Ologies with Alie Ward - Fearology Pt. 1 (FEAR) with Mary Poffenroth

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Every day, your brain tries to save your life by being terrified. Thanks, brain! Also, calm the f*ck down, brain. Alie hunted down Mary Poffenroth, an expert in the biological and sociological causes/effects of fear and it is riveting. This real life FEAROLOGIST (which is a real word) talks about how fear is literally killing you, the difference between stress and fear, how to get along with your co-workers, friends, or partner better, and how to talk to your brain when it has needlessly pulled the fire alarm. Part 1 of a 2-part series that will honestly change your life.For more info on Mary Poffenroth, see her website, Facebook, Twitter and InstagramMore episode sources & linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Hi friends. It's your weird old dog hiding behind the couch. Because I ate from the garbage. A-W here. Halli-Ward, hi! Oh man, this episode you guys. Woo! This episode is so good. Nothing to do with me. It's just very good. It's two episodes is how good it is. So this is just part one of a discussion with anologist who might actually very much change the way that you are living your life. Because fear. One was the last time you felt it. I know that there's a slim percentage of tough bros out there being like, uh, when I was like five. And we all know that isn't true. We're scared all the time. Someone almost spills a slurpee on your new shirt. No one in the group chat responded to your meme. Your credit score went down because you messed up auto pay. You're late to work. You have to buy a gift for your sister,

but she might not like it. We're scared all the time. We're scared all the time. And it turns out for kind of weird reasons. But we can do something about it. But first, what can you do for me? Well, you guys are so kind. I love Allergy's listeners so much. Um, thank you so much for keeping this indie podcast up in the top 20 or so science podcasts. I think in the world on iTunes, that's so crazy. Um, thank you to all the patrons on patreon.com slash allergies for making it happen each week. There would be no podcast without you. You can join up for as little as a buck a month, which lets you ask the allogists your questions. It gets you videos, behind the scenes photos. So thank you for supporting there. Thank you to all the listeners who tweet and who gram. If you tell a friend about the show, thank you for that. I really love making this podcast so much. I wanted to do it for like 10 years. And even when I'm afraid that no one will like it because it's too weird and I talk about butts and bugs and stuff.

Um, I'm so happy I make it and I'm even happier than you guys listen. And so rating and reviewing and subscribing on iTunes keeps it up in the chart so other people can be like, what's this thing? And listen and there's more allogites in the world. So thank you for doing that. Each week I read a review as a little, thank you. This week, new girl left a review that just says, Hey, do you like breathing? Then you'll love this podcast. Thanks, new girl. I also want to shout out to Taylor and 2017 who wrote, I absolutely love this podcast. Allie has such a great way of making everything interesting. And just to prove how much I love this podcast, I just spent two hours fighting computer updates so that I could write this review.

Taylor and 2017 props. Now, fearology. Really pops word. Really. Okay, now I knew I wanted to do an episode on the subject of fear and I came across the work of this allogist and I saw that she studies fear specifically. I said to myself, Ward, is fearology a word? Get honest with yourself. Wouldn't this be phobiology because phobias mean fears?

Yes. No. Phobias are technically irrational or obsessive fears. Now the word fear just comes from a root meaning danger. So phobias are maybe a little OTT, maybe a little over the top and specific, but fear is a response to everyday danger. I looked it up and fearology is in fact a real word as it's been used in books about fear, like philosophy and fearism and east-west dialogue and a few other experts in stress and fear and anxiety use the word fearology.

So I think it's a super critical field of study and thus I am throwing my weight behind making it an even realer, more commonly used word. Fearology. Let's do this. Let's talk about it. So I came across this allogist work. I was immediately like, I must speak to her. And then I sent her a fangirl email. I found out she lived a mile away from me.

Thrilled. I was so thrilled. We had a time set to do the interview and about 10 minutes before she emailed me just to say she was on her way and I was eating toast at a coffee shop having fully forgotten that we were recording. So I saw her email, shot up, abandoned my friend and the toast at the coffee shop and I sped walked home like one of those weird ladies who get exercised at the mall and I arrived just as she walked up. I was very sweaty. My apartment was littered with tax paperwork. I was so mortified. I was so stressed out.

I was afraid of being judged. I was damp in many places. It was perfect. So we recorded for about two hours. So this episode, again, it's broken into part one this week, which covers a lot of ground. And then part two, which answers your specific questions and it gives even more insight on how super successful folks address their fears. So helpful. There were parts I was so shook I could not make words.

I just grunted in response. So come back next week for the follow up episode because they're both both episodes are real life fixers. Also quick audio note, it was so hot that day and I just run home so all the windows were open and the air conditioning was on. So if you hear like just a hum in the background, it's just the air conditioning. Super sorry. Ignore it. So she is an instructor at San Jose State University, a TEDx speaker and my new personal anxiety guru, whether she would like to be or not. So please breathe deep and make room for epiphanies with Fiorologist Mary Pothenroth.

Now this is your mic. I'm, I'm still sweating. I'm sorry. This is going to be the sweatiest interview I've ever done. I mean, sweating is part of the stress response. So it's, it's good that you came all like ready to go. You're like, it's good. You're a literal hot mess right now.

Have I ever been a hotter mess? And now, okay, I emailed you and I was like, is there a, I knew that you studied fear. Yeah. And I was like, and for a second I was like, is it possible that you study pairs and this is a typo or you study feet or something? And there's a typo because there's no way that you just study fear. That's too awesome. So how did you get into the study of fear? Like, wow, where, where do you even start?

I was raised by someone that was afraid of everything. And so, you know, like all good parents, my mom did a really awesome job of fucking me up because I think that's what parents do. Right. She was a loving mom and had a great childhood, but like all parents, that's your job to, you know, pass on your dysfunctions to your children. And, you know, she never had a passport. She never left the country. You know, she was very much and only went to high school. I didn't come from a educated family.

I was the only one in my entire family to go to college. And so it's, it's one of those things that she passed on a lot of her fears onto me. And as she got older, then it just kind of escalated. And it was not until like, you know, my late twenties and I realized I haven't left the country either. Mary was the youngest of five siblings and the only one to graduate from high school. So she ended up earning one master's in science, having studied ecology and evolution and population biology and another MS in science communication, are two really high up limbs to go out on, if you ask me, and thus very brave and cool. And I became a university lecturer in biology at age 27 and, you know, was doing well in my career, but felt like,

okay, there's all these like explorers that I see in ecological biology that I find are my heroes and they're doing all this cool stuff. And I'm still in the same town that I've lived for my whole life. What is going on? So I started to kind of examine where that was coming from. And that's really when I started to get super excited about the study of fear. My personal research background, my first job was at NASA Ames in the Bay Area, looking at the impact of hypergravity on the mammalian system, which sounds super fancy for putting rats in a really big centrifuge and spinning them around for months. Oh my God, have you ever been in a centrifuge?

No, yeah, no, they don't let us go in there, but the walls were so thick. We had like we're in a bunker in case things went wrong with the centrifuge because it could like spin out of control. And that's where I first started to get some of the physiology experience of the impact of stress. What we were looking at in the hypergravitational study was basically it was a preface of can we send humans into a long term journey where their bodies are going to be under hypergravitational stress. So we were looking at stress and, you know, can can they pee? Can they can they eat? Will they still fornicate? Will they do all the things? And if, you know, under long periods of stress.

And that was really when I started to examine the body's response to stress and stress is that funny word. When we think about fear, like no one uses the word fear in common language for the most part. And that's another interesting side note of actually what portion of the demographic in Western society uses the word fear. We can come back to that, but stress and fear are basically the same. When we think about, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I just was grunting because I was like, oh, that's so true. Especially right now we're surrounded by my tax paperwork. And I had like a full on stress meltdown being like, I'm doing the forms wrong.

And I was scared. Yeah. Yeah. So think about like what we call the stress response. You are going to have like tightness in your neck and your lower back. That's your body getting ready to fight with your arms and getting blood and energy to like your legs so you can run away. Getting the shortness of breath and like the tightness in your chest and getting sweaty. And, you know, your pupils dilating and your body is shutting down non-essential systems like digestion. This is why, you know, depending on what kind of nerves we use that word a lot to that you're feeling,

you get like butterflies in your stomach or maybe like a little something more serious. You need to excuse yourself. So all of that is the stress and response is the fear response. So having slightly more gravitational force on you is a type of physical stress. And so Mary was studying what would happen to other mammals, i.e. humans exploring space under these conditions. And, you know what, for some people just being around a bunch of rats on what amounts to a very expensive carnival ride would be a major source of stress on its own. But I like to think that the rats just loved it, that they just stumbled out wanting a corn dog and more tokens to go on again. But aside from rats just having a summer, what kind of data were they gathering?

But we were looking at can they do the physiological basic functions under stress. But we were just looking at like the renal system, can they eat, can they drink, can they process urine, right? Are things coming in and going out? Did you find that, just because I have to get this question answered, in hypergravity, were they able to pee and poo? Yeah. There was an uptick in like, holy shit, what's going on? Oh my god, we're in a big centrifuge. And then when everything just kind of like was on lockdown and then we weren't studying for that. But if you were testing for that, then you could say that could have been like they were in the super fear response.

And then when things kind of they got acclimated to, okay, we're just going to keep spinning. Okay, this is just how it is. Then they would return to their like normal daily activities of eating and drinking and going to the bottle and getting, you know, some some water, you know, humans under stress, go to a different kind of bottle. The most scared I've ever been in my life. It's funny. The only reason why I keep peppering you about this is the most scared I've ever been is when I was in a centrifuge at a testing facility for where they were testing and training Air Force pilots. Oh, wow. And I've been mugged at Knife Point and that was one of the scariest things and being in a centrifuge was one of the scariest.

So I was like, how did they do? Like, I remember the moment where they put me in the thing. I've never been so scared of anything because like, at least with mugging, it was like a surprise. I was like, whoa. But this, I was getting in. I just was shaking. I thought I thought I needed a diaper. I was like, I don't know what's going to come out what end. So I'm like, I'm feeling like feeling for these rats. But so that was that was one study you did. And then you started to kind of that opened up your mind too. Okay, let's really get into the negrity of this rest stress response and fear.

And and you're right, we do call it stress when we mean fear. Yeah, yeah. We in Western society, we have like this stress badge of courage. When you ask someone how they are, oh, my God, I'm so stressed. I'm like, oh, my God, me too. There's the kids and there's the work and there's all the things. And so we feel confident talking about stress because we can commiserate, but we don't feel confident talking about the F word because there's so much shame associated with fear in our society. And we are never taught how to deal with fear in a healthy way. I mean, I never was. Yeah, that's not a subject in school. Yeah, no.

Yeah, it's one of the four basic human emotions that going to make like all of the rainbow of colors of all of the other emotions. Wait, one second, there are four basic human emotions, just four. I thought there were approximately one billion and then several thousand more if you include feelings that only the French have words for. But nope, just four, say researchers, there's happy, sad also. And then two that not unlike many LA residents who are like actors and yoga teachers, there are two emotions that are hybrids. One is afraid slash surprised and angry slash disgusted. So right now this information is either making you feel happy, sad, affriest or engrusted. And fear is not something we talk about in that way because the messaging we get is be fearless,

which is hella dumb because that's like saying, just don't be thirsty. I know. Or like you just be homeless. You can't do that. I mean, we are the product of, you know, as I was talking to an evolutionary biology, I was like 3.7 years of evolution. I meant 3.7 billion, but whatever. And clearly the ones who could fight and run away were the ones who survived.

So it would be crazy to be fearless because how would we have made it this far? We would be dead if you were like, should go ahead and attack me. That's cool. Like no. So do you think that when you first started studying stress and fear, what was the biggest question you had? Like what did you find that was lacking in either communication about fear or just data about fear? I would just like to point out that as we discussed fears and emergencies,

there happened to be fire trucks and sirens screaming past my apartment, which was an unintended audio bonus just to make sure that our fear responses were working. So yeah, yeah, it's working fine. It's working fine. Thanks, Frank. Call me your tits. Yeah, I think that for me, I initially started studying fear in just a more hobby way because I was interested in it.

And as an academic for my entire professional career, it's been one of those things that I'm just a big nerd and like, I just was absorbing all these things because it was fascinating to me. And through that initial search, I was really finding either like clinical or pathological studies on fear that were about people that were more of the outliers, that were dealing with mental health issues in a professional setting, that were having very extreme phobias or, you know,

really extreme anxiety that was negatively impacting their life. And I was like, well, I don't fit in that category because I'm just, it's everyday fears of how, you know, how do I not freak out about this presentation? Or, you know, how do I go say, what up to that cute guy? Like this is, I don't need to go and have a clinical, this is just normal stuff. And I didn't really see a lot of research in that area.

And then in terms of what was happening with people that were communicating, because part of my degrees are in science communication and biology, and the people that were communicating about fear were either people that were bringing a lot of like pseudoscience level of it to it, or people that really did extreme stuff. So like, yeah, bro, I climb Mount Everest and it was like super dope when I'm here to like teach you how to like fight through the fear and also climb Mount Everest.

I'm like, I'm never, I hate the cold. I'm literally never going to climb Mount Everest. Or former Navy SEALs and fighter pilots and just being bad asses. I'm like, that's cool. But there's nothing that I can use there. Right, not applicable. Yeah, exactly. Right.

And one of the things that really got me interested in not only studying it, but trying to create a framework that people could take the research that has been done and apply it to their daily lives is you have to make it simple. And that's kind of my jam with fear is I do original research, but I also am combing through the research and trying to create like strategies for people that are easy to remember, easy to use, that help them understand their own bodies and then apply that so they can not be so afraid of all the things.

Quick question. So what are Americans biggest fears? Well, that actually depends on what year you ask. So in 2014, Chapman University put out a list of Americans, big old fears. They were the usual suspects, like public speaking was number one, then heights and bugs and snakes and drowning and then blood and needles. They use, it's like a menu of scary stuff at a chain restaurant you've been to a dozen times, familiar.

But according to the same source, the new biggest fears of Americans are number one, corrupt government officials, the American Health Care Act, pollution and being involved in a nuclear war with North Korea. So never have I been so nostalgic for just some simple old American drowning fears. But a fun thing to do is sit down, make a list of the things that scare you and then say, hey, scary thing, I see you. And then maybe what can I actually do about some of this stuff? Maybe not all of your fears are big, huge environmental or governmental ones.

You know, I did this once and I realized that driving a Miata with a terrible blind spot on the highway was a consistent source of panic. And so I sold that thing, I got a station wagon, I never looked back. So that's one thing you can do. Not that they're going to get, like there's no cure for fear, not to get rid of the fear, but like change that relationship and change that story around their fears so they can start living a better life with fear.

Now with added fear. So what is fear and what is stress? They are the same thing, but what's happening? I know that the basics I know of are like the HPA axis, like the hypotuitary adrenal, there's something going on hormonally, but what is happening? Like what is my, why is my body jacking me so hard all the time? Yeah, right. And that's a complex, like big, messy ball.

And this is why, you know, the study of fear is so messy. So I'm going to answer that question by like pulling out just a little bit of there's no like discipline in any academic institution around fear. Fear sometimes is looked at in the psychological genre. Sometimes it can be in sociology. Sometimes it's in biology. There's also in marketing and communications literature, this idea called fear appeals, which is a way to communicate a powerful persuasion tool that we have overused.

And now everyone's freaking out because we have trained people to be scared all the time. Okay, side note. I looked up this term fear appeals and y'all, it is a whole thing. Oh boy. Anytime a commercial or like a news network makes you feel like you are about to die, they're pretty much using fear appeals. So yes, sex sells, but so does, oh my God, you're in a lot of peril. Oops, I took your money.

So one could be a cheese monger, one could be a fish monger, but fear mongering is a little less smelly and it might make you more money. So you find these in like so many disciplines that they don't fit in one discipline, which is not necessarily surprising because fear is such a base unit of our lives. So it's not going to fit neatly into anywhere. When you're talking about like the physiology, the way that I like to explain it is if you're looking at the brain and kind of like a simple like condition of the brain, kind of separating the three big parts.

So you have your hind brain, it's going to be in the back. It's going to be the like most basic of functions. Some people have likened it to the reptilian brain that I'm sure that you've heard because it's similar to other reptiles. So if we're looking in the, you know, kingdom of life, kingdom on Amalia, we have our vertebrates, we're not that closely related to reptiles, but we are going to all be vertebrates. And then you have kind of in the center of our brain right around the midbrain,

the ooey gooey limbic system center, right? This is where the emotional magic happens. Oh, it's like a truffle. Yeah, it is like a truffle. It's all gooey in the center and you're like num, num, num. And there you're going to find the amygdala. So the amygdala is going to be kind of like the size of your thumbnail, but shaped like an almond.

And it's going to be on both sides. So if you're to cut your brain in half and you have one on each side. Ooh, okay. And they're really small, but that is kind of the powerhouse of the fear response. That's going to be the control center. So when our body is going to perceive a stressor, so we talked about making of stress versus fear, you can really start to look at it as stress is going to be a physiological

response that your body is having to a stressor. And that stressor is going to be the outside thing, the trigger. Stressors are generally never in our control, but our stress response is. Okay. So let's go back to the story that you said about getting mugged at knife point. Yeah. Right. So the, the stressor is going to be the mugger with the knife threatening your life.

And there were two of them. One for each side of my amygdala. Oh, that's nice. They thought about you. They're like, you know, we're going to, we're going to tag team. You obviously are very ferocious opponents. We're like, we're going to need backup boys. Um, in that, in that moment, your central nervous system is what is allowing you to

interact with your internal and your external environment. So your senses, your eyes, your ears are picking up a threat. So that's going to be the stressor. You have no control over that stressor, but their stress response is what's happening inside your body and you're, you know, amygdala is kind of like hitting the panic button, being like, okay, we need to, we, it's go time. And then at that point it's going to create a kind of like cascading, um, effect through your, um, hypothalamus and thalamus and getting everything ready for your body to, in this

particular point, to do the fight or flight. Okay. So little recap. This whole shebang is part of your limbic system. And once again, the little almondy amygdala deep within your brain receives info. She says, ha, no, oh no. I'm paraphrasing. And it chemically pokes your thalamus, which sends other signals to the brain to just release

a floodgate of adrenaline and cortisol in preparation to either engage in fisticuffs or get the fuck out ASAP. Okay. So this next thing she says changed my whole life. Okay. Get ready for it. Are you ready for it? Get ready for it.

And I think this is a good time to kind of also separate. When we look at fear, we have kind of like two major types of fear. Um, what I call factual fear versus fictional fear. Oh. So since we're on this example, like factual fear is going to be actual threats to your life that are happening in a shared reality right now that your body is responding to. So you getting mugged at knife point was hell yeah, factual fear. Like shit is going down.

It is time to put all, all systems into fight or flight. And that means at that time, your body is shutting down non-essential systems. So cellular regeneration, not taking that offline. Don't need it. Um, digestion. Like we're just, we're not going to worry about that. Um, libido. Don't need to be worried about sex at the time right now.

Just, just trying to get out of here alive. And then that means that other resources can be put to your skin. This is why you can either break out in cold sweat or get hot because your blood is flowing through your muscles so that your muscles will have the energy to do what it needs to do to survive. Um, there's also a, and that's all the stress response. Um, there's also going to be the other side of that, which is fictional fear, just like a good fictional book might have a nugget of truth in it, but most of it is just made

up. Right. So with fictional fear, that is the everyday fears. And that's the fears that I really focus on of how we can change our story with our fictional fears so that they aren't like firing up the amygdala so much. And then we're not going into this full stress response because in modern times, our body isn't really good. Like our amygdala just sees stressor.

Right. It's up to us to control how that is perceived because if we are constantly in hyperdrive with our amygdala, just keep sending signals of danger, danger, danger when it's not necessarily dangerous, like it could just be annoying or, um, you know, maybe it's a, it's a good stressor, like it's an opportunity. Um, if we don't start to discern that for ourselves and we constantly are just redlining the stress response, then that's why we're seeing this increase in all of these other issues in our body that usually would be taken care of.

So like, you know, like, um, like the cellular regeneration, right? Especially when we go to sleep at night, that's our time for our bodies to be like, okay, we're going to do some maintenance. We're going to get rid of some cells. We're going to make some new ones, do all the things. If we're constantly in the stress response, if it's constantly go time, our body's like, nope, nope, not even dealing with that. Wow.

And, and cancer is a disease of the cell cycle that this is mind blowing. This is blowing all of my amygdala area. So we, we are keeping ourselves partly in a state of heightened fear. When we don't need to. Yeah. Absolutely. Why? Um, cause no one teaches us how to not to.

Isn't it frustrating? Yes. So many years of like being scared we didn't have to. Oh yeah. And that's, that's my jam of cause I, I'm, I'm still that person by the way. Like I'm, I continue to apply the things and do the, you know, walk the walk of, of what I teach and when I study, but it doesn't mean fear is gone. Yeah.

It's just, I got super tired of living in a really tiny box and knew that there was a life beyond the provincial town. But in order to get to that life, I needed to handle my fear business. Yeah. Cause no, like no one's going to handle it for me. So sadly Mary's mom passed away and looking back on her life and how controlled by fear she was, Mary decided to face a lot of her own fears and just take some dang risks. So she was in a relationship that hadn't been working for years and she really longed

to get out of the small town that she was from. And it is here that I will refrain from crooning just a small town girl living in her lonely world. But don't stop believing that I really want to. Anyway, she went on a journey. Fast forward a year of like branching out of my original friend group, meeting people that had all these like crazy stories of like international travel and adventure and me making the decision that I want this new life.

And in order to do that, I'm going to have to make some pretty radical changes within that year because no, too off topic of science, but you know, like the, you know, our long term relationship at that point when like 12 years wasn't going well. So we decided to get married because just like having a baby and when you're struggling in your relationship is the best idea ever. It's not. It's not the best idea ever. So clearly that works.

So and I was like, okay, I just, I'm going to, I'm going to completely change my life. And, and did that relationship, you know, started this whole like new just was traveling. And when, whenever I had the opportunity with, with breaks from teaching at the university, and I would just travel by myself and freaked out most of the time because you know, I want, I wanted to travel, but my friends had normal jobs, so they couldn't just take off for like a month. And so, you know, went to Costa Rica, got stuck in a cyclone in Croatia, you know, went to the, the markets of Marrakesh and, you know, and most of the time being like, what am I

doing? And I went, am I doing? I'm not really freaking out, but, but also discovering that, you know, I want to die with good stories. Oh. Right. Like, I'm going to get that tattoo to my stomach.

Right. Like, yeah. I want to die with really good stories. And in order to do that, I needed to leave my hometown and so that's what I did. And it just became kind of a game of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. And it's no wonder that we constantly stay in this loop of being afraid to do anything because even if we have an idea, the people in our life out of, out of love, we're like, oh, you should do that because you're going to die.

Well, is fear contagious in, in mammals and social creatures? Is fear contagious? Yeah. So we, when we're in fear, we actually give off almost kind of like a pheromone as well as like really delicate visual cues. And this is why, have you seen like someone talk for the first time or they're really nervous and it is uncomfortable to watch? There are some TED talks where you can, you can hear how dry their mouth is.

Yeah. Like, yeah. And you're like, oh, just relax. It's fine. Although I knew if I were up there, I'd be crying blood. I don't know what would be happening. You know. Yeah.

And it's, and it's that, it's that visceral reaction for as, as mammals, we want to run away from people that are in a big, like fearful anxiety state because that generally means danger, like life threatening danger. So like, okay, well, we're, I'm not here. Yeah. You seem like the danger zones. I'm going to go. I think sometimes also we're conditioned to think if I remain in an anxiety cycle, if

I remain seeming scared or fragile, then I will get care from other people. Yeah. But it's funny that that's actually probably in a, in a really subtle biological way, driving people away from you. Yeah. And it's, and it's a delicate balance because one of the, like, so when we see this in primate studies as well, that when we have fear, we will reach out like young kids and primates we see it the most in, we'll reach out for like physical like connection or some kind

of connection. And that's the best way to kind of calm your fears is to reach out and get connection, to ask for connection and receive that support. As adults in Western society, we, we've had that trained out of us. We've been socialized to say, especially in America, stand on your own, pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Yeah. So individualized that we are like afraid of reaching out and be rejected of that support.

It's, it's something that is so ingrained that we were having to fight our natural instincts because like primates and children, right? Like when, what happens when like a little kid is scared, they're going to run for their safety person. Yeah. You know, whether it's mom or dad or whatever, and they want that connection there. That's their, their safe spot. As adults, we just internalize it and then maybe like numb it with drugs and alcohol

or sex or porn. And then we, we just pretend like it's not there. And it's, it's totally affecting our entire society. Well, what percentage of our fears would you say that we feel, would you say are factual and how, how much are fictional? And also the way that we consume media, either whether it's like presidential Twitter rants or, or, you know, documentaries about cults or whatever, like we, I feel like we're kind of stimulating that a lot.

Right? Yeah. What's going on there? So, you know, as a, as a scientist, I'm always hesitant to just make up percentages, right? Because like 98% of statistics are made up. But I would say, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and it's going to be very specific to where you're living, right? If you are an American and living in LA and, you know, you have your basic needs taken

care of, most likely most of your fears are fictional. If you are living in a really politically unstable area, if you're in Syria, right? If your basic needs are not being met, then a lot of your fears are going to be factual. So, you know, it's kind of depends on what your situation is, but in like modern society, in countries that are wealthy, like the United States, even though that wealth is not spread apart, we're still a very wealthy country. We're still getting by. And so in that, most of our fears are going to be fictional.

And, you know, like fear is so funny that it, you know, why do we like scary movies? Because they give us that like rush of adrenaline. When we watch a scary movie, and this is going to, this is kind of where it'll be interesting with the VR world, right? Because our mind doesn't know the difference that that's not happening if it's a really engrossing movie. And I just saw, like on the social theater thing yesterday, there was some kind of this Netflix or something that they made this like super scary episode of something.

And people like were shuddy not like no one was finishing it because it was so terrifying. Right. I mean, I clearly didn't click on it. Yeah, no, no, no. Okay. I looked this up and Netflix released a list of 10 films that people tend to watch more than 70% of, meaning that they would have turned it off earlier if they just didn't like it, but they noped it hardcore when the action started getting too spooky.

So they made it most of the way. And then they were like, no. So among these 10 films, Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, plus movies like Carnage Park, one called Teeth, one called Raw, and of course, Human Centipede 2. So this kind of led me down a rabbit hole to learn about people who have suffered fainting spells and heart attacks in horror movie screenings. It happens. People just straight up faint and die.

Oh, human beings. Man, we grew these big fat brains and we're like, you know what we could do? We could create technology to make pictures move. And then we can scare ourselves until we literally die. Let's do that. It's one of those things that if we can put ourselves in the story, we can like, we're activating all those things, but our like higher brain functions, you know, like our cerebral cortex is being like, OK, we're still safe.

We're in a movie theater. We have our popcorn. We're on our couch. There's enough safety where we can play around in that fear zone and get the like fear high, right? I'm like, or like, you know, we also get to dress, rehearse tragedies and dress, rehearse fear scenarios. Like, I mean, I know what I would do during a zombie attack. I totally think about it.

I'm like, OK, I'm on the second floor. So that means that, like, you know, where or or if someone broken, like with the axe through my front door, I would probably go out the back door. I mean, we were constantly dress rehearsing these things that will most likely never happen. Right. But some movies like that help us almost in a weird way feel safe. Because our mind likes to dress for her stuff. It likes to play with scenarios, because in a weird way, that lets us feel like, OK,

well, at least I would I would know what to do when zombies come. Right. I wonder about that. Like, why do some people love horrifying stuff and others are like, hell no, like pictures of bunnies only, you know, totally. And part of its tolerance, right? Some people can have like a peach schnapps and be like loopy and the other people can have straight whiskey and be like, well, it's good to warm up. So it's it's really a personal tolerance and that gets into personality and what

your experiences are and what gets your motor oven for certain things. So that's that's definitely like a person by person thing. But the the underlying physiological responses are the same. Just some people enjoy that feeling like adrenaline junkies. Right. They put themselves in physically precarious positions because they want to feel that high. They want to like feel the knots in their stomach and like all the things because they find that pleasurable, whereas other people are like, yeah, no.

Yeah. That's no, that sounds horrendous. Why would I do that? I don't ever want to opt into diarrhea. That's always going to be a no in my book. Never. Yes. Side note, just to say, not everyone's adrenaline rushes are the same. Some folks may love jumping off buildings in webbed onesies

that allow them to drift back to the earth. While others just procrastinate on their deadlines because they're afraid to fail and need a rush of stress hormones to prod them. Guess which one I am. Guess. Do you find that there is a distinction psychologically between stress, fear and just anxiety? Like what is an anxiety disorder? What is anxiety?

Where does it play into all of that? Where does neuroses come into it? Yeah, so it's like I said, for me, I specifically have always focused on like the non clinical, non pathological stuff. And so I'm a biologist and a science communicator by degree and training. And that means that I pull together interdisciplinary work on all of it, but I don't treat patients. So I think that's important just because anytime you're talking about this,

sometimes people are like, oh, good, I don't need to see a professional because I can just listen to a podcast and watch a video. And, you know, if you if you're feeling those really extreme bouts of anxiety and depression and that's how we deal with fear, right? But there's a spectrum. So on those on those extreme things, that's when you really need to get that professional support so you can get back to having, you know, like control over your life. That being said, they're all the damn same, right?

And when I teach people about how to create strategies around fear, one of the mechanisms I talk about is like RIA or RIA that. OK, so this is a genius strategy, RIA RIA. Are you ready? The first step is just recognizing what's going on. And then the second step would be identifying it kind of like name it to claim it. And I was just in Cozumel last week and talking about my research with my partner and he came up with this really funny idea that he works

in creative and narrative kind of stuff as well. And he was saying that there is power in naming things throughout storytelling and mythology, pop culture, Betelgeuse, right? Rumble Stiltskin, that if you know the name of the demon, then you can control it. And I just found that really fascinating because when you start to name it, sometimes that can just short circuit the fear response in and of itself. Wow. Like you recognize, OK, I'm starting to feel like the physiological effects of something just set me off and just kind of recognizing that that's happening

and identifying it. So one of the things that I've made is what I call a fear wheel, which is basically a bunch of different synonyms for fear that we usually use, like I feel insecure, I feel overwhelmed, I feel stressed, I feel inadequate. Right. This sounds like the best worst game show ever, where there's just a wheel of fear that you have to spin. But it is comforting to know that whatever is making us wet or wring our hands could be named and identified on like a glittery, colorful game show prop.

I'm so into that. When looking at fictional fears, you can really most fictional fears will fit into one of two categories, either the fear of being not enough or the fear of not being in control. Oh, wow. And so if you can kind of go back to that and say, like, OK, where where which category does this fit in? Sometimes that will just click you right out of the fear response. But yeah, it's so fun because humans love to pigeonhole.

We have an entire store called the Container Store because we love boxes so damn much. I love the containers. They are so like so many zipper pouches. I love it. We love to put in boxes. It's so good. We're like, oh, yeah. Like there's a relaxing like, oh, it's so good to put the box. And then we love to category stuff. So when you get into the habit of categorizing what you're feeling,

sometimes I will just click out of it and you'd be like, oh, it's so good. Can't put it in a box. Happy safe box. I filed it correctly. Yeah. And it's like, ah, and it's just sometimes that's enough to like, you know, knock you out of it. So the RIA so far is R. I recognize and identify, but what's the A?

And then the A is going to be to address, you know, what kind of strategies or do you need to manage outcomes for this? But a lot of times you can get just in the recognizing and the identifying stage, and then it'll it'll kind of click you out. You know, for example, I have a great story. It just like back to Cozumel, because it was like two days ago. So we're coming off the plane. This had a whole travel day.

This is the end of the week. And my my partner, Craig and I are sitting on different seats because, you know, American Airlines, not my favorite airline. And I got out first. I'm waiting on the jet bridge from him for him. And so he comes up and he's like, wow, you look a bit rough. Just a little visual, FYI. I looked appalled when she told me this.

I made that face. I made that face and got real mad. You're like, it was so bad. And he's not he's not someone that would ever usually say something like that. And I'm like, yeah, well, I do look like crap. We've been traveling for like a million hours. Yeah. And so at that point, I'm just like internal rage.

Yeah. And when you're feeling a stress response or a fear response, you're like cerebral cortex is just where the higher thinking happens. Just shuts down. Yes. It's like, OK, and I'm offline. It just shuts down. And now I'm just I'm in it. What I call like a fear storm.

It's like a maelstrom because that just hit my I'm not enough button. At this point, I'm going through all of the scenarios of like, he thinks I'm fat, he thinks that I'm ugly. Oh, my God, I'm old. I should probably dye my hair. I should probably want to dye it. I probably need to never eat again, right? It's and it spirals so quick. This was all happening even before we left the jet bridge. And it's but it's so it was he did not mean in a mean way.

It's just kind of like when he came out, I was like Towson, my hair. And I kind of kind of look like a lion. But I took it so personally. And it was my perception of what he had said, of course. And instead of I didn't ask questions like, oh, what do you mean about that? I just went straight down the rabbit hole of like internalizing everything. And that was my fear talking the fear of not being enough. And so, you know, I walked it off a little bit

because I'm just like, I'm not going to talk to you right now because I'm going to say something real mean and then in my head, I'm like, OK, you got to walk the walk. If you're going to ask other people to do it, you got to do it yourself. And just analyzing, OK, why am I going down this crazy rabbit hole? And especially as women, like our value is associated with how we look in Western society. Yeah, we've been conditioned. So that's going to be one of our buttons.

Hands down, that's going to be one of our buttons. And so just kind of like identifying what I was feeling, naming it and putting it into a box. And I'm like, oh, OK, because it also makes us feel not so alone that it's just it's just our human body being a human body. That it's not like what we would consider ourselves. It's it's our brain doing its brain thing. And that like totally helped me like snap out of it

and then be able to have a conversation. Right. Because before that, I was just so caught up in like the emotion of it. I just couldn't even ask questions about like, so what exactly did you mean by that? And then once I calmed down, you know, a baggage claim, you know, and I was like, OK, now now we can have a conversation. But, you know, 10 years ago, before I started really studying fear, I was really shit at emotions like I was a scientist. That's why I got into science because you didn't have to have emotions.

In fact, they give you extra credit if you didn't have emotions. I was so great. I'm like, oh, science, I'm here for you. You are going to be my friend because I don't have to have emotions, which is kind of weird for a girl. But whatever, it was so great. And I had to, like, teach myself how to communicate, especially difficult emotions. And so for me to even within, you know, a couple of minutes go from

Ragey Pants and her in like going through, like, no, we're dramatic about it to, OK, now that I'm like able to get a little bit of my higher functions online, what exactly did you mean by that? Right. He's like, I'm really sorry. I just met, like, you know, after like a long day and and, you know, like Wonder Woman at the end of the battle, she looked a little rough too, because I'm a big comic nerd. So he's going to pull in all the stops of this one, right?

Way to go, Craig. I know, right? He's like, you know, like, like, you know, Wonder Woman, she looked a little rough after the end of the battle. So that's just what I said. I was like, you're ridiculous. OK. And it was fine, right? But I could easily see myself 10 years ago being mad about that for like a year. Now I'm just internalizing it and being like, man.

Well, how much do you think of our anger in general is just fear that comes out the wrong pipe? So much, especially with men that's, you know, and not to like overgeneralize and in genders, very complicated as well. But generally, men will go to the anger button first and women go to like the shut down button first. Part of that is socialization. Part of that, you know, can be associated with physiology.

But but anger is a way to not show what they think not showing fear. So, you know, if they're scared of not being enough, if they're scared of losing control, whether that control is financial or their health, it comes out as anger because it makes the person feel powerful. Right. Because anger is also one of the base emotions. And but we don't feel powerful in fear. We we feel powerful in anger and we talked about media. When we look at archetypes in media, the ones that come in, they're angry

and they got the Rambo knife and they got the guns. Those are those are the power ones. They're they're here to whoop ass, not the like, I'm afraid in the corner. I'm the big, you know, like scared pants. I'm not saving anybody. No one wants to be the scaredy pants in the movie. They want to be the hero. Yeah. And the way that we've told stories, the hero is generally angry.

Yeah, they have a they have a bone to pick. Or they have revenge to seek or or something like that. They've got a score to settle. Yeah. And so and I find it's funny. I find when I'm when I'm scared, I either shut down and I just almost in conflict, can't even speak. And like words just won't come out. That's me.

That happened when I got mugged, too. I went to scream and no noise would come out of my mouth. And I was like, it was like one of those like nightmares. Yeah, where you can't run only I ran, but I was like just nothing. And then but yeah, sometimes I'll I'll be super afraid. I'll have like an anxiety attack about something like I was doing my taxes the other day and was like, I realized I forgot to pay this one thing and there was a fine on it. It was like this tiny business tax that I just didn't see the paperwork.

And I got so angry at just humanity. Yeah, I was like, but I mean, do you think that that there's a stage where we'll stop doing that? We'll stop relying on on those either shut down or anger, like, especially with like, you know, not to make it like the world today. But I mean, I feel like people online get so angry with each other. Like politically, people are so angry. Like, do you think there's a way to make people recognize like you are afraid right now?

And that is why you are bullying someone, or that's why you're just shutting down sections of the government, you know what I mean? I think that we definitely can get there as a society if if we try. And I think this is for me part of my why of why I think this work is so important to start these conversations, because fear in and of itself is never going to go away. And it's going to be as long as we're humans until we can put our consciousness in a robot, then, you know, we can come to that bridge when it exists. But if we have our human bodies and our amygdala is are intact,

we are going to have fear. And so changing that conversation and, you know, teaching people, this is a total like we teach people to sit on a toilet. That is not a natural thing. From a very young age, we're like, just don't stand in P because most animals are just like, like, I mean, you know, like we we teach very young children a very unnatural thing because it's more socially acceptable.

So we can do it. I believe in humanity. At some point, someone's like, hey, you know, this really good idea. It's called the toilet. It's going to be real fancy. Yeah. And and people thought they were crazy and caught on. And then now it's it's great. So glad. So happy about it.

Happy about it. Ten out of ten, twelve out of ten. Yeah. And I mean, with human behavior, people have to see what's in it for them. They have to see, like, well, what do I get out of it? And that's going to take some people longer than others because it's going to take humans and adult humans recognizing that this needs to be cultivated because fear can't be cured, but it can be cultivated in a way that we can have a healthy relationship with it

and changing the conversation when people are raising kids about like, it's OK to be afraid, like, you know, you don't you can you can be scared and allowing for that to be socially acceptable and then teaching people what to do when they're in the rabbit hole is going to be important. And I think that we definitely can get there, but it's not going to happen overnight as nothing does. If you had kids, what what would be a good toilet training for them

in terms of fear? Would it be trying to recognize if they're afraid of being out of control or not being good enough? Or would it be naming their fears? Like, what how would you try to train a kid to have better? Or how do you wish you had been trained or I had been trained to deal with fears? Yeah. And I think it's depending on how they are like right now. Yeah.

You would want to start having the conversation of asking them to examine their own feelings in the moment. I think it's one of the hardest things to like, you know, since we're not trained about our emotions, sometimes we don't even know what we're feeling. Yeah. We're just like, I'm just I'm not happy. Like, like what is it? I'm just I'm not happy. I'm in the not happy spectrum of not happy.

I'm growling. Yeah. I was like, rawr. And in getting to the practice of, OK, you know, I'm I'm feeling insecure or I'm feeling terrified or, you know, trying to trying to attach names to things. So even just in the moment, they can say, you know, I'm feeling this way and and teaching them to reach out in that moment. If they're they're smaller, even if they're larger, saying like, you know, I as your parent that loves you,

I am a source for you to reach out. So when you're scared, you reach out to me, whether that's a text, whether that's a call, whether that is physically coming over and like just holding my hand like I can be your buoy when you're when you're afraid and we can talk about it. I think one of the worst things is to just really super internalize the things you're afraid of because then you just keep building that story and it gets bigger and bigger and the stories that we tell ourselves

continue to grow if we just keep in that cycle. So kind of creating a pattern of behavior that acknowledges the fear that is aware of it is accepting of it and then focuses on kind of ways to cultivate a better relationship with it. Do you recommend that adults kind of have those same conversations with themselves like when you're when you're feeling, you know, anxious or angry or whatever, sitting down with yourself and saying, like, what are you feeling? Yeah, yeah, all the time.

And one of the reasons I'm so excited about like what I studies because I was like, I'm not kidding. I was really bad at emotions. I was good at showing happy, bubbly, perfect, Mary. Everything's perfect, but darker emotions. No, they don't I don't have those. Yeah, they don't exist. You know, and they would everything was coming out sideways.

So having that conversation with yourself is going to be important. Knowing what your fear reactions are is going to be essential. Like you said, you shut down, right? That's really common. People will run away. They'll get angry. They'll self medicate with food or substances. They'll become depressed or inactive.

These are all unhealthy ways to respond to fear. But knowing how you respond is really important for building those relationships. So you have those people to reach out to. So having like, you know, like a romantic partner or friends. And, you know, once you they're in that kind of like circle of trust, saying like, this is how I react when I'm in fear. Like I shut down. It's not that I don't want to talk to you.

My mouth isn't working. Like I'm one of those people like I, you know, like I'm I Stonewall and I know that's not the person I want to be. But it's also going to just be part of the question. And when you add in, you're tired or you have eight hundred other things that on your plate, you know, you're not always going to be that perfect person of being like, hi, I'm feeling fear and I'm going to eloquently articulate those feelings for you in a very nice and gentle tone.

So there's going to be no, you know, friction between us. You're like, I have a PowerPoint. I made a slide deck. It's on Prezi. I just had to look up what Prezi was. And I'm sure it's for lectures and marketing professionals. But it seems like a real snazzy way to tell a lover how and why they bruised your feelings.

Let me use it. Like, it's just it's not going to it's not how it's going to come out. Right. But knowing how you and your partner. Like react when you're in fear is going to be important. So you can also start to see it. So that if they're shutting down or if they're getting angry, that's disproportionate to the thing, you can actually be like, OK,

this is not me like an ass. Like, are you are you feeling afraid right now? And are you able to talk about it? Or maybe do we need to like take a five and like for me, sometimes I just need to walk away because I'm just going to say something stupid. So I just and what's happening in that because I will sometimes be. I know there's this adage of like never go to bed angry. And sometimes I'm like.

If I if I'm annoyed or angry or insecure or fearful and it's coming out sideways. Thanks, Catholicism. Like I'll fall asleep and I'll wake up and I'm like, I'm fine. And I'm like, and that's so antithetical to the never go to bed angry. But I feel like I'm like, this is a chemical tornado in my brain. Yeah. And it's going to go away. And I is there ever is it just like different strokes for different folks or like is there something good about just

like letting your brain chemicals drain and get broken down over time? Like an hour or five minutes? Yeah, we're we're essentially always two year olds. OK, like forever. And sometimes we just need a goddamn map and we just we just need to take a little nap or have like a snack. Hanger is a thing. And sometimes the root of the problem is just.

Yeah, your brain just needs a break or you're hungry. And that sounds oversimplified, but it's also true. And so sometimes if you just feel like everything's going wrong. I heard this quote a couple weeks ago and it's great. It was like if you run into one asshole during the day, that person was an asshole. If you keep running the assholes all day, it's you. Yeah, you're the asshole. You're the asshole.

And so if you just all day, everyone is just on your last nerve. It's you. Just go take a nap, right? It's probably your you haven't had enough sleep. So there is something to be said for going to bed angry and just waking up chill. I saw this one psychology website that said that the typical fight or flight response lasts about 20 minutes. And so 20 minutes of calm is just a good start to drain your brain of the panic juice, which I'm starting to realize maybe why some

meditation practices recommend 20 minute stretches at a time. Now, OK, if you can't find a soft surface to peace out and dream or just breathe your fear slash rage away, apparently exercise can also help you burn through some of that cortisol and epinephrine. So if you're having a day, you're having a moment, just announce, I'm going to run around the parking lot a bunch to metabolize my very common chemical feelings of inadequacy. Be right back. Thank you.

Also, maybe take a look at what's making you have those adrenaline spikes. But do you think that there is there should maybe be a deeper look at like the way that we do scare ourselves? Like, should we maybe stop looking at Twitter accounts that terrify us all the time? Should we put a cap on how much how many rabbit holes we go down? Or do you think that if we're going down and we should be going down it? I think you have to like really be discerning on where you're going to spend kind of your your stress response.

So we know that having a stress response all day long is really bad for you. It will kill you. Like your body is not able to take care of itself. It's not going to be mentally fun. It's not it's not good all around. It's not good for your relationships, because you're constantly like, yeah. So you're not going to have the best life if you're constantly in that state of stress and fear.

So just like you can't eat all the things every minute of the day. You have to be discerning, right? It's got to be discerning on what what kind of things do you want to expose yourself to? What kind of things do you want to spend your stress money on? Right? Like for me, I I don't engage with people in like comment sections. And as you do media as well, and especially when you do visual media and as a woman, even if it's in science, people make crazy ass comments. And you're like, seriously, you came to a science show.

I'm not into it. But I I'm just going to let it go because that's not worth my my stress energy. It's a finite amount of like currency that I have. And I'm not going to spend it on that stuff. That doesn't matter if it's something I enjoy. Like I don't like horror like slasher films, but like spooky films, you know, or like psychological thrillers. And that's kind of fun.

If I don't have to go to bed alone to have like a spooky movie, then that's that's fun for me. So I'm going to spend some of my my stress energy there. But that's going to be a choice. And really, it's it's about it's about choices and knowing which things are going to kind of be your stress responses. And you're not going to fully manage those, but just kind of making making better choices of what is my like return on investment in this? Like, you know, like we're talking about social media.

Am I going to change that person's opinion by fighting with them in the comment section? Probably not. Right. People like cognitive bias is a thing. And people in the comment section are not there usually to have a deep, meaningful conversation. They're there to get their anger fix. And so, like, for me, I'm like, I'm not going to be your dealer. Sorry, I'm just you're going to have to get your anger fixed somewhere else.

So staying calm and super collected might be the cruelest response. And then to quote the wisdom of ancient East Coast philosophy, forget about it. And when you have like rumination, when you have like fear and anger that don't have an outlet, then you just keep cycling in your body. You're just like, I'm going to hold onto this and just get more angry and more, you know, like frustrated or fearful about things. That's not that's not serving anything. It's not doing any good.

You know, I know we don't know a whole lot about depression and anxiety. I mean, compared to the amount people suffer from it to what we know. I think we're we're we still are figuring out like how SSRIs really work in the brain. How much do you think of anxiety is is genetic physiological? And how much is it learned responses? Do you know what I mean? I mean, I know that cognitive behavioral therapy is super helpful and that is relearning, but I'm just curious and I can look more into this

just because I thinking of my family history of anxiety. I'm I'm wondering how much of it is just patterns of behavior. Yeah, it's definitely going to be a mix. And with a lot of like mental health issues, part of it, you know, it's going to be genetic predisposition, take addiction, right? Part of it is genetic predisposition. Part of it is going to be the environment in which you were raised. Part of it is going to be your active choices and the support system

or education that you've been given around how to make different choices. So humans are so complex. And this is kind of why there's no easy answer to any of these things. But there's always going to have that genetic predisposition be a part of it because we do have lineages. They just came out. I think like like a few months ago, you probably saw this with like scientific evidence to support trauma gets passed on through generations

and not just in utero. Like there's a genetic with a telomeres impact of trauma that gets passed through DNA. You're like, what? So if you have a trauma line, you're screwed. It was not even your fault. You can't do anything. It's I just let me live my life.

That is quite an inheritance. Right. Like, yeah, you're like, I got shitty telomeres and some epigenetics that are boning me. Thanks grandpa. Right. So if you listened to the evolutionary biology episode, you might remember some things about acquired genetics and epigenetics and gene expression. And this kind of falls in line with that. So there was a study out in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2014

and it involved data about war survivors who suffered PTSD, having children with higher methylation of a gene involved in stress response. But it was a small study. It only looked at a little slice of genes with not that many people. So some scientists say that more data needs to be gathered. We got a lot to learn. And a lot, especially like really big trauma, things like the Holocaust, things that were completely out of those individuals control.

It continues to get passed down in generations. So, I mean, with the brain, there's still so much we don't know. And we're kind of still scratching the surface of understanding, like learned fears. We still don't quite know how that works of why someone, you know, learns to be afraid of water because something happened when they were a kid. And then you have other people that love water. And so there's still like a lot of research to be done on that end.

But it's definitely passed on both, I think, genetically, as well as behaviorally, because how do you learn how to be a human for your parents and your family? Like, especially when you're young and really impressionable, like, how do I human? Oh, that's how I human. OK. And that's so deeply imprinted that even when you start to learn new behaviors, it's not going to be as powerful as what was imprinted when you were young. So depending on what kind of, you know, shake of the dice you got, that's going to have a huge impact on how you're going to

like express yourself as an adult. But it's interesting to me that like learning about how much of our fears, especially in the western world or, you know, in a in a big city or whatever, our fictional gives me more faith in in pursuing more like cognitive behavioral tactics. I think there's at some point, I think you kind of just surrender to your anxiety and you're like, well, I'm an anxious person. Like I got I got diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.

And I was like a few years ago and I was like, oh, that's why I'm constantly worried about like living under a bridge. That's why I'm always afraid of being a failure or something. And so I think at some point, I kind of was like, well, I got a diagnosis, so I'm surrendering to it. You know, like it's who I am. And it's interesting to hear about you talk about it in that way. Because I'm like, oh, I'm there are there are steps that I just don't take

because I just think like this is my lot. And like it'd be like, if you were diabetic and you're like, well, why bother taking insulin? I'm diabetic. You know, like I'm like, I have more power to actually change things than I probably have given myself credit for, you know what I mean? I think I and I think it's interesting because I feel like the more people open up about fear and anxiety and stress,

the more you find out a lot of other people have it. And it's there's something really tragic about that because that means a lot of us struggle with it. And none of us know what to do to self soothe in the moment. Like we just it's we're just not equipped. We weren't given that. That's so that's so fascinating. I'm going to remember that.

Yeah, all right. Yeah, super helpful. Yeah. And it's and it's one of those things that, you know, like having professional therapy can be super, super helpful. But that's only maybe once a week, maybe twice a week. And we feel fear every damn day. So we need things that are going to be easy to remember when our higher functions are just shutting down that we can put in our pocket

and be like, OK, I'm going to I'm going to pull this out. And I'm going to pull myself out of this like fear storm. And that empowers us. That makes us like not feel like we're just the whims of our brain. Exactly. That, you know, our brains is going to be like, I do what I want. And the other thing is, especially if you're having a fear can be divided, if fictional fears can be divided into I'm not good enough or I'm out of control.

I think that feeling like embarrassed that you're afraid or ashamed that your fear made you angry, that only triggers more of that I'm not good enough and I'm out of control because I'm not in control of my emotions. And I'm a huge turd for feeling angry and afraid. And now I'm even worse because I'm ashamed that I'm angry and afraid. You know what I mean? So it's just like it really spirals down so quickly.

It's like the song that never ends. I don't want to turn you off. So if you're an alive human, you probably relate it to a lot of this and you're like, wait, there's so much more I need to know, but don't fear. Part two is here while it will be next week. So I broke this episode into two. I made Mary talk to me on my couch for so long, I'm obsessed with her work now.

So stay tuned next week to hear about Mary's own personal moments of greatest fear and what she did and what it taught her, as well as a ton of really good questions sent in from your own inquisitive brains, which Mary will answer. Meanwhile, you can find Mary online at www.marypuffinroth.com. She's on Facebook at Mary Puffinroth. She's also on Twitter at Mary Puffinroth. Instagram, though, her handle is fear forward.

So gently stalk her. This podcast is at allergies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at Allie Ward with one L on Instagram and Twitter. You can pick up allergies, shirts and pins and totes at the newly designed allergies merch.com site. We have bird pins, bug pins, clock pins. We just got in this week, these cosmetology pins, and they are glittery.

They're eight bucks, so much cuteness. So go to allergiesmerch.com for that. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas for helping with the merch site. You can join the allergies Facebook group if you like nice people. Thanks, Hannah Lippo and Aaron Talbert for admitting. And thank you, Stephen Ray Morris, for the lastest minute editing ever. You're a champion. Also, happy belated birthday, Stephen Ray Morris.

It was last Tuesday. Thank you for existing. The music was written by Nick Thorburn of the Band Islands. And if you stick around through the credits, you know, you get a secret. I'm just going to tell you that this is so dumb. So this whole two part episode is about fear and stress. This weekend, I was on a tiny vacation with some of my best girlfriends. I've known since I was 12 and I had to get the audio uploaded.

And the Wi-Fi at the Airbnb we're staying at was the slowest ever. Like this will not mean anything to most people, but it was 0.24 megabytes per second upload speed, which if that, if you deal at all with any uploading of anything, you know that that is just that's like tear inducingly slow. Anyway, I finally went to a library. Shout out to public libraries. Y'all have fast free Wi-Fi and I love you.

But my poor girlfriends I've known since high school had to watch me freaking out trying to upload this episode all about fear and this rest response. So it's uploaded. And I had to ask myself, why am I freaking out right now? I was like, I'm afraid I'm not good enough because I didn't upload this earlier. And what if this episode isn't good enough and no one listens anymore? So there you go. There's my secret for the week, you guys.

Real life fears. What if I'm not good enough? What if this isn't good enough? All because of slow upload speeds. So anyway, think about what you're afraid about. We'll have more next week. This is it's what a great two parter. It's kind of like free therapy, even though I think I'm supposed to say a disclaimer

about that this is not intended to diagnose or treat anything and you should get professional help for everything because podcasts aren't allowed to fix anything, but it's very helpful nonetheless. Okay. Breathe deep. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.