Something You Should Know - A Better Way to Solve Problems & Why Anxiety is a Good Thing

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Starting point is 00:00:17 You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, what's better, fresh or frozen fish? Turns out the answer isn't so obvious. Then how do you solve problems before they happen? It can be done if you change your thinking.

Starting point is 00:00:44 For instance, there was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn. How do you solve problems before they happen? It can be done if you change your thinking. For instance, there was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple losses. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches and all of the injuries would have been eliminated, but nobody thought to do that. Also, what happens to all that stuff that gets confiscated at airport security? And understanding anxiety, it turns out to be a good thing, even if it doesn't always feel that way. I mean, it really does stink to feel anxious, but it feels bad for a reason because it's activating us to achieve things in our life. When we think about it as a disease, however,

Starting point is 00:01:22 it causes us to do more of the unhelpful things. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman

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Starting point is 00:02:31 Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. So the other day we had some people over and we were cooking fish on the grill. And the question came up, what's better, fresh or frozen fish? The answer seems obvious, but I did a little digging. And it's actually kind of a trick question, what's better, fresh or frozen,

Starting point is 00:03:17 because a lot of fresh fish was frozen. The term fresh fish doesn't have anything to do with how old the fish is. Fresh fish just means it's not frozen. And if it was never frozen, it may be several days old and may not taste as good as it would have when it was just caught. So to solve this problem, stores often buy frozen fish, ideally fish that was flash frozen right after it was caught, then they thaw it out and sell it.

Starting point is 00:03:46 That way there is less waste because they can defrost only what they expect to sell. If you're buying fish to cook at home, frozen fish may be a better way to go, particularly if it says on the package it was flash frozen. It will taste just as good, if not better, than fresh fish, and it tends to be a lot cheaper. And that is something you should know. Imagine if you could solve problems before they happen. Well, the fact is you do, and the perfect example, I think,

Starting point is 00:04:21 is when you change the oil in your car. You take your car in for an oil change, not because there's anything wrong with it. You know that if you don't take it in for an oil change, you're asking for trouble down the road. So you change the oil to prevent the problem before it happens. Yet so much of our life is putting out fires, not preventing them. But what if you could actually solve a lot more problems before they happen in the first place? Well, that's what Dan Heath has been looking into, and he has authored several really interesting books. His latest is called Upstream,

Starting point is 00:04:56 The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Hey, Dan, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on the show. You bet. So explain why you took a look at this and why you think this is important to talk about. My interest in this topic goes back to a parable that's pretty well known in public health circles, but not well outside it. And it's originally attributed to a guy named Irving Zola. And the parable goes like this. You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river. And just as you've laid out your picnic blanket, getting ready to eat, you hear a noise from the direction of the river.

Starting point is 00:05:31 And you look back and there's a child thrashing around in the water, apparently drowning. And so, of course, both of you instinctively jump in and you fish the child out and you bring them to the shore. And just as your adrenaline is starting to subside a little bit, you hear another shout and you look back, there's a different child drowning in the river. So back in you go and you fish that child out. And no sooner have you brought that child to shore that you look back, there are two more kids drowning in the river. And it begins a kind of revolving door of rescue where you're in and out and fishing kids out. And just as you're starting to grow fatigued from all the rescue work, your friend swims towards shore and steps out,

Starting point is 00:06:10 seeming to walk away and leave you alone. And you say, hey, where are you going? I need your help. All these kids are drowning. We can't just leave. And your friend says, well, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. In life, whether we're talking about our personal lives or in our businesses or even in society,

Starting point is 00:06:29 I think that too often we find our attention focused downstream on the reaction, the reaction, the reaction, and we never make our way upstream to try to tackle the systems and the forces that are causing the problems in the first place. Because that's just how we kind of think. I mean, I don't know if we grow up and learn how to think that way, but you know, you solve problems when they arise. You don't, you know, just don't think about doing what you said. And then also, like if you're going to go upstream and fix the problem, well, some of

Starting point is 00:07:01 these problems are so complex. Some of these systems are, you know, government or whatever. Where would you even start to solve that? It's incredibly complicated to solve problems upstream. I'll give you a simple example. I had a conversation with a deputy police chief about a decade ago, and he had this thought experiment where he said, imagine two police officers, and one of those police officers goes downtown where there's a very chaotic intersection. It's a place where cars have collisions a lot of times. And the officer just kind of stations herself visibly in the intersection. And because she's

Starting point is 00:07:40 there and drivers see her, they slow down, they get a little bit more cautious and accidents are prevented. And then he says, imagine a second officer that goes to a different part of downtown where there is a prohibited right turn and she stations herself around the corner. And when people make that illegal right turn, she jumps out and nabs them and gives them a ticket. And he says, if you think about these two officers, which one is doing more to protect the public safety? And he says, indisputably, it's the first one. She's preventing crashes. She might be preventing injuries or deaths. But if you ask a different question, which of these officers gets rewarded? Which of them gets praised? Which of them gets promoted? It's the second officer because she comes back with this stack full of tickets that show what a good job she's done. And meanwhile, that first officer,

Starting point is 00:08:31 how does she prove she did anything? You know, you think about there was a guy commuting downtown that morning who crossed through this intersection and in an alternate reality where the police officer hadn't been there, he would have been in a car crash, possibly fatal. His life was saved by virtue of the officer being there that morning. He'll never know it, nor will the officer ever know that she saved him in particular. And so there's a kind of maddening ambiguity about upstream efforts that I think is interesting. It's like, even as you and I could probably say, well, of course you want to go upstream and keep the kids from being thrown in the river. What I wanted to show in the book was basically two things. Number one, there are lots of obstacles to getting upstream. And number two,

Starting point is 00:09:14 despite the presence of those obstacles, we've got to try because that's the only recipe for permanently improving systems in our lives and our work and in our communities. Well, but maybe that's happening. I mean, like you say, when you prevent things from happening, you never know they would have happened. So there may be a lot of this going on because we just never see it. No question. Yeah, in fact, everywhere you look, there's the evidence of people before us

Starting point is 00:09:44 that have had the foresight and the patience to do this for us. You think about the rate of car accidents and fatalities has declined from, oh boy, I better make sure I'm getting my denominator right. My memory is that, say 50 years ago, it was about five deaths per hundred million miles traveled. And today it's down to one. So there's been an 80, 80% reduction in fatalities. And you ask, how is that? So, I mean, are we all just naturally better drivers today? And the answer is no, I don't think driving ability has improved a lick. It's all about the systems that have been designed to try to forestall those problems. It's about, you know, safer roads. It's all about the systems that have been designed to try to forestall those

Starting point is 00:10:25 problems. It's about safer roads. It's about better lighting. It's about better brake systems. It's about seatbelts and airbags. It's about mothers against drunk driving, reducing the incidence of drunk driving on the roads. And we're talking about thousands of people over decades who are all committed to this idea of what if we put our hands together? What if we put our resources toward preventing bad things from happening? And like the police officer in that story, those people will never know who they helped. They won't know who those thousands of people are whose lives were saved because of their work, but we can see in the data that it happened.

Starting point is 00:11:07 And that's the power of upstream thinking. Can you bring this down to a more personal level? I mean, we can talk about, you know, how police deploy their officers and how that affects policies and all that. But what about on a more personal level? Yeah, it's a fair question. I think the advantage of upstream thinking is, is it works really on any level, you can think about it at the national level, like with the healthcare example, but you can think about it in your own life. And I'll give

Starting point is 00:11:36 you the most trivial example possible from my own life. So I am, you know, as you know, I'm a writer, and I tend to write in coffee shops. I don't know why that works for me, some busy, loud coffee shop, but it does. And so I'm used to shuttling my laptop around. Like I'll go to the coffee shop and write for a while, then I'll come back to my office. And so I'm constantly packing my laptop, unpacking it. I bring a power cord and I plug it in at the coffee shop, pack it back up, bring it back to my office, plug it in there. And after a while, I mean, after years of this behavior, it occurred to me, hey, what if I just bought two power cords and one of them could live forever in my backpack where I carry around my laptop and one of them could be just strapped down on my desk so that, you know, when I come back,

Starting point is 00:12:23 I can just plug it in and not have to mess with unpacking the power cord. And I'm not telling that story to share my genius with you because I don't think there is much genius there. But it's almost a clue that in our lives, so often we adapt to problems or we come to take problems for granted that need not exist. You know, that I had just come to accept a reality where I was forever going to have this nuisance of power cord shuffling. And yet the actual amount of labor it took to fix that problem was I had to go online for five minutes and press, you know, buy. And one of the interesting things to me about this work is, why is that shift in our thinking so difficult? And why do we choose to endure things that we might have prevented?

Starting point is 00:13:12 Well, human nature, don't you think? Because, I mean, here's the simplest example I can think of. If you want to not get lung cancer, don't smoke. There isn't a smoker alive that knows that their risk of lung cancer is huge compared to a non-smoker, and yet they still smoke. So there's an example of clear upstream thinking, stop smoking, prevent cancer, and many people ignore it. Many people don't, but many people ignore the advice. No, it's definitely true. And I think something like smoking is compounded by the addictive nature of the product. But I think you're pointing out that there's something universal at play here. And I think that something is tunneling, which is a word I stole from a couple of psychologists who wrote

Starting point is 00:14:05 a book called Scarcity. So let me explain what this is. There was a researcher named Anita Tucker who followed around a bunch of nurses as they went through their day. So she shadowed them for hundreds of hours as part of our dissertation at Harvard. And she found about what you'd expect, that these nurses were constantly dealing with unexpected problems, like they couldn't get the right medication at the right moment, or they ran out of towels and had to run around and find some somewhere. This one morning, Anita Tucker described a situation where there was a nurse who was checking out a new mother. She was ready to take her baby home. And as part of that checkout process, they have to remove the security anklet from the baby's leg. And unfortunately, they couldn't find it. Itlet from the baby's leg. And unfortunately,

Starting point is 00:14:49 they couldn't find it. It had fallen off somewhere. So they do this frantic search, and it turns up in the bassinet. And then Anita Tucker says three hours later, the exact same thing happens with a different mother. The anklet's missing again. They do another frantic search, and this time they can't find it at all. So the nurse goes to the boss. They figure out an alternate checkout process, and the mothers are dismissed. And so this is what it's like to be a nurse. You're running around, you're trying to figure out novel solutions to problems, you're being resourceful, you know, you don't have to run for help every time something goes wrong, you can handle it. And it's kind of an admirable portrait when I say it that way. But if you look at this from another perspective, what you realize

Starting point is 00:15:25 it's something that's a bit shocking, which is the system I'm describing here is one that will never improve. It's one that will never get better because what these nurses have learned to do is work around problems, but they're never going upstream to solve them at the system's level. And back to this word tunneling, that's essentially what tunneling is. And to be clear, like the point of this story is not to throw stones at nurses. Quite the opposite. My point here is that I think all of us are tunneling in our own professions in the same way. That when we're juggling too many things, too many issues, too many problems, we kind of abandon the idea that we might strategically prioritize them. And we just kind of get in the tunnel.

Starting point is 00:16:11 If you can picture that in your mind, just being in a tunnel, there's only one direction. There's forward. You hit an obstacle. You try to get it behind you as quickly as you can so you can keep making progress. And the great trap of being in the tunnel is that it's self-perpetuating. You know, what those nurses did is they solved their problems in the moment. You know, they got the mother dismissed, they got a fresh set of towels, but they also doomed themselves to solving exactly the same kind of problems the next week and the next month. And so I think this is what

Starting point is 00:16:43 we have to overcome, this kind of universal force of tunneling, if we're going to get serious about solving problems. A problem, though, I see is that and using your example of that guy throwing kids in the river, so we go upstream and tackle him and get him to stop. Well, there are a lot of cases where that guy is hard to find, that the cause of the problem is hard to find upstream. And if you can't find it, you can't fix it. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. That often what we find is when we start trying to get to the root cause of a problem, it gets really confusing. It gets very complex.

Starting point is 00:17:22 I mean, there's a comfort in rescue because it's very tangible. You see the kid thrashing in the river, you can pull them out, you feel good, you get glory from your friends because you rescued a kid. And then when you start talking about, well, what caused this to begin with, all of a sudden you've got a debate, you've got a discussion, and it can get very confusing. And that's why one of the themes that stuck out in my research was so often to solve problems rather than just react to them required a different set of people to come together. One of my favorite stories in the book is about the city of Rockford, which is the second biggest city in Illinois behind Chicago.

Starting point is 00:18:05 And it became the first city in the U.S. to solve the problem of veteran homelessness. And what's fascinating about it, I talked to the former mayor, a guy named Larry Morrissey. And he said he'd been working on homelessness for nine years. You know, Rockford's one of these places that was an industrial hub. And then all the factories closed and all the problems that come along with that. And he said they basically got nowhere on homelessness in nine years. I mean, they just tread water at best. And he said they discovered something in the 10th year where in a period of 10 months they went from nowhere to that first city achievement that I talked about.

Starting point is 00:18:43 And so I was asking him how they did this. And he described the following changes. Number one, they stopped treating it as a problem where everybody got to stay in their silos, you know, because there's so many people that have a stake in homelessness, ranging from the homeless people themselves to social services, to the VA, to the police, to homeless shelters, to the fire department. And everybody kind of did their little piece of the puzzle, but they never really collaborated. So the first thing they did was they brought everybody around the same table. And then the second thing was they didn't just bring them around the table to pontificate, you know, to brainstorm about, you know, the origins of homelessness and how to solve it

Starting point is 00:19:23 at a societal level. What they did was they oriented people around specific homeless individuals. So their meetings involved what they called a by name list. They keep a real time census of every homeless person in the community. And when they meet, they talk about Mike. They talk about Steve. And they say, OK, who's seen Steve left? Well, Steve last rather.

Starting point is 00:19:46 Well, I saw him in the, under the bridge last week. He still got his tent under there. He's, he's coming to the shelter a few times a week to get lunch. Okay. Who's, who's going to reach out to them and see if he's ready to be housed? Well, you know, someone raises their hand and said, we'll do that this week. And that's what the meetings are like. They're very concrete. They're very human. And the result of that is you come to understand all the moving parts in the system so much better because you see them through the lens of these real individual cases. And that taught me something powerful that what feels like macro change often starts with micro understanding that you can't help thousands of people or millions until you can help one. And I think that's part of the antidote here is learning how to change the way we collaborate and learning how to get closer to the systems that yield the problems.

Starting point is 00:20:39 Dan Heath is my guest. He is a writer and researcher and he's author of the book Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

Starting point is 00:21:33 It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Starting point is 00:22:08 Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Dan, I think one of the problems in trying to identify those upstream problems is that we live in an era of specialization. You know, in the factory, one person does one job, is not necessarily aware of what everyone else does or how they do it. They just know that to do their one job. So they don't see the big picture enough to know how to tackle the big picture as a whole. Exactly right. And what we're fighting there is, I mean, most organizations are designed with great care and intention to divide people up and to force them to specialize within silos.

Starting point is 00:23:00 And it's not that there's some evil intent there. That's the source of great efficiencies. You know, you have the one guy on the assembly line whose job it is to screw in the widgets. And by God, with a lot of practice, he gets very efficient at screwing in the widgets. But that very same structure is also the deterrent to solving bigger problems than exist at any one level of that kind of fragmented infrastructure. Like just to be more tangible about this, there's a story about Expedia, which is the online travel site where you can book hotels or airfare or whatever. They had a problem back in 2012 where of every hundred customers who booked a reservation on the site, 58 of them ended up calling the call center for support, which is just kind of mind-boggling, right?

Starting point is 00:23:51 Because the whole point of an online travel site is that you can do it yourself. And yet almost 60% of the people who did it themselves ended up needing help. So this guy named Ryan O'Neill starts digging into this to figure out what in the world is going on. And he figures out the number one reason that people are calling is to get a copy of their itinerary. That's it, to get a copy of their itinerary. 20 million calls were placed in 2012. That's like every single person in Florida calling Expedia in one year to request a copy of their itinerary. And so if you ask, how do you solve that problem?

Starting point is 00:24:26 It doesn't take a genius, right? Well, they added a branch to the IVR, press two if you're calling for a copy of your itinerary. They allowed people to self-serve online. They changed the way that they sent out the confirmation so that they wouldn't end up in spam, which was part of the problem. The solutions were easy. The more interesting thing to me is how does a problem like that boil up to that point? Why wasn't there a kind of red flag triggered when you got your seven millionth call for an itinerary? And the answer is back to that idea of fragmentation where at Expedia, like virtually every other business, you have these distinct groups of people with different goals. The marketing team's goal is to attract people to

Starting point is 00:25:10 Expedia. And then you've got a product team whose job it is to design such a smooth, easy interface that they get to the point of booking a transaction. And then you've got the IT team whose job it is to keep everything humming and keep uptime as high as possible. And then you've got the call center and their job is to resolve people's issues quickly and keep people happy. And on an individual basis, all those goals make perfect sense. They sound logical. But then when you ask a very basic question like, whose job in this ecosystem is it to

Starting point is 00:25:42 make sure that customers don't need to call us for help? The answer is nobody. It's nobody's job. And in fact, it's even worse you'll always find the problem upstream and you may find something else. You may say this is the solution and in fact it's not. Well, this is another layer of the upstream challenge is thinking in systems and realizing that when we intervene in systems, they're likely to have unintended consequences. Like there was an example in New York City where a Google engineer, a young guy was walking through Central Park and a branch from an oak tree fell down and hit him on the head and caused brain injuries and paralysis. And it was just a horrible tragedy. And it seems like one of those freak things that just happen. And then later, the controller of New York City, a guy named Scott

Starting point is 00:26:51 Stringer, he started analyzing the claims that had been paid out by the city to settle lawsuits. So this engineer I talked about had settled a claim for $11 million from his injuries. What Stringer discovered was there were actually a bunch of settlements from falling branches. And so Stringer was thinking, well, what in the world? And he began to dig around, come to find out that the city's pruning budget had been cut in previous years in an effort to save money. And so here you've got an interesting side effect, right? From within the silo of the parks department, what's the presenting problem? The problem is we got to cut our budget. They think, okay, we've got too much money in the pruning budget. We can cut back there.

Starting point is 00:27:35 From their perspective within that part of the system, it all looked good. They did save the money. But then what they weren't seeing was that the side effect of that was they're not pruning these old dead branches. The dead branches are falling. They're hurting people. And as one of Scott Stringer's colleagues said, whatever money we thought we were saving on the maintenance side, we were just paying right out on the lawsuit side. So Stringer's office starts mapping out the nature of these claims they're paying. They created a program called Claimstat where they mapped and indexed the tens of thousands of annual claims made against the city. And they start finding these just remarkable patterns.

Starting point is 00:28:18 They found there was one swing on a playground in Brooklyn that had been responsible for multiple lawsuits. All somebody needed to do was go out and raise this swing six inches and all of the injuries would have been eliminated. But nobody thought to do that. Nobody could see it. And so that's part of the challenge is when we get involved in these complex systems, we can't just focus on the part. We can't just obsess on the fact that, okay, parks needs to save money. We'll cut money from within parks. We've got to

Starting point is 00:28:50 ask ourselves, what is the effect of cutting this thing within the park's budget? And are we paying attention to the side consequences? Well, what I really like about this is it makes you think differently. It makes you look at problems differently. It makes you look upstream instead of just focusing on the symptom of the problem right here and now, which can open up all kinds of possibilities. Dan Heath has been my guest. The book is called Upstream, The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Dan. Thanks so much, Mike. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life.

Starting point is 00:30:31 So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. There have been times in your life, I'm sure, when you have felt anxious. Probably really anxious. And if you have, you know that that feeling of anxiety doesn't feel very good. And there is this prevailing idea that anxiety is something to avoid or get rid of, that it's not a good thing. In fact, many people are prescribed medication to reduce their anxiety. But wait, maybe anxiety isn't so bad. Maybe it serves a useful purpose if you understand how it works.

Starting point is 00:31:15 And here to explain how it works is Tracy Dennis Tuare. She's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College at the City University of New York. And she's author of the book, Future Tense, Why Anxiety is Good for You Even Though It Feels Bad. Hi, Tracy. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. So great to be with you. Thank you. So my understanding of anxiety, what I think of when I think of anxiety is that it is worry about the future. Is that a fair definition? So worry is sort of the thinking part of anxiety. And as we all know, we've all felt all the other parts too, right? Like the butterflies in our stomach,

Starting point is 00:31:59 the racing heart. So anxiety also feels a lot like fear. So fear is, you know, roots us to the present. There's a present and certain danger, like a snake about to bite us. But anxiety forces us to imagine the uncertain future, to think about it, sometimes worry, but really to visualize the good thing that could happen as well as the bad thing. And it activates us to avert disaster and make the good outcome into reality. So in this sense, anxiety is this key human achievement that allows us to think about and plan for the future and hopefully make the best future possible. So when you are thinking about future possibilities and the possibility you are thinking about is good, not bad. Is that still anxiety? It is really simultaneously good and bad. So take, for example, you have a big job interview in the

Starting point is 00:32:53 next day or so, and you're starting to feel a little anxious about it. Maybe you're worrying, you're starting to get butterflies in your stomach thinking about it. What's happening at a mental level is you're anticipating that, oh, you know, that job interview, I could really blow it. You know, it's something really important to me, so you care about it, and it could go wrong. But when you're anxious, you're still in it to win it because you also believe that there's something you can do to actually do a good job at the job interview.

Starting point is 00:33:21 So you might say, huh, I'm feeling anxious, so I'm going to prepare. I'm going to do a little more research about the company. I'm going to practice my spiel with a friend. So that anxiety, actually, you have to hold in mind at the same time, the bad and the good. And the activation you feel that feels a lot like fear is actually just pushing you forward to really make sure that you can navigate that uncertainty and reduce the uncertainty and make that good thing happen. When most people think about anxiety, I suspect most people think of it as not a good thing, that anxiety gets in the way, and you have a different take on that. That's right. This idea we have that anxiety not only gets in

Starting point is 00:34:06 the way, but sort of chokes us and stops us and is a disease. And this is really, we mental health professionals have to take the responsibility here because we promoted this view of anxiety that it is always something to be managed immediately, to be suppressed, preferably, and it's a dysfunction. It's a failure of some natural happiness that should be kind of constant in our lives. And so we're setting ourselves up by thinking of anxiety because it does feel bad. I mean, it really does stink to feel anxious, but it feels bad for a reason because it's activating us to achieve things in our life. When we think about it as a disease, however, it causes us to do more of the unhelpful things when it actually comes to working with anxiety. Things like

Starting point is 00:34:56 suppressing it, things like avoiding it. And suppression and avoidance are literally recipes for making anxiety worse. It makes it grow stronger and it prevents us. It's an opportunity cost in terms of building skills to work through anxiety. So we treat it like a disease like cancer to eradicate, but that's impossible because an anxiety-free life is impossible, but a cancer-free life might be possible. So just in everyday life, I can think of examples where I assume it's anxiety that's causing the problem. For example, you've got a big test to take, and you don't feel like you do good on tests. So you tell yourself you're anxious. You tell yourself you're not going to do well, and the anxiety builds up,

Starting point is 00:35:51 and you don't do very well. Or you're playing golf, and you tense up in the clutch. You don't do very well because you're anxious about making the putt. You're not going to get it in the hole, and so you screw it up. In my view, that's anxiety. Is that, in your view, anxiety? Well, let's break that down. So you and those examples are really great examples because it's sort of this anticipatory feeling you have about something and you choke because you're saying, oh, the anxiety is getting in my way. How much of that reaction is actually the story you told yourself about anxiety? My son actually came to me when he was 13. He came to me the other day. It was in finals.

Starting point is 00:36:23 He's in seventh grade. He said, you know, mom, I have this big math final coming up and I'm feeling anxious about it, but I studied, you know, I really studied. So he's like, he said to me, you're the expert. Why, what should I do? And I said, well, first of all, it sounds to me like you care about this test because you're only anxious when you care about something. And he thought for a moment and said, yeah, I do care about it. And then I asked him, so what, you know, what is it on your mind when you're worrying, when you listen to that worry, instead of assuming it's like some sign to panic,

Starting point is 00:36:57 what is it telling you? And he said, well, you know, I actually didn't study that one part of geometry or whatever he was studying. I didn't study it quite enough. He's like, you know, I'm going to put in another 15 minutes of studying and then see what happens. And he did that. Came back, he said, oh, I don't feel so anxious anymore. I actually feel a little better. So he and we together were sort of able to break down that, you know, day-to-day situation we all face into anxiety giving him information. He took a chance and listened to it for a moment instead of assumed it was going to make him choke or get in his way.

Starting point is 00:37:35 He discovered he actually needed to prepare a little bit better for this test that was coming up. So when we consider and kind of open up ourselves to the possibility that anxiety might be useful, that we can be curious about it and maybe learn something from it, we are going to get better at managing it and get better at telling the difference between healthy anxiety and the anxiety that does get in our way that we are not quite able to manage yet. So here's another example that I'd like to get you to comment, and this is a true-life example. I know someone, a student, high school student, who gets anxious over tests. Straight-A student, studies well, nails the test every time,

Starting point is 00:38:21 but the anxiety about taking the test the night before drives him crazy. He doesn't need to study more. He will ace the test, but nevertheless, he's so nervous about it because he's afraid he'll fail. So the first question I'd ask is, you know, maybe it's okay to feel those feelings. We don't want it to drive our kids crazy or ourselves crazy. But the first question to ask is, huh, can we, instead of assuming we need to suppress and get rid of that anxiety, take it for maybe what it's signaling, which is that this is a kid who's a great student who really cares about doing well and needs to now figure out and gain some skills in being able to know when enough studying is enough studying.

Starting point is 00:39:07 That anxiety is a signal that there's more work to do on his or her, you know, any person who's struggling like this, his or her own stance towards high-pressure situations. And so this is, again, this is where the story we tell ourselves about anxiety makes all the difference. Because if we take the anxiety as a signal to say, all right, there's more work to be done. I don't have it nailed, but it's, you know, it's messy being human. You know, I'm, I, right now I'm at a point in my life where I don't know when enough studying is enough studying. So I can actually decide that this is something I need to really work on so that I can start to tell the difference between studying enough and being too perfectionistic and studying too much. And so, again, this is not a malfunction in this young man. This is actually a feature of how he's going to figure out how to be a great

Starting point is 00:39:56 achiever in life and do wonderful things and care about his school and his learning, but also understand how not to, you know, cause too much burden on himself and really find that fine line. But it makes you wonder if anxiety is fear about the future. What in the case of the golf game or the geometry test, it's the fear of what? What's the worst that could happen if you get a B instead of an A, if you need another stroke to make the putt? What's going on in someone's head that makes them feel fear when there's really nothing to be afraid of? Well, that's a fascinating question, right? And if our stance towards anxiety is that we need to immediately suppress it and get rid of it,

Starting point is 00:40:45 we lose an opportunity to understand what we are struggling with. So, you know, my son, as you were describing that young man, that reminds me of my son, who really, he's a straight-A student. He really cares about his grades. He gets nervous. And most of the time, he does extremely well. So what is that struggle? What is anxiety kind of raising the alarm about in terms of us figuring out what he's truly worried about?

Starting point is 00:41:10 But imagine that we instead avoid and escape and reject all anxiety. We lose this opportunity to figure out why that gall stroke means so much to us. What is it about these grades? Is it that he feels he might let his parents down? Or does he have some other barrier in his life that he's not fully aware of yet? Anxiety is a call to tune in to those concerns because you can't ignore it. It's made to be unpleasant so that we sit up and pay attention, kind of like a smoke alarm. What about, though, when I had a great aunt, wonderful, lovely lady,

Starting point is 00:41:44 but if you knew her, you would say she's an anxious person. She worries about everything. If you go out to the store, she's going to worry you're going to get in a car accident. And there's nothing to—can't work on that because there's nothing she can do to prevent an accident. She's going to worry about it anyway, that there are people who just seem to be more anxious all the time. Yes? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:42:15 And I don't know in the case of your aunt, but certainly there are times when that excessive and extreme and pervasive anxiety and worry starts to get in the way of a person living their life well. And that's when it might be an anxiety disorder. And that's a really important distinction because you can have strong feelings of anxiety daily. But if it doesn't get in the way of going to work, having relationships, having a sense of well-being, you won't be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. But when it starts to disrupt those basic quality of life facets of being human, then that's when it might actually be useful to diagnose this as a disorder and receive very

Starting point is 00:42:59 targeted therapeutic treatment. We don't need to go to a therapist with our daily anxieties to also think of anxiety, say, hey, there are things I can leverage about this amazing emotion that actually we've evolved to have. I can listen to this as a way to understand what I care about in life, where things are going well and maybe where they're not going well, where I can, you know, pay more attention to, you know to struggles and also see opportunities. Because the flip side of anxiety is hope, because it sends us into the future where both the bad and the good are possible. It seems that there is a connection between anxiety and insecurity and anxiety and lack of confidence, that it's that I can't handle whatever's going to happen. I'm not secure enough.

Starting point is 00:43:48 I'm not confident enough to handle what might happen rather than whatever happens, I got it. That's a great insight. I agree entirely. And it's about that insecurity, but it's also, well, not really, but, and it's about uncertainty, fundamentally. You cannot be anxious without uncertainty. Again, it's these potentials, things that are coming around the bend that haven't happened yet. So what does that mean when we think about working with anxiety? We have to start getting a little more comfortable with uncertainty.

Starting point is 00:44:21 So give me an example, if you can, of somebody in an anxious state of mind over something and what you suggest they do with it so that whatever is coming is handleable. I'll give you a personal example of myself, if I can really speak to what worked and what didn't. So when my first child, my son, when I was midway through my pregnancy, we discovered that he was going to be born with a very serious congenital heart condition that would require open heart surgery when he was an infant. And it's life-threatening, so we knew it had to be done. And when I found this out, of course, so many emotions, but anxiety was one of the biggest ones. And after I sort of crawled into bed and had a good cry, but then what I did is I realized that this anxiety could be something that could work in my favor,

Starting point is 00:45:18 because the only thing I needed to do at that moment was to figure out how to optimize my son's ability to get the best care, to survive, and to thrive. So I started by, you know, I did research. I learned about this disease. I found the best doctors. And, you know, so we just kept this momentum moving forward, trying to put everything in place for his care. And then he was born and there were these similar struggles. Now, my anxiety definitely got the best of me on many days. But what I realized about it is that it was something that was really a key to my success of combating despair because I could have given up and really feared that he wouldn't survive and do okay. But anxiety helped me believe that there was still things I could do to affect change. So when we're anxious in this kind of way,

Starting point is 00:46:10 it's very important to make the distinction between what can I control and what can't I, and use the energy of that anxiety to help you move those things you can control forward. What about my theory that one of the reasons people get anxious and upset and worry about something is like if you have, like your son has to take a test and he's all anxious about the test and works himself up into all this anxiety. And when the test is over and he aces it, it feels so good. And that you're just setting yourself, it's like hitting yourself with a hammer, because it's going to feel really good when you stop. It's almost like you're looking for the dopamine hit of it going away.

Starting point is 00:46:55 Right. This is, again, this is where you have to tune in and you have to start saying so for my son in that example the worry and the getting worked up and the getting you're right I mean you almost start to get into a cycle of doing it and so that you can you can have the feeling go away and this is the interesting thing about anxiety when we actually start to have a relationship with anxiety is when we're anxious we think that it's just fight-flight, you know, that our adrenaline raises through the roof, and that's how we think of it. But biologically, what science has shown is that we actually also increase different biological responses like oxytocin, which is the

Starting point is 00:47:37 social bonding hormone. So when you're anxious, oxytocin increases. Why? Oxytocin actually primes us to seek out social connection. And what is social connection? It's one of the best ways we have to manage our difficult emotions, to seek support, and to really outsource our challenges in life because we evolved to be in tribes, right, and to seek out the support of others. So anxiety within itself, it actually contains some of its own solutions. It also increases the neurotransmitter dopamine. That was actually really relevant to what you were saying before about sort of revving up this almost this addictive system we might have, right, to wanting to feel all this anxiety so that it can go away.

Starting point is 00:48:26 But in a more positive light, when anxiety increases dopamine, what dopamine actually does is it also marshals our brain's resources to pursue positive goals. Dopamine isn't just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It also is this little shuttlecock, this little neurotransmitter that communicates with all these areas of our brain that helps us get our whole brain working together really efficiently to work towards our positive goals. So anxiety channels us. So anxiety is all these things. It's horrible and it's beautiful. It's challenging and it's inspiring.

Starting point is 00:49:00 And if we can just open our minds a little bit about the possibilities that anxiety offers us, I think we will do more of the right things when it comes to handling anxiety in our life and managing it and coping with it when it becomes too much. Well, I understand what you mean by anxiety can really suffer from anxiety, that it is really hard. And there are times in our life when we're great with it. And other times, especially if we maybe have vulnerabilities or fewer resources or a trauma, where it's going to get the better of us. But the only way out of that is working through it and engaging with it as part of our humanity. It's the right word. We can't treat it like a disease. We can't treat it like something to excise or eradicate because it will only lead us down the wrong path when it comes to actually negotiating and figuring out how to live well with anxiety. Kierkegaard

Starting point is 00:50:06 said 180 years ago, sorry to throw a Kierkegaard quote at you, but he said something amazing. He wrote a whole book about anxiety and he said, whosoever learns to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. Well, this is a very different view of anxiety than the one I think most of us hold, and perhaps a more practical view because anxiety is going to be there and might as well have some ways to deal with it and make it work for you. I've been speaking with Tracy Dennis Tuare. She's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College at the City University of New York and author of the book Future Tense, Why Anxiety is Good for You Even Though It Feels Bad. And there's a link to that

Starting point is 00:50:51 book in the show notes. Thank you, Tracy. Appreciate you being here. Thanks, Mike. It's been so great speaking with you. Every day at airports all over the country, people have items confiscated because you're not allowed to carry those things on the plane. If you've ever wondered what happens to all the stuff people have to part with at airport security, well, a lot of it gets sold. When items are confiscated for security reasons, there's nothing that says you can't have them back, but there's nothing that says that anyone has to go out of their way to help you get them back either. And of course, the harder it is for you to get that stuff back, the less likely you are to try to carry it on the next time. Eventually, unclaimed items are turned over to state surplus property agencies who sell it online or at retail outlets. One exception is liquids. That expensive shampoo or vintage champagne that you put in your carry-on,

Starting point is 00:51:54 that gets confiscated and goes right down the drain, as do all other liquids. To prevent this from happening, it's always a good idea to read the rules of what you can and cannot take on an airplane. And that is something you should know. If you enjoy this podcast, it would be greatly appreciated if you would recommend it to one of your friends so they too can become a regular listener. They'll probably thank you for the recommendation. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

Starting point is 00:52:32 In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

Starting point is 00:52:55 The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride.

Starting point is 00:53:53 Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, and welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - A Better Way to Solve Problems & Why Anxiety is a Good Thing

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