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Dread Anxiety

Oct 03, 201336 min
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Episode description

What is dread and how are we supposed to cope with it? Why do we let it control our lives so much? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Law and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, you dread anything, see anything in your life that you just truly, opinically dread on a sort of permanent basis, Yeah, like in a day in, day out kind of a thing, or even in a on on a very short term scale, like are you dreading our move from the fifteenth floor

to the eleventh? Now? I celebrate it a new beginning. Yeah, yeah, I'm positive way to look at but yeah, I think you just you know, we're gonna release ourselves from the shackles of the past whatever that means. No, for me,

it's more I don't I don't dread that. It's more like I'll have these sort of clouds of existential dread every once in a while, meaning that it could be the most beautiful day with this clear blue sky, everything could be going right, but somewhere in the world I feel like, you know, there's this general unease about something not going well, possibly in the future. So for me, it's not usually a defined dread. What about you, um

dread well? Yes, we so we discussed in paper tigers. Uh. It's it's easy to begin to have these these fight or flight fears about things that have have have have no power to really harmss. Like when I was going through a lot of a lot of paperwork for adoption or or every year with taxes, I get that sense of dread, you know, like I've got to I've got to do this paperwork and it's gonna be dreadful on some level, and I feel like it's a physical threat

to me. But but of course it isn't. And if I stopped to analyze it enough, I realized, no, this is not necessarily life for death. Yeah. But I was thinking about this that we have been trained, at least here in the United States, UM, in various ways to dread something off will happening to you. And it begins very you know, at a young age. We're taught to anticipate these various tragedies, whether or not it's a hurricane

or tornado or some other sort of natural disaster. Uh. And you know how about the whole like stop, drop and roll, um, all the sorts of alarms and emergency uh routines that we go through and that's good because it helps to prepare you need you need to be prepared, and so we'll have very real life examples of that

where if there's a fire, you stop dropping roll. And then we have uh, you know, in our fairy tales and the stories we tell each on the fictions, I mean by the very nature that you need the narrative to be engaging. It's fiction, it's storytelling. You need there to be a threat. You need something to happen that is bad so that the characters can navigate through it, around it, or what have you. So people wander into the woods and they're abducted by witches and which is

trying to cook them. Things of that nature happened, as it means to try and remind children, hey, don't go walking into candy houses just because they're made out of candy. You might wind up being eaten by a cannibal woman, right. Stranger danger really what we're talking about. So you do have to create this database of dangers in order to

better survive. But then you have sort of this minutia of minor threats or perceived threats or just stand ins for threats that aren't really dangerous, but they begin to take over in your imagination more real pressing threats. And that's where this idea of dread anxiety and in some

ways just generalized anxiety disorders take over. Stranger danger is a great example of that because on one, on a very basic level, yes, there's their children need to be on guard, they need to stay around their parents, and there are individuals out there who will harm them. It's

just you know, statistically they exist. However, if you go overboard and you start thinking that every stranger is a danger, if you start, even as a culture began to just go on like a NonStop witch hunt of potential people who are a danger to children, then you get into an entirely weird and problematic area. Well, let me layer

one more thing over that. Then you begin to read things like it shouldn't be a stranger that you're concerned about, because the majority of abductions take place by people that you actually know, and so you have to sort of reframe that conversation with your child. So what the point is is that there's all there's all these sort of real and perceived threats such as pile up one on top of the other. Whereas humans, particularly in the day

and age that we live in. When there's so much data in front of us, you have to sort through it and try to figure out what you truly should be anxious about. And sometimes the you know, the wiring gets crossed, yeah, which makes us to something called general anxiety disorder or or GAD or or as I like to read it, God. And so general anxiety disorder is severe,

ongoing anxiety that interferes with your day to day activities. Uh. And we're talking about symptoms such as panic disorder, ob sensive compulsive disorder, other types of anxiety that kind of get uh sucked into the fold, and they're they're varying

at different levels of this condition. Yeah, And it's generally involves thoughts of uncontrollability and unpredictability of upcoming personally selling an events or shifting attention, of our inability to cope, memory of negative aspects of certain events, and negative emotion. And people with this disorder they can't relax, They startle easily, and they have difficulty concentrating, and a lot of times they have a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep.

And the National Institute of Mental Health says that the physical Symptoms that accompany this include, of course, fatigue, headaches, muscle tension, muscle aches, difficulty swallowing, trembling, twitching, irritabilities, wedding, nausea, lightheadedness, and having to go to the bathroom frequently. I thought was interesting. Now now luckily it's it's very treatable for the most part via medications and and or therapy, so

it's not not necessarily a permanent life condition. But it's it's again, it's it's like you say, it's these these in xieties build up in our lives. Um. I like to think of like a cave with stalactites and stalacmites forming until eventually they're just all the sharpened cave to teeth everywhere and uh, and they can be cleared out, but you've got to sort of stop and have some sort of level of self awareness either come out of you or or have it imposed upon you, to realize

what's real and what's not well. And I think the reasons why they can, even if you brush them away, they they continue to build back up is because at the very heart of this is this this knowledge that one day we will all die, right, this is so you know, every last one of us. So this is that sort of I always think about it as this um sort of double edged blade of consciousness, you know, like it's great that you're conscious, were humans are conscious,

and we can enjoy so many different things. At the same time we realize that, you know, our time um in our physical bodies is going to come to a close, right yeah, and that you know, there's a very good chance that the last few chapters of that book might be a little less happy the middle one, right, and

everything beyond that is the great unknown. So it's sort of you know, that's that's a lot for a brain, a conscious brain, to sort of taking, even if you pick it apart, which I sometimes do, and you know, I remind myself, well, death everybody does it. Everybody's every everybody's doing it, and look at some of the people

who do it. It couldn't there couldn't be that much to it, right, But on one hand you can sort of this man like that, But then you remind yourself exactly what it entails, not just a mirror cutting off of life, but a well in some cases it's that, but but in other cases a decline of life and a decline of the quality of life that terminates in this of this well, I was thinking about probably one of the best films that deals with this topic, and for me, it's a serious man five the Coen Brothers.

It is. It's probably a little bit leaker than some of their films that it's definitely it's it's probably one of the Cohen Brothers films. It's easier to overlook. And just in case you know you're listening and you don't know or have a context of this film, Um, it is kind of a slow mo existential train wreck of this character's life. His name is Larry Gopnick, and it

gets a clean bill of health. This is how the movie starts out with and then everything just kind of falls apart from there, and um, every relationship in his life falls apart, which is again this sort of dread that we all have, like are we tending to this person? Is this happening? Is this is the machine still moving along in the ways that it's supposed to, And for

Larry Gopnick, it doesn't. It begins to fall apart, and he even begins to receive angry calls from a Columbia record club debt collector, which I think is really brilliant because if you've ever been plagued by anxiety, then you know that these minor infringements from your past are things that bubble to the surf us every once in a while that you worry about. So this, you know, past record club collection calling him and nagging him is a

nice stand in for that. Yeah. I mean, like we've discussed the power of closing loops in your life and how an unclosed loop is instantly at least a pinpoint of anxiety in your in your mind. And so that's a great example because the Columbia Records is not going to come and break your thumbs, you know, maybe, well it depends, it depends which Columbia Records, if they're actually based out of Columbia, I don't know, but but but yeah,

it's totally a paper tiger. It's totally a closed loop, I mean, an unclosed loop anxiety working on this character. I'm glad you brought up the loop thing because that's something that what we can talk about later in terms of trying to um, you know, keep this anxiety disorder in check. But I think we should talk about how America is a very anxious country. It turns out and that Americans really suffer from anxiety disorders more of than

any other culture in the world. Yeah, because you think about what what sort of has become the I don't know about the predominant, but a but a very common American story. Uh. And I imagine you have this as well as I. What happened in your life At one point, you moved away from your parents house? Where do you move? You moved to the big city where you're surrounded by people, but you're less close to any of the people around you.

You know, you you, you know, you you have maybe your your your spouse and or your child with you. But then you increasingly you have all this social media creeping into your life and this becomes the means by which you connect to other people. And uh and and then meanwhile this uh, the families be moved away from They may be across the country, they may be on you know, in some cases, they may be on the other side of the globe. And so we're more and

more distant from people and uh and we're more cut off. Yeah, that's true. And uh. I just wanted to point out that according to the World Health Organization, that the United States has something like a nearly a third of the Americans UH suffering from anxiety problem albums in their lifetime, So a third of Americans will suffer in their lifetime. And the National Institute of National Health says that in any given year, ninetent of the population suffers from anxiety.

Between nineteen and two thousand and four, Americans more than doubled their spending on anti anxiety medications like sanics and value, so that industry went from nine hundred million to two point one billions. So what we're seeing here is this idea that our anxiety has not just always been an American thing, but it tends to uh or we tend to see an increase in it over the last couple of decades. So, as you had mentioned, you know, there

are a couple of factors to them. One is just sort of chasing that job around various different parts of the country and resettling and losing some of the connections to your family and friends. And some of that is um that you have an increased amount of data and information, but it's more in the way that it's presented. And I was thinking about this because uh, I've been rowing at the gym a lot lately, and this I find

to be a very zen activity. It's great, But then I'll look up at the TV and at the ticker at the bottom of the news program will have some sort of horrible thing about some child, some something just unimaginable happening to the child, just running over and over again and so again it. You know, the way that this information is presented and consumed by us sort of adds to that feeling, because here I am feeling like I'm imagining myself on a on a lake rowing and

now now I'm thinking about a dead child. Yeah. I've never understood the need to have that kind of ticker going on in places like a gym, where shouldn't the focus be on getting out of my head and getting into my body? Like why am I watching this horrible news? Or I've seen the same TV sets blaring over jacuzzis uh and or within earshot of a sauna like why why why they're oh? And then of course the big

one is airports. You know, Like, I'm very much of the mindset that we need to have we if the TVs are on, okay, have the TV is on to distract people, but have it tuned into kittens and puppies playing. Have the for the audio, just have it be Brian ENO's music for airports. We don't need to watch ticker tape about um, you know, child murders, train rex plane crashes and what have you. It just seems like like

like why continue to sprinkle that kind of horrible topic. Well, it is inescapable and um, as Taylor Clark in the article It's not the job Market from Slant Magazine says, UM, a lot of this is reported in a fear based fashion, so it's not balanced in the sense that, um, you know, the good natured stories tend to hit the news, it's usually the ones that are bleeding and awful attention. Part of that is the virtue of the twenty four hour

news cycle. You gotta you gotta find something, you gotta put it up there, and then you gotta milk it for everything it's worth. Now, Taylor does say that UM compounding this is an intolerance for negative feelings. So Taylor says, we reject situations that could make us feel discomfort. We try to bury or reverse our feelings through shopping, alcohol or drug use, or entertainment and psychologist Stephen Hayes who uses an acceptance and commitment therapy rather than drug therapy,

or maybe he uses an in conjunction. Said Americans are victims of feel goodism, the false idea that bad feelings ought to be annihilated, controlled, or erased by a pill. So some of this is that idea of this pursuit of happiness, right, Like, we're all entitled to be happy, and if we're not happy at this very moment, something

is wrong and not feeling settled without discomfort that everybody feels. Yeah, well it comes it comes back to the end of the idea of balance in one's life, you know that, and to to get you know, to to dip my toes in a little of Buddhism here for a second. You know, it's the idea that it's from the from the human realm. It's from this, this realm of peace that one is able to ascend above that cycle of suffering.

It's not from an extreme of pain and worry. It's not from extreme of happiness and pleasure, Like those are both kind of not really dead ends, but those are not the extremes from which liberation life you have. If it's it's through this middle ground and an understanding that those are extremes that when I'm happy and when I'm when I'm having just an awesome time, that cannot be the norm. You know, not sustainable, and if you try to sustain it, it's like stretching a rubber band. You're

going to crash down to the other end of the hallway. Now, there there are some other factors. According to Red Curves University researcher. To this Seabear, poor mothers are more likely to be classified as having the mental illness of anxiety disorder or generalized anxiety is disorder because they live in poverty, not because they're suffering from a psychiatric disorder. And so that's where some of this area gets, you know, a little bit gray, because there are some people who are

priest predisposed genetically to have anxiety disorders UM. And then sometimes it's just the environmental factors that are pressed upon you. And it was nature and nurture, both environment and genetics playing a role here. Yeah, And what I thought was interesting about this is we already talked about how UM in the United States in particular, migrating from one airing to another is pretty typical, and so we don't usually have the support systems of our families or our communities. Um,

I mean some of us do. Some some people have lived for you know, their families have lived for generations in one area. And some people, you know, like in Atlanta for instances, is the great transient city, have lived here for only five years, and so they're still putting

their roots down. But if you have had a huge economic loss in your life, and you are a single mother, then it would make sense that you begin to have these sort of anxieties creeping in at all times because one of the basic bedrocks of your existence, um, your

access to healthcare, food is jeopardized. I was thinking about this a lot when I was Me and my wife were recently in China to adopt our son, the because you know, over there, we had had a really good guide, uh in in in the city of Nanning, and her name was Jane, and she was taking a song should point out things about the culture while we were there, and she pointed out, you'll see a lot of grandparents with the children during the day because you know, it's

very family wise, very conservative culture and uh and so the grandparents will live with with the with the with the family and then they'll look after the kid during the day while the mom and dad work. And it's so at the same time, I'm you know, we're thinking, oh, well, here we are alone, you know, in this cult in this country, and we're about to to to get our son, and then that our grandparents units are on the other

side of the world. You know, we positioned the center of the earth between us and them, and even when we return home, those those grandparents are still in uh in cities that are you know, four or seven hours away. Well see, and that's some really interesting is that's a discrepancy. That's that's the reason why in some third world countries you don't see these anxiety disorders being as prevalent as

in the United States. Um, even though the conditions you know, in the access to food and healthcare could could be far worse than in the United States, because they have supports them in place. All Right, we're gonna take a quick breaking when we come back, we will discuss tail

and all and anxiety. All right, we're back and we're about to to lay on some information on you guys about ten at all about emotional pain and David Lynch, Yes, this is in case you were wondering, is there a study out there that involves let's see dental procedures, prostitutes, um, the Fear of death, and David Lynch's rabbits. Well, yes

there is, Yes, we have that study for you. First though, I wanted to mention that we have talked about emotional pain and physical pain being processed basically by the same circuitry, and UM. That was fascinating to me because it turns out that, um, they're so closely related that if someone say hurts your feelings or there's some other emotional pain that you have, it literally does hurt you in that way.

I mean you're not presumably you're not sitting there feeling as though daggers are in your skin, but there's but that's the sort of looney Tunes vision of it. It's like they stabbed me in the back with that statement. That was like, yes, your pures my heart when you said that, your brain is taking that as a threat.

And um, this was particularly pointnant when we were talking about the teenage brain and why when when you're a teenager and if you're if you feel like you're shunned, it feels like the end of the world and it's not because a teen is being dramatic. It just turns out that that part of their brain is more amped up and they're getting many more signals from their brain that they are they're threatened because it's it's very much about attach yourself to a group, find your place, because

that survival. Even though that model doesn't necessarily make as much sense uh in a modern sense and a very an organism level sense, it works. It does right, And researchers are really looking at this whole physical pain and social pain and looking at some of the same chemicals

and neural processes that they share. And so these conditions really are kind of two sides of the same coin here, And so they have struck on this idea of tile a all not so much like, hey, let's use talent all to to really dial down any sort of anxiety, dread or emotional pain, but more in the sense of let's look at tilen al and see how it's working in conjunction with emotional It's more about, let's by giving talent the subjects in this experiment, we're able to highlight

the connectedness between physical and emotional pain. So this do we want to talk about this study. We do. All right, So what do you do if you are Daniel Randall's a doctoral students psychology at the University of British Columbia. Well, what you do is you get a hundred twenty college students and you randomly assigned them to take either a thousand milligrams of a tail and all brand, a set amenta thing or a po cibo you know, a sugar pill. Uh,

And that's the control group. And then one group of participants you instruct to write to barrack paragraphs about what would happen to their body if they die and how they would feel about it. And then the others you asked them to write about dental pain, which according to the paper would not be unpleasant but likely wouldn't invoke any existential anxieties, which I take some issue with. We'll discuss.

But and then all the students then had to read a hypothetical or rest report about a prostitute and set the bail on a scale of zero to nine hundred dollars. And then finally there's there's there's some viewing of David Lynch's Rabbits. Yeah, tell us more, have you seen Rabbits?

I haven't seen, but the still that I saw from it seems just in line with every other David Lynch film that I've seen in which there is a human with an animal head on in a domestic setting, and um, from from what they describe in this study, the domestic setting um is made even earier by the fact that not only is there a rabbit headed humans standing there, but there's a soundtrack that is very foreboding, and there are sort of the non sequiturs that are said by

these rabbit humans that have no context, and then a laugh track that accompanies them. And what I thought was so brilliant about this is that Lynch is so good at sort of bringing up these very vague notions of unease in actual just like wrongness, that he's the perfect choice for trying to exacerbate this conditions and show a video of somebody like just hitting themselves in the knee with a sledgehammer. I'm sure that our film exists somewhere, um, but but yeah, this this walks the line in a

very possibly effective manner. So from my understanding that they were made to watch this clip and then sort of um way again their reasoning in terms of death or even um what sort of punitive damages these prostitutes would pay,

right right. So what's interesting here is looking at the way that Taile and all is affecting there their emotional response, their their their anxiety level regarding physical pain in terms of this dental um procedure that they're supposed to write about, in terms of the notion of inevitable physical death, and also their possible empathy for this, uh, this prostitute, this

hypothetical prostitute that's been arrested. So of course the people that took the tunnel, well, they didn't seem to be as bothered by this idea of death, and they weren't as um I guess you could say, um, maybe their their value system for the prostitutes were a bit kinder and they didn't feel like they needed to pay as much as their counter approach who took the sugar pill, and they're dental pain they didn't feel was you know,

quite as awful as they had imagined. So I mean that's telling you that this this tiel is sort of what they think, is that it is taking this emotional pain, processing and recasting it for people, and perhaps they're not feeling it is as much as they would have if they hadn't taken it. Now, again we have to underline once more, don't go taking a lot of time and all expecting to to treat your own anxiety levels. Yeah.

I wanted to also point out that, as the researchers pointed out, this is not something that they said, oh, take time and all if you have anxiety. Um, this was just again them trying to figure out how time all works on the brain. With emotion and a large amount of time all can actually lead to liver problems.

So there's a whole Now. I do disagree with them about the whole um, the whole idea that oh, and thinking about dental pain is not going to cause you any kind of existential dread, because I tend to find, uh quite the opposite that if I think about dental pain, if I think about dental procedures, then I'm inevitably thinking about people getting older and people aging and the long of certain road to death. I always come back to

Tina Fey's quote that the mouth dies first. You know that as you get older, you suddenly find yourself realizing, Hey, I I actually have to work a little harder to maintain everything in this cavity that is so damningly close to my brain and the center of being. Uh and and and then you end up having to get these procedures, etcetera. And uh And I find that it is a center of existential dread that I can dial down if I think about it enough and realize, all right, well, there's

plenty of stuff I can do. And you know, it's just a matter of fault establishing a plan and following it and trusting in your health care procedures that they're possibly more interested in maintaining your dental health and selling you a bunch of jumps. Well, I think that most people when they think about going to the dentist, they know that there's some mild discomfort, right, they might have their you know, gum lines bleed, so and so forth.

But for other people, like maybe you and I who have had procedures, it really is there's a lot of angst because for me, going to the dentist is finding out that you have a problem. But then they go in and then they find even more problems that so it's like, you know, I'm peeling the onion and the existential dread of you know, are we ever going to get to the bottom of this awfulness. Now you're erecting

a tiny village in my mouth with all sorts of materials. Yeah, and the feeling like if I do everything you say, I'm still gonna wind up having to get something done. You know. It's so so Yeah. Maybe other people are different. You'll have to write in and let's know about that. But but I find it kind of an area of existential dread, possibly confounded for me personally since my deceased father was a dentist, so I probably have some additional

baggage loaded on that train as well. It's possible. Yeah. UM. I wanted to point out that a second experiment of two hundred and seven participants in this same sort of structure where you have the Thailand all and you have the sugar pill and you have David Lynch, and this time you have the Simpsons UM as they control UM was shown to those two hundred and seven participants, and after watching the clip, the students looked at footage from

the two thousand and eleven Vancouver hockey riots sparked by the Canucks loss and their bid for the Stanley Cup, and they are asked how harshly the rioters should be punished for vandalism. And again, uh, those who took tin all before they watched Rabbits that David Lynch films seem to feel more lenient, as did all the students who watched The Simpsons. So uh, you know, it's good that

they check that out again. Again, this is you know, this idea of thailand all and emotional well being either early studies, they're not a lot of them, so it'll be interesting to see, but it does cast some interesting light on the connectedness of physical pain and anxiety. It's casts an interesting light on how anxious people behave towards other people, you know, they're they're how it affects their empathy, uh,

and their severity and judging others. Well, it's interesting you say that because I read about trickle down anxiety and there's a small study of parent child pears that was conducted by John's Hopkins, and they looked at the relationship between anxiety ridden parents and their children and they found that parents with particularly in particular, social anxiety disorder, are more likely than parents with other types of anxiety to engage in behaviors that put their children at risk for

developing angst of their own. And we're talking about sixty six anxious parents and their sixty six children ages seven to twelve, and they had to do this activity together. And what they found is that using a scale of one to five, that those again as kids that had the parents with social anxieties were criticized a lot more during this act um the parents expressed a lot more doubt, and then the kids sort of took that on again.

So they were again trying to get to the bottom of you know, how much of this is nature and nurture, and you know how much of this do we actually pass on to our children. The other thing about anxiety, besides just being you know, very uncomfortable and for some people debilitating, is that for some people, particularly women, older women,

it may shorten your telomeres. Now telomeres are those DNA proteins at the end of the chromosomes, and it's really important because telomeres, the longer you have them, presumably the lengthier of your life will be um or at least, you know, the less disease you may end up having, which would be great because presumably you would live longer

if you have less disease. So a study by researchers that Brigham and Women's Hospital showed that a common form of anxiety, known as phobic anxiety was associated with shorter telomeres and middle age and older women, and um that suggested that phobic anxiety is a possible risk factor for accelerating age. So we're talking about blood samples from five thousand women, more than five thousand women ages forty two

to sixty nine. And they used those samples and they analyze the telomere length as well as the participant's concurrent self reports regarding their phobic symptoms. And you know, this is the story again that these environmental factors in our internal states are going to affect the way that our

body responds and how healthy it can be. So again, this is a this is a small study, and this is just this one group of women from those ages, but I think it's very telling on the sort of damage that sustained anxiety disorders can due to our bodies and minds. Ye, fear as the mind killer, all right, So we should probably everyone's thinking about anxiety now, we've been talking about it all of those podcasts. You're probably

pinpointing examples of anxiety in your own life. So we should probably try and send everybody home semi happy and discuss some basic methods to cut down on the anxiety in your life. Uh, let's start with that with just talking about the body itself, fear in the body, anxiety and the body. What can you do to to bolster

your your physical response to anxiety. Well, already know that when you are feeling anxious or stressed, that you're breathing patterns change and they're essentially telegraphing to your body, Hey there's a problem here. So gaining your breath and becoming

aware of that is hugely important. And we've talked about that in terms of meditation, yoga, Yeah, stopping to breathe, basically any kind of any kind of basic breathing exercise out there, and there are many, Uh, they can have just I don't know about phenomenal, but they can have very nosable effects on your immediate level of the axone. Um, some basic stuff here, just sort of mom kind of stuff. Eat right, you know, stuff you know, eat, eat balanced meals.

Eat Eat some things that are good for you, not just junk food. Avoid alcohol, nicotine, sugar, and caffeine. Because you know, we're talking about UM, we're talking about things that the depressed or stimulate the body. Again, you know, talking about that hallway. On one end of the hallway, there's uh, there's worry and fear. On the other hand,

and there's happiness and you know, and crazy excitement. And in the middle of the hallway that's where the pieces, that's where the balance is and you can't make you're not going to maintain one extreme without without ricocheting back

to the other. So when you're taking these uh you know, I'm not saying don't you know, drink alcohol or don't have a cup of coffee, but know that your skyrocketing yourself in one direction or the other, and it's you're potentially turning into this pin pall ball of anxiety, zipping up and down the hallway. UM. Exercise is great for a variety of reasons, including, as we mentioned earlier, getting

out of your head and into your body. You know, there's if you're you're straining yourself into a pose in yoga, or if you're you're punishing yourself on the rowing machine at the gym, then as long as CNN isn't on in the background, there's a good chance that you're gonna be able to get out of your mind and get into your body. Um, taking care of yourself, getting a

good night's sleep. This was something that I really woke up to on the adoption trip when when we came back, especially and everybody was jet lagged, including the toddler of course, is that if you don't have enough sleep, everything gets crazier. And it's something I already knew from our podcasts and and and our research, but really drove home for me that if you don't have enough sleep, then the anxiety is really gonna crank up. And then also finally considered

that hormonal changes may be occurring as well. Yeah, that's true. And I think like a British person, yeah yeah, if you're a if you're an American listening to this, uh not someone buried all down, but um, this idea and you already kind of touched on this is that happiness

and you know extremes are not sustainable. And so if you look at it a culture, if you look at the UK culture in terms of pursuit of happiness, that's not quite as rapid as it is in the United States, Like the expectations are a little bit more pragmatic in terms of what we should expect for ourselves. Yeah, don't buy into the product that most commercials are selling saying you can be happy all of the time with this product. That's right. Yeah, yeah, all right, Well, there you go.

We've discussed discussed anxiety, general anxiety, dread in your life and the lives of those around you. Hopefully we've uh we forced you to at the very least sort of turn the camera back around and look at anxiety written and sort of get some perspective on it in your own life and realize that a little bit what's going on there, and you know, maybe we even covered a few of the tools you may begin to use to

correct it. But if, again, if you are experiencing this kind of general anxiety that we've discussed, if anxiety is really playing a debilitating role in your life, even just a little bit, do consider getting some sort of professional help. Help, go to a doctor, tell them what's going on. You know, don't don't feel like you're alone in this. And this is just a personal battle between you and your deane.

All right, So hey, you want to get in touch with us, You want to talk about anxiety, about fear, about dread about all these things. You can find us in all the usual places, uh stuff to bow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where our blogs, videos, podcast, et cetera may be found. You can also find us

on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Stuff to Blow your Mind on all of those, and you can also find us on mind Stuff Show for our YouTube clips and Julie put and they find us for a good old fashioned email correspondence. You can send that to blow the mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com

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