Hidden Brain - Waiting Games

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

For so many people across the globe, 2020 has been a year of waiting and uncertainty. Waiting to see friends and family in far-flung locales. Waiting to hear about unemployment aid, or job opportunities. Waiting to hear about loved ones in the hospital. And even though the end of 2020 does not mean the end of these hardships, many of us are letting out a sigh of relief as we say goodbye to this difficult year. This week on Hidden Brain, we look at the psychology of relief and waiting, and how we can make periods of limbo less painful.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanthan. Hundreds of millions of people have spent the last year waiting. Waiting for it to be safe to enter workplaces. Waiting to see if loved ones will survive their stay in a hospital. Waiting to see if lost jobs will return. Perhaps you have caught yourself daydreaming about the moment everything returns to normal, when we can go about our lives without masks, sit in a crowded theater without worry, meet friends in our homes without fear.

What will it feel like that day? Will there be a surge of joy? Or will it be better sweet? This week on Hidden Brain, the agony of waiting and the strange things that happen in our minds when we experience relief. In books and movies, the experience of relief usually follows a period of waiting. We're going to mix up that order on today's show. We'll look at relief first, and later in the show we'll explore the psychology of waiting

and what new research reveals about how we can wait well. Our story about relief comes from Jamie Spurway. For five years, Jamie walked as a tour guide, mostly in the Middle East in Europe, but also in South Africa. One of the places he often brought to us was called the Garden Route, where the safaris boast an incredible range of big game. You're seeing an extraordinary array of animals, zebra, giraffe, rhino, hippopotamus, impala. Jamie typically shepherded groups around in land rovers. They were completely open on the sides.

No glass, no metal, no doors. You just put your hand out and there's air. So you feel close to the animals in a way that is exciting but can also be quite scary at moments as well because there's no sense really of anything in particular protecting you from them. Jamie understood that this thrill was what paying customers were looking for. They wanted to get a feeling of being out in nature, among animals large enough to kill them, but without real risk. The chance an animal would attack was small, but there were occasional reminders that this was not just an excursion to the zoo.

One of the landraovers that we used had a slightly sort of V-shaped dent in its front where one of the rhino in their park had in the past charged their vehicle and it just shows you the enormous weight of a mountain behind an animal like a rhino that it was able to leave this the significant size dent in the in the front of the car. As a failed safe, Jamie got used to having a rifle on hand for many trips. But not all of them. On one trip in 2005, his company contracted Safari Rangers to help with transportation and security. At the beginning of the trip, Jamie noticed something unusual about the Rangers assigned to his group. In the two parks that we visited in the garden route,

Safari Rangers didn't have a weapon at all. So it was always in the back of my mind this sense of, okay, I've been trained in recognizing that there may be the need to use a rifle to defend your group of travelers, of tourists, and then in these particular Safari parks, that means of last resort wasn't there. It seemed not necessary to bring this up since the trip was going great.

No charging rhinos, no rampaging hippos, no need for guns. One day the group was in a safari park. There were too many people to fit into one vehicle, so Jamie split them between two land rovers He rode in one with a driver and a set of parents and their young kids While the rest went in a second land rover. They all had a great time for several hours Finally as the sun was beginning to slip over the horizon It was time for one last animal encounter It was time to see the lions. So we went into the lion

area towards dusk because they're very sleepy during the day but they start to get more active as the sun goes down. The other land rover was just ahead of them when they got to the area with the lions. We pulled up just kind of behind the other vehicle, switched off our engines straight away because that's always the practice as soon as you switch off the engine the animals stop paying any attention to you. And what we were observing at first was, I almost want to say it was flirtation between the alpha lion and a lioness who was on the other side of the fence, so actually in another safari park. And I've never seen a lion behave in the way that this lioness was behaving.

If a lioness could blow kissies, this lioness would have been blowing kissies. She was very clearly flirting, and the alpha male on our side was pacing up and down. It was very clear that he wanted to get through that fence, but there was there was nothing he could do So he was looking very frustrated and in addition to him there's four sub adult males Essentially like a teenager very close to fully grown, but not actually yet a full adult For a while the tourists and the two vehicles sat quietly and watched the lions ignored them They saw tourists come and go every day. The alpha male had by this point wandered off.

I think he'd just got, you know, sick of this, seen as annoyed by the frustration of not being able to get to the other side. If he could go for a cold shower, that's what he would have been a way to do. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha So now all it is is us and these four sub-adult lions, all male as I remember them. And what we were observing was really that they were playing like kittens. And the comparison to kittens, of course, is wrong in the sense of size. I mean, these are very, very much lion-sized kittens, but it looked very, very cute.

And most of the reactions from my tourists are a remember where they're kind of awe, you know, isn't that adorable to watch what they were doing. And I suspect that we in that moment didn't really even think of them any longer as lions. Eventually, the other Land Rover headed back to base for dinner. But Jamie's group wanted to stay a bit longer to watch the big kitten's play. The kids were excited. It was all very charming. After a while though, people started to get hungry.

So our guide, who I remember is quite a young man, who maybe in his early 20s, said, okay folks, what do you think? Shall we head back for dinner? The group said, yeah, yeah, okay, let's do that. So he goes to turn on the engine, to turn the ignition. And there's that sound that all of us recognise, but in this moment meant something quite different from usual. So the engine did that noise of it trying to turn over, but it didn't start. And I can't tell you how obvious the impact on the lions was. Suddenly all four of them turn around.

Oh! Staring straight at us. Suddenly it goes from adorable and cute and fun and relax to, oh look, they're looking at us. All of a sudden, the open sides of Land Rover, started to fear rather make it. We're in this vehicle, it's open sighted and there's four lions very much intently staring at us. Then the driver did what we were told never ever do, not only did he stand up in the vehicle, he got out of the vehicle and he opens

up the hood. And now the lions are pacing towards us. Very slowly but still with absolutely clear intent, they're stalking us, perhaps stalking him. They just look like kittens a few moments before. Now, they looked like adult lions. Like apex predator. Inside the Land Rover, Jamie was feeling increasingly nervous. But he didn't want to communicate his misgivings to the kids. Or even to himself. I think that I was processing it even in the moment as, oh no, this is fine, this is safe,

and telling myself they're sub-adults, they're not fully grown, and telling myself we're in a vehicle, doing this sort of self-talk that is to keep me just away from the edge of actual terror. from the edge of actual terror. It took a child to voice aloud what Jamie was thinking. The youngest in the group, I remember her really expressing that child's sense of, mommy, daddy, is this okay?

That's it, you know, I can see the lion's coming towards us. Jamie tried to keep calm, but his body didn't feel calm. My heart was starting to beat quickly. I was getting that dry mouth, sweaty palms, the stomachs sort of churning. The lions were closing in, scattered in a crescent around the land rover. They were about 25 feet away.

They're low to the ground. Their movements are careful and slow. I mean, we've all seen this in wildlife documentaries. When an animal is stalking its prey, it moves slowly to avoid the risk of startling the prey away, of scaring the prey away. So they're moving very slowly, inching towards us.

But the gap is constantly closing, and you're seeing, as you're looking out at these lines, increasing detail in their faces. I wouldn't say that I did get the point of seeing the whites of their eyes, but I do remember a sense of just seeing this sort of burning intensity in their eyes, because they were, they didn't, they looked like they weren't blinking sort of burning intensity in their eyes, because they were, they

didn't, they looked like they weren't blinking as if everything in their beings was focused on us. Finally, the driver got back in the vehicle. To Jamie, it seemed blindingly obvious what the driver needed to do. Call for help. Like now. So I said to some words along the lines of, so I think it's best just in case, you know, just in case that you contact the base and let them know what's happened.

I was trying to pick my words in a way that we convey to him a level of urgency, but not convey to the children the level of anxiety that I was starting to to feel. The driver finally got the hint. He radioed back to base and asked for help. Jamie and the driver and the parents and kids watched the lion slowly close in. It couldn't have taken more than a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity before the other land rover got to them. When he arrived, the driver of the other vehicle revbed his engine

and drove circles around Jamie's Land Rover. This made the lions pull back a bit, but they showed no signs of giving up. They would be scared back and then they would immediately turn around and fix their attention on this again. So it was really not a long-term solution. After a few concentric circles, the other driver pulled up in front of Jamie's Land Rover. Then, both drivers got out of their vehicles and started to attach a tow rope between the Landrovers. So then we've got the same problem. We're back to the beginning because now we've got two people out of the vehicles

and they're attaching the tow rope between us and the Land Rover in front. The Lions meanwhile were inching ever closer. So by the time both of the drivers got back into their vehicle to start up the engine and try to pull us to safety, they're very close to us, as close as they'd ever been before, but perhaps sort of 10 feet or so away from us. And when the driver in front starts up his engine, thankfully his engine worked fine, and he starts to pull forward to take up the strain between the two vehicles. There's this crack, and it's the tow rope snapping with a strain of trying to pull our

vehicle. As soon as there's that noise, all four lions sprint towards us. Everyone's screaming, but they run between the two vehicles. They don't come for any of us. The lead lion picks up the tour open his mouth, sprints off into the jungle, and the three other lions follow him. All this happened in seconds. And in those seconds, Jamie and the others experienced a range of emotions. First dread, then terror, and almost instantaneously after the lions disappeared, euphoria.

I remember the tension that had been so strong before, just breaking, and suddenly people shifting very quickly from having just screamed a second ago to laughter, because you're still in such an elevated state. There's still so much adrenaline going through your body that I suppose it's not natural to just go, oh, okay, well that's done now. Already, the meaning of what had just happened was changing. I remember having a sense of being physically shaken, as in my hands shaking still from it, but there's just being so quickly a sense of not only are we safe now, but

that was already quite a hilarious experience, quite a funny and positive the exciting rather than terrifyingly exciting experience. And really striking how quickly the mood shifted that way. Something else was curious. When the group got back to base and sat down to dinner with the rest of the party, the emotional texture of what happened changed, as the tourists told one another the story. It went from being the most scary part of the trip to being the absolute highlight. People's memory of it was, that was amazing. That was, that was amazing. That was that was fantastic. And actually the other group when we got back

Safe and sound to the center and had our dinner with them On hearing the stories many of the kids were quite jealous the kids in the other group because they hadn't had this close brush that we'd had The way that we suddenly process it in such a different way is kind of fascinating. How is it a situation can be pure terror and then moments later, a fun story you tell over dinner? What happens in our minds as we brace for the worst and then suddenly find ourselves released from fear. That's when we come back. I remember having a sense of being physically shaken, as it might be, you know, my hands shaking still from it, but there's just being so quickly a sense of not only are we safe now, but that was already quite a hilarious experience, you know, quite a funny and positive the exciting rather than terrifyingly exciting experience.

In the seconds after Jamie's spurways near brush were death, the mood in the land Rover shifted from pure terror to manic laughter. Why does this happen? Psychologist Kate Sweeney has thought a lot about this question. She remembers one time she was driving with family along a steep cliff in Norway. She was in the backseat and at one point, they got dangerously close to the edge. At the very last moment, they pulled back to safety. I started laughing hysterically and emphasis on the hysterical part of it. Obviously nothing about this was at all amusing, and I truly believed any moment that the edge was going to go

and off we would be. Happily for Kate and her family, the cliff edge held. And as soon as they were down the mountain, Kate felt something nearly identical to Jamie's emotion after his brush with the lions. Euphoria. From the moment we got off of the cliff edge, really through that evening,

and really, really for the next few days, we were all just feeling so gleeful that we were alive. And I'm thinking of something that I think is attributed to Winston Churchill at one point. He said, nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without effect. And he was talking about going up to the front and feeling bullets whizzing by him, but

not actually getting hit by them. So the sense that you've come close to something terrible, but it hasn't happened, doesn't just leave us feeling, okay, we're fine, let's move on, it leaves us feeling almost exhilarated. What do you think that's about? I think that one of the things that happens when we have a near-death experience is that your physical system, all of your physiology, is on alert. Everything is narrowed, focused, to make sure that you address the threat at hand. Your heart rate is up.

Everything is amped up on 11. That doesn't just go away once the threat is gone. You kind of have this still very heightened physical and emotional kind of experience that is kind of floating around in your body now without much of a target. And so I think one of the things that seems to happen certainly from my own experience and from some research is that the momentum is still there but it

kind of changes the direction. And so now it's directed towards immense relief and inhalation rather than terror. But the physical feeling is not entirely different. Intense terror and intense relief might seem like very different emotions, but they have something in common. They are both intense. The emotional overlap between the two might partly be explained by the fact

that our brain categorizes feelings into two groups. Higher rousal and lower rousal. So, for example, excitement and terror don't look that different in the body, and so it's relatively easy then to switch from one to the other. This might explain why Jamie's group shifted so quickly from screaming to uncontrollable laughter, from terror to euphoria. But it's worth noting something here. The euphoria we feel after a near miss, it's not pure joy.

It is often an unpleasant aftertaste attached to this particular high. It's not just you know the heights of pleasure but there typically is also a sense of it's almost like an after version of dread like wow that was close I really don't want to ever get that close again and and it kind of sticks in your mind even though you're obviously quite pleased that the outcome didn't occur. Can you stay with that idea moment because that idea is so fascinating?

Because simultaneously, we have a sense of elation and perhaps euphoria. But it's not something that we say, this felt euphoric, I want to do it again. When we have these moments, we never sort of say I want to do it again, even though it feels euphoric afterwards, which speaks to what you're talking about, which is the euphoria is tinged in some ways with dread. Absolutely. So, you know, one of the things that's kind of at the core of most people's thinking about emotions

is this idea that feeling is for doing. In other words, the emotions, we have emotions because they are motivating, they help us to survive functionally or to be well, in many cases. And so we can only ever guess at the evolutionary roots of specific emotions, but our best guess with that sort of relief is that it is meant to be sort of rewarding in the sense that it's usually thought of as a positive emotion because we didn't have the bad thing happen. We did something right that helped us survive. And so, that's a good thing, but you also probably got way too close for comfort if you're having that feeling.

And so, it is adaptive, essentially, for relief to both feel good, reward the thing you did right, but also draw your attention towards the very distinct possibility that it could have gone a different way so that you can avoid such a close call in the future. As kids tell you the phenomenon of relief, she began to realize there was more than one kind of relief. We've looked at the hue that was close kind of relief,

the kind that we often associate with close calls and near misses. But there's also another kind that makes you go, finally, thank heavens. It turns out this form of relief has an entirely different psychological signature. Kate has a story from her own life that reveals this other dimension of relief. Some years ago, she planned a trip with her husband and her parents to Iceland. She was incredibly excited about the trip and didn't want to leave anything to chance. She planned every detail. And as part of the planning, I had been really nagging. I'll confess my husband to confirm that his passport wasn't expired because he hadn't traveled in quite some time. I had

traveled more recently overseas. And, you know, just trying to get my goat. He kind of refused to show me his passport. So he knew full well it wasn't expired, but he was sort of enjoying getting me riled up about it. So that had been the state of affairs for a few months. The morning before they fly out of LA, Kate logged on to the airline's website to check in. A message popped up on her screen. This really unusual message that I'd never seen before that said something about passport exploration. And I thought, well, no, this can't be right. I've been very clear about

whose passports are and are not expired. Kate checked her passport for the hundredth time. It wasn't expired. In fact, it wasn't going to expire until three months after her trip. So why was she still getting that computer message? And so I did some hunting around, some fairly or increasingly panic, hunting around, and ran across the very unfortunate piece of information I had missed, which is that many countries, including Iceland, require that you have a passport that is valid for some period of time after your trip, in case you decide to just stay.

A passport that expired three months after the trip? That wasn't long enough. I felt sick. I felt absolutely physically ill. Panic, certainly, but just I think nausea was probably the primary, the primary feeling as it was really starting to dawn on me. What was happening? Kate made a few phone calls, first to her dad. It was like, map, sounds like a problem. Not sure what to tell you. Then to the State Department.

They confirmed Kate had made a mistake. But they also offered some good news. About three hours from Kate's home, there was a State Department office that did same day pass-board renewals. I basically grabbed my purse and got in the car. I was just absolutely frantic with terror that this whole thing was going to fall apart

and it was all going to be my fault. And I also just could not quite get past the irony that I had been such a pain to my husband about his bath for it. And now this was all happening to me. Kate Drove drove in silence, inching through three plus hours of rush hour traffic. When she got to the State Department office,

there was a very long line. When she got to the front of that line and turned in her documents to get a new passport, she was sent to wait in another long line. During this period of time, I once again called my father, who is just sort of my first call for most, I don't know, life panic moments. And he had the interesting idea of trying to reach the Icelandic Embassy, which on reflection seems absurd, but seemed

as reasonable as anything at the time. Kate hopped on her phone to find a number for the embassy. It turns out the embassy in LA for Iceland is small such that it is also serves as a recording studio. So I had a few bizarre moments of calling this number and having the person answer, you know, such and such recording studio and he's saying, okay, and I hang up. And then the next time I called, he says, wait, wait, don't hang up. Are you trying to reach the Icelandic embassy? I said, yes, I am. I said, oh no, wait, wait, don't hang up, don't hang up. Are you trying to reach the Icelandic embassy? I said, yes, I am. So don't know, we do that too. We do that too.

The recording studio slash embassy gave her the number of someone in Washington, DC, which also didn't pan out. But you know, after about, I think it was 10 hours total right before the office closed, they called my name and I had a passport in hand. Compared to the relief she felt not going over the cliff in Norway, Kate did not feel elation or even excitement. It was just exhaustion. I think all systems were just spent at that point and I just wanted to lay down.

Her mind was saying, finally. This feeling of exhausted release fell different from the surge of euphoria that Kate experienced after her drive along a cliffside in Norway. Thank heavens that's over feels different than few. That was close. Heavens that's over feels different than few. That was close. Why do we have two different mechanisms in the brain to experience the same emotion? Do these different responses affect how we remember events, how we respond to similar events in the future? Kate decided to launch an experiment to find out. She recruited volunteers for a study that was ostensibly about music and emotions. We asked them a lot of questions when they first got there, some of which we actually cared about, things like their

emotional state, and then a lot of kind of distracting things that made them believe we were interested in their take on how music makes you feel. The study was centered around a song. Feelings by Morris Elberts. And this is a very sappy song. Kate and her team divided volunteers into two groups. The first group was told they would have to listen to the song and then sing it as a research assistant recorded the performance. In other words, they were asked to do something extremely awkward and uncomfortable. So that's mimicking essentially or creating. In fact, the experience of what we would call task completion relief. They did the thing and now thank heavens it's over.

In the second group, the volunteers were told the same thing. Listen to the song, then sing the song on camera, They did the thing and now thank heavens it's over. In the second group, the volunteers were told the same thing. Listen to the song, then sing the song on camera in front of a research assistant. And then lo and behold, the recorder is broken and they won't have to sing after all. It probably goes without saying the recorder was not in fact broken, but that set up the experience we were looking for, which is near-miss relief. So these participants in the study thought they were going to have to do this terrible thing and then were saved in the nick of time from having to do so.

The results of the study were consistent across the board. Volunteers who experienced completion relief felt uncomfortable before and during their performance. But what's fascinating is that right afterwards, they moved on quickly with that day. This was something that Kate and her team understood as yet another evolutionary adaptation. If you do something hard or unpleasant and you survive it, there isn't that much of a function to kind of ruminating on what just happened because if you are asked to do it again, you don't necessarily want fresh in your mind how terrible that thing was.

It's much more functional, we think, to simply experience the kind of positive rewards of satisfaction, feel like it was a job well done or at least done, and that might incentivize you to take on difficult challenges in the future. But the volunteers who experienced the near miss who didn't end up having to sing a

sappy love song in front of a stranger, they reported something very different. Like Jamie in South Africa and Kate in Norway, these volunteers not only felt elated to have been spared, but spend time afterwards, ruminating on what happened. It seems like when you have a near miss, a close call, it's useful. If rather than just moving on and pretending it never happened, we actually do spend a bit of mental energy thinking through how we can essentially ensure that we don't get that close again. As Kate reflected on her own experiences, as well as the experimental findings, she realized there was an important component of the experience she had not yet studied.

Not the part where you go, few, or thank heavens that's over, but the agonizing moments before the arrival of relief. The moments when the car was inching to the edge of the cliff, or the lions began creeping toward the Land Rover. The 10 hours Kate spent in the State Department office unsure about whether she would get the passport in time. One thing I've studied is the idea of bracing for the worst, and it's a very functional form of expectation management that we do when we're waiting for some kind of news where

we embrace pessimism and really consider the possible negative outcomes so that we're prepared. As the world deals with a seemingly endless coronavirus pandemic, many of us have become experts in this kind of waiting. Can being worried about the coronavirus make you more? It will be months before the general public gets access to this vaccine. The recipe for anxiety and depression, ABC's aerial recipe. It's a basic, truly primal instinct, and it too is contagious. When we come back, the psychology of bracing for the worst and new psychological insights on how to cope with dread and uncertainty.

Before we can experience relief, we invariably have to go through a period of waiting. As many of us have learned, this can be uncomfortable, distressing. It can make sleep difficult, distract us from work, and leave us anxious. Psychologist Kate Sweeney has studied the experience of waiting. She's examined people who've developed strategies to wait well and others who crumble under the pressure of uncertainty. Some of her insights also stem from a lengthy personal experience of being on edge.

her insights also stem from a lengthy personal experience of being on edge. During her sixth and final year of grad school, Kate began applying for research jobs at universities. Those jobs are incredibly hard to get there, just not very many of them and there's lots of people who want them. So I knew it was a long shot, but I wanted to give it a try. Kate spent most of the summer and early fall on the onerous tasks of preparing and completing job applications. In the fall, she submitted her applications and held her breath. Ultimately, I had some, you know, initial good luck, so I got five different interviews. From the beginning of November to the beginning of December,

Kate flew all across North America, interviewing at the University of Miami at Ohio, University of Iowa, the University of British Columbia, University of Illinois at Chicago, and then last at University of California Riverside. The hiring process for an academic job involves much more than just an interview. You often have to give a prepared lecture, have detailed discussions with students and faculty, and engage in extended Q&A sessions. It can be grueling. So I was exhausted by the end of it and ready for it to be over, but I had had a good experience and I was feeling pretty good about my chances. But as the answers rolled in,

Kate's positive attitude started to falter. So this will be a parade of failure. So University of Iowa, I didn't hear from from quite a while and then ultimately found out that the position had been offered to someone else and that they had accepted, I believe, or if they didn't in any case did not come to me. It was the same for all the other universities she applied to, except for one. The University of California Riverside. It was within two weeks after the interview just before the holiday break. I got the call that I was the second choice, so it could have been worse. The reason the university called to tell her that she was the second choice was that the candidate

who was the first choice had said she needed time to figure things out. The university promised Kate to be back in touch once they heard back from the other candidate, which meant Kate was left in a state of limbo. She was going to have to wait. So we now set off into holiday break with her making a decision, me having no control over either the decision or the timeline and knowing that I would have at least a month to wait. Kate's dress manifested in ways many of us can relate to. I would wake up just naturally in the middle of the night, but rather than easing back into sleep,

my mind would seize upon some worry about what would be fall me if this job didn't work out and trying to play the odds of whether it would come my way, but it definitely made sleeping soundly pretty challenging. When she wasn't spiraling into doubt, she would bargain with herself, trying to find a reason to not want the job. She told herself it would be better to find a postdoctoral job,

a temporary position that's more like a fellowship. I think more than catastrophizing, I was looking for any way out of the absolute torture of uncertainty that I was experiencing. After Christmas, Kate continued to wait and wait and wait. Finally, in January, she heard back from the school. Around 505 on a Friday, I believe. I got an email from the chair of the department at the time.

I'm sure just not thinking quite clearly on a Friday that this was going to set me into a tailspin. But he said something to the effect of, I have some news. I think you'll be pleased. I'll call you tomorrow. I remember I had plans to hang out with some friends from my graduate program, and I just called them and said I'm useless.

I can't, I just have to go to sleep as early as I can and hope for tomorrow to come. The night lasted forever. And then? On the next day, the rest of my life sort of began. The head of the department called to tell her that the other candidate had decided not to take the job and that they wanted to offer the position to Kate. I think I knew in that moment that the cool thing to do would be to, you know, play koi like I had lots of other options, but I did not do that. In the least, I think I exclaimed with Joy and he said, oh, good.

So, so, so you're, you're enthusiastic about taking it and then I, you know, calm down right away and said, well, you know, I, of of course I'll need to hear the details, but I think I was probably doing a dance of joy as I was saying that. The experience of having to wait for something is universal, but surprisingly, Kate found very little research had been done on it, and almost no research had been done on how people could manage the anxiety and uncertainty of waiting. You know, I think one of the things is it is difficult to study because so often these waiting periods are, I mean, they are by definition, in fact, temporary. And so it does take some pretty

significant creative work on the part of researchers to figure out how best To create those experiences if you're doing so for example in the lab or find them out in the wild and actually catch them as they're happening In other words one reason it's hard to study waiting is that waiting tends to be unpredictable You don't always know that your aim for an extended period of waiting until you're actually in it. That made it difficult to study using the experimental tools of modern psychology. So what we were really, you know, looking for was a waiting period we could study practically that was long enough to watch some of these processes unfold that we were interested in and that had fairly high stakes. After brainstorming, kids' team identified the perfect group to study.

California law students waiting on the results of their bar exam. Typically in California, most people take the exam in late July, and then they wait. The wait is considerably longer than it is in many other states. It's for very long months. They all get their results at the same time. It's posted online whether they passed or failed in late November. So they can all go online and check. And in the interim, of course, they're all hearing

from all their friends who took the Barg Xam and other states and are already getting their results, which simply, I think, adds to the torture, particularly because in California, we have one of the lowest pass rates for the bar exam in the United States. And it's also an incredibly stressful waiting period for the folks who endure it, given that their professional future essentially rides on this exam, and it is pretty hard to pass. Now that they had the perfect group to study, Kate and her colleagues came up with a research plan. We were interested in whether waiting has kind of a shape to it. Is there any predictability to when waiting is the hardest and when it might be a little bit easier? And we've found

in that context and lots of others, it seems to be hardest at the beginning and the end and a little easier in the middle. Kate was also interested in finding out how people with different temperaments reacted to the stress of waiting. So she launched another study. She followed a group of women as they waited for the results of a biopsy for breast cancer. It's you know not an easy study to run as you can imagine you know we're asking for time and you know kind of emotional attention from someone who's having a probably not great

day in their life. And so we try to get as much as we can from what little time we have with them. Before the women had a biopsy, Kate and her team tried to figure out each woman's baseline emotional state by asking questions about their personality, health history, and coping strategies. Then the week after the procedure, they're checking on the women to see how they were dealing with uncertainty. We're really interested in just figuring out

who is more resilient to that experience and why, what are they doing right? What kids' team found was that there are some people, especially those who tend to be optimistic in their day-to-day lives, who are much more comfortable with the uncertainty of waiting. One of the things that is most consistent is, if you generally expect that the thing you're waiting for

is going to turn out well, waiting is a whole lot easier. Having said that, that makes you feel good while you're waiting, but if the unfortunate turn of events occurs, that the outcome isn't what you hope for, being so optimistic as you're waiting can really set you up for some pretty shattering distress and disappointment. And so, unfortunately, one of the things that we've really revealed in our research and haven't been able to quite reconcile in terms of how to advise people is that a good waiting period will often mean underwhelming good news and potentially shattering bad news,

whereas a really worrisome waiting period means elation in the face of good news and potentially shattering bad news, whereas a really worrisome waiting period means elation in the face of good news and maybe a little less of a shattering experience with bad news. It's not quite clear that you can split the difference. In other words, you can choose to be optimistic at the front end and run the risk of feeling let down at the end, or choose to be pessimistic at the front end, have a miserable time as you wait, but limit the emotional downside of bad news. That doesn't sound very helpful. It sounds like you just have to pick your poison.

But keep things to finding, does contain an important insight. If I had to give advice about balancing the kind of trade-offs of distress while waiting or distress after, it would probably be all about the timing. So one of the things that we know from our research is that, for example, bracing for the worst is good at the moment of truth, whatever that might mean, if that's minutes or hours or days, but close to that moment where you're going to find out the outcome. Put another way, optimism prepares you for waiting, but pessimism prepares you for bad news. So try to stay positive, be as optimistic as you can, as long as you can, and then kind of

grapple with the potential for bad news towards the end of the wait in hopes that that will buy you that that buffer from bad news and that elation over good news. Kate has developed an entire toolbox of strategies like this. Another has to do with the feeling she experienced as she was waiting to hear back about that job. A loss of control. As I've thought about what makes waiting so hard and what makes it different from other kinds of stressful experiences, I've come to the conclusion and we now have some data to support this, that it's the combination of not knowing what's coming, being uncertain and not having control, so not being able to do anything about your future or your outcome.

And it's those two things that are really difficult in combination. So if you can grab hold of a little control over your fate by at least being planful about what you'll do if the bad news comes, that can ameliorate a little bit that a challenge of not feeling like you have control. Kate did a version of this when she was waiting to find out about the job at UC Riverside. Maybe I don't want to start a faculty position right away. Maybe it just needs better if I started off with post-doc. There's another benefit to thinking this way. It allows you to shift perspective on what the bad news means.

It allows you to see that even bad news can have an upside. So, one of the things that we know from research on trauma is that people who are able to find some sort of silver lining, some kind of benefit in something, you know, bad that happens to them, a loss or a trauma, they tend to be better off. If you can figure out something good that came of something bad, that's a typically good coping technique for well-being. But in my lab, we study waiting, and so I wondered if maybe it's the case that we can kind of set up those silver linings in advance so that they're ready and waiting for us when or if the bad news comes. To test this, Kate and her team asked the

group of women waiting on their biopsy results if they could see any kind of silver lining in finding out that they would require treatment. That was a gentle way of asking, is there any upside to finding out that you have cancer? And what we found is that almost 75% of our sample said, yes, they could, they did not yet have a diagnosis, but they could imagine seeing some kind of silver lining if they found out that they had cancer. And their silver linings, when we inquired about them, ranged pretty broadly.

Some of them were more social, so things like serving as a role model for their daughters, being more connected to friends and family, but then also some were more kind of personal, like appreciating life more or appreciating the time that they spent with family more or thinking more carefully about their health. So the kinds of silver linings people identify are really wide-ranging and of course depend on the context, but people do seem very readily able to identify those silver linings even

in advance. So again, be optimistic at the front end of the waiting period and pessimistic as you get close to the moment of truth. Come up with plans on how you can adapt if the worst case scenario comes to pass, and think in advance about the silver linings of bad news. All of these strategies of course are needed now more than ever. I feel that over the last several months, the entire world in some ways has been living your research. And I'm wondering if you can just talk a moment about the global experience of waiting and holding one's breath in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. once breath in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I absolutely agree that we are all in a sort of collective moment of uncertainty and very stressful uncertainty. It's different from some of the things I've studied in a way that I think makes it extra challenging, which is that it's open-ended. So if you take the bar exam, you know that, you know, November 25th or whatever, the result will be there. If you get a biopsy, you know your doctor is calling you in a week. With COVID-19, we're all in this suspension essentially. And that, it seems, makes waiting a lot harder in some ways because you can't plan really and you can't sort of put your mind on hold and just wait it out till the results come because there is no result coming exactly. And so it's, you know's isolating us from other people, which is not good for well-being. It's disrupting our schedules.

And so I think we are not coping especially well. That said, we have a little bit of data that are kind of hot off the presses. From a study we ran, a survey that we sent out in China in February of how people were feeling and to some extent how they were coping. And we found a few interesting things in short, the thing that seemed to be the most helpful,

especially if you were in quarantine during that period of time, was to find good distractions. In other words, get into a state of flow where you are fully absorbed in some kind of challenging activity in a way that really gets you out of your head and helps time pass quickly. That seems to be maybe the best strategy in that kind of moment. Kate found in her survey in Wuhan that experiencing a sense of flow where people forgot about the pandemic because they were deeply engaged with some other activity. This was associated with significant improvements in well-being.

If those folks in quarantine said they were experiencing flow, they looked just like their non-quarantine counterparts in terms of well-being. So, you know, whatever people were doing to find flow, I suspect it just sort of made the time pass faster and more pleasantly in a way that didn't create quite the sense of claustrophobia that quarantine might otherwise create. So what should you do to achieve this ideal state? Kate has devised a simple question to help people figure out how to reach a state of flow. So in fact when I'm helping people identify their own flow states, one way I do that is what is the thing you know you can't start if you have to leave the house in 15 minutes or a half an hour because you will lose track of time. So that's such a baked in part of the flow experience that when time is the enemy because you were just waiting for some kind of news to arrive, it's going to make that happen faster at least in your own perception. assumption.

For those of us who want desperately to be out in the world, seeing friends and loved ones, time is the enemy. We stare at the clock and then stare some more. We bargain against the pandemic in our own heads and fantasize about what we will do when it's over. It sometimes feels like the past year has been one long psychology experiment. One thing I found useful at times like this is to imagine we actually are in a psychology experiment.

But instead of thinking of ourselves as the guinea pigs, it's helpful to think of ourselves as the guinea pigs, it's helpful to think of ourselves as the scientists. Instead of looking at the world with frustration, turn the tables and look at things with curiosity. Ask yourself why you feel the way you do. Tweak your daily routines and see if they make a difference in how you feel. A pandemic is a useful reminder that there are big, powerful things in our lives that we cannot change. But that doesn't mean we are powerless.

We always have the power to change how we respond. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Midro-Amedia is our exclusive advertising sales partner. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Laura Quarell, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boye is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our run sun hero for this episode is Dan Osset. Dan is chief operating officer of Stitcher Media. For many months in 2020, Dan and I explored what it would be like for Hidden Brain to work with Stitcher as a distribution partner for our podcast. We went back and forth with different proposals and counter proposals. During all the waiting, I was always struck by

Dan's intelligence and his emotional intelligence. He helps set up the working relationship between our companies that shapes so much of the work we do every day. If I was less selfish, I would recommend Dan as a diplomat to solve thorny international problems, but that would mean I wouldn't get to work with him. Thanks Dan. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. I'm Shankar Vedantum. See you next week.