Short Wave - What 'Inside Out 2' Got Right About Anxiety, Per A Psychologist

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Pixar's new movie, Inside Out 2 came out Friday. It's the sequel to the 2015 movie Inside Out, which follows the life of 11-year-old Riley and her family as they move to San Francisco. In Inside Out 2, Riley is 13 and thriving in her new city. She has friends and is a star on her hockey team. But when puberty hits one night, four new emotions come into play: Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment and most of all, Anxiety. Clinical psychologist and Inside Out 2 consultant Lisa Damour says the movie is surprisingly accurate when it comes to experiencing anxiety and puberty. Plus, she offers some guidance to help make the most of our anxiety. Have other pop culture science you want us to decode? Email us at [e-mail] — we'd love to consider it for a future episode!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Warning, shortwavers. This episode contains many spoilers for the new film Inside Out, too. So continue at your own risk. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Pixar released Inside Out in 2015 to critical acclaim and had me and my daughter bawling in the theaters. It was a movie that focused on 11-year-old named Riley, moving from the Midwest to San Francisco. This move really shakes up her core emotions, joy, sadness, feeling. disgust and anger. But as they try to make things better, they first make things worse.

In the new film Inside Out 2, Riley is 13 and settled in her new city. She has best friends and is thriving on the hockey team. But when puberty hits and her friends tell her they won't be going to the same high school next year, things begin to change. And with the arrival of adolescents come for new emotions that appear all. all at once and are wildly disruptive for Riley and her family. That's clinical psychologist Lisa DeMore. Her most recent book is called The Emotional Lives at Teenagers,

and it's aimed at helping parents support their teenagers while they go through the stage of their lives. It's work like this that made her an excellent scientific consultant for Inside Out too. So what's interesting about the evolution of the films is that it's actually also mapped onto the evolution of our science of emotion. So at the time that the first movie came out, there was this idea that there are these basic universal emotions. And we now identify at least 20 emotions that we see as universal and easily, you know, distinguish from one another. And so it makes sense from the scientific perspective to start to expand the landscape of Riley's emotional world. And for Inside Out 2, Lisa helped Pixar welcome four new emotions to Riley's inner. landscape. Envy, embarrassment on we, and...

Hello! I'm anxiety. Where can I put myself? Riley goes through a similar emotional roller coaster as the first film, but this time anxiety takes over and locks Riley's core emotions in a mason jar. You can't just bottle us up? We are suppressed. And for Lisa, getting to work on this movie has been a thrill, especially because she has teenagers of her own. So I got a call from Pixar in May of 2020, letting me know they wanted to talk

with me about a film they were working on. I was so excited because I loved the first film. And actually, my older daughter was the age of Riley at that time. And now I have a 13-year-old daughter. So in a very funny way, it's mapped on to my own parenting experience. Today on the show, Art Imitating Life. Anxiety takes center stage as we get into its depiction in Pixar's Inside Out 2. And how anxiety affects our brains in real life. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. Lisa, so in Inside Out 2, one morning Riley wakes up, and she's basically been launched into puberty,

like dealing with all these new emotions. Is this depiction of puberty accurate? You know, it's surprisingly accurate, especially if you look at it from the perspective of what it feels like for the teenager and for the family. So she goes to bed one night and is a kid. And then the puberty alarm rings on the console and is suddenly extremely reactive to her mother who's trying to have a conversation with her. And what is captured so beautifully in the film is the way in which the arrival of puberty sets off a cascading neurological set of events that cause emotions to be much more intense than they used to be. And it's so quick and comical in the film, but it's very, very accurate where her mother says something to her, and Riley, like, flips out on her mom, gets inexplicably angry. And it cuts to the inside of Riley's mind and all of the emotions turn on anger like, what are you doing?

And he's like, I barely touched it. I barely touched it. I like that. It was so funny. And sadness does the same thing. And she's like, yeah, no, I barely touch it. This thing's broken. And I think that's what it feels like for families.

And I'm so glad that it's on the big screen. So people don't have to worry that that means that something's wrong with them or their kid. It's totally normal. Yep. So how is this pubescent brain, like, then different? Like, what is actually happening? So what's happening is actually the brain is upgrading. It's becoming faster, more powerful, more efficient.

And that involves pruning some neurons. It means adding some neurons. It means strengthening the connection between neurons. And the thing that happens, and this is a problem. I guess you could say it's a bit of a design flaw. The brain remodels in the order in which it developed. And so that's from the back up to the more sophisticated, more, you know, modern regions, which are behind the forehead. And I guess the design hiccup maybe is that the emotions are housed in the more ancient regions.

And so they get upgraded first. But the perspective maintaining systems don't get fully upgraded until young adulthood. Right. And so there's a period, and this is really where we meet Riley, where teenagers have what we call a gawky brain, that their feelings and their ability to have emotional reactions has been, you know, sort of improved. But their ability to maintain perspective or get some distance on that experience is still lagging. So in this film, the new major character that's introduced is anxiety, right? And I love her. But for you as a scientist, what did you think?

Like, was there anything about her that really stood out to you? Well, the thing that was really interesting is in the evolution of the work on the film, anxiety got a lot cuter. She was initially cast as a bit more of a villain. Right. And I'm really, you know, through conversations and through, you know, their own thinking and research, Kelsey, manned the director and Meglafov at the writer, you know, came to a place of really treating her like, you know, she's wonderful. of the team. And it matters that she is adorable because you want her around and seen as a valuable partner to Riley and to the other emotions so long as she's within bounds. And that's accurate. We as psychologists, we see anxiety as an important, valuable, protective, and natural

human emotion. We see it as having a healthy version, which is the kind that is accurately anticipating what could go wrong, having the right reaction to it, having the right strength of reaction. We only see anxiety as pathological if it's, you know, anticipating threats that aren't real or overreacting to potential problems. And so in terms of her relationships with the other feelings, I think that over the evolution of the film, she went from being sort of a bad guy in the outside to being treated as she should as an uncomfortable but valuable emotion. Yeah, and for me, the most accurate depiction of what it feels like to have anxiety shows up when Riley's brain is hijacked by anxiety, which means well, but spoiler alert ultimately sends her into this like panic attack in the middle of her hockey game. Can you break down the moment Riley has this panic attack from like a clinical psychology standpoint?

Sure. So panic attacks are actually surprisingly common. Many, many people will have panic attacks in their lives and they're different from panic disorders. We don't see them as inherently pathological, though they are miserable to have. And, you know, if she's put in the penalty box and she starts to have a panic attack, and it's depicted so vividly. And so accurately to me, like it was so good. It was so good. You know, anxiety is swirling and swirling and swirling around her. And that really captures what people talk about when they have panic attacks.

It's a sense of feeling like cut off. from themselves and cut off from everything around them and feeling, you know, like that they just have lost all sense of place and time and, you know, very, very disorganizing to have a panic attack. And then, you know, the ways in which she sort of pulls herself out, you know, starts to get in touch with the physical sensations around her. When she touches the wood, you know, like, I know that, like, my therapist is like, oh, just, like, touch something, tap something, you know, like. Yeah.

just to bring your brain out of it. Yeah, and we call that using grounding techniques, and that is part of how you get yourself through and out of a panic attack. And, you know, I was sort of just blown away by that part of the film when I saw it for the first time, just how aptly they capture an experience that is so uncomfortable and so unpleasant

and also just the incredible tenderness that joy brings in that moment and helps to pull Riley back and bring her back to herself. And, you know, the goal of, as clinicians, our goal is not to rid people of anxiety. Our goal is to help people manage anxiety if it gets to an irrational level. And how do we do that? Like, how do we work with it so that it can help us? So there's multiple pathways in. So the first is, you know, given the definition that irrational anxiety is about overestimating threats and underestimating the ability to manage them, we can then engage in questions like, you know, okay, so you say you're not going to have any friends in high school, right? So that's an overestimation of the threat. We can instead say, maybe you won't have as many friends as you want, right? So we're just bringing the threat estimation down a few notches. And then if the person's like, I won't have any friends in high school and there's nothing I can do about it, then we can be like, okay, so you may not have as many.

you friends as you want and like what could you do right if you aren't coming across the kids you want to hang out with like what options do you have available and helping people to find you know a sense of some you know agency and empowerment that can help them address the threat so that's what we call a cognitive intervention right where you're using your mind to ask questions that can help bring anxiety down to size there are also physiological interventions um when we become irrationally anxious The heart rate accelerates a great deal. Breathing gets quick and shallow. And this is all in the name of getting a whole lot of heavily oxygenated blood out to our large muscle groups

so that we can run or attack. And interestingly, breathing can help reset the body. So when we're anxious, we breathe in a way that's quick and shallow. When we deliberately override that and breathe in a way that is slow and deep, We hack into this network of nerves and send a competing message. And basically the messages were safe. This is really speaking to me because I also suffer from these things and gotten much better over time with breathing and many things and talking, naming, like you said. But why do you think this was a film that needed to be made?

You know, it's interesting. They got going with it at the height of the pandemic. And the pandemic led us into an adolescent mental health crisis and has us appropriately concerned about teenagers and how they're doing. But one unintended consequence of that is that I am now caring for teenagers and families who are more uneasy than they need to be about psychological distress. So I've cared for teenagers for almost 30 years and have known from that work that ups and downs are part of being a teenager and a great deal of dysregulation is part of being a teenager. And so the value of this movie now is so, you know, it's so well-timed because we really do need the level setting that being a teenager, having a teenager is an inherently challenging thing. and that uncomfortable and unwanted emotions are not on their own grounds for concern. They're natural.

They're part of life. They're protective. They're valuable. Their growth giving, they guide us. Thank you so much for talking to us about Inside Out. I love these movies, and I'm glad we got to talk to you. Well, thank you so much for having me. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez,

and fact-checked by Rachel and me. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.