Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Psyching Yourself Up for Anything & Surviving Family Get-Togethers

Episode Date: February 15, 2020

Some people love rollercoasters and scary movies – but why? What is the appeal of being scared half to death? Today, you’ll find out why. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/why-do-some-brains-enjoy-fear/280938/?single_page=true We’ve all been in the situation where we HAVE to perform well and because of that we lose our confidence, get nervous and catastrophize all the horrible things that could happen if we fail. Why on earth do we do that when it does nothing but makes us perform even worse? The trick is to “psych yourself up.” Daniel McGinn, senior editor at Harvard Business Review and author of the book, Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed (http://amzn.to/2sv4p4Q) offers some suggestions, based on research, that can help you perform better when there is a lot on the line.  How many times did you hear a teacher say to never to end a sentence with a preposition? Is it really such a sin? A grammar expert explains the truth about where that rule came from and whether or not it is important to follow it. http://mentalfloss.com/article/68490/4-fake-grammar-rules-you-dont-need-worry-about  Why does it seem that when families get together, it always leads to trouble? Family therapist Eric Maisel, author of the book Overcoming Your Difficult Family (http://amzn.to/2rjwPui) explains why when families gather they have trouble getting along and what you can do to rise above it all and save your sanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 was 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. 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. Today on Something You Should Know, why do people like roller coasters and scary movies? What's the appeal of being scared to death? Then what do you do when you have to perform at a job interview or a sport or give a presentation and you're extremely nervous? It happens to everyone. And even the highest profile musicians in the world,

you know, Carly Simon, Barbra Streisand, almost debilitating kinds of stage fright. You know, our biology is programming us to be nervous in certain situations and you need to find a way to deal with it. Then, is it really bad English to end a sentence with a preposition? And getting along with your family,

why do we so irritate the ones we claim to love? We all want what we want. We all have our own personalities. We all have our own styles. Put three or four or five or six people into the same room, and you're going to have difficulties. 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 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

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And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. You know, I've never been one of those people who likes really scary roller coasters or really scary movies. I guess it's because I had a rather unfortunate incident happen to me when I was like seven or eight years old on a roller coaster at the Ohio State Fair. And ever since then, I've just, I just, I don't get any enjoyment out of going. So I just don't go, which upsets my two sons because they both love roller coasters, but I just can't go on them.

I just don't like them. And the same thing with really scary movies. I mean, I can watch them, but I don't really enjoy them. In fact, a long time ago, I did a voiceover, and I was the guy when you waited for the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios while you were in line and watched the monitors. I was the guy narrating about how they made Back to the Future Part 2 and all that. And I would bring people there to see it and show them, but I wouldn't go on the ride because the ride made me nauseous.

So it's, I guess, always fascinated me why some people love scary rides and scary movies because I absolutely hate them. And psychologists have been fascinated by this as well. Why in the world, as I would wonder, why in the world would you subject yourself to something scary and unpleasant and call it entertainment? And the two prevailing theories have been that the person is not actually afraid, but is actually excited by the movie or the ride. And the second explanation is that people are willing to endure the terror in order to enjoy a euphoric sense of relief at the end. It's kind of like hitting your head with a hammer for a while because it feels so good when you stop. But recently,

two scientists concluded that neither of these explanations was really adequate. They believe that people watch or do scary things because they're happy to be unhappy. They enjoy the negative feeling of being scared. For some, the most pleasant and memorable part of an event may also be the most fearful. Legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock once said, People like to be scared when they feel safe. And that is something you should know. We all have moments in life, those big moments, when there's a lot riding on how you perform, like a job interview or a speech

or presentation, or you have to take a test, or you're playing in a championship game in a sport. And it's at those times when there's a lot at stake that we often lose our confidence, get nervous, and start telling ourselves how horrible we are and how bad things will be if we screw this up, which then affects your performance and makes you perform worse. So what can you do about it? That's what Daniel McGinn is here to discuss. Daniel is senior editor at Harvard Business Review, and he has a new book out called Psyched Up! How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed. Hi, Daniel.

And so why does it seem that when we need to perform at our best, we often feel the worst? When we need to feel powerful, we feel powerless, and then our thoughts run to the negative, which most of us know can do us absolutely no good. Well, we're biologic creatures, and we've been programmed that when we see a threat, we get a rush of adrenaline, and we enter this fight-or-flight state. And, you know, when we were running away from lions, that was super useful. But when we're trying to

go to job interviews, then it's not so useful. We need to come up with ways to decrease the anxiety we feel during these moments, increase our sense of confidence, and make sure we have the right level of energy to perform well. Why do we perceive them as a threat? Is it just that there's often so much riding on it? Yeah, there's research that shows that when there's a lot of eyes upon us that invoke some sort of a predatory kind of situation. And so some of it is, I think, deep-seated and biological. I think that the bigger issue in sort of modern day human existence is we're very aware of what can go wrong. We're very aware of the downside risk. You know, am I going to, you know, what happens if I don't get this job? What happens if I fail the SATs? What happens if

I botch this pitch and my coworkers think I'm not very talented? I think a lot of us catastrophize too much. And getting psyched up is partly about trying to focus on the positive and the upside and not do that worst case scenario stuff. Which is, it must be human nature because nobody has that moment beforehand and thinks, wow, if I do this, imagine how great things will be. It's always, if I screw this up, imagine how horrible things will be. Our impulses are often wrong about what we should be doing in a stressful situation. So take standing on the first tee at a golf hole where there's a water hazard on the right. Our impulse as humans is to focus on not hitting it to the right into the water. That's

actually not the right thing to do. The better thing to do is to focus on the positive affirmative thing you want to do, which is hit it straight into the middle. So a lot of the research is about trying to counteract our bad impulses and focusing on the negative. So we have all seen athletes in particular with, you know, little rituals that they do to get themselves ready for competition or whatever. And does that play into this? Are these kind of little rituals helping people psych themselves up? And if so, I mean, do they work? And maybe they work because people think they work.

So they can be very elaborate, or they can be very simple. So two of the people I feature in the book are Jerry Seinfeld and Stephen Colbert. They both have a set of things they do before they do their shows. Seinfeld is very quiet and unobtrusive. He listens to the same set of music before he goes on. He rereads his joke cards, you know, reviewing his routine. And then at exactly five minutes before the curtain, he puts on a jacket and he says the jacket is sort of his cue to his body. Okay, five minute warning, time to do your thing, get energized, get ready. Colbert has a much more elaborate ritual that involves, he rings a bell, he does hand gestures with everybody backstage,

he chews a certain kind of Bic pen, he looks at a spot on the wall. His is much more elaborate and complicated. They're just different personalities. These things are very idiosyncratic. What works for you won't work for me. And it's all about finding what does work for you. And when we say it works, it works because you think it works. Yeah. If it makes you more confident, confident people tend to perform better.

So one of the things I did, there's research that suggests that if you use a tool or an object that was used by a high performer before you and you start using it, you'll perform better. So I got in touch with Malcolm Gladwell and I mailed him off a keyboard. He wrote on it for three months. He mailed it back to me. And now when I write important things, I write it on a keyboard that Malcolm Gladwell used to use. And that makes me feel lucky. It makes me feel confident. And I have sort of an extra spring in my fingers when I write on that

keyboard and I pull it out for special occasions and it helps me. Yeah, because you think it helps you. Right, right. I mean, the placebo effect is a powerful thing. Our minds are powerful tools. And if we can do things that either subconsciously or consciously put us in a mindset that makes us more likely to succeed, you know, more power to you. So this idea of confidence, obviously, we perform better when we're confident. And those moments when things a lot is riding on it, that's when we feel the least confident. So how do we, even if we're generally a confident person, how do we pull that in at the moment when we need it? So one of the reporting trips I made for this

book was I went to West Point, and I sat in on psychology sessions with some of their athletes and their cadets. And they actually make these audio soundtracks for the lacrosse players that I was watching. They had a professional radio narrator come in and read a script that was personalized to the individual that would talk about what a great goalie they are. And remember that game against Navy when you had 17 saves and very, very specific recollection, almost like a greatest hits reel or like a highlight reel from SportsCenter. And the players would listen to that in the morning. They would listen to that before practices, before games. It was a way to increase their confidence, increase their sense of power.

And we're not going to have a psychology department that makes an audio track for us, but we can find ways to remember our best moments at work before we go into another performance. And that works. I think there's research that suggests that it does. And I think I've talked to lots of people who say that finding ways to be more confident and to remember their successes and try to forget their failures, it definitely increases the odds for them. My guest is Daniel McGinn.

He is senior editor at Harvard Business Review and author of the book Psyched Up, How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed. 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. 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. So Daniel, one of the elements of this thing is not just before the performance or before the big event, but during. Because how often has somebody flubbed something at the beginning, and then they just talk themselves into disaster, and it just goes downhill. They can't let it slide. They just catastrophize in that moment that this is going terrible, which makes it go worse. Right. One of the reporting trips I did was to Juilliard, the music school in New York,

and they have a whole class that teaches musicians how to try to increase their confidence and reduce their anxiety before auditions. And at the end of the course, they tell all the students that they're going into this audition with professional musicians as the judges, and they tell them everything's going to be fine. But when they get in there, everything goes wrong. They have a fan that blows the music around. They have ping pong balls on the piano. They do all these things to trip them up and to see how well their mental preparation has kept them okay, even if adversity strikes. When you have a ritual, something you do like Jerry Seinfeld or Stephen Colbert, is it okay to just make it up? I mean, it has no basis in anything, because none of them have any

basis in anything, but could you just make something up, call it your ritual, and after a while, if you do it enough, it'll work? There are certainly examples of people who do things like that, that there's not any sensible explanation. So Wade Boggs, the baseball player for the Red Sox back in the day, he would eat chicken before every game. He would run sprints exactly so many minutes before the first pitch. He would carve certain symbols into the dirt with his bat before his at-bats. None of that has any logical explanation. But other rituals that increase your confidence like the West Point guys do, that makes a lot of sense. Personally, I tend to favor things that are connected with my work

that make me remember my best moments as a professional person. But I don't denigrate or, you know, find fault with anybody whose superstitions are more kind of out there or elaborate. Again, I think these techniques are very idiosyncratic and they, you know, what works for one person won't work for the next. It really is a case that we're kind of our own worst enemy in these moments, that when it really counts, we can't really count on ourselves to cheer us up and cheer us on, because we tend to do just the opposite. Yeah, that was one of the biggest learnings for me in this project.

I have a tendency to engage in what the psychologists call defensive pessimism, which is thinking about what the worst case scenario is and then telling myself why, if that happens, it won't be so bad. So when I'm driving my daughter to her driver's test, you know, and she's nervous, I'll talk about how, well, you know, if you fail the test, you can take it again in two weeks. And, you know, I don't mind driving in between now and then. That's actually the worst thing you can do. You know, so I've come out of this trying to find the sort of more positive, more optimistic, more confident view of the world, because that's going to increase your odds of success.

Yeah, well, in a sense, I mean, you would think you wouldn't want to say that to your daughter, that, you know, if you fail the test, because now she's thinking, well, now I'm going to fail the test. Exactly. It primes you for failure, yet that is a lot of people's natural instincts. You talk to a lot of people, they engage in that kind of catastrophizing and trying to figure out ways, especially in those moments leading up to your performance, to not do that is really key and can boost the way you do things. I think a lot of people think the idea of psyching up for something is to just, you know, tell yourself how great you are and all of that. Does that work? Well, it's easy to make fun of this stuff, no question. I mean,

Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live back in the 90s, we remember, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and doggone it, people like me. We do make fun of these. The Office, every few episodes, they would have Michael Scott give a pep talk. It's definitely possible to sort of mock these psychological techniques. But there is a proven track record for a lot of these things. They don't have to be elaborate. They don't have to be showy or something that other people know that you're doing. They can be quiet. They can be simple. But they can kind of fine-tune your emotional state before you go into these high-stakes events. It is kind of reassuring that it's not just you, that like when you describe that golf shot, that everybody does that. It's like it's not that you're a pessimist or that you think you're going to fail.

Almost everybody in that situation is going to do the same thing. One of the striking things about some of this research is how much of it is done on musicians, and even the highest profile musicians in the world, you know, Carly Simon, Barbara Streisand, really almost debilitating kinds of stage fright. So you can be at the top of your game, you can be super successful, and still have a problem with the fact that our biology is programming us to be nervous in certain situations, and you need to find a way to deal with it. But eventually, if you stick with it, I mean, if you were going to go on The Tonight Show and you've never been on The Tonight Show, that's got to be nerve-wracking.

But if you're the host of The Tonight Show, it's probably not so nerve-wracking. Sure. You know, practice and routine, you know, the more times you do something, the novelty wears off. You know, I'm sure you're not nervous at all when you interview people on the radio, except I bet that every once in a while you get kind of a bigger guest than normal. I bet there are times when you say to yourself before the microphone goes on, you know, this one's more important than the rest. I really need to bring it for this one. Even Johnny Carson probably had interviews that were more important. He had a day when he had a really big guest and he had to bring his A game. And I think more of our jobs are that way, the way the economy has evolved. Salespeople have more key clients that they need that are more important

than the others. We have days at work when we're just doing our normal jobs, and then we have days when we're making a big presentation to our boss. So if your job is the kind of thing that goes up and down, and some days are more important than the others, I think you can benefit from trying to learn a routine like this. In a first 80 kind of way, can you, in the last moments here, if somebody has got some big event, the big interview, the big speech, the big whatever, just based on all the research that you've looked at, what they might do to prepare for that in the last few moments that might help? Sure. I would focus on your emotions and think about it like a stereo dial, the same way you would adjust the treble and the bass.

Try to find ways that'll crank down anxiety, that'll boost your confidence, that'll get your energy level right for what you're trying to do. If you feel those physical sensations of being nervous, remember that that's just your biology. It doesn't mean you're going

to do a bad job. Something would be wrong if you didn't feel that kind of way. So just get out there and be confident, and it should go okay. And usually it's really just the first few minutes, right? I mean, most of us, when we give a talk, unless it's just going horribly bad, it's the first few minutes that are the worst, and then you kind of get comfortable in that. So one of the guys I interviewed for the book, he gives a lot of presentations and he's really, really busy.

So he doesn't really have time to carefully craft every speech he gives. So what he does is the first three or four minutes of every speech, no matter what the topic is, he found a way to make it the same. So he has basically his standard opening. He does it, he's memorized it, he's done it a thousand times at

this point. So he doesn't even need to think about it. I call it going on autopilot. So he autopilots the first three minutes. By then, everybody's relaxed, and then he pivots into the new material where he's not so sure of it. It's a great hack to try to figure out how to avoid that feeling you're talking about, which is if the first three minutes go fine, then I'm going to do well. Well, it's all about mental preparation. I don't know anybody who can't use your advice to help get psyched up and also to help calm down to perform better at those pivotal times when you really have to. My guest has been Daniel McGinn. He's author of the book Psyched Up, and you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Daniel.

Thank you. 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.

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 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 when you put family members in a room together, what do you get? Trouble, usually.

The best example is probably when a family gets together at Thanksgiving or Christmas and everyone's so happy to see everyone else, but after a little time passes, the sniping starts and the little comments get made and then the unsolicited advice about how you should live your life starts flying, and the trouble begins. This is such a common experience, but why? Well, that's what Eric Maisel set out to discover, and the results are in his book, Overcoming Your Difficult Family. Welcome, Eric. And so, is this just what families do? We just rub each other the wrong way and

the trouble is inevitable? I think that's exactly right. I mean, everybody has their own agenda. We don't understand that so well. We don't think that parents have their own individual agendas or marital partners have their own individual agendas. But you put three or four people into a room and everybody, you know, is coming from their selfish gene place. That's just a natural thing. That's not a knock on human beings. We all want what we want. We all have our own personalities.

We all have our own styles. Put three or four or five or six people into the same room and you're going to have difficulties. Yeah. But with people that are not family, when you have difficulties with people, you can X them out of your life and move on. With family, you're pretty much stuck. That's exactly right. I think the only analogy might be the workplace, where it's hard to get away from difficult people in the workplace also, unless you change your job. But there, of course, you can change your job. With your family, you're stuck not only with the people who are there right now, but also memories, the things that were done to you or that you did,

and also future events, things that you know are coming, that next Thanksgiving or that next Christmas. So it's not just being in the same room with somebody. It's a whole lifetime of experiences with family members. And so is there an overall approach here? Is there some overall advice before we get into more specific stuff of, you know, you've got a family, there's going to be trouble, so here's what you should do? Yeah, I think there's a big headline of overall advice, and that is we're caught in a model generally of individual pathology. That is people thinking that they are

depressed or that they are anxious or that they are something. And I think because of this predominant model, which of course is usually treated with medication nowadays, with this predominant model, I think folks forget to look at their circumstances as what might be causing their sadness or their anxiety. So the headline is don't take it upon yourself to believe that you have something, that you've kind of caught some mental flu and now you're depressed because you caught something or you're anxious because you caught something, but rather think about whether family circumstances or any other circumstances might be really contributing a lot to these feelings that you're having.

How so? How would a family do that? And it wouldn't be obvious. It would seem to me that if the family's causing you to be depressed, that that would be screaming at you, that that's the cause. You know, Jung, the psychologist Jung had an interesting idea that he called blind spots. And I think it's a true idea that we can be blind to the things right in front of our nose. We can somehow miss that some family member is drinking too much, or we can somehow miss that some family member is super anxious. I think we actually miss noticing the signs. And so if our whole family is made up of anxious family members, I think it's actually easy to miss that your family is contributing to your problems.

What about, though, just the fact that people, because they're in your family and they have a different personality and, as you say, a different agenda, when you're just in those situations where they're just annoying you, family and they have a different personality and, as you say, a different agenda, when you're just in those situations where they're just annoying you, they're just irritating, they're just, it's just that, oh, shut up kind of argument, what do you do? Well, I think that's why I talk about the skill of smartness, and that's the question to ask, what would be smart to do, as opposed to reacting in a knee-jerk kind of way. I think that's mostly what we do is we just react.

We blurt out the same thing that we tend to blurt out in those situations. So the task here is to engage in what I sort of think of as a ceremony of quietness where you just go to your own room, go to your own space or walk around the lake or do something and ask yourself, what would be smart to do in this situation? The next time that I'm criticized, what do I want to do? Do I want to walk away from it? Do I want to say that's not okay? What new thing do I want to try? For all of us, I think we need a kind of personality upgrade. That's my language for the ways in which each of us needs to kind of get a little better at life. And so whatever goes on in your family, this is an opportunity to figure out how to get a little better at life and stand aside and think through what you would like to do as opposed to just reacting. And is this just to get through the situation or is there a bigger picture here where what you're now trying

to do is to make peace in the family, or are we just trying to get through dinner? I think both things. I think, you know, one of the keys in life is to understand what we can control and what we can't control, but then there's the idea of influence. And I do think that we can, by changing our behaviors, upgrading our personality, I think we do start to model something new. So let's say that you're in a family of overeaters, and it may not be the case that because you now start to make a healthy dinner that that influences anybody else, but it might. So I think that, A, you're right that the first thing is to just get through dinner, so to speak, but B, by doing the things that make sense to you, the things that seem like the appropriate things to do, you might be modeling for the rest of the family, and it might change the behaviors

of other family members. That is the idea behind family therapy, is that any family member who improves actually improves the whole system. So I do think that it's possible for whole families to grow and change and heal by virtue of one person upgrading his or her personality. Yeah, but I'm thinking too of like when, if you have a sibling who's always having romance problems, or you have a brother who's always got money trouble, and all they do is talk about it, and you know what they need to do to fix the problem, or you think you do, and you want to say it,

are you better off just, look, this is who they are, accept them for who they are, stop giving them advice, and just try to get along? Is that good advice? I don't think so, actually. I think we have to be careful about how we communicate

because so many of our communications come off as criticism and maybe they really are meant to be criticism. But if we love our family member or if we just want to help our family member, then I do think that continuing to try to be of help is a good idea. But we may have to change our communication style. We may have to learn new ways of starting sentences so that we're not coming off as if we're criticizing. We may want to change how we talk in the sense of just physical space, rather having the conversation

at the dinner table, rather than doing that, setting up a time to chat with our sibling and going having a cup of coffee and having a new different kind of heartfelt conversation. Well, because it's easy to criticize. And it's easy to, I mean, it's easier to criticize family members, perhaps than somebody who isn't, because even if you piss off your family members, they're still going to be your sister, your brother, your mother, or your father, or your son. So maybe you just feel a little more free to spout your beliefs. Because we have social obligations in the world, and we're very aware of them, family members who work in the world may be very careful during the day of not upsetting anyone,

and then they just want to let down their hair when they get home. And so they're probably more likely to criticize family members at home than they were at work. And so family members then bear the brunt of how the working members had their day go. So I think that's true, that it's easier to criticize. It's easier to, in a certain sense, be our shadowy, darker selves and our families than out in the world. Well, but it's nice to know, I think, and maybe people do know this, but it is, I guess, comforting to know that this is all families. This isn't just our wacky family. It's the dynamics of every family. I think so, and I think that's why I said at the outset that it also helps us understand

that maybe what's going on with our thoughts and feelings aren't really only about ourselves, and they're not something called a mental disorder, but they may be really circumstantial, and that if we could either improve our family life or maybe get out of the way more, these feelings of sadness, these anxieties might lessen or even go away. So Eric, is it ever appropriate, do you think, that if it's just so stressful and it's just so conflict-ridden that you step away? That maybe just because they're your family doesn't mean they need to be in your life? I think so, and if you do that, I do think so. I think you may have to step away

if someone is always eternally criticizing you or physically or emotionally abusing you. We can think of lots of situations, bullying you, being too demanding. If it's an addicted person, I think there can be lots of reasons why we do walk away. But I think that when we walk away, we have to remember that our relationship needs still have to be met somehow. If we're losing family members and now we're not relating, all of us have relationship needs. So now maybe we need to turn to friends or in some other way, make sure that our relationship needs are being met and that we're not just isolated in life now that we've turned away from some family members. As families mature and mom and dad get older and eventually pass on, as must happen in all families, I can see where that might bring the remaining family members together or maybe split them even further apart. What do you think? It tends to split them apart even further. What typically happens is that one child, one sibling gets the job as the identified caretaker for the

elderly parents. That person is resentful and a lot of animosity grows over that situation. Well, and I think if you think about it, we all know families where that's happened, even if it hasn't happened in your own family. So clearly it's a fairly common phenomenon that when parents pass on, siblings kind of go their separate ways and maybe not happily. That's right. Plus the aging parents are still themselves. If they were always critical of you, if they were critical of you when they were 30 and you were 5, they're still going to be critical of you when they're 90 and you're whatever your age is.

So it's not so easy to deal with those aging parents necessarily. Well, that's good advice. And like I say, it's just comforting to know that at least it's not just you. That's right. It is pretty universal. And I think the headline is just to be careful, be watchful, be aware, not take on, you know, not have the idea that what's going on inside of us is just inside of us, like biology or broken plumbing, but that there may be circumstances right around us that are contributing to our problems.

My guest has been Eric Maisel. He is a retired family therapist. He's authored 50 books and his latest, Overcoming Your Difficult Family, Eight Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation. There's a link to his book on Amazon in the show notes for this episode of the podcast, which, as with every episode of the podcast, you will find at our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. Thanks, Eric. Thank you. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you probably remember an English teacher or two

telling you that ending a sentence with a preposition is not good English. But it used to be people had been ending sentences with prepositions in English for hundreds and hundreds of years. People like Shakespeare and the writers of the King James Version of the Bible among them. But in the late 17th century, this rule showed up about not ending an English sentence with a preposition. And what happened was this rule was created by people who had a strict background in Latin. And they decided that since it's improper in Latin to end a sentence with a preposition, it should also be improper in English. But according to grammar expert Patricia O'Connor, the rule is absolutely ridiculous because it can get so awkward to try to reconstruct a

sentence to move the preposition off the end of it and move it back into the middle of the sentence, and it ends up sounding awkward and, frankly, stupid. So Patricia says you shouldn't worry about the rule. Ending sentences with prepositions is perfectly good and normal English. And that is something you should know. I'm Micah Brothers. 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. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. 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. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. divine plagues, and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph-Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available.