Episode Transcript
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0:15
Pushkin. I
0:23
was having my annual medical checkup. The
0:25
nurse measured my weight in blood pressure, She
0:27
listened to my heart, and then did some blood work.
0:30
Most of my test results came back fine except
0:32
one. My CRP levels were
0:35
kind of high. But I didn't
0:37
actually know what CRP levels were, so
0:39
I turned to Google. Turns
0:41
out, high CRP levels are a sign of bodily
0:43
inflammation, which can increase the risk
0:45
of chronic health conditions like kidney disease,
0:47
cancer, dementia, and premature death.
0:50
I'm no medical doctor, but that did
0:53
not sound good. I returned
0:55
to the clinic to go over the results. So
0:57
this inflammation thing, I asked, what's causing
1:00
it? Inflammation? My doctor
1:02
replied, can be lots of things, but
1:04
it's usually a sign that your immune system is
1:06
on the defense. But we often
1:08
see levels like that when patients are experiencing
1:10
a period of intense stress. Have
1:13
you been going through any stress lately? I
1:15
fidgeted, well, I said, then
1:18
launched into all the stuff on my plate. I
1:20
talked about how I'd cared for over five hundred
1:23
students during a pandemic while also
1:25
running a lab while also making a podcast.
1:28
I admitted I hadn't been exercising or
1:30
eating well, and that I was feeling totally
1:32
overwhelmed. My doctor,
1:34
a fan of the show, gave a smirk. So
1:37
the famous happiness expert has been all stressed
1:39
out? Huh yeah,
1:42
yeah, I guess she has been, and apparently
1:45
it's making her ill.
1:48
Stress is a normal bodily response. It
1:50
can be triggered by external factors like major
1:53
life changes, relationship troubles, financial
1:55
worries, and troubles at work, but also
1:57
by internal things like self criticism,
2:00
unrealistic expectations, and being too
2:02
busy all the time. Stress
2:04
is just the body's natural response to a perceived
2:06
threat. But as I know well, that response
2:09
doesn't feel good. It can make us anxious,
2:11
sad, and irritable. But it also hurts
2:14
us physically, causing headaches and insomnia
2:16
and digestive problems. And if
2:18
we leave stress unchecked, it can badly
2:20
damage our bodies and our immune systems.
2:24
Stress is a happiness challenge that I and
2:26
so many others face on a daily basis.
2:29
But is there anything we can do about it for
2:32
my own sake? I really hope so. Our
2:37
minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
2:39
But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
2:41
minds are lying to us, leading us away
2:43
from what will really make us happy. The
2:46
good news is that understanding the science of the
2:48
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
2:50
You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie
2:53
Santos.
3:00
At around the time I was thinking about my own struggle
3:02
with stress, a new book landed on my
3:04
desk. There seemed to be an odd mismatch
3:07
between the author and the subject matter, but
3:09
after reading it, I realized there was a
3:11
lot I could learn from his experience.
3:13
Hey, Steve, I'm in the car because
3:16
for some reason, all the traffic lights on since sent Boulevard
3:18
are out.
3:19
When scientists studies stress, they often
3:21
turn to one particular group of very stressed
3:23
out people, caregivers, and
3:26
there's no shortage of such research subjects.
3:28
Around thirty percent of US adults provide
3:31
some form of care to say a child
3:33
with special needs, a sick partner,
3:35
or even an aging parent. It's
3:37
around the clock job that's often really
3:40
brutal. Thanks so much for taking the time.
3:42
Of course, the person I wanted to talk
3:44
to had a hectic life before he took on the tough
3:46
role of a caretaker, and he's still
3:48
rushing around La from meeting to meeting today
3:51
traffic allowing, of course, do you want to
3:53
talk now? Do you want to wait till you get back to your place?
3:55
What's better?
3:56
Let's start right now because I have another
3:58
appointment.
3:59
But I'm thrilled to talk to you, but
4:01
not as thrilled as I was. You see,
4:03
I'm not just a fan of Steve's book, Time
4:05
to Think Caregiving for my Hero. I'm
4:08
also a fan of Steve's acting. Steve
4:11
Gutenberg is the star of some of my favorite
4:13
eighties movies, Three Men in a Baby
4:15
Cocoon and Short Circuit Number
4:18
Five is a Lie, and
4:20
Steve attributes much of his amazing career
4:22
success to his father.
4:24
He was my hero, and my dad was really
4:27
a very tough guy who was a US Army
4:30
Airborne ranger, one of the first
4:32
Jewish ones. And then my dad became
4:34
a New York City policeman and he actually
4:37
went to the New York City Police Academy. So
4:39
when I auditioned for Police Academy
4:41
the movie, he said, why don't you wear my police Academy
4:44
shirt? And I said, yeah, that
4:46
would be great.
4:47
The director asked about Steve's shirt and
4:49
seemed impressed by the actor's attention to detail.
4:52
After all, Steve was reading for character
4:55
Kerrie Mahoney, who was also the son
4:57
of a police officer. It was a great
4:59
start, but the audition went
5:01
terribly.
5:02
I called my dad and I said, Dad, you
5:04
know, I wore your shirt, but I don't think I
5:06
got this thing. You know, nobody laughed,
5:09
nobody clapped, nothing. He said, well, you
5:11
never go just give it a little time.
5:13
My dad was really positive
5:15
thinker. He just said it'll all work out.
5:17
Take your time with it. About ten minutes later, my agent
5:19
called and I said, oh, I feel lousy. I did terrible.
5:22
He goes, no, you got it. He said what?
5:24
And that was the phone call that changed my life. And I
5:27
think that my dad's lucky shir It really helped me.
5:29
So Steve was going to star in Police Academy.
5:32
What could possibly go wrong?
5:34
Actually, my manager saw Police Academy.
5:37
He said, this is going to be the worst movie
5:39
ever. I'm going to put you in a TV series
5:41
Tomorrow.
5:42
Steve landed a role in a spy series made
5:45
by Blake Edwards.
5:46
He was a great director, directed Breakfast
5:48
and Tiffany's and all the Pink Panthers.
5:51
Steve's dad was incredibly supportive of his
5:53
new role and wanted to join his son on
5:55
set, but that might have also had something
5:57
to do with Blake Edward's famous wife.
6:00
My dad wanted to come out because he thought
6:02
maybe you'd get to meet Julie.
6:04
Andrews Stanley Gutenberg. Set visit
6:06
coincided with a short delay in shooting. Steve's
6:09
character was supposed to jump off a thirty foot
6:11
roof and Steve didn't want to do the stunt
6:13
himself.
6:14
And my dad was looking up there and said to Blake
6:16
Edwards, you know I could do that, and
6:19
the director Blake Edwards said yeah, but you don't
6:21
want to do it, do you? And he said, yeah, I'll
6:23
do it. I'm airborn rajor. I jumped from airplane
6:26
some thousands of feet.
6:27
Stanley made the jump, and as he was finishing
6:29
up the stunt, it became clear that he wasn't
6:31
the only visitor on the lot.
6:33
All of a sudden, this Rose Royce pulls up and
6:35
out of it comes Julie Andrews, and
6:38
my dad looks down there and says,
6:41
Julie Andrews Julia Hedgers and
6:44
Julie Andrews looked up and I guess asked who that was.
6:46
He said, oh, was a good bug. And
6:48
he said, oh my god, I wanted to meet you.
6:50
He says, well, here I am.
6:52
So Steve's dad got to play the hero and
6:54
meet his movie.
6:55
Idol, and that was a big kick
6:58
for me.
6:59
Steve's dad was a caring, positive guy
7:01
who also took great joy at his powerful
7:03
physique. But age and infirmity
7:05
pay little respect to such things.
7:07
He said, look at my thigh, Yes, look
7:10
how big my thighs are. And
7:12
I would say, dad, but you're still tough, Dad, You're
7:14
still tough.
7:15
Stanley was diagnosed with kidney failure, a
7:18
disease that immediately reversed the Gutenberg
7:20
family roles. Steve, along
7:22
with his sister were now cast as caregivers
7:25
with all the stress that entails.
7:27
And I was a reluctant caregiver because I didn't want
7:29
to see my dad like that.
7:33
As many of us know, being a caregiver
7:36
is very challenging.
7:37
Doctor Alissa Epple is one of many scientists
7:40
studying stress and caregivers.
7:43
It's a job that doesn't end twenty
7:45
four to seven, and that's because
7:47
we care so much, We're so connected
7:50
to another's well being, we feel responsible
7:52
for it, and that doesn't end.
7:55
Alyssa is a professor a UCSF
7:58
and the author of the Stress prescription seven
8:00
Days to More Joy and Ease. She
8:03
explained that caregivers, like so many of
8:05
us, are often harmed by the very biological
8:07
reaction that's supposed to help us.
8:10
Our stress response is the
8:13
only reason we're all here, the only reason
8:15
our ancestors have survived.
8:17
Thanks to those ancestors, we've inherited
8:19
a unique biological control center,
8:21
the autonomic nervous system, which
8:23
allows our brains to switch instantly from
8:26
normal processes like breathing or digesting
8:28
food, to the high energy fighter flight
8:30
activities we need for emergencies like
8:33
sprinting away from a tiger or punching an
8:35
attacker. Whenever our brains perceive
8:37
a threat, this fighter flight system kicks
8:39
into high gear. We breathe quicker,
8:41
our hearts pump faster, our pupils dilate,
8:44
and our brains release energy rich glucose
8:46
into the blood. This response allows
8:48
us to react faster, see better, and
8:51
summon the muscle power required to flee
8:53
or tackle an oncoming threat. Neuro
8:55
Scientists like to think of this fight or flight response
8:58
kind of like jamming your foot on a gas pedal,
9:00
and if the brain decides a particular threat isn't
9:03
going away, it will keep that response
9:05
pressed to the metal. That's when we launch
9:07
a hormone cyclone orem glands
9:09
release substances like cortisol, which
9:11
keep our energy up and our muscles at the ready
9:14
at least until the threat passes. And
9:17
that's when our brains finally hit the brakes.
9:19
We relax, our muscles and our bodies
9:21
switch back to running the normal rest and digest
9:23
processes we need for everyday life. The
9:26
problem is the modern world leaves
9:28
our fight or flight mode switched on way longer
9:31
than it should, which means our digestive,
9:33
sexual, and sleep functioning gets all screwed
9:35
up. We up our risk for high blood
9:37
pressure and headaches. We spend our days
9:40
feeling irritable and.
9:41
Anxious, our bodies really living
9:43
in a chronically aroused state
9:45
that we don't even notice anymore.
9:47
All this would be bad enough if we only freaked
9:49
out about our actual daily stressors, but
9:52
part of.
9:52
The problem with our stress
9:55
today is that we keep it alive with
9:57
our thoughts, because things aren't
10:00
always happening, but they can be
10:02
in our mind if we take them with us and
10:04
we ruminate about what's happened,
10:06
or we are worrying about what might happen
10:08
next, and we're all challenged
10:10
by that to some extent, and especially
10:12
right now, because things
10:15
are more unstable than they
10:17
used to be. We live in an unstable
10:19
climate, in an unstable political
10:21
world, and then we still have
10:24
our daily drama that we need
10:26
to cope with as well.
10:27
It's a lot, and as I have
10:29
definitely experienced in my own life, we
10:32
usually react to these daily mental dramas
10:34
in ways that make things even worse.
10:36
For so many of us, it really is about
10:39
rushing, about creating
10:41
a schedule that has no spaciousness
10:44
in it, that has no time for breaks,
10:46
and it doesn't match our value as usually
10:49
we don't have time for people, we don't
10:51
have time for health or eating
10:53
healthy meals. We no longer want
10:56
to eat normal food. We want to eat highly
10:59
palatable food, high sugar food,
11:01
high fat food, and for some of us, high
11:03
salt food. And we call this comfort food
11:05
because it is biologically
11:08
comforting to the body
11:10
and brain.
11:11
Ah comfort food, I could honestly
11:13
spend a whole episode in this series talking about
11:15
this happiness challenge. When my Yale
11:17
students disappeared during lockdown, I
11:20
comforted myself with whatever sugary food
11:22
looked good. I wound up putting on the so
11:24
called COVID nineteen pounds and then some
11:27
But Alyssa says, this wasn't a willpower
11:29
failure. It was just my basic biology
11:31
at work. Take one experiment in
11:34
which researchers stressed out a bunch of rats
11:36
and then gave them access not just to their
11:38
usual meals but also to human
11:40
junk food like cookies and candy. The
11:43
rats switched over to the fatty stuff, but
11:45
they also changed their approach to feeding time.
11:48
The addition of stress
11:50
on top of giving rats access
11:53
to oreos creates this
11:56
craving an addiction in these rats.
11:58
So each time they get access to the
12:00
oreos, they're not just eating leisurely
12:02
and saying, what a fine meal, this feels great.
12:05
They're binge eating. They will eat
12:07
more, and they'll develop greater or
12:09
intro abdominal fat, and that is just
12:11
a little disease making machine.
12:13
To have a lot of introbdominal fat means that
12:15
We're also having a lot of lipids
12:17
and our blood and insulin resistance. So
12:21
stress plus comfort food means
12:23
we're becoming more apple shaped in our body.
12:25
But chronic stress doesn't just change the size
12:27
of our mid sections, as my own heightened
12:30
CRP marker show, it can also affect
12:32
our immune systems.
12:33
Our immune cells have receptors for
12:36
cortisol, but when we're chronically
12:38
stressed and cortisol gets
12:41
too high, then the immune
12:43
cells are not turning off inflammation
12:46
in response to cortisol, and those
12:48
cells are more prone flammatory during
12:51
stress.
12:52
Chronic stress results in exactly the same inflammation
12:54
profile that I presented with at my doctor's
12:57
visit. What researchers are referring
12:59
to as inflammating chronic
13:02
stress also damages our DNA. It
13:04
destroys the part of our chromosomes that we need
13:06
for cell division.
13:07
What are known as teeling telomeres
13:10
are these caps at the tips of our chromosomes
13:14
and they protect our genes,
13:16
so they have this incredibly important role
13:18
in the cell. Telomeres are basically
13:20
the sentinels or these guards, and when
13:22
there's too much stress in the cell,
13:25
the telomeres tend to shorten
13:27
quickly. And more excessively.
13:30
Telomeres work like the plastic tip at the
13:32
top of our shoelaces, which the Internet
13:34
tells me is actually called an ag lit. Did
13:37
not know that. In any case, if you've
13:39
ever had a shoelace lose it zag lit, you
13:42
know what happens next. The lease starts
13:44
to fray and fall apart. Telomeres
13:46
at the top of a DNA strand work the same
13:49
way. When they get messed up, our
13:51
DNA winds up frayed and broken.
13:53
And once they get too short, they start
13:55
sending out distress signals saying
13:58
this cell is no longer good. We
14:00
got to call it quits. Time for this cell to
14:02
become senescent.
14:04
Dyeing sinescent cells, higher abdominal
14:07
fat levels, long standing anxiety,
14:09
irritability, inflammating, and
14:11
an increased risk for premature death. Apparently
14:15
this is where all my self imposed pressures over
14:17
the last few years have gotten me. At
14:19
this point in my conversation with Alyssa, things
14:21
were starting to sound kind of hopeless, but
14:23
Alyssa assured me that chronic stress doesn't
14:26
have to be a cellular death sentence. In
14:28
fact, her newest research has shown that healthier
14:31
stress responses are possible even
14:34
in a population that experiences some of
14:36
the hardest possible stressors.
14:38
We've learned more about chroduct stress from
14:40
these caregiving studies than other types
14:42
of stressors.
14:43
But what lessons can we learn from the painful
14:45
experience of stressed out caregivers. We'll
14:48
find out when the Happiness Lab returns from
14:50
the break.
14:59
When you were a caregiver, beautiful responsibility
15:01
to be more than a human being, you just
15:04
do.
15:04
When his father Stanley became ill, movie
15:06
star Steve Guttenberg was forced to trade
15:08
the glamor of Hollywood for the hard job
15:11
of a long term caretaker.
15:12
You have to be superhuman because
15:14
it takes a superhuman to clean somebody
15:17
up when they go to
15:19
the bathroom, when they
15:21
throw up, when they
15:23
have a seizure, when
15:25
they have bouts of true
15:27
darkness. You
15:30
have to be more than an average
15:32
human being.
15:33
Step and his sister joined the thirty four million
15:36
other Americans offering unpaid care
15:38
to an older person in need.
15:40
I would call them angels,
15:42
super angels, muscular,
15:45
strong, super powered
15:47
angels, because when you're looking
15:49
at somebody at two in the morning and they have to go to
15:51
the bathroom and you have to pick
15:53
them up out of bed and
15:56
they can't make it to the regular bathroom, and you have to
15:58
put them on their commode,
16:01
and you have to give them their privacy and
16:05
their dignity at the same time
16:07
being there to help them. You're
16:10
not a human being, You're way
16:12
above a human being, because
16:14
the average human being walks out of the
16:16
room. Can't do it, cannot
16:19
do it. Now, I'm not going to tell you that I didn't
16:21
have my moments of gagging and
16:26
dry eaving, because
16:29
some of it was really hard to watch. And I
16:31
feel my metal coming
16:33
up in me when I'm talking about this, because
16:36
you have to be made of metal to
16:39
deal with this.
16:41
The range of daily challenges that carers face
16:43
is immense medical bills,
16:45
dealing with hospitals and insurance companies,
16:48
negotiating time off work, and
16:50
that doesn't include the heartbreaking pain of
16:52
watching once healthy loved ones deteriorate.
16:55
The reason I wrote the book is caregiving
16:57
is a really lonely occupation.
17:00
You're basically sitting in the room with that one
17:02
person who's very ill, and
17:05
you're looking at them constantly,
17:08
monitoring their health well and seeing
17:10
what you can do for them, and at the same
17:12
time, you're trying to figure out your
17:14
own life and what you're doing with it
17:17
and what you have to give
17:19
up to be part of
17:23
this process.
17:24
The problems caregivers contend with can
17:27
last day after day after day, and
17:29
as doctor Elyssa Epple explained earlier,
17:32
such sustained stress can be really bad
17:34
for our bodies. Melissa likes to
17:36
point to one caregiver study in particular.
17:38
Showing that their wounds
17:41
heal almost ten days longer
17:44
than low stress age
17:46
matched older controls, And
17:48
that really is about the chronic
17:50
stress response, the excesses
17:52
of the exposure to cortisol.
17:54
It wouldn't be surprising if Steve Gutenberg's
17:56
cortisol levels were through the roof during his
17:58
time as a caregiver. Steve was
18:00
living in LA when his father was diagnosed
18:02
with renal failure, so taking care
18:04
of him meant regular drives to his father's
18:07
house in Arizona mile.
18:09
Round trip every week. And I started
18:11
listening to podcasts or music, but
18:14
quickly I stopped and just started thinking.
18:17
So what I would think about was
18:19
when my dad was younger, and my
18:21
dad was really fit and young
18:24
and healthy and enthusiastic,
18:27
sitting.
18:27
Behind the wheel for long hours isn't ideal,
18:30
but ruminating about his father's physical
18:32
decline during those long drives was bound
18:34
to trigger even more stress.
18:36
My dad was in such pain, physical
18:39
pain, mental pain, he did not want
18:42
to die.
18:44
Steve says his father's final years were
18:46
the most depressing period of his entire
18:48
life. And Steve's not alone. It's
18:51
estimated that half of caregivers have major
18:54
depression, a rate that's twice
18:56
as high as the general population. Even
18:58
more shockingly, twelve percent of dementia
19:01
caregivers die before their sick loved.
19:03
One one study estimated that
19:05
a caregiver's mortality risk was sixty
19:07
three percent higher than they're not caregiving peers.
19:10
With stats like these, it's probably not
19:12
surprising that many caregivers like Steve
19:15
wind up neglecting their own self care.
19:17
It fell by the wayside. I
19:19
did not exercise for so many years.
19:22
I didn't sleep very well at all. There
19:25
was about a month before
19:27
he passed where he would be up all night,
19:31
that he would be screaming
19:34
all night. So my self
19:36
care did go to the side.
19:39
But researcher Alyssa Apple has found that not
19:41
all caregivers succumbed to the effects of stress.
19:44
The good news is that there
19:46
are ways to
19:48
be with this life
19:51
situation.
19:52
Alissa studied caregivers telomeres, that
19:54
part of our DNA that gets prematurely shortened
19:57
by chronic stress. She found
19:59
that many of her subjects telomeres were badly
20:01
affected. They showed all the expected
20:03
hallmarks of inflammating, but
20:05
the telomeres of some caregivers were fine.
20:08
Even though the these people face the same stresses
20:10
as those with the shortened tail of mirrors, their bodies
20:13
weren't affected in the same way. How
20:15
is that possible? Alyssa discovered
20:17
that one factor was the narrative these caregivers
20:20
created to explain the difficulties they were facing.
20:23
The healthier caregivers embraced what's known
20:25
as radical acceptance.
20:27
I don't control outcomes. I don't
20:29
control the disease course. I don't control
20:31
someone else's behavior. I can
20:34
control X and Y. So really
20:36
separating out a situation to
20:38
understand there is a little bit
20:41
that we can control. We can control our response,
20:43
and we can do things to show
20:45
compassion, to be with
20:47
someone with a loving presence, spend
20:50
our time with them showing that we care. There
20:52
are ways that we can be
20:55
our best self in these uncontrollable
20:57
situations that allow
20:59
us to not be in
21:01
this chronically stressed
21:03
state of striving, of
21:06
hitting a brick wall.
21:07
If you're a caregiver, you might be saying, well,
21:09
that's easier said than done. Radical
21:12
acceptance was definitely something Steve
21:14
Gutenberg struggled with.
21:16
I was reluctant to accept the reality
21:18
of the situation. I just couldn't accept
21:20
it. I wouldn't accept it. Everyone
21:22
else knew my dad was dying. I
21:25
knew it, but wouldn't accept it, so I never talked
21:27
about it. I always said, he's going to get better,
21:29
He's going to come through this, even at the very end.
21:32
Alyssa shared one strategy we can use
21:34
to bring a healthier narrative to times of stress.
21:37
We can try out what's known as expressive
21:39
writing. Take time to journal about
21:41
all the crap on your plate and how
21:43
it makes you feel.
21:45
I suggest just starting off with a
21:48
massive list without any editing
21:51
or censoring, just writing down everything
21:54
that you feel bothered by, worried
21:56
by, pressured by, and
21:59
then thinking about your day. You know what stresses
22:01
you out most during the day. We often
22:04
don't give ourselves the opportunity to step
22:06
back and reflect on the
22:08
level that we're carrying.
22:10
The act of putting all your stresses down on paper
22:13
can also reveal all the things you're doing that
22:15
inadvertently add to your stress levels.
22:17
We're very routine animals, you know. We get
22:19
into this I'll call it a daily
22:21
stress routine, and we can
22:24
break that routine. We can see where
22:26
we're creating unnecessary stress.
22:29
You can then take stock of all the neglected stuff
22:31
you can control about your situation practices
22:34
like sleep, or food or time with friends.
22:37
You can also take some time to count your blessings.
22:39
Gratitude, it turns out, is a powerful tool
22:42
for tackling stress. Fortunately,
22:44
this was a practice that did come naturally for
22:46
caregivers. Steve Gutenberg his dad
22:49
was a gratitude role model.
22:50
Oh yeah, my dad was grateful for
22:52
anything. Had told
22:54
get a cup of coffee. H coffee.
22:58
My dad taught me, you know, Stephen,
23:01
enjoy your life. Enjoy
23:03
your life. Be
23:06
happy. That's it. Just
23:08
be happy. Everything else
23:11
will come.
23:12
Steve called his book a Time to Think,
23:14
because in spite of his father's difficult illness,
23:17
he still managed to remember all the many
23:19
ways in which he was fortunate.
23:21
Thank god I have a job that
23:23
I could stop and just sit
23:26
there with my dad all the time. How
23:28
lucky I was that I
23:30
didn't have to be in some office hearing
23:32
about my dad on the telephone.
23:34
Steve hated seeing Stanley's physical decline,
23:37
but the time Steve spent with his dad in those
23:39
final months allowed him to remember
23:41
the dead of gratitude. He owed the old man.
23:44
I think gratitude it's a verb. I
23:47
think like love is a verb. You
23:50
know. My dad used to say to me, you could either
23:52
love someone or you can love someone
23:55
and show up. You know. That's that's
23:57
gratitude. That's gratitude.
23:59
That's the deep part of gratitude.
24:01
Research shows that strategies like gratitude
24:03
and radical acceptance can protect us
24:05
from the negative effects of chronic stress.
24:08
But as I read through a list is work, I learned
24:10
one additional way to handle stress that sounded
24:12
kind of odd. It turns out we
24:14
can fight stress by looking for new chances
24:17
to get stressed out. This is the insight
24:19
behind what effective scientists call hermetic
24:22
stress.
24:23
Her Medic stress is absolutely
24:25
fascinating because it's so counterintuitive.
24:28
We know very well from
24:31
fly studies that organisms
24:34
like a little shock of moderate
24:37
repeated stress, and in fact
24:39
it's strengthening. It's like a vaccination,
24:42
so it really is building up biological
24:45
resistance. It's exercise for our
24:47
nervous system.
24:48
What you're looking to create is a short episode
24:50
of stress, something that will get your heart
24:52
racing and blood pumping, but also
24:55
an episode that you can stop so
24:57
you can train your autonomic nervous system to
24:59
go back into recovery mode. And
25:01
it doesn't have to involve finding true fight
25:03
or flight danger. Hermetic stress
25:05
can be way easier than that.
25:07
The best example, of course, is extra and
25:09
we know exercise is good for our health, but
25:11
we haven't thought about the fact that short
25:14
bursts of exercise are creating that
25:16
positive hormetic stress response.
25:18
One study found that caretakers who were asked
25:20
to exercise three to five times a week showed
25:23
less short in telomeres than those who didn't
25:25
move their bodies. The blast of stress
25:27
that comes from exercise seems to slow
25:29
down and possibly even reverse the
25:32
effects of inflammating Exercise
25:34
was another strategy that came easily to the Gutenberg
25:37
family. When Steve's great grandfather
25:39
first came to the US, his physical fitness
25:41
came in handy.
25:42
What he would do for extra money is he would go down to the
25:44
Brooklyn Bridge and he feats of strength.
25:47
He would carry people on his dock.
25:49
He would carry huge weights and
25:51
at the end he had a Shetland pony and
25:53
he would pick up this little Shetland party walk around
25:55
it.
25:56
Steve's grandfather was a powerlifter who
25:58
then passed on the jim bug to his son Stanley.
26:00
My dad started lifting weights when he
26:03
was twelve years old. My dad
26:05
was a handstand king. My dad
26:07
could do a handstand for by four straight.
26:10
As a skinny teen, Steve turned to his dad
26:12
for exercise tips. Under Stanley's
26:14
tutelage, Steve was able to put on fifty
26:17
pounds of muscle. I'm building a
26:19
mean, lean monster, his dad had announced
26:21
proudly. But like many stressed
26:23
out folks, Steve let his usual exercise
26:25
routine slide at exactly the time
26:27
he needed it most. As Steve
26:29
explained just how infrequently he hit the gym
26:32
during his time as a caretaker, I felt
26:34
a bit called out. I mean I
26:36
rarely make my yoga classes or hit
26:38
the elliptical. What I'm feeling frantic, but
26:41
Ironically, a jolt of hermetic stress was
26:43
probably the perfect remedy for the strain I
26:45
was under. But giving our bodies additional
26:48
bursts of stress to fight stress isn't
26:50
even the most surprising way we can protect ourselves
26:52
from chronic overwhelm. We also
26:55
need to train our brains to think differently
26:57
about stress. I'll explain
26:59
more when the happiness Lab returns after
27:01
the break. What
27:08
someone says they're feeling stressed, we usually
27:10
assume that they're having a bad time. My
27:13
own periods of stress are accompanied by yucky
27:15
feelings like irritability, interrupted
27:17
sleep, digestive issues, and a sort
27:19
of forehead clenching. Feeling
27:21
stressed sucks, and I usually
27:24
just wish that I could avoid it.
27:25
Your heart is facing your pomps or sweaty or butterflies
27:28
in your stomach, so of course, in that circumstance,
27:30
it feels like self evidence the stress is bad.
27:33
Right, This is ut Austin psychologist
27:35
David Yeager.
27:36
Your stress could be viewed in a
27:38
debilitating way that it's a
27:41
sign your body is preparing for damage and defeat.
27:43
Who wants damage and defeat? Seems
27:45
like we're all agreed. Then stress sucks.
27:48
But David says that's not the whole story.
27:51
There are lots of times when we face a stressor
27:54
and we're thrilled and excited, and
27:56
that energy allows us to show what
27:58
we know. I mean, if you talk to great athletes, right, they
28:00
talk about performing at the level of your preparation,
28:03
and one of the ways they do that is they kind of get in a zone
28:05
in their heads and they're like amped up before
28:08
a performance, right. And so in
28:10
those cases, that's a much better situation to
28:12
be in than to have no stress at all, where you're
28:14
like about to fall asleep.
28:15
David is an expert on the power of mindsets,
28:18
the beliefs we have about things like our abilities
28:20
and how our brains respond to challenges. David's
28:23
work has shown that how we think about things
28:25
has a huge impact on how we behave His
28:28
early research focused on what's known as
28:30
the growth mindset, the belief that
28:32
our abilities and talents can improve over time
28:35
if we're willing to put in some work in practice.
28:37
But these days David has started thinking about
28:40
a different type of mindset, the beliefs
28:42
we have about the effects of stress.
28:44
If we think about stress is terrible, we
28:47
may behave in ways that lead us to suffer. But
28:49
if we greet stress as a potential friend,
28:51
couldn't improve our lives. Researchers
28:54
have begun conducting some elegant laboratory
28:56
experiments to test this possibility. But
28:59
David's favorite illustration of the importance of
29:01
our stress mindset occurred when he was
29:03
on vacation with his daughters.
29:04
Scarlet, we when water
29:07
skiing in Wisconsin, and she'd never keep She's
29:09
a fourth or fifth grader, and She's sitting there
29:11
bobbing in the lake and I'm holding
29:13
the back of her skis and she says,
29:16
Daddy, I'm so nervous. I have butterflies on my stomach.
29:18
I don't think I can do this. And
29:20
I was like, well, Scarlet, you know that
29:23
that's stress and that energy that's just getting
29:25
oxygenated blood to your muscles and your brain,
29:27
and those muscles with that oxygenated
29:30
blood are going to be stronger. You can hold onto
29:32
the rope a little more, and once you do that, you're
29:34
gonna pop up and just have the most fun of your life and it's
29:36
gonna be thrilling. And what
29:38
I was doing was just giving
29:40
her a different way of appraising or making meaning
29:43
out of that bodily experience. She's
29:45
like, okay, and she got
29:47
right up and I just stayed there bobbing in the water
29:49
for I don't know, twenty minutes. Well, she just did laughs
29:51
around this lake in Wisconsin.
29:53
Justice Scarlet initially interpreted her stress
29:55
response as a signal that she shouldn't
29:57
try water skiing. David says that many
30:00
of us greet the early signs of stress the wrong
30:02
way.
30:03
In general and society, people tend to have a stress
30:05
is debilitating mindset. You see that
30:07
if you just google image s, stress
30:10
and well being memes, they all take this
30:12
assumption that stress is always bad and should
30:14
be avoided. Right. It's like depleting
30:16
you. It is something that you need to
30:18
suppress. Most people are convinced there's
30:20
only one way to look at stress, which is that it's always bad,
30:22
and when they do that, it spirals on itself
30:25
and it becomes self confirming for them. But
30:27
we know from just basic science
30:29
of stress in both animals and humans that
30:31
the stress response is simply there to keep us
30:33
alive, to overcome and meet the demands
30:36
that are imposed on us. And so there's
30:38
a different kind of mindset or belief you can have
30:40
about stress, which is the stress can be enhancing
30:42
mindset.
30:43
Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb was
30:45
the first to show the harmful effects of the wrong
30:47
stress mindset. She found that people
30:50
who expected stress to be debilitating experienced
30:52
more anxiety and lower happiness ratings
30:55
than people who thought stress was enhancing. The
30:57
people she studied who believed that stress was good
30:59
for them also showed more optimism,
31:02
better performance at work, and even better physical
31:04
health. Crumb's work showed it's
31:06
not our stress that seems to be hurting us, it's
31:08
how we think about it, which got David
31:10
wondering could people shift from one
31:13
stress mindset to the other, just as
31:15
he did with Scarlet at the Lake? Could David encourage
31:17
people to reframe how they saw stress.
31:20
Could you just tell
31:22
people what their physiology means
31:25
one way or the other and could that change their
31:27
performance when they're in a stressful situation.
31:30
David and a colleague, Jeremy Jamison, recruited
31:32
college students planning to take the Jerry Exam
31:35
and presented them with a practice version of the test.
31:38
Everyone was reminded that it's normal for people
31:40
to feel stressed out before an exam. Behalf
31:43
of participants were given a list of reasons
31:45
why their stress response might improve their performance.
31:48
You know, the bodies releasing catecola means and those catacola
31:50
means are going to enhance performance. And the
31:52
reason your heart is pumping so much is because it's
31:54
getting more blood to your brain and to your muscles.
31:56
It's going to help you perform better.
31:58
The results were striking. Students who
32:00
reappraised their stress response as beneficial
32:02
showed way better scores than those in the control
32:05
condition. On some parts of the exam,
32:07
their scores were more than one hundred points higher.
32:10
But the interesting thing is that a month later students
32:12
went and took the real gre and brought their scores
32:14
back, and they did much better. The difference
32:17
is like the difference between getting into a mid
32:19
tier top fifty graduate program or a top five
32:21
graduate program.
32:22
But GIRE exams are acute stressors.
32:25
David wanted to know whether the same mindset shift
32:27
could also reduce the chronic stress that
32:29
dogs people like me day after day. So
32:32
he turned to a group of high school students from
32:34
low income backgrounds.
32:36
And these are almost exclusively black or Latino students
32:38
whose parents had not gone to college. And we explicitly
32:41
wanted to choose this situation because
32:43
we know kids experienced lots of stressors.
32:46
They might experience racial discrimination, prejudice,
32:49
but also for kids whose parents are experiencing
32:51
poverty, food and security, things like that, So
32:54
could a little mindset shift have
32:56
an impact in that kind of population.
32:58
David's students watched a thirty minute video that
33:01
explained both the importance of a growth mindset
33:03
and why stress can have beneficial effects
33:06
on performance. Would this be enough
33:08
to change how they great stress? Would
33:10
the video help students react better to the annoying
33:12
challenges of everyday life.
33:14
So, over the course of the first semester of high school
33:16
kids completed daily diary surveys
33:18
three times a day, provided cortisol samples
33:21
several times per day, And what we find
33:23
is that on days in which kids say, yeah,
33:25
this is a really stressful day, like I'm
33:27
feeling judged and evaluated by my teachers, I'm feeling
33:29
left out by my friends, kids were saying
33:32
I can handle this, I'm feeling good about
33:34
myself, I feel positive. So it's
33:36
by definition stress resilience. And
33:39
then what we see also is just lower cortisol
33:41
levels almost across the board and That's significant
33:43
because the body produces cortisol in part
33:45
when the mind expects damaged tissue,
33:47
and so if you are expecting defeat,
33:50
then you see increase in cortisol. But if
33:52
you're expecting to do well to take
33:54
on the challenge, then you should see less cortisol. And
33:56
that's what we see over the rest of
33:58
the semester.
34:00
This is an amazing finding. By
34:02
merely thinking of stress not as a prelude
34:04
to damage and defeat, but is something helpful
34:06
and useful, You can prevent your boy
34:09
from chronically releasing the very substances
34:12
that cause the inflammating effects usually
34:14
experienced by stressed out people like me. That
34:17
is really cool, But there is
34:19
a trick to getting the benefits of the right stress
34:21
mindset. You need to practice long
34:23
term. You need to carry over that
34:25
positive mindset from one situation to the
34:27
next. So if you train yourself to appreciate
34:29
exam stress, you need to return to that
34:31
same positive mindset when your car breaks down,
34:34
or when you lose your wallet, or when you face a tough
34:36
meeting at work. Again, David's
34:38
daughter Scarlet is there to show us the way. Remember
34:41
the mindset pep talk David gave Scarlet
34:43
before she went water skiing.
34:45
Fast forward two years later and she's getting in
34:47
the car on the way to a cello audition. She's
34:50
like, Daddy, I'm so nervous, Like I don't
34:52
know if I can do well in this. I was like, Scarlett, you know what I'm
34:54
going to say. She's like, yeah, you're going to say
34:56
that. The butterflies on my stomach are there just
34:58
to pump, you know, good energy through my body
35:00
and give me adrenaline and oxygen et cetera, et cetera.
35:02
I was like, how did you know that? She's
35:05
like, oh, you total to me two years ago whenever we're
35:07
skiing. And so what I love about
35:09
that is, first of all, it's proof that at least
35:11
once in my life, my kids listen to me, which is not
35:14
always happening. But second of all, she's
35:16
transferring some appraisal
35:19
about her stress to a totally different situation
35:22
years later. And I think about that a lot. With our
35:24
interventions, we're often like giving
35:27
you a different mindset right before
35:29
you need it, and there's some stressful situation,
35:31
and then you kind of see that it works for
35:34
you, and then you carry
35:36
that new mindset with you and apply it
35:38
to new situations, and I knew
35:40
that from our research, but I'd never seen that firsthand
35:42
until the scarlet situation happened.
35:46
Making this episode has made me realize that I'm
35:49
way too negative about stress. I can
35:51
remember lots of times in my own life when
35:53
small bursts of stress have felt good. That
35:56
rush I get before a big talk, or
35:58
that push I experienced during a tough yoga
36:00
session. The adrenaline I experience
36:02
in those moments doesn't feel stressful or debilitating.
36:05
It feels exciting. A reaction's
36:07
going to help me perform better. I
36:10
need to harness that and apply it across
36:12
other situations in life. Our
36:14
daily stressors probably aren't going away anytime
36:16
soon, but that doesn't mean we're stuck experiencing
36:19
the negative health and happiness effects of chronic
36:21
stress. We can examine our feelings
36:24
and create a narrative that lets us accept the
36:26
things we're not able to control, while
36:28
at the same time trying to control the stuff
36:30
that will help us improve our lives. All
36:32
those self care essentials like sleep, exercise,
36:35
diet, and social interaction, and
36:37
like Steve Gutenberg, we can work to greet
36:39
tough times with gratitude and seize
36:42
the opportunity to notice the blessings
36:44
in life. With strategies like these,
36:46
I'm hopeful that my inflammation markers
36:48
will be a bit lower at my next annual checkup,
36:51
and that my doctor will have fewer opportunities
36:53
to mock me for not practicing what I preach.
36:56
But there are still plenty of other happiness challenges
36:59
that I still mess up. So join me
37:01
next time as I learn some new strategies
37:03
for being nicer to my future self, ones
37:06
that involve a trip down memory lane and
37:08
through a ton I realized my
37:10
skin would look so bad. That's
37:13
really disturbing all
37:15
that next week on the Happiness Lab with me
37:18
Doctor Laurie Santos
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