten this wrong on my last exam. This is the question. See if you can answer it. Producer Kayla, are you with me, I'm going to give you a test. Okay, If somebody has a psychosomatic disorder, it means they're imagining their symptoms. True or false? True, false, till it's false. Fifty percent of my students, even after I teach it, still answer true. When you have a psychosomatic illness, it means psycho means psychological, somatic means the body. It means the emotional brain
colludes with the body and makes it sick. Now, you may go to the doctor and the doctor say I can't find the reason for your pain, but the pain is real and the health outcomes are real. In fact, as children chronic anxiety can even impact growth and development. So we have to learn to make the connection between our physical symptoms and our psychological symptoms. Right,
But there are things that we can do to calm ourselves down. And what we need to do is learn how to stimulate what's called our parasympathetic nervous system. So you know biology one oh one, folks, the role. You have an automatic nervous system, right, It's got two sides. The parasympathetic nervous system, I'm sorry, not stimulated to calm it down. Sorry, I got it backwards. You don't want to stimulate it, you want
to calm it down. The parasympathetic nervous system is sometimes called rest and digest, and the sympathetic nervous system is called fight or flight. Right, So your sympathetic nervous system is the one that increases your heart rate. It does make you more alert because you've got to look out for that lion or tiger
or bear that's chasing you. And it does release activating hormones like neuropinephron and epinephron that can make you run really fast if you need to outrun a lion, tiger, or bear, but not if you're sitting on the one oh one mad because you're not moving and you're going five miles an hour. Okay, So the parasympathetic nervous system controls our heart. It slows down our heart rate, it slows down our digestive system, it slows down our respiratory system.
In a minute, I'm going to tell you one big trick that will only take you about sixty seconds to do that will actually activate your parasympathetic nervous system right away. It's not comfortable, you're not going to want to do it, but if you try it when you have anxiety, it will really work. But before I get there, let's talk about what research has said
can help activate our sympathetic nervous system. Spending time in nature. There's lots of research to show that spending time in nature is good for your health. It actually increases immune system cells. Getting a massage. I am overdue. I've actually been back to you know, trying to get back in wedding shape. I've been going to agree. I go to Studio MDR. It's my favorite. There are five locations that they didn't pay me to say this.
I just love them so much, and honestly, I've only gone eight times and I've lost five pounds, and I have clinched in my belt an inch of two and not cha two. Yeah. But anyway, I need a massage because I'm stiff. Every inch of my body hurts. Because that is a total body workout. You can listen to relaxing music. So at the end of my busy day, I come home and I love to cook. That's my hobby. It's relaxing for me. But I cannot cook unless there's
quiet jazz playing in the background. And I've lit a candle, you know, for Mother's Day? Do you remember, did I tell you? Producer Kayla gave me a beautiful scented candle, So now I'll light it when I cook dinner later. Just smell wonderful. It does mell wonderful. So listen to relaxing music. It can help stimulate your sympathetic nervous system. The other big one our relationships. Increase your social connections with others. Laugh with them,
be funny. One of the reasons why Producer Kayla and I have such a good relationship is before we start any live show, we tell some stories of our week and laugh our butts off. Don't we They're tragic stories, but we find a way to laugh at them. Right. I don't have to tell you that you can stimulate your sympathetic nervous system by meditating, exercising, and of course taking a few deep breaths. Now here's the prescription I
promised you. Here's how you can activate your vegus nerve. Okay, your vegus nerve is the most important tool you have in your toolbox to reduce anxiety. It's called the cold water plunge. It's also known as the diving reflex
or the mammalian dive reflex. So here's what it is. When your face comes into contact with cold water, especially around the nose and the mouth, it triggers sensory receptors in the skin and they signal the receptors of the brain to signal a trigeminal trigeminal nerve that you didn't know you had to trigeminal nerve, did you. Here's what it does. Basically, it instantly slows down, so it imagines that you're drowning in cold water, and so it tells
the body just get oxygen to the brain and nowhere else. Calm down. Everything. We can't waste time on breathing, digestion, anything else going on. Let us just calm down and survive with the brain. So here's what you do. You take a big old mixing ball in your cupboard. You fill it full of cold water. You add ice cubes. Let us sit for a few minutes so it gets nice and cold. You take it big deep breath, and you hold your breath, and you put your whole face
in the cold water. Yes, your forehead, yes, your chin, yes, your eyes, nose, and mouth, and you hold your breath for at least fifteen seconds underwater. I know if you're a vapor and smoker you probably can't hold your breath that long, but let's assume you can. And then you take it out. You gasp, you take a few deep breaths, you relax, You wait about thirty seconds, and you do it again. Do it up to three times. If you're feeling anxiety, I
promise you the cold water plunge would change your life. Don't say I didn't tell you. Don't say I don't have you back. I know how to reduce anxiety for you. All right, when we come back. Maybe you have anxiety around love. Guess what we fool ourselves sometimes when we're looking for love. Let's talk about the tricks our brain plays on us. You're listening to the Doctor Wendy Wall Show on KFI AM six forty one, Lave Everywhere
on the iHeartRadio Apple. You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI AM six forty Welcome back to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty Live Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. I want to tell you about this dissertation that I read recently from a researcher in the Netherlands. Her name is Ileana Samara. I like people to get credit for their work because dissertations are
so hard. You know, in order to get your PhD in clinical psychology, you have to mount a research study, and a lot of students do small, quick, easy ones. But I was a dumb student and I did a whole longitudinal study where I followed one hundred pregnant women for a year and I looked at the relationship between their own romantic attachment style and their ability to breastfeed. My hypothesis was that those with a insecure attachment style or avoidant
attachment style would be less likely to breastfeed. What I found out is that people with an avoidant attachment style are less likely to sign up for such studies. So that particular group was small, but I did get to talk about the statistical significance of an instrument I made. When you think instrument, you think I took some fire and metal and made an instrument. No, it just means a test, a test that I made that had good reliability and
validity. Anyway, So I'm reading this dissertation because it's right up my alley. It is about the kind of tricks our brains play on us. And some of the stuff that Samara did has been proven in other studies, but it was interesting to see what she did. She got a group of people together, ten men, ten women. That's good and manageable. You can do that, And over four sessions she had them do some different experiments and one was a speed dating experiment. And so she wanted to answer the question
how do we form romantic bonds? Right? Does our brain really get us the best mate or does it perceive certain things as attractive and then we follow it? So she found duh, that people respond faster to attractive faces.
She figured out this with the five minute speed dating thing, that if somebody had she showed all the guys and the girls the pictures ahead of time, so they knew, so she knew which ones they felt most attractive, and then when they saw them in real life, they're very quickly to respond. They're very animated. But here's an interesting thing about human nature. So when you meet somebody, did you know if you like them, you unconsciously mirror
them. If they tilt their head, the other person tilts their head. If you know, put a hand on a hip, they'll put their hand on. They'll start watching that, and it means that they like each other. They'll mirror exactly what they're doing. With one interesting exception, if the well not really an exception. Think of it this way, the person. If the person's gaze goes to another direction, maybe they see something across the
room, the other person will follow their gaze. Right, that's the indicator. I'll follow their gaze. We guess what, which she proved in her dissertation is not if they're looking at a really hot person, that really hot person can look at a fire happening across the room and the person won't take their eyes off the attractive person. They hold the gaze too long. This is the brain tricking you, tricking you into thinking it's just so lovely to
stare at this person. Why look at anything else right now. The other thing, she asked, she was looking for something called the over perception bias. This has been proven in other studies too, so she basically after they did the speed dating thing, she and her colleagues asked all the participants, all the men and all the women, whether they had interest in the people they saw, and whether they thought that interest was mutual. And guess what.
Men overestimated the likelihood that their date would want to see them again. You know, we have always known about this over perception by I often say it is largely responsible for many cases of sexual harassment in the workplace. Men are psychologically wired to think almost every woman is into them, literally like, oh, yeah, she wants to go with me. I can tell. Now you have to ask evolutionarily why this is. Think of it this way.
Dudes have a hard life in heterosexual relationships. They have to find a woman they find attractive, although research has shown they find men find way more women attractive than women find men attractive. It's we're more selective on our side. But anyway, they find a woman who's attractive, then they have to have the guts to go and talk to her, and then they have to say the right thing that makes her not think like they're weird, and then
they have to ask her out. That takes a lot of courage, It takes a lot of bravery. So mother Nature said, you know what, We're going to prime you by saying you know what, She's probably going to say yes, Just go for it. She's probably going to say yes. I call the over perception by it's called the sexual over perception bias, the thing that keeps one dude in the strip club too long. His buddies leave after the bachelor party and they're like, come on, dude, we gotta
go, we gotta go. He'say, no, I want to wait till she gets off because I think she's really into me. Man, I think she really is. Look at her. Look how she's looking at me. I think she's in. They're like, no, she's there for the money, dude, No, no, no, really, I'm just gonna wait till she gets off. Okay, see what happens, right, And they
leave and shrug their shoulders. But every once in a while there's a dude who thinks that way, and that's probably why women who are exotic dancers usually have someone walk them to the car, because there's one of those dudes out there. It's also sometimes sadly responsible for sexual harassment at the workplace. The guys will be like, but she, she gave me all those signals like I thought she was into me. I'm like, oh, my heart breaks
for that nerdy guy who didn't know. A smile doesn't mean that we want to have sex with you. A smile just means we're in a good mood, or the sun is out, or we like the dress we're wearing that day. I don't know, like really guys, but that is how guys are wired. So obviously, the big limitation of this study is that the researcher only did heterosexual couples. Bisexual and homosexual couples get studied less often.
But it's really interesting when some of that research does come out. So I want you to be careful when you're out there in the world when you're looking for love. Don't get stuck on the most attractive person in the room. Understand that they might not like you as much as you like them, and that you have to be able to handle rejection sometimes. Move on, find somebody in your league. You've got this. Hey, when we come back, I'm going to my social media to answer some of the questions that you
guys have been sending me in your DMS. Love that you're listening to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six forty. We live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Waalsh. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty from seven to nine pm I'm on Sunday and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.