Something You Should Know - Fascinating Ways Your Brain Works & Amazing Advice for People Who Are “Too Sensitive”

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

You may not have ever noticed this but hotels rarely offer milkshakes on their room service menu. And yet, if a hotel has a kitchen there is a good chance they have ice cream milk and a blender. But if you try to order a milkshake you probably won’t get it. Why not? The answer is simple, ridiculous and points out a big problem in American business today. (Steve Little author of The Milkshake Moment) Why does time seem to go by faster as we get older? Why do people love kitten videos? How can you spot a liar? These and other fascinating psychology questions are what we tackle in my discussion with Art Markman, Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, co-host of the podcast Two Guys on Your Head and author of the book Brain Briefs https://amzn.to/2xcxdyJ. It’s an interesting discussion that will help you better understand how your brain works. Art Markman's website is http://www.smartthinkingbook.com/ A lot of new cars have a keyless ignition. And while that is convenient, it also makes it easier to forget to turn the car off and leave it running. That has caused some real problems. I’ll explain why and what to do to make sure it doesn’t happen to you. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/hidden-dangers-of-push-button-start Do you know what an empath is? It is a person who prefers solitude and is extremely sensitive to noises, smells, crowds and social stimulation. It turns out there are a lot of people who fall into the category of “extremely sensitive” and being this way makes it a bit harder to navigate the world. Psychologist Judith Orloff, author of the book The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People https://amzn.to/2OvEiBV is in fact one of these extremely sensitive types and she has some insight and advice for other empaths and the people who must deal with them every day. This Week's Sponsors Daily Harvest. Go to www.Daily-Harvest.com and enter promo code SOMETHING to get three cups FREE in your first box! Apple Music. Go to www.AppleMusic.com/something to sign up and get 3 months free! No obligation, cancel at any time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, it's almost impossible to get a milkshake from hotel room service. I'll explain why and why it matters. Plus, the interesting psychology of humans. Like, why do we crumble under pressure? Why do we buy the things we buy? And why does time speed up as you get older? As you get older, more and more of your life becomes predictable. A great way to slow time down is to take up new skills, to learn how to play an instrument or something like that.

Also, new cars have keyless ignitions, and that can be a big problem. And people who are extremely sensitive are called empaths. How do you know if you are one? Do you prefer replenishing alone versus in crowds? Are you sensitive to noise, smells, and excessive talking? Do you take your own car places so you can leave when you please so you don't feel trapped? All empaths will answer yes, yes, and yes. 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. So I'll bet you have at least one really good customer service horror story. I've got one or two myself. Everybody's had some problem with customer service somewhere. And very often at the core of those stories is the fact that the person you're trying to get help from has no authority to solve the problem you have. And therein lies the frustration.

Someone who's taken a fascinating look at this is a guy named Stephen Little. Several years ago, he noticed that it is almost impossible to order a milkshake from a hotel room service menu. Hotels just don't have milkshakes on their room service menu for whatever reason. So as he would travel around and check into various hotels when he traveled for business, he made it a point of calling room service and ordering a milkshake. And the conversation would usually go something like, I'm sorry, sir, we don't have milkshakes. And then Stephen would say, well, do you have ice cream, milk, and a blender? And room service would say, well, yeah, sure, of course we do. Well, then why not whip me

up a milkshake and send it up to my room? Now remember, Stephen did this hundreds of times over the course of several years. How many times do you think he got a milkshake sent to his room? It turned out in the final analysis to be about 20% of the time. The point of doing this was to show how company policy often makes it impossible for employees to do their job. There is actually no reason not to make that milkshake, but hotel policies prevent employees from giving a customer what he wants. And this goes on every day at millions and millions of businesses. It's bad for business, but policies are policies. And that is something you should know. How can you not be fascinated by the human brain and how it works?

Particularly when you step back and see that it sometimes works in very strange and mysterious ways. And I think the more we understand how the brain works, or at least shine a spotlight on it and observe how it works, the better insight we gain into ourselves. And someone who I think would agree with that premise is psychologist Art Markman. Art is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the co-host of a podcast called Two Guys on Your Head, and he is the author of several books, including Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. Hi, Art. You were here way back on episode 46 discussing how to think smarter.

It's good to have you back. It's great to be here. Thanks so much. So one of the questions you tackle, which I think a lot of people would be curious about, is why we find kitten videos so irresistible. The thing about kitten videos is that they are this perfect storm in the sense that one of the things that evolution has done is to recognize that infants are annoying in every species. And so what they do to make sure that parents still want to take care of them is they do things to make them look really cute to the people who are going to take care of them. And so infants of every species have big eyes and they have little small features.

And so we love those. And so what happens is kittens have that aspect ratio. They have big eyes, very small face, you know, very symmetric. And so what we're doing is getting this evolutionary dose of cuteness. And then rather than having to live life in all of its moments to wait for the one moment that's great, what a kitten video does is it's kind of like the highlight reel for football fans. You don't have to sit through the whole game. You just get the highlight, really the great part of it. And so what a kitten video does is it takes this extraordinarily cute thing

and then just gives you the highlights, and they're absolutely fascinating. So talk about liars, because that interested me, how we can tell when people are lying, if we can at all. If you go on the internet and you start searching around, you will find all of these tips for catching liars. And a lot of these tips have to do with these unconscious tells that people are supposed to give off when they're lying. So they'll tell you

if you look up or down or to the right or to the left, that means you're lying. Or if you make eye contact or if you don't make eye contact or if you hesitate. And it turns out that almost all of those cues, actually pretty much every one of those cues, is not a very effective means for telling you who's lying to you. So really, absolutely the best way to figure out if somebody's lying is to follow up with them and ask them lots of questions whose answers they should know if they were telling you the truth. So if someone said to you, yeah, well, I took the bus to get to this meeting. Well, what bus? You know, where did it go?

What are some of the things that you passed? Where if you actually had that experience, you would actually know the answer to that. And what happens is people, when they lie to you, they haven't necessarily prepared the entire world around that. And so it's fairly easy to get people to trip people up. And there are actually really good studies showing that, for example, the agents who are trying to catch people who might be lying at customs and border control at various countries, if they use that technique, they're much more effective at catching people who are lying. But wouldn't you have to know the answers to what the bus went by in order to catch them in a lie?

You might have to know the answers. And certainly, if it were important enough, you could go back and check some of the things that they say. But the fact is that what ends up happening is when you catch people suddenly where you start asking them a bunch of questions to follow up, most people have a really hard time actually coming up with answers to things that ought to be at the tip of their tongue if they'd actually experienced the thing. Here's one that's always interested me, and I was just talking about it the other day with someone, that as I get older, it truly does seem that time goes by faster. And I think it's a fairly common experience. What is that? So there's several reasons, actually, that come together for why time feels like it goes faster as you get older. is that a lot of what makes time feel slow is that your brain, when your brain is doing a lot of work

to understand a situation, then in the moment, your brain has to, is going to create lots of memories that will, when you look back on it, become these landmarks that feel like a lot of time has passed. Now, when you're young, everything is new. And so your brain is constantly doing lots of work in order to understand the situation. And that influences your sense of the passage of time. As you get older, more and more of your life becomes routine. More and more of your life becomes predictable. And as a result, your brain is laying down fewer and fewer landmarks that make the time feel like it's gone slowly. And that's one of the reasons why a great way to slow time down is to take up new skills, to learn how to play an instrument or a new sport or something like that, or to expose yourself to new classes, because what that's doing is forcing your brain to set up a bunch of new landmarks.

Now, even if you do all of that, you're not going to slow the feeling of the passage of time completely, because there's another piece of it as well, which is that your brain is also taking into account how much other stuff you have learned about your life so far. So if you think about it, when you're six years old and then you go through another year, that year occupies a tremendous amount of space in your brain because you haven't been exposed to that much yet. You haven't learned that many things. But by the time you're 50, the amount of new stuff that you add to your brain in the next year is just a small fraction of everything. And so all of that gives rise to this sense that time is just rocketing by as you get older. You have a section in the book that's really interesting to me about

slackers and how we perceive other people to be flakes and slackers and not very conscientious, and we would never do that, and how can they do that? And I think it speaks to how we see our place in the world, and so talk about that. Well, there are two parts to it, right? So one of them is that we tend to judge people based on a particular set of values that we have. And so some people, particularly folks who are pretty conscientious, would like people to just either do it or not do it, but let me know in advance. And so there's a case where we are, we're going to judge people on the basis of whether we would have done the same kind of thing. And that's, that's a piece of what's going on. But then there's another piece that's also kind of fun, which is we have a, a lot of, of what's called an egocentric bias, which means basically we over-represent our own

influence on the world relative to everybody else's, which is why if you have a group do a project and you ask everyone the percentage of the project that they were responsible for, and then you add up that number, the number is going to add up to way more than 100 because everyone is going to overestimate their own contribution to what happened. And so when you look at what people have done, one of the things that happens is you assume that you had a much bigger impact on results than other people did. And that ends up making you feel like, you know, you really carried the weight and everybody else was just riding on your coattails. We're talking about things that go on in your head and I'm talking about that with psychologist

Art Markman. He's a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and he is author of the book Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. 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, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen,

of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left-field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him,

but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. So Art, I remember hearing someone say, and it's always stuck with me, I heard them say, we judge ourselves by our intentions, and we judge other people by their actions. That's right, and not just their actions, but the outcomes that come from those actions.

So we don't even always see all of the effort that somebody put in. We just see the results. Whereas when we see our own actions, not only do we judge our intentions, we judge the amount of effort we put in, even if we don't completely succeed at the thing that we set out to do. Whereas with somebody else, most of what we see is the outcome. And so we discount that amount of effort. By the way, that works also with how we credit other people for things that they've done. So for example, if you go to a great concert and you see this amazing musician play, you often at the end of it say, man, that musician is incredibly talented. And you call them talented because up on stage, you don't really

see all the work that they put in, all of the practice hours and everything that they had to do to achieve that amazing level of performance. And so you assume that a lot of what allowed them to play the way they did was talent rather than effort. One of the interesting questions you look at is why do we buy what we buy? And I think most people would think, well, you know, I'm a smart guy and I sit down and I make a decision of where I'm going to buy this and not that because I'm a logical, thoughtful guy. And you're going to probably tell me that's not how we do it. You probably are a logical, thoughtful guy, but most people are actually driven quite a bit by just mere familiarity to things. I mean, one of the scariest things is the influence that advertising has on the kinds

of decisions that we make and the kinds of things that we buy. There's a beautiful effect that was first categorized by a guy named Bob Zients back in the 1960s called the mere exposure effect. And what he showed was simply showing something to someone makes them like it better later. And you see this, for example, with music, where when you first hear a song, yeah, you're not 100% sure how much you like it. But after you've heard it several times, suddenly you like it quite a bit more. And the same thing happens with advertising. It really doesn't matter what the advertiser tells you about the product. Most of the effect of advertising is just taking something and making it feel familiar.

And so in the moment, when you go to a store, for example, and you're trying to figure out which of the products on the shelf you're going to buy, you will feel more warmly towards something that's been advertised because it feels familiar. And then, and here's the beauty of it, then you're going to backfill a story about why that's actually a better product. And you see people do this, for example, with certain kinds of products that are legally mandated to be identical. has to have a formulation that fits within a particular set of FDA guidelines, which means that chances are every single brand of product that is that type of cold remedy actually has an identical formulation. And yet people still consistently buy the brand name products in part because those products feel familiar relative to a generic product. And so

then they'll tell themselves, well, it must be higher quality, it must be a better formulation, but in fact, it's actually identical to everything else on the shelf. Something I think people universally experience is choking under pressure. And it might seem somewhat self-evident, we choke under pressure because there's pressure, but there's got to be more to it than that. So the thing about pressure is it does a couple of things. One of the things that it does is it decreases the amount of what's called working memory. So working memory is the amount of information that you can hold in mind at the same time. And the less information you can hold in mind, the less complicated a decision you can make. And so the more pressure that you're experiencing

at any given moment, the less information you get to take into account when you are working. And so that's one source of choking under pressure. And then there's another, which is particularly important for motor skills, for actions that you're performing. So if you ever think about if you've ever played golf or tennis or something like that, and you find in a pressure situation that suddenly you're hitting the ball terribly, one of the reasons for that is because another thing that you tend to do under pressure is to monitor your own performance. So you start paying attention to what you're doing in a way that you don't do when you're

performing without pressure. Now, the thing about motor skills, about movements, is that actually paying attention to those movements tends to discoordinate those things rather than make them more coordinated. And so the more that you pay attention to your own movements, the more that you lose that coordination that's important for skilled performance, which means that when you are practicing a skill that you're going to perform under pressure, a motor skill, one of the things that you want to do is to learn to pay attention to the situation you're in rather than to the motor movement itself. So this way, if you're playing tennis or golf or something like that, when you get under pressure, you start monitoring the situation rather than the performance of the skill itself. What about punishment?

Does it work the way we think it works, that punishment deters future problems? Or how does the brain deal with punishment? Yeah, so the fascinating thing about punishment is it works depending on the time horizon you care about. So punishments are negative things that you do to somebody that engage what's called the avoidance motivational system. And rewards, positive things that you give to people, engage what's called the approach motivational system. And so here's the paradox. If you want to get somebody to do something right now, it is absolutely critical that they do it right at this moment. Absolutely. The best way to get somebody to do something right now is to threaten them and to, and to threaten them with a punishment or some, some, some harm, because in the moment, people would rather do something and avoid that punishment.

The problem is that the avoidance motivational system, one of the ways that you know it's active is through the emotions you experience. And the emotions that are associated with avoidance are fear and stress and anxiety. And nobody really enjoys experiencing fear and stress and anxiety. And nobody really enjoys experiencing fear and stress and anxiety. And so as a result, over the long term, people actually go out of their way to try to avoid situations in which they might experience fear, stress and anxiety. And so in the long term, if you keep punishing people and you keep threatening people, they just find ways to avoid you altogether. So a workplace that's full of threats of punishment will in the moment get people to hop to it and get stuff done.

But in the long term, you'll see lots of turnover and absenteeism and things like that because people don't really want to be around a lot of those punishments. Yeah. So talk about life's little nuisances and aggravations and the best way to deal with them. I've got to know this. is that we have a tremendous amount of choice about what it is that we want to pay attention to and what kinds of information are going to influence us in the future. And it turns out that when you create a mindset where you start looking for the things that bother you, you start seeing the things that bother you. Your world actually becomes more and more surrounded with the negative things that are out there in the environment because you get this state dependent memory. So when you're in a negative mood and looking for negative stuff, you remember negative

things, you see negative things, you start feeling badly. So that that feeds on itself. And the fascinating thing is if you flip that switch and you start looking for the good things that people are doing, so you ignore those pet peeves and you actually start trying to look for better things, you begin to notice more good things in the environment. And it actually creates a situation in which people start interacting with each other in a way that starts to bring about those good things. So if you spend your time, rather than trying to be critical of everybody, if you spend your time finding really good things somebody has done,

then you find they're smiling at you and then you smile back and suddenly you're having a pleasant conversation. And so these things can really become a self-fulfilling prophecy in either direction. And so absolutely the best thing to do is for those things that are not going to threaten anyone's life, giving those things an opportunity to just pass by without comment and focusing on the more positive things actually just makes life infinitely better almost immediately. Good advice and interesting insight into how the brain works in real life, in real life situations. Art Markman has been my guest. He is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. And his book is called Brain Briefs, the answers to the most and least pressing questions about your mind. There's a link to his book in the show notes.

And Art was on episode 46 about a year and a half ago. It was a really interesting interview about how to think better, how to actually think better. And you can find that in the back catalog of Something You Should Know Podcasts wherever you listen. Thanks for joining me, Art. Oh, my pleasure. It's great talking with you again. 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. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners 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? 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. So a few months ago, I did an interview with a psychiatrist, a woman named Judith Orloff, who is someone I've interviewed before. And this interview was about people who might best be described as really, really sensitive. The actual term is empath, but that is essentially what an empath is, someone who is extremely sensitive. And after doing the interview, I decided not to use it because, as interesting as I thought it was, I just didn't think it applied to that many people, that empaths are a fairly

small percentage of the population. So I put the interview on the shelf, but in just the last few weeks, the subject of sensitive people has come up in conversation a couple of times. And one psychologist I know who's familiar with Judith Orloff said, oh, you should use that interview. That could help a lot of people, not just empaths, but also just sensitive people. There are a lot of sensitive people who feel different than everyone else, and they're not really sure why. And this could be really beneficial to them, because most likely they've heard all their life,

don't be so sensitive, you're just too sensitive. The implication being that that's something you need to fix, that your sensitivity is getting in the way. Well, maybe not. So I got out the interview and listened, and I've decided to use it. So Judith Orloff is a board-certified psychiatrist. She's written several books, including The Empath Survival Guide, Life Strategies for Sensitive People. Hi, Judith. Welcome.

Thank you. So when you talk about sensitive people, what is that? What are sensitive people sensitive to? And how is a sensitive person different from an empath? And just put all of this in context for me. Yes, well, there's a spectrum of empathic sensitivity. On the high end of the spectrum are the empaths. Empaths are people who have big hearts, very sensitive, very intuitive, very loving, very giving, but they pick up the energy and emotions of other people and absorb it into their own bodies

so they could get exhausted, anxious, depressed, or get stomach or pain they didn't have before. So empaths are people who actually absorb the energy from other people. A little bit lower on the spectrum are the highly sensitive people, and these people are sensitive to sounds, noise, smells, and are very sensitive to being around large groups of people, prefer being small, having small groups of people. But the highly sensitive people don't absorb the emotions or the physical

symptoms into their own body. And then at the very lowest end of the spectrum are the narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. And these people have what are called empathy deficient disorders, meaning they don't have the usual empathy that we have. So that's the whole spectrum of sensitivity. Wait, that's a big jump from highly sensitive to psychopath. Oh, well, there's regular people in between. Oh, okay.

Who are loving and can feel empathy, empathy which is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, which is the quality that the Dalai Lama quote, that empathy is the most precious of human qualities. And so these are the rest of the people with empathy who don't necessarily take on the other person's problems or issues into their own selves. So how many people would you say fall into those top two categories of either being an empath or a very sensitive person?

Well, before the last six months, it was about 20%. But now what I've observed is that even regular people who had beautiful, normal empathy are turning into empaths because there is so much more stress in our environment, and there's so much to handle that their ordinary sensitivities are being broken down, so they're becoming more and more empaths. And what do you think causes this? I mean, we all know people, oh, he's a sensitive person, or she's a very sensitive person, but where did that come from? Well, I'm a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, and I'm also an empath, so I want to say that that's one of my motivations for writing this book.

And I believe that sensitivity is born. People are born with certain sensitivities. As a physician, I was at a lot of births, and you can see little babies come out, and each one is so different. Some just seem so utterly sensitive to everything, and others seem a little bit more closed off. You could see the weight of the world on other children. So I believe that it's genetic.

I believe that it's temperament. I believe that sometimes if a child has an abusive or a neglectful environment, was raised by alcoholics or narcissists, that can grate on their sensitivities and make them feel more sensitive and open and vulnerable to the world because they didn't get the kind of love that they needed. So when I think about sensitive people, I think of people who have a more difficult time maneuvering and navigating through life because things that other people can handle hit sensitive people a lot harder. Yes? Oh, yes.

You know, as an empath myself, I don't have the usual boundaries that people have up or filters that people have up that guard against some of the coarser aspects of life that come at you. So I just feel it. But on the other hand, what I and other empaths feel is the joy and the compassion and the depth and the connection. And we go very, very deep. So we're very, very passionate people and curious and playful and like to explore the secrets of the universe. So empaths and sensitive people go very deep. They make incredible mates, and they make incredible workers if they're in the right work environment. Since you are one yourself and you work with people, very sensitive people,

what are the situations in life, what are the things that are the most difficult? Yeah, I think the most difficult part, because empaths love to give, and they're trained to take the pain away from others. And you just can't do that if you're an empath. You have to be able to hold the space and hold your center and be loving with others but not take on their pain. And that's why I wrote this book, was to give the empath and sensitive people and empathic people who want to keep their hearts open without compassion fatigue the skills to stay centered and not take on other people's stuff. And once you learn how not to do that, you are free. You are free to enjoy the amazing gifts of being an empath,

to become an empowered empath. And I personally feel that empaths are going to save the world, and people with empathy who value their empathy, who know how important it is to tune in to somebody else and find out where they're coming from, even if you don't like them or agree with them, because it's the only chance we have of bridging the gap. And I believe that empathy is what will allow us to have a peaceful personal life in society. You know, it doesn't always work, doesn't always get through to people, but I think it's the best

chance we have. I think the image of sensitive people, including empaths, because I think people tend to lump all of those people into one group as being very sensitive people. I think the image of those people is that they're very fragile and that they can't take the slings and arrows of life the way the rest of us can, and consequently we have to treat them differently because they are so fragile. Right, I know, that's a misconception. That's an untreated empath. That's an empath without any kind of strategies and skills. Once an empath has skills,

and let me tell you just personally, I wrote this book because I've developed many skills to navigate the world. And empaths are givers, but the givers need to be protected. And they need to develop ways to protect their sensitivity so they can go out and give what their heart wants to give. And it's when an empath who's giving in a healthy way is a happy empath. Do you think that very sensitive people and empaths see themselves as part of this group? My guess would be that they probably do because people probably tell them all the time, you're so sensitive. But do you think they see themselves as sensitive?

And also, do you think they, if they do see themselves as sensitive do they see it as a positive or do they see it as a handicap? Well I think most empaths don't know their empaths, you know, because people misdiagnose them. Traditional medicine misdiagnoses them as chronic anxiety, major depression, agoraphobia, you know, all kinds of big, big labels, when they haven't been diagnosed as an empath, the treatment is different. They're not usually put on medication as the first line of defense, like so many psychiatrists do.

So if an empath comes in to me, I give them the Are You an Empath quiz, and I assess them, you know, do you prefer replenishing alone versus in crowds? Are you sensitive to noise, smells, and excessive talking? Do you replenish when you're alone? Do you take your own car places so you can leave when you please so you don't feel trapped? So those are kind of the common questions that all empaths will answer yes, yes, and yes to. And the reason it's good to know you're an empath is then you can take care of your own sensitivities and learn strategies so that when you are on sensory overload, you can really take care of it quickly, rather than having it snowball into days or weeks of discomfort. But if you live or work or are friends with someone who is in this category, who's very

sensitive, do we, as the people around them, need to treat them differently than we would treat everybody else? Or do we treat them the same and let them deal with life as they deal with it? No, empaths have special needs, and there's a chapter in the book on empaths and love, and how to be in a relationship with an empath, how to love an empath, because I know I'm an empath,

and I've been in a relationship about four years, and it requires ongoing conversations about my needs. And an empath needs a partner who can be open to listening to his or her needs and work with her so that there's some kind of compromise. Because I'm not highly social, and so it wouldn't be good for me to be with a highly social mate. And, you know, I choose to have quiet time a lot that he understands. Sometimes I need to sleep alone in my own bed because I need that space.

And he's not entirely happy with it, but he understands it and he's able to respect it. And so when I express my needs to friends and to my partner, it's just a beautiful relationship. But you need somebody who can dialogue with you, otherwise they have no idea what your needs are, because most empaths don't speak up, and then when you express your needs, they think you're crazy. Well, you've mentioned a few times that very sensitive people and empaths like their solitude, they don't like a lot of social

interaction, they don't like big groups, But a lot of times that's not possible. They can't all be artists or they can't all work at home. There are plenty of times when I imagine they have to be out in the real world. So given that, is there any benefit to understanding that you're very sensitive, but also understanding that maybe you need to toughen up? Well, that's a great question. And the idea is to get stronger from the inside, not toughen yourself up. But if you consider getting strength from the inside, toughening yourself up, then yes. But what people usually mean by that is they squash their sensitivities and just grin and bear it,

and that's not the answer. The answer is, you know, if you're out in the environment where there's a lot of, you know, energy going on and you're having a meeting, let's say, that's uncomfortable, what an empath would need to do is just take a little break, regroup, meditate, breathe, and come back to the meeting after that, you know, if they're feeling sensory overload. Because sensory overload, it feels like every cell in your body is getting over-amped, and all you need to do is to shut it down and be quiet.

And even if you can do that for three minutes, it brings you back to yourself very quickly. So you have to learn to work with your own body, you know, if it feels like it's getting overwhelmed. And then you go back in the same circumstance and you're fine. You said early in our conversation here that one of the characteristics of an empath is they take on the pain of other people and that they need to learn to not do that because there's no real benefit in doing that. But if that's what you do, if that's who you are, how do you learn how not to do that? Yes, well, empaths need to reprogram what their beliefs were growing up, because usually they were programmed that in order to be a compassionate person, you want to take on other people's pain, you want to help them, you want to take their pain away. And let me tell you,

as a psychiatrist, if I believed that, I would have had no longevity as a healer. What I need to do as an empath and a psychiatrist is to be there with somebody, empathize with somebody, guide them, but not take on their pain. Now, that's very important. And ideologically, I believe that it is none of my business to take on someone else's pain. I believe that that's codependency. And so I've done a lot of work with that in myself so that I've trained myself so I can be with people mostly and not take on their pain.

Where's the line between taking on someone's pain and genuinely feeling bad or sad for the pain they're going through? The line is when you absorb it. You can feel bad all you want and put your heart out towards somebody, but the minute you start assimilating it in your own body, that's where problems come. And it's interesting because empaths and sensitive people are thought to have hyperactive mirror neuron systems, which are the compassion neurons in the brain where they're just overactive, whereas narcissists and sociopaths have hypoactive, underactive mirror neuron systems. And so realizing that, then empaths need to kind of tweak it, you know, by saying to

themselves, it's not any of my business to take on their pain. I want to be there. I want to hold the space for them and give to them, but not take it on. And you can program yourself where if I feel like I'm taking something on, I visualize a huge, beautiful window with a breeze going through it, and my body is that window, and the breeze just goes right through the window and takes anything that I absorbed or any tension or stress that might have glommed onto me out the other end. So it's a beautiful way to use nature to help to clear what's inside of you. So there are all kinds of techniques like that or the three-minute meditation where somebody, if they start feeling overwhelmed, can just take three minutes out, a mini tune-up, and breathe.

When you slow down your breath, you slow down your heart rate. And when you slow down your heart rate, you slow down your anxiety. And so using that medication, that lowers sensory overload and anxiety. And so it means taking control of your breath for that period of time to bring down your anxiety. It's really powerful, and it works quickly. Well, I think what's really important about what you say is that it gives voice to people that it's okay to be sensitive. It's okay to be an empath. I mean, these are people who all their lives have probably heard, oh, don't be so sensitive. You're just too sensitive. But you don't say to somebody, oh, your eyes are too blue.

But being sensitive may just be part of who you are and not something you need to fix. And maybe it's just fine. Dr. Judith Orloff has been my guest. She's a psychiatrist and author of the book, The Empath Survival Guide, Life Strategies for Sensitive People. There's a link to her book in Amazon in the show notes and her website, drjudithorloff.com. There's a link to that website also in the show notes. Thank you, drjudithorloff.com. There's a link to that website also in the show notes. Thank you, Judith. Oh, thank you. It's pretty common now for new cars to have keyless ignitions. Instead of a key, all you

have to have is a key fob in or near the car, and the car will start when you push a button on the dashboard. But there's a problem. Since there's no key to turn off the engine, and the car will start when you push a button on the dashboard. But there's a problem. Since there's no key to turn off the engine, it's easy to exit the car and leave the engine running accidentally. Even if you take the key fob with you, the engine can keep idling. If the car is parked in a closed garage attached to a house, carbon monoxide fumes from the engine can seep into the living area, possibly harming anyone in the house. It's even trickier with a hybrid car because if it's in

electric mode when you park it, it's virtually silent, which makes it a lot easier to leave it running. News reports have linked more than two dozen carbon monoxide deaths to keyless ignitions, and a number of lawsuits have been filed. Now, some cars have warning chirps if you leave the car running, and others, like General Motors, have designed their cars to automatically shut off after a certain period of time once the driver has left the vehicle. Still other automakers design vehicles to automatically turn off whenever the driver exits the vehicle with the key fob. But if you don't have one of those cars, make extra sure

the car is turned off when you park it. And that is something you should know. If you're on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, so are we, and I invite you to check us out. We post additional content there that's not in the show, and I think you will like it. 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. 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.

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