Science Vs - Stress: The Science of Chilling Out

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Stress! We’re all feeling it. And besides just feeling crappy, we’re also told that stress can wreak havoc on our bodies. The internet has a million solutions: vagus nerve stimulators, deep breaths, or a hot sauna! If that doesn’t work, maybe a cold plunge? But what does the science say about all this — what works to lower our stress? And is it really THAT bad to be stressed out? We dive into the research to find out, with psychology Professor Mark Seery, psychology Professor Jeremy Jamieson, and anatomist Dr. Theresa Larkin.    Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsStress  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) We’re all stressed out!  (02:37) Is stress that bad for us? (13:55) A healthier stress response (22:32) How our vagus nerves are involved in stress (25:57) Can we “hack” our vagus nerves?  (30:42) What else can relieve stress?  This episode was produced by Meryl Horn, with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Video editing and sound by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode including Professor Julie Vašků, Dr. Christopher Austelle, Professor Daryl O'Connor, and Dr. Jennifer Wild, as well as Humdinger Studios in Melbourne. And thanks as well to Humdinger Studios in Melbourne. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Verses, the show The Pits Facts Against Feeling Frazzled. Today on the show, stress. It's everywhere. We're all feeling it. It's like we're swimming in stress. Is life just like stress anybody else out? I feel like every fucking five minutes there is something going on

and I have to pay a fire. I like want to throw in the towel. Like I just am like, that's it. We're hearing more and more that stress isn't just bad for our mental health. But if we experience too much of it, It can screw it with our whole body. We're talking about sleeve disruptions, headaches and muscle tension, digestive issues, low energy and fatigue. No living organism was created to sustain these levels of chronic stress for an extended period of time.

But don't stress. Because online, people say they have the solution. The thing to chill us out. So one thing that's blowing up right now are these devices that can stimulate a very very, specific place on our body. Holy crap. Oh, it's got nice, honestly. Oh, yeah.

They're not telling vibrators, although maybe that could work. This is a vagus nerve stimulator. It is all over the internet, and it is just the latest in a long line of these tips and tricks that people say can relieve our stress. They're telling us to buy a cold plunge tank, to use a sauna, or even sign up for a breathing class. Inhale. This time we're going to let out a sigh.

So today we are going to inhale the science of stress and exhale a podcast. We're going to find out how bad is stress really? What is it doing to our bodies and what are the science-approved ways to de-stress and regulate our nervous system? When it comes to stress, a lot of us are ready to throw in the towel. But then there's science. Science versus stress is coming up just after the break. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

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Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. Welcome back today on the show. We are looking into the science on stress. I am super excited to get to know the science here. And the only person who could tell it to us is the incredibly stressed out senior producer.

Merrill on. Yep. I could definitely use some science on stress, so I was excited to dive into. I was joking. I was joking. How are your stress levels right now? I mean, they're like terrible, like everybody. Okay.

So, yeah, I definitely wanted to know, like, what actually works and how bad is this really? Because I had heard that it's like, you know, on top of just feeling like crap, it's also going to destroy my body to be stressed out. So I wanted to see, like, what is the evidence there? Yeah, 100%, 100%, because the word on the street is definitely every time we feel stressed, every time your heart rate elevates just a little, you got to regulate, chill yourself out, go jump in some cold body of water. First question, is that true? Is all stress really that bad for us?

So, yeah, I started diving in and right away it came across some stuff that was pretty surprising. So, like, there's a study done by this guy. My name is Mark Siri. I'm a professor in the psychology department at the University of Buffalo. And so let me tell you about what Mark did. So he wanted to see how living through, like, really stressful life events affects our mental health. Like, how much is being exposed to hard stuff take a toll on us mentally. Great.

And, you know, lucky for him. He had access to this really amazing data set to help answer this. So they asked about 2,000 people about all these really stressful things that had happened to them over their lives. Serious illness or injury to oneself or a loved one. Exposure to combat. Being divorced yourself. Your parents being divorced. Death of a loved one.

Pretty terrible things. Terrible. Absolutely. Yes. Major negative life events. And then they gave people a checklist. So it had 37 of these things and people could check off what's happened to them. And then they also asked them.

about their mental health, things like life satisfaction, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and then they look to see whose mental health was worse. And one finding was pretty obvious right away. The people who are at a high level of adversity, they, on average, are the worst off across all these outcomes. So if you've had a ton of these really hard things happen to you, they are feeling the worst. Exactly right, exactly right. Not surprising. Yes, it does make sense. But the really interesting part, then is comparing people who were at zero adversity to people who were at like some university. And the people who were at zero were not the best off. They were actually worse off than the people who had experienced some adversity. That actually makes sense to me. Yeah, how come?

I'll give you a sort of obvious example. The other day, I had a really nasty stomach bug. It was so bad. My stomach pain was off the chest. I was crying. The physical pain was so bad. And after it, it kind of went away within a couple of hours. And all this week, my stress levels have been way lower than normal. I'm like, I'm a healthy. I'm alive.

I can eat ice cream again. There's something about you go through a difficult time. You know you can survive it. You're proud of yourself. you know, depending on obviously what happened to you. And you do come out the other side, as many songs have told us stronger, I think. And that is just a stomachache for a couple of hours,

a terrible thing like what these people have experienced. I could imagine that, do we want to call it a glow lasting a little longer? Is that what Mark has found? Sort of. He actually thinks that it's basically like you're building up resilience, sort of like exercise, he thought. Like, we need to work out our stress response to get good at stress. It's very much analogous to developing physical fitness. Like, if you never

work out, if you never put your body through a physical stress, you have zero opportunity to develop physical fitness. So, yeah, maybe getting exposed to these big stressful things helps our body get better at responding to other stressful stuff without like totally overwhelming us. Okay, so it's not just putting pain in context, which was how I was thinking about it. It's actually your stress response gets better and better with each stressor, potentially up to a point. It seems like it could be both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's actually a sweet spot was like four awful things happening to people.

Oh, gosh. So you don't want to go too high either. Uh-huh. But yeah, some stress seems like it, or some big stress full of things seems like it actually makes us more resilient. And he actually tested that in a separate experiment. He, like, brought people into the lab to see if they were basically tougher if they had experienced stressful stuff in the past. What did he do? We asked them to put their hand in ice-cold water for as long as they could stand and then report, how painful is this?

Tell us at the end their level of what's called situational catastrophizing. Like, I thought this was never going to end. Have you done this by, by the way? I have. And I do not prefer to do it. My hands get cold if I'm like rinsing kale under the cold watered faucet. Okay, so the people who had been through some level of trauma, these terrible things in their lives had happened, they could cope with this painful exercise better than others. Yeah, yeah, the people, they ask people, you know, to do that same checklist and the ones who had experienced some, you know, adversity experienced less physical pain than the people.

those that didn't go through anything like that, and they could catastrophized less. Interesting. And then there's also animal experiments that back this up, too. So does all this research change the way that you, like, go through life? Yeah. You know, it's a good question. Honestly, it's helpful to know this stuff. Because, like, how I explain you the meaning of this work is not that, oh, yeah, you should seek out to break some bones.

Yeah. Like, these are bad things, and you don't need to seek them out. But invariably almost, they do happen to people. But what this work says is that, you know what, at some point in the future, this actually does have the potential to be a net positive for you. I personally, I find that to be really comforting. Yeah, so bottom line, science actually does kind of support the whole like whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. So Mark was talking about these kind of terrible, singular stress. events that hit. You break a bone, someone you love dies and how your body responds to that.

But what about kind of day-to-day stress, just the relentlessness of life? What do we know about what that does to the body? Yeah. So the way that scientists kind of think about this is that our bodies are totally made to deal with stressors here and there. So it's not like every time you get stressed out by something and your heart starts speeding faster. It's not like that's a bad thing. We want to like eliminate that altogether. Right. You don't need to jump in some cold water or anything. Our body can deal with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our body can deal with that. And then if it recovers, then you'll be okay. Yeah. But we know that if you don't have like time and space to like recover and the stressors just are like happening again and again and again and again. Yes. That can add up and take like a toll on your

body. And the way we know this is by studying groups of people who experience a ton of stressors. Like, if you're taking care of someone who's sick or disabled, if you've been abused, if, you know, you live in a low-income neighborhood, if you experience racism, there's all these like signs that in these kind of situations where you might experience stress day in and day out, we can see this kind of bigger effects. So what happens in your body when you have this relentless stress? So one thing that we think is going on is it does mess with your cortisol system. Yeah. So it's like normal for cortisol to be high at the start of the day since it helps us wake up.

And then maybe you'll experience little bursts of it during the day as the stressful stuff comes up. Uh-huh. You can literally measure that, right? In studies, they'll get people to do your stressful things and you see the cortisol spike. Mm-hmm. And then it should go back down. Is that the idea? It should go back down.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so the system kind of turns itself off after you've dealt with that stressful thing. The little cortisol spigot is like, okay, stressor is gone. I'm going to turn off now. But studies have found that when stress is incessance, that system gets dysregulated. So the cortisol spigot is like turning on too much or not enough or at the wrong times a day. And, you know, that is what's bad. That can up your chance for cardiovascular disease or depression and anxiety. And can you feel that? As you're describing it, I do know it when is happening to. Yeah, yeah, because I sort of, I feel like the times in my life where I have been overwhelmed with stress, I do feel like I'm just like vibrating at a higher frequency throughout the day and things will trigger me much faster. Is that the response you're talking about? I was trying to find, like, what are the signs for, like, when you've reached this point of chronic stress?

And even though there's no, like, for sure, signal that's like, yes, you are chronically stressed now. One of the things that reviews say to kind of look out for is feeling irritable or overwhelmed a lot. So maybe that's what you're describing. Yeah. And, like, that kind of changes in mood. Yes. Feeling down, having trouble going to sleep. Like, those are kind of some of the clues that tell us that you might be heading into kind of

chronic stress land. And then there are other things that happen kind of in the moment when we're feeling stressed out. So like your heart rate will get faster. Your breathing gets faster. But then sometimes you get into this particular stress response that's bad. It's called a threat response where even though your heart is pumping blood faster, it can't get out to your limbs and your brain more easily because your blood vessels don't dilate. And so that's part of the way we think it's kind of bad for us because like the blood isn't getting where it's supposed to go. Wow. So it's just totally dysregulated. The systems that are supposed to be, you know, heart pumps, blood vessels dilate, that something's just all gone haywire with this stress

response. Yeah. But what's interesting is that there's another way. There is another stress response. That doesn't seem like it's as bad as that. So that whole process that I just described, it's not inevitable. So I talked about this with Jeremy Jameson. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. And he told me that he noticed firsthand that people can have more helpful stress responses back when he was a football player in college. You would see your teammates before a game who'd be like really amped up.

And so there the stress response was seen as like a supportive thing for the performance. performance. So like, yeah, we can do this. Yeah. Yeah, I want that stress just what. So in this case, you know, your body actually, when you think you're prepared to take on the challenge, this, you have this different thing happening in your body called a challenge response. And in that case, your blood vessels will dilate. You'll, you know, your, everything opens up and the blood gets to where it's supposed to go. And so, yeah, Jeremy told me like, what happens in this case? body's like, great, I will do things, help get you all the resources you need to take that stressor on. And so you see dilation of the blood vessels. You see more blood going out the periphery.

You see production of animal hormones. It's all these performance and health supportive responses. To the aim is like, I want you to take, I want you to approach the stressor because you think you can handle it. So your body is like, go, go, go, go. Like you can do it. Go get it. So sometimes I do have that response to stress. So can, it's, it's. It's a lot. It's, it's. It's not as if one person will always be by stress and another person will always be charged by it. The same person can have two different responses. Yeah.

And then one key thing about the way these two responses are different. Yes. Is that we think your body might make less cortisol when you're having that good one and more of other hormones like testosterone. Less good. Oh, how interesting. It's a stress response, but you don't have cortisol spikes. Instead, you have testosterone spikes? Well, you still make some cortisol, but the ratio is different.

Yeah, you make less cortisol, we think, and more testosterone when you're having, like, the good stress response, which would be kind of, it's a performance enhancer, right? Yeah, interesting. It can help us do more things. It gets cleared out of the body faster. Here's Jeremy. And so once a stressor is dealt with, you go back to baseline, you go back to home your space very quickly. And yeah, so Jeremy wanted to see, like, can we teach people how to have that testosterone-fueled, like, Captain America challenge response? Oh, okay.

Instead of feeling the, like, the scary, you know, I'm not ready. Yes. So, yeah, he did a study where he basically taught people that stress can be helpful, like, you know, stress isn't the enemy. So they got over 300 community college students. and before a big math test, they gave some information to teach them about basically what we've been talking about, how stress itself isn't necessarily bad. And so when they felt it coming on during the test, hey, your hands are study, your heart's raising, great.

You just pull it around the way you need to. That's good. Yeah. And so I think when people see that, it's like, oh, this is fuel now for me. And this is how I can support myself in this performance setting. You take something that was seen as this hindrance, and now it's seen as something that's resourceable to you. So instead of like, instead of trying to do the math test,

despite the stress happening in your body, try to like use the stress? Yep. You lean into it. You use it. It's a resource. Wow. You can control it.

You're not just a puppet to whatever your cortisol is doing. You can actually direct that energy. That's what Jeremy wanted to test. Okay. So they had some people learn this technique of like, try to use this, you know, feeling. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Ride the wave. Yes, yes, yes.

And then they also had a control group where they just told people to ignore the stress. And then they looked to see what happened. And they found that the students who learned this like lean into your stress technique, they did better. Like fewer of them dropped the course. They were about 15% more likely to pass the class than the students who got the just ignore it advice. That was across a couple of different studies with different groups of students. and their bodies made relatively more testosterone and less cortisol than the other students. That's an inspirational stress story, Merrill, that you can try to redirect it.

And it's as simple as just being aware that I'm in stress mode, do-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Right it, write it. Yeah. That's kind of what we're supposed to do. Yeah, there's another study that did something even simpler. So my favorite one on this got about 100 people to do something else. So they weren't preparing for a math test, but it was something else.

Yeah. Do you want to guess? Public speaking? It was karaoke, actually. Ah, okay. So I just love to get people up there doing public speaking. Karaoke, even better. Even better.

Okay, did they give them the songs or they got to pick? They didn't get to pick. No, they made everybody sing, journeys don't stop believing. Oh, no. This is scientists really putting themselves on the line. You know, they would have had to listen to that song. People kill that song over and over again. How many people do you say were in this study?

It was about 100. A hundred. A hundred. Don't stop believing. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And not surprisingly when people found out they had to do this, their hearts started beating faster.

And so they all showed a threat response. My heart is beating, because I'm worried you're going to ask me to do it. I'm there, I'm there. Well, but then beforehand, the researcher assigned some people to say something out loud, like, I am excited than other people had to say something else, like, I am anxious. And she found that the ones who said, I am excited, they felt more excited. And not only that, they actually sang the song better than the people who said they were anxious. Wow.

They were less off-key and they were more accurate when they say. saying don't stop believing according to this like software program that they use to analyze people's responses. You know what this makes me think? You know when people today, they don't like science, they don't like facts, and you know what I want to tell them, Merrill? Don't stop believing. Yeah, that's right. So if you're not having to sing Journey, um, can you use, can you really use this in day-to-day live. Jeremy is like hopeful that this could actually help people more generally, even not specific to like preparing for like a bench, but yeah, like he did a preprint where he enrolled people who

might be vulnerable to chronic stress. So these were high schoolers in like a low income, mostly black community who went to a really challenging high school. And he taught them this, you know, stress can be positive. Yeah. Use it mindset. Yeah. And it seemed like it helped them too. like just generally on their most stressful days, they felt better about themselves and their cortisol was lower. So he thinks that it can just like generally be helpful. Wow. And obviously I don't want to make it seem like all you have to do is change your mindset

and all of, you know, your stresses will melt away. Yes. You know, there's a reason people are stressed out. Yeah, this isn't going to fix like the causes of stress for a lot of people. Yeah. And then there's also just situations where using this approach probably wouldn't be a good idea in the first place. Like if you're having panic attacks, Jeremy mentioned like you probably don't want to like lean into the stress in that case, right? You want to lower your stress.

Right. But maybe as you're going through your day, maybe this tool can help with little moments to make your day a little bit better. That's the idea. Yeah, exactly. Okay. After the break, I want to look at that orgasm device, Merrill. Yeah. What's the hell was that person doing?

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Welcome back today on the show. We are talking about the science of stress. And now we are jumping into this device. There's a bunch of them online. I'm getting advertised all over the shop. I started seeing these ads too. And just generally stuff about the vagus nerve everywhere. Everywhere. The internet just discovered the vagus nerve. Tell us about the vagus nerve for those who don't remember from anatomy class. Yeah, so I talked to Teresa Larkin, who is an associate professor and anatomist at the University of Walla Gong in Australia. Wallengong. Wallengong, sorry, Australia. Wait, you can't say Wulingong. Wollongong? Is that it? Forget it.

Tell me about Doreen. She's really into the vagus nerve, which. By the way, it should actually be nerves because we have two of them. Oh. Honestly, I will refer to it as such a beautiful nerves. It's the left and right, but they are just beautiful nerves. So why are they beautiful? Well, Teresa has actually cut open cadavers and looked at them, so let me let her tell you.

They're very prominent and they're quite glistening. They're, you know, this white, yellow. Really important nerves. One reason she's so into these nerves and thinks they're so beautiful is just like how extensive they are throughout the body. So I sent you a picture if you go to the link. Yes. Open that link up. Ooh.

Wow. Because Vegas means wandering. Yes. Right. Yes, exactly. throughout your body. The nerves like start at your brainstem, so kind of like the back of your neck, and then they go down and really start branching all through the chest and the gut, and then they go all the way down to the colon, touching tons of organs along the way.

Aha. Yeah, wow. And so does stimulating it reduce stress? Well, there is a logic to that because we know that these nerves are really important just generally when it comes to stress. Like they kick in just naturally when your body is kind of coming down from stress. So here's how Teresa put it. Chronic stress is not good. And the antidote are the vagus nerves.

Like they literally are in what way? So when we have a big stress response and then it's passed, these nerves can trigger a like chill out response, which has this own tagline. Rest, digest. restore. So if we just break those down, we can really think about the rest slows down our heart rate. It slows down a breathing rate. So when our body decides, it's time to chill out now.

Your vagus nerves help slow down the heart, you know, get the gut moving again, reduce inflammation. So they kind of take the brain's instructions that it's like, ah, it's time to chill out now. And then they spread word to the rest of the body on like how to how to do that. So then do these Vegas nerves stimulators work? So yeah, let's like unpack the science here because first we do have devices

that stimulate the vagus nerve that are FDA approved for other conditions. So not stress exactly. Here's Teresa. So some people have implantable Vegas nerve stimulators. So through a surgery, they will have this stimulator put

under the skin in their chest and it will stimulate the left side of the vagus nerves. And they've been approved for treatment-resistant depression, some epilepsy. The science is actually a little bit mixed. Like, even though it's FDA-approved in some studies, it didn't actually work that well for those conditions. And then there are the vagus nerve stimulators that you cannot, you and I can just like buy online.

Right. That go over the neck. Those can be pretty pricey. They can cost hundreds of dollars. But I did find a study looking at those for stress, and it seemed pretty promising at first. Really? At first? They had people... Yeah.

Also, so they had people do some stressful stuff, like solving some annoying math problems, and they found that zapping their necks with this thing seemed to lower their stress after. And there are some other studies seeming like it might help for PTSD or cluster headaches. Uh-huh. But then I scroll down to the Conflict of Interest section on some of these papers. And a lot of the time the researchers doing these studies are getting funding from the companies that make the devices, the biggest nerve stimulators. Okay. Yeah.

But the main reason that I got, you know, over these stimulators is because when I was talking to scientists about this, they were like, we actually have a way of stimulating the Vegas nerve for free without these devices that has more evidence behind it. Oh, okay. What do you do? Yeah. So, like, one way that you can do this is just by breathing in a particular way. So do you want to try it with me? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. So to simulate your vagus nerve, just try this. Okay. So take a big breath in and then slow breath out. And as you do that, the vagus nerves are doing two things. So the first is this. So, so, tell you. Taking a slow breath will stimulate the vagus nerves and tell them to tell the brain we are safe. So, one thing I haven't told you about the vagus nerves is that most of them, 80% of them, are actually made of fibers which take in information from the body and report back to the brain, like how the body's doing basically. Uh-huh.

And so we think that because some of these nerve fibers are in the lungs, they can kind of sense when we're doing. this like big slow breath out. And so the idea is that, you know, you take the big exhalation and then the vagus nerves notice until your brain like, oh, she's feeling safe. And then the brain also uses the vagus nerves to relax you even more by like slowing down the heart and doing those things we talked about earlier. And, you know, when I did this with Teresa, I feel like I could actually feel my heart rate slowing down during those like long, slow exhales. Like that's where your heart rate is like slowing down. So Teresa says to try to have your exhales a little bit longer than the

inhales if you really want to like feel this. So one of the easiest things people can do is just a breathing for four but a breathe out for five. And there is some science backing up the idea that breath work like the slow paste breathing is pretty good at reducing stress. Uh-huh. Like there is a big meta-analysis that looked at ways to help with your cortisol. So it compared dozens and dozens of studies, and it found that relaxation techniques, like those that had people do breathing exercises, that was one of the things that worked the best.

In the same way that multiple little stresses can happen in a day and build your stress, build your stress, build your stress. You're trying to get into the car and then your clothes, get caught on something, and it's stuck, and then you can't open. When we do the opposite, it also adds up, you know, some nice breathing when we are waiting for the kettle to boil, some nice breathing when you're in the car, some nice breathing before the meeting starts. All of these things help to lower the baseline stress level. Then by the way, the other big thing that that meta-analysis found that worked the best

was mindfulness and meditation. So there's some evidence for that stuff too. Okay, so breathing, stimulating the vagus nerve for free, not buying these devices. That's one little trick up out. sleeve to help with our stress response. Hearing a lot about going to the sauna, cold plunges, these kinds of things. Where is the data at today on that? Yeah, I looked into both of those, to sauna's cold plunges and neither had amazing evidence when it came to stress. Yeah. For asanas, there was one study saying that it can reduce anxiety, but there is no control group in that study.

For cold plunges, there were some studies that said maybe it could lower some stress hormones, but it was kind of weird because the effect only showed up at 12 hours after the cold plunge, but not at any of the other time points they looked at. Smells like pee hacking a little. Yeah, it wasn't totally convincing. But then what's interesting about this stuff is that both of these kind of get at this cool idea that is science-backed, Which is, so stressing out your body can leave you feeling more relaxed later. And the area where there are by far the most studies on that is exercise.

Exercise. I was going to say. Yeah. Yeah. So running. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Okay.

Take me through it. I mean, you might know that like exercise is basically a form of stress. Like if you think about it when you're in the middle of a jog, your body's like, all right, we're doing this. Your heart is pumping. Your breathing is faster. your muscles are getting more blood, all that jazz. It's basically a stress response, right? Yeah, yeah.

But then you hit your like mileage goal or kilometer goal and you can stop. It's over. You're safe. You're okay. Yeah. So here's Teresa. So I think one of the best things about things like exercise is that it has an end point. You stop that stress.

So then your body's like, oh, we just got the signal that we've stopped. So then it can. and the sympathetic goes down, stress goes down, vagus nerves go up. So where does Teresa like to run around? You mean, like... Woolling. Because she's... Oh, don't make me say it again.

Sorry, I'm just... I'm just trolling you. And so, yeah, like, you know, the idea is that maybe this goes back to that resilience point that we talked about earlier. You're helping your body learn how to, like, go back down after, being stressed. And one systematic review of 31 studies found that doing exercise, you can see these reductions in cortisol afterwards. And there was recently a randomized controlled trial that found exercise can help people who got panic attacks. So people had fewer and less

severe panic attacks after doing an exercise program for 12 weeks. All right, Merrill. Here's what I've learned about stress. Yeah, yeah. What have you learned? We're ready to wrap up. It's not necessarily a bad and you can try and use it to get that challenge response to inspire you. But it can, as we've all felt, it can also be completely overwhelming. Our cortisol may be running wild. And at times like that, you may be vulnerable and see someone online look like they're having an orgasm from a vagus nerve device. But don't get sucked in. Just pick up a vibrator instead.

No, don't get sucked in. Try to breathe slowly out, try to exhale. If you can, try and do some exercise. And also try and be kind to yourself because stress does suck. Yeah, sure. That's what... How do I do? Yeah, that's great. 10 out of 10.

Great. Wendy, there is one more thing. one final study that I want to tell you about. And this one's about cute animals. And I know how much you love studies about cute little animals. I mean, what are they doing to the animals? I've been worried about them. Don't worry.

So, it's my concern for science. But no, in this case, they want to look at whether just petting a furry friend can help with stress. Okay. And so, yes, a lot of studies have looked into this and some of them find that, yeah, this can work. This is the phrase furry friend. You don't like... Are you talking about a pet? Is that a dog or a cat or a hamster?

Well, so, yeah, in this particular study, they were comparing a real rabbit and then a toy rabbit. Okay. And then they got a real turtle and a toy turtle. Okay. And then they had people pet these guys and then they checked their anxiety levels before and after. Do you have any guesses for which worked out of those? For the turtle? I would say the turtle was less strict.

when it wasn't petted. I don't think a turtle likes being petted. Oh, yeah, the turtle felt. No, we're talking about that. They don't measure the stress responses in the turtles. Science. God.

Yeah. I think people liked petting the rabbit better. Right. So, yeah, the real rabbit worked for sure. The real rabbit. The toy rabbit too? No. So the real rabbit and the real turtle worked,

but not the toy rabbit. or the toy's hurdle. And the researchers concluded, quote, it was the quality of being alive rather than the texture of the object that produced the effect. But scientists are such robots sometimes. It was the quality of being alive.

Don't pet a table. Yeah. Find anything that's alive. Anything that's alive. Get consent and pet them. Yeah. Yes. Thanks, Merrill.

Thanks, Wendy. That's science verses. How many citations are in this week's episode? We have 63 citations. So if you want to look at all the research that went into this episode, go to our show notes and then follow the links to the transcripts. Excellent. This episode was produced by Merrill Horn with help from Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, and Aketti Foster Keys. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, Wendy Zuckerman, that's me, is the executive producer, fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard, video editing and sound mix.

by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munga and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all of the researchers that we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Julia Vaschku, Dr Christopher Ostell, Professor Daryl O'Connor, and Dr Jennifer Wilde, as well as Humdinger Studios in Melbourne. Science Versus is a Spotify studio's original.

Listen to us for free wherever you get your podcasts. You could also find us on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. So come and say hello. let us know what you thought of the episode. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.