Something You Should Know - Amazing Factors that Determine What and How Much You Eat & How to Better Deal with Life’s Catastrophes

Episode Date: February 28, 2019

Ever go out knowing your hair looks horrible or there is something wrong with your clothes? Everyone probably has but the more important question is – does anyone actually notice. This episodes begins with some fascinating research about how much people actually pay attention to you and your physical appearance. http://www.youbeauty.com/beauty/psychology-of-hair/ So many factors influence what you eat and how much you eat – and you are totally unaware of many of them. Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of the book Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life (https://amzn.to/2XlCS1M) returns for a closer look at how you are influenced and how to protect yourself from eating too much of the wrong food.   Every office has a set of coffee mugs in the kitchen that people use. Have you ever stopped to consider just how clean those coffee mugs are? A scientist has tested mugs in several offices and wait until you hear what he found. http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2013/02/23/Expert-Coffee-mug-on-desk-agerm-machine/UPI-72401361679514/?spt=hs&or=hn Bad things happen. They are part of life. Often when catastrophe strikes, people freak out and don’t cope well with the situation. That’s why Sarah Knight is here. Sarah was one of those people who worried about problems rather than actually deal with them. Then she found a better way. Sarah is the author of the book Calm the F* Down: How to Control What You Can, Accept What You Can’t So You Can Stop Freaking Out and Get On With Your Life )https://amzn.to/2VnXNzn). Listen as Sarah offers some great advice to help deal with those inevitable disasters that life brings and come out better as a result. This Week's Sponsors -Purple Mattress. Text "Something" to 84888 to get a free pillow when you buy a mattress. -Quip. Get your first refill free when you buy a quip toothbrush at www.Get Quip.com/something -Geico. Go to www.Geico.com to see how Geico can save you money on your car insurance -ADT. Go to www.ADT.com/smart to learn how ADT can design and install a smart home system for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, does anyone really notice when you have a bad hair day or your clothes don't look just right? Then we'll examine all the things that influence how much you eat, and you will be amazed. We did something with secretaries where we put candies on their desk, where we put them six feet from the desk, and we found that the average secretary ended up eating 125 more calories if the candy was right on their desk than if it was just six feet away. Over the course of the year, that's over 12 pounds. Plus, just how clean are those coffee mugs in the office kitchen? And how to handle life's catastrophes, no matter what your friends say. Most people in your life are just trying to make you feel better and saying,

Everything's going to be okay. Don't worry. It's not that big of a deal. It's not so bad. And the fact is that it is big of a deal. It is so bad. And it might not be okay. And we still have to be able to figure out how to deal with it. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right?

Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more.

Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily 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.

We start today with something I think everyone has experienced. It's when you have a bad hair day or something about your clothes isn't right. There's a button missing or maybe there's a little tiny stain on there from something. And you think that everybody is going to notice this. Well, it turns out they don't. And to prove it, researchers asked 44 college students to walk into a classroom of fellow students while wearing a t-shirt that had either an embarrassing or flattering image. The students wearing the embarrassing shirts thought that they stuck out like a sore thumb.

But that actually wasn't the case. Once the subjects left, the majority of the students in the room could not recall the image on the shirts that they were wearing. Researchers concluded that people overestimate how much others notice about their appearance, both positively and negatively, and that the social spotlight doesn't shine on you as much as you think. People are a lot less judgmental about

your flaws than you probably realize. What's probably going on is they're more worried about what you think of their flaws. And that is something you should know. One of my favorite topics is food. I love food. I love to eat it. I love to cook it. I like to talk about it. Although we don't talk a lot about food on this podcast, except in terms of health and what you should and shouldn't eat. And it's not like we're going to be sharing recipes here anytime soon. But what does work for this podcast and is such a fascinating topic, is the psychology of food. Why do you eat what you eat? Why do you eat it when you eat it? And why do you eat as much or as little as you do?

Dr. Brian Wanczyk joins me to discuss this. He is the director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of the book Slim by Design, Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. Brian was here a few years ago, and I've asked him back to continue this discussion because it's such a universal topic. I mean, we all eat. Hey, Brian, good to have you back. So a good place to start might be to consider how many food choices a person makes in a day. It's amazing. The typical person believes they make about 15 decisions about food a day. In reality, they make well over 200. I mean, even if we just look at breakfast, before a person sits down, they pretty much decide what cereal they're going to have.

They decide whether they're going to put fruit on it or not, whether they're going to have one bowl or two bowls, or they're going to fill it up, or two-thirds full, or they're going to put skim milk or whole milk. There's 12 decisions that are made before a person even sits down. This follows us through the entire day, and the problem is because we're not aware of these 200 small decisions we make, we're very easily influenced by the cues around us and some of the things in our environment. Well, I think everybody believes that, because we've all been influenced at some time or another

to eat things that we might not otherwise eat. And certainly people who struggle with their weight know that they're often influenced to eat things they shouldn't eat and eat too much of it. Well, it's interesting. If you take somebody and say, hey, why do you overeat? Most people would say, I mean, other than maybe emotions or something like that,

they'd say, well, I overeat when I'm really, really hungry, or I overeat when the food is really, really good. We did a study where we actually took people who were full, we gave them food that was terrible, and we looked to see if we could get them to eat more just by changing the cues. And what we did was we took people who were going to a movie theater, this is down in Philadelphia, who had just finished eating dinner. We gave them huge buckets of popcorn or medium-sized buckets of popcorn that were 14 days old.

The popcorn didn't even crunch. It was like styrofoam. And what we found is even though the people hated the popcorn, as they watched the movie, they just continued to eat popcorn. By the time the movie was over, the people with the huge buckets had eaten about 35% more. Because what? Is it just because you're at the movies? When you're at the movies, you eat popcorn and there's the popcorn. So you eat it even though it's horrible. But movie theater means eat popcorn. And so that's what people do. And I remember when you were here last time, it was episode 115.

If people want to go back and listen, you talked about the amazing variety of things that influence what we eat and how much we eat, like the size of the plate and the lighting in the room and the music in the room. And all of that has a real impact. And what's interesting about this is even after you show them how the environment influences them, whether it be the size of a bowl or plate or whether it be the variety of food or the shape of a glass or the lighting in the room or who they're eating with, every time you show them how much they're influenced to a person, people will deny it.

They'll say, oh, well, no, you know, really, I was really, really hungry today. Yeah, that's why I happen to eat so much. That's what makes it so dangerous because we don't want to believe that we can be tricked by something as simple as whether the candy dish is on our desk versus six feet from our desk. We did something with secretaries where we put candies on their desk or we put them six feet from their desk,

and every single day we found that the average secretary ended up eating 125 more calories if the candy was right on their desk than if it was just six feet away. I mean, over the course of the year, that's over 12 pounds. Talk about how words are used. And what I mean is how words on a menu or words on a package or a label will get us to buy something and maybe buy more of it and eat more of it? Well, one thing that happens a lot is our taste buds are incredibly suggestive. You know that when you eat with a friend or some of the friends, oh man, this is really a tremendous appetizer. Here you have to try some. We almost never try and go, no, you're wrong. That's terrible.

Our taste buds almost always fall in line with what our expectations are. So if we think it's going to be great, it is great. And this is one of the biggest things that restaurants end up doing to influence us is they often have very evocative, descriptive names for their items. And so we did a study, for instance, where we used restaurant menus. We either called something a plain name like, you know, seafood filet, or we gave it a very descriptive name like, you know, succulent Italian seafood filet. In reality, in both these cases, it was just pretty much a dried fish stick.

But if people believe they're eating what was a succulent Italian seafood filet, they rated the food as tasting better, they rated the restaurant as better, and they were more likely to claim that the chef had some European culinary training. All we did was change two words. There's actually good news to this if you're a home cook. If you were, instead of just kind of plopping the salad and the entree down at home to your family, if you give a little bit of a description as to what it is or how you made it, what it does is it increases our expectations of what it's going to taste like.

And the taste buds of whoever's your guest for dinner, whether it be family or friends, are going to obediently fall in line with what your expectations are. What about presentation? A lot of restaurants go to a lot of effort to plate the food and make it look pretty and all that. Does that have an effect on the person eating it? It has a tremendous impact on not only how much we eat, but how good we think the food is.

And it's the same expectation thing. We did a study where we gave people a brownie, either on a nice piece of china or on a napkin, and asked them to rate the flavor and to rate how much it cost and how much they'd be willing to pay for it and things like this. And if people ate the brownie on the napkin, which was the exact same brownies as was given to another group of people in this nice China, they said, oh, yeah, this brownie on the napkin, yeah, it tastes okay.

How much would you be willing to pay for it? Oh, about 57 cents. When a person was instead given it on a nice piece of China, we said, what do you think? They go, oh, this is really, really good. How much would you pay for it? It was like about $1.20. It was the exact same brownie, but simply the presentation that brownie led people's expectations to be higher, and those expectations led them to taste what they thought they would taste,

which is a really good, classy brownie. You really hate to think you're that suggestible, that these kind of things really can influence you. And you would think, too, that just knowing that would make you a little more bulletproof to it, but maybe not. And that's what makes these things so powerful. I mean, I've been studying this stuff for 20 years, and it influences me on a daily basis.

The only way that I found to kind of reduce the impact is to just re-engineer my environment so I don't eat mindlessly. So we have pretty much everybody in the lab at home, you know, has moved the candy dish, has replaced the cookie bowl with a fruit bowl. We've changed short white glasses. We've got rid of them and put in tall skinny glasses. We've made all these own changes in our own home. And it's pretty much the only way to fight this because who wants to go through life saying, oh, hey, I've got to remember not to take extra candy

because it's sitting on my desk. I'm speaking with Brian Wansink. He is the director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of the book Slim by Design. 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. 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. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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. So Brian, explain the experiment you did with the never-ending soup bowl. Well, one thing we found over and over again, that people eat with their eyes.

They don't eat with their stomach. We don't really know when we're full, but we dish out what we think we're going to eat or what's going to make us full, and then we pretty much eat until it's gone. That way we can kind of focus on who we're eating with or the newspaper or the radio or the television, whatever's going on. And we did a study to say, well, what happens if your plate never empties? How much longer would you keep eating before you finally decide to stop? And we set up this refillable soup bowl that had a, we had drilled a hole through a table and this is the bottom of the bowl and put some food grade tubing that connected the bowl, bottom of the bowl to a big big pot, six-quart pot of soup in another room. And what happened was we found that when we brought people in for a soup lunch, over the

course of that lunch, they would end up eating about 73% more from a refillable bowl than the people who instead just were given a normal sized bowl of soup. What's so crazy about this is that after they're finished, we got readings of how full they felt, of how many calories they thought they ate, of how much they thought they'd eat for the rest of the day. There's no difference between them and the people eating a normal the normal bowl, even though they ate 73% more. Some people ate a quart more.

The thing is, I decided out of mind, if we've eaten it and it's gone, we don't remember that it's gone. The key thing to do is to see this food before we eat it. In the case of, let's say, chips and candy, instead of eating right out of the bag, just pour it out in a bowl. At least at one point before you get started eating, you're going to see how much you're going to eat. It's going to lead you to eat less. We find it's about 20% to 25% less usually.

I know I heard or read, and maybe it was from you I heard this, that when people eat what's considered healthy food, because it's healthy, they tend to eat more of it. One thing that goes on whenever it comes to healthy foods is that healthy foods are surrounded with a health halo. And what this leads us to do is two very bad things. First of all, we underestimate the number of calories we eat, but second, we end up overeating that amount of food. So let's say we take like low-fat snacks, low-fat candy. For the most part, people, when it comes to low-fat snacks and candy,

they tend to be on average of about 10% to 15% lower in calories because what they do is they replace the fat with more sugar, okay? But most people think they're about 40 to 50% lower in calories. And so as a result, people tremendously overeat anything that says low fat on it. And after the smoke clears, they've ended up eating about 20% more total calories from a lot of low fat snacks than we find they do for normal weight snacks. And this health halo also follows you when you go eat lunch. You know, you go to a place that might be a sub-sandwich place or something. You kind of go, oh, yeah, this is healthy for me. No French fries, none of those trans fat things.

Well, as a result, we find that people will eat about 700 calories there at lunch. But they think they ate about 450. They just don't realize that the mayonnaise they put on it wasn't zero calories. There wasn't zero calories to the cheese. There wasn't zero calories to the potato chips. There wasn't zero calories to the cookies they ate to reward themselves for eating good. This is where those healthy foods backfire. We underestimate the calories and we overeat the food. Something I've always wondered is how much of how we learn to eat and what we ate and what we liked and all that growing up,

how much of that influences what we eat as adults? It influences us in a whole bunch of different ways. I mean, the socialization of food, starting with the nutritional gatekeeper. I mean, as parents, it's incredible the impact that we have over children, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not. What we find is that the typical parent influences 72% of eating and food decisions their child makes. And this nutritional gatekeeper can either influence them for better or for worse. They can influence them for the better if they end up bringing the good stuff home

and they end up giving them money to get a certain type of lunch rather than any type of lunch when they're at school. They end up influencing them when they go out to eat as a family based on what they order. And these eating habits end up following people around, following people for some time. One of the things that was found in one study was that people frequently ask, you know, they've got a 10-year-old son. He's a little bit husky. Is it baby fat or is he overweight? What we find is that, what other researchers rather have found,

is that if people are, if a child's overweight at this age and their parent is overweight, there's a 73% chance that child's going to grow up to be overweight. So if a person's trying to figure out whether it's baby fat or real fat, you've got to check your own tummy. You would think, though, that if you know this, if you really understand that you are being influenced by all these factors, words on a menu, everything else that you've talked about,

knowing that would help you protect yourself so that you wouldn't be so susceptible to these tactics. What goes on in most of our lives is we have way too many things to think about on a day-to-day basis to be obsessing about whether there's too much writing that's causing us to eat more, whether the lights are too low and it's causing us to overeat, or whether having family-sized servings on the table is causing us to eat three servings versus two servings if we're in the other room.

The better thing to do is just to set up our environment, to re-engineer our home so that instead of mindlessly overeating, we can mindlessly enjoy food more and eat less. And simply taking these steps, the changing the bowls, not putting serving dishes on the table. But that's a pretty common family-style practice at the dinner table, to have bowls or plates of food to take servings from. Well, what tends to happen is when people end up eating family style is everybody waits until the last person's done,

and then they finish together. Well, if somebody's a fast eater, what happens is there's a tendency to continue to eat until the pace yourself to the last person finishes, which can mean seconds, and it can mean thirds if a lot of items items on the table. Instead, convenience or rather inconvenience makes it tremendously difficult to overeat. And so what we suggest is putting the starches and the main entrees, the heavier things,

don't serve them family style, but pre-plate them and just leave them in the kitchen on the stove or on the counter. And if somebody wants seconds or thirds, they can certainly go up and go get it. But they're not going to be getting seconds, thirds, and fourths just because it's mindlessly in front of them. Explain how dim lighting makes you overeat. You know, one thing about dim lighting is it causes us to pay a lot less attention to what's going on. And subconsciously, we almost feel like what's going on is we're kind of hidden, and the things we do, kind of this dim lighting or the dark, don't even really count. So what we find is when this lighting is this way,

not only do people end up spending longer on average eating, but they also spend eating more, but estimate and believe they ate less than they actually do. That doesn't mean that we have to turn on fluorescent lights or spotlights on us when we eat. But what it does mean is that we need to be extra careful that we don't have all these other cues. We need to eat more. We need to make sure if we're at home, we're not eating family style. If we're at a restaurant, we need to make sure that we use the rule of two, which is in addition to the entree, we can have either an appetizer, piece of bread, a drink, or dessert, but we can

have any two of those. We can't have all four. Well, it is interesting to look and see how obviously some people are more susceptible to these influencing factors than others because some people are skinny and it seems to come fairly easy to them. And other people are heavy and struggle with that, perhaps because they're being influenced by all these things you're talking about. And it's kind of depressing. But it's also really somewhat encouraging because making some of these small changes, let's say just making two changes that result in us eating 100 calories less every day is going to make us 20 pounds lighter in a year than we'd otherwise be. So that's the good news.

Well, and it's at least good to know what's going on, to have the information about how you're being influenced. I think it just seems like that would help you protect yourself. Dr. Brian Wansink has been my guest. He's the director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of a couple of books, including Slim by Design, Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life. And there is a link to that book in the show notes.

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 who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue.

It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. 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. 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. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. There will be times in your life when things fall apart, all hell breaks loose. Sometimes are worse than other times, but bad things do happen. Life gets messy, and how you react when these bad things happen has a lot to do with how things turn out in the end.

So it pays to think about how you will handle these inevitable detours in life. Here to offer some very practical help is Sarah Knight. Sarah describes herself as a writer, editor, and recovering perfectionist. She's author of a book called Calm the F Down, How to Control What You Can, Accept What You Can't, so you can stop freaking out and get on with your life. Hi, Sarah. Welcome. Hello. Thanks so much for having me. So I've noticed that when things go wrong, when things go wrong in my life, the reaction you get from other people is

to often minimize it. Whatever happened isn't so bad. And it said, I know it said with the intent of comforting, but it also often kind of misses the point. Yeah. And you know, what I started out with was the premise that most people in your life are just trying to make you feel better and saying everything's going to be okay. Don't worry. It's not that big of a deal. It's not so bad when something happens to stress you out. And the fact is that it is big of a deal. It is so bad and it might not be okay. And we still have to be able to figure out how to deal with it. So dive in with some examples here of what you're talking about. Well, so, you know, it can be anything

from work to family and relationships. I'm worried that I'm going to have an ugly baby to there's a category five hurricane bearing down on my home. What am I going to do about that? It's a very wide spectrum. And the idea is to give a universal toolkit to deal with all different kinds of problems. And the main question that I ask is what I call the one question to rule them all, can I control it? And if you can, then there are ways to move forward and calm yourself down and deal with whatever's happening. And if you can't, you have to be able to let it go.

Well, if there's a hurricane bearing down on your house, you can't just go, well, nothing I can do. Hurricanes are hurricanes, so So you got to do something. Exactly. And I call that productive, helpful, effective worrying, which has a great acronym that goes along with it. And that's when you batten down the hatches and you prepare as best you can and you mitigate the eventual damage from whatever it is that's about to happen to you. You know, you certainly can't control the direction of the wind, but you can control how relatively safe and secure your home and your family are before something like that happens. And the same thing goes for, you know, if you work in an industry where it's clear that layoffs are happening, you're not going to be able to ultimately control

whether the bean counters upstairs decide that your job is or is not valuable to them, but you can start preparing financially, emotionally for an eventuality and be that much more able to deal with the bad circumstances that arise from it. Even with all the preparation for the inevitable catastrophe that might happen, it does seem that some people handle it better than others and other people, even though they've prepared, when the bad thing happens, they don't deal with it well. Well, I refer to this as the what-ifs. This is something I'm intimately familiar with and probably a lot of your listeners are too. And it starts with very innocent, well, what if this happens? What if this doesn't work

out the way I want it to? What if so and so thinks such and such about something that I do? And then when you keep focusing on it and you don't take action, it keeps piling up and piling up in your brain. And suddenly you have this swirling collection of what ifs that drive you into what I call freak out mode. And that could be anxiety, it could be sadness, anger, avoidance, these are the sort of four overarching categories of freaking out. And I really think that it all has to it all comes down to action. And if you don't take action, then you're going to wind up, you know, just in that frame of mind and not be able to get out of it. And so how do you deal with all those what ifs that start piling up in your head?

Okay, so for example, for me, I tend toward anxiety. And I would say that the biggest, most toxic outcome of anxiety is overthinking. And it's what I just described about you start to think about one thing that might go wrong and it gathers steam in your head and then suddenly you're thinking about 10 different things that could go wrong. So one of the techniques is called give anxiety the finger. And what it means is focus on something hands-on that you can do that just calms your brain and distracts your brain from all of the overthinking it's doing. So all of the things that I talk about are really offshoots of cognitive behavioral therapy, actual scientifically proven therapy and whatnot to get you through anxiety, but I give it in a slightly edgier, fun tone. So for me, when I'm sitting around my house in

the Dominican Republic feeling anxious about something, I often get up and get a pair of kitchen scissors and go prune this gigantic papyrus bush in my yard, which is extremely calming and helps me narrow my focus to one very specific, very hands-on, mindless task that gets me out of that mode of anxious, freaking out. Well, I like that because you're basically distracting yourself. And I think so often people get in that state where they just compound in their own head the problem and it swirls around with nothing to contradict or have another point of view. And what you're talking about, about trimming the bush, breaks that cycle because you're distracted by doing something else. Yeah. And there are other things, you know, there are other people who are more prone to different kinds of freaking out. Um, some people tend to get really angry. They just go from zero to 60 on the anger scale and they need to be able to get to what I call the flip side of the four faces of

freaking out. And for anger, that's peace. You need to be able to get to a point of peacefulness. And one of the ways to do that is visualization. And like I said before, a lot of other self-help gurus and whatnot talk about meditation and mindfulness and all of that. I'm a little bit less traditional, but it all comes from the same place, which is if you find yourself very angry, as my husband once did when we were in the Mexico City airport and I didn't have a seat assignment for our flight home, you need to avoid Mexican airport syndrome, which is when you freak out and upset the very people who are able to help you get your wife on the plane. So I say, take a minute, visualize what's it going to be like if

we're both stranded in Mexico City airport jail for the next 48 hours because you lost control and decided to get angry at the flight attendant or the gate check agent. And if you take just one minute to visualize the consequences, you will typically realize that you are headed down a path of no return. You're about to make your problem worse. You really need to stop being so angry and come to a point of peace. Well, I think that's brilliant because who hasn't been in their version of Mexican airport jail where you're so upset and you're so angry and your world seems to fall apart that you end up getting mad at the exact people who have the power to help you. Yeah. And I, and I say that, you know, if the worst outcome of anxiety is overthinking, the worst outcome of anger is making your problem worse. Um, and, and avoidance is another one of

the modes of freaking out. And that means never ever solving your problem because you're not doing anything about it. So I call that ostrich mode. And I'm guilty of that sometimes as well. And you just need to be able to take one tiny little action toward reversing your situation, just one little bit. And that tends to make people feel accomplished. And then they realize, oh, okay, I can do this. And then they take another small action and then another one. And I like to say that one of the ways to avoid avoidance is to bargain with yourself and say, okay, if I'm avoiding balancing my checkbook and I'm avoiding making a doctor's appointment because I don't want to find out that I'm in the red in my bank account or that I have some terrible malady that my dermatologist tells me about, I'm only allowed to avoid one of those

things. So pick one and then you have to do the other one. Well, then you might end up being anxious and that takes you back to the other thing and now you're really screwed. This is true. But if you bring your knitting and you engage in giving anxiety the finger, then you can sit in the doctor's office and keep your mind off of your anxiety by doing something with your hands. What's the other one? Aren't there four modes? Yes, sadness. So clearly the flip side to being sad is being happy. But what I, you know, what I tend to think of sadness as is exhaustion. And what would you do for a friend who was in that space, whether they were, you know, maybe they're grieving, maybe they've lost their job, you know, what would you do? You would be kind to them.

And so you need to be kind to yourself. And so one of the tips that I have is called, you know, treat yourself. And literally it means send yourself some flowers, buy yourself a candy bar, run yourself a hot bath, you know, do the kinds of things for yourself that you would do for someone else who was very sad. Because we tend to forget when, especially when we're in the middle of a freakout, that we are our own best friends. We are our own, you know, we have to look out for number one. Nobody else has put on this earth to do it for us. And so I think that people really need to make sure that they recognize, you know, the situations that they find themselves in and treat themselves the way they would treat other people in those situations. One of the things that seems to run through all four of those things is when you're freaking out in one of those four ways, your brain cannot possibly work in a way that's going to help.

I mean, it's as if the good part of your brain kind of shuts down because these things take over. Yeah, I think it's the difference between having an emotional reaction and having a logical reaction. And what I try to deal with is logic, reason, and being rational about things. And, you know, I'm not here to minimize your emotions. I'm not here to tell you not to have them. You do need to experience emotions. You need to get through them to get past them. But I talk about what I call emotional puppy crating, which is the idea that emotions are like puppies. They're very distracting. They can be good. They

can be bad. You know, you can be having fun with them or they can be peeing on your carpet. Either way, you can't get anything done with a puppy running around. And you really can't deal with the stressor that has happened to you if you are overly focused on your emotional reaction. So you need to have it. You need to let it run around and tire itself out just like a puppy and then pick it up by the mental scruff of the neck and put it in a mental crate while you deal with the situation at hand. So how do you let it run around and tire itself out? You know, you give it some time. You acknowledge your sadness. You acknowledge your panic.

You acknowledge your anger. And you say, OK, what is the outcome if I continue indulging in this set of emotions? And then you recognize, well, that is not a very good outcome. I guess it's time for me to take these emotions and put them over to the side and start working on solutions. Right. I was hoping you would say that because it's one thing to stop freaking out, but then it's another thing to solve the problem that you're freaking out about. So how do you go about doing that once you've stopped the freaking out process? So the first thing is that you have to take stock and I compare it to landing in enemy territory. You only have a short period of time to say, where am I? What just happened? What's the most likely way for me to get out of this unscathed or as unscathed as possible? The second is what I call your RIO, your realistic ideal outcome. And it's very important that you be honest with yourself about what is realistic, both what's realistic that you can't control and what's within your control that's realistic.

And then what's ideal. And that's different for different people. You know, somebody who's in a relationship and they get cheated on, maybe their realistic ideal outcome is to work through it and remain with that person. Somebody else might say, you know what, I got to get out of this. I got to pack up my stuff and move out and end this relationship. It's all about what's realistic and ideal for you. And then the third part of dealing with it is triage. And it's just a fancy word for prioritizing, which is at the core of all of the advice I give. And that's you saying, okay, what's the most likely thing that I can fix the soonest and starting there. I really like to prioritize based on urgency. I find that that's the best way to get the right things done because you can't get

everything done at once and you can't do everything first. So getting the most efficient and effective things done first is the way to go. All of this makes sense as we talk about it in this calm and very reasonable discussion. I think what often happens is that when you're in the moment of freaking out, when you're really having trouble calming down, then this is hard to do. Exactly. And I try to tell people that, you know, again, I'm giving you tools that you can hopefully use when you wind up in that moment again, because it's all just common sense. It really is. I don't have magic solutions and incantations and potions to suddenly make life, you know, 100% easier than it really is. It's not easy, but it is simple. And that's the message that I'm always trying to tell people. Yes, this might not

be as easy as you want it to be because life isn't easy. But these are simple steps. These are take stock, identify your realistic ideal outcome, triage. It's really not, the concepts themselves are not that complicated. But do you have a suggestion or two or three for when you're in the moment to be able to divert yourself into this rather than go where you're more likely to go? I talk about naming your tarantulas. And there's a story I tell about the first tarantula, a literal actual tarantula that I encountered's a story I tell about the first tarantula, a literal actual tarantula that I encountered in my home here in the Dominican Republic and how it sent me off the deep end. And then when it came back, I said, oh, okay, I've been here before. The thing did not

jump at me. It did not growl at me. It's much smaller than me. All right. Okay. I've seen how this goes. We've had a dress rehearsal. Now I know what to do with it. And I recommend that people do that with all of their problems when they find themselves really anxious, or they find themselves wallowing in sadness, or they find themselves hiding in the house, avoiding their problems to say, what are my tarantulas? You know, what are they really? They're not just these omnipresent shadows in the corner. There is a reason why I feel this way. Name it. And once you name it, then you can start doing something about it. I can imagine people hearing you say that and think, well, you know, she's a very calm,

reasonable person, but that's not me. I'm, you know, I get worked up and I can't do that. That's not me. It's not who I am. I really reject that notion. And I just think that there's a lot more to your reaction to stress and anxiety than that's just who I am. And maybe I'm saying that because I'm somebody who's been dealing with severe anxiety and panic disorder for, I mean, really my whole life, but I identified it about 10 years ago. And so I've done the work, you know, I've gone to the doctors, I've done the journaling, I've done the deep breathing. I once filled a cat litter box with sand and put it under my desk at work so that I could take off my shoes and put my feet in the sand because doing that is a comfort to me. I've done all of this stuff.

And so I reject the notion that, well, I'm just an anxious person and nothing can be done. Things can be done. I mean, I'm proof that they can be done. And that's what I'm trying to help other people realize is that there are ways. Well, this is good to hear. It's empowering, I think, because so often when problems arise, things go bad, the catastrophe strikes, we revert to the old ways of doing things and maybe there's a better way to do it. It takes a little effort, but there is a better, more productive way to deal with these things that leads to a better outcome. My guest has been Sarah Knight. The book is called Calm the F Down, How to Control What You Can, Accept What You Can't,

so you can stop freaking out and get on with your life. There's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Have you ever been at work, needed a coffee mug, found one sitting in the sink, wiped it out, rinsed it out, and then used it? Uh-oh. I used to do that all the time when I worked at radio stations and had to be there late at night or very early in the morning. I would just grab a cup and use it. And most people tend to be pretty casual about coffee mug cleanliness.

But Dr. Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, says mugs have been tested and 90% of them are covered with germs. 20% even tested positive for fecal matter. I can't even begin to imagine how that happens. Most office kitchenettes don't have a dishwasher and mugs are washed by hand with the community sponge that never gets cleaned and whether you're at home or at work if a mug has traces of that coffee ring on the inside consider that a filthy ring of bacteria if you have a favorite commuting mug be sure to run it through the dishwasher every day bacteria thrivesia thrives in dark, warm places, and rinsing out a coffee mug isn't enough.

And that is something you should know. That's the podcast today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community.

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