Something You Should Know - The Untold Dangers of Prescription Drugs & Fresh Look at Dealing with Anger

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

At work, do you go out to lunch or eat at your desk? It makes a difference in the quality of your work after lunch is over. Listen and I’ll explain the details. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/going-out-lunch-zaps-mental-focus Drug companies. Big Pharma. They create life-altering and life-saving drugs that help people all over the world. However, the way they sometimes do business has a lot of people concerned. Why do some drugs get recalled after they were deemed to be safe and effective? Why is so much of what happens in the development of a drug kept secret? What don't we know about the whole drug testing and approval process? These are the kinds of things journalist Sharyl Attkisson has been investigating and you will be shocked at what she has to say. Sharyl is host and managing editor of the Sunday morning TV program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. She is a former journalist at CBS News, and she is author of some bestselling books. Her latest book is called Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails https://amzn.to/3ZhfF3q Anger. There’s a volatile emotion. Everyone gets angry but everyone doesn’t handle anger in the same way. Joining me to help us all understand anger and how to deal with it is Russell Kolts. He is a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University. He is also an internationally-recognized trainer in compassion-focused therapy (CFT). Russell is the author of The Anger Workbook: Discover the Strength to Transform Your Anger Using Your Compassionate Mind (https://amzn.to/3zcluEt). If you are like me and hate throwing food out, I have some great ideas and suggestions I found on this interesting website that will keep food fresh longer and save you money in the process. Listen to hear these cool kitchen hacks. Source: Robbie’s Kitchen (www.kitchen.robbiehaf.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, when you're at work, is it better to go out to lunch or eat at your desk? Then, a peek behind the scenes of prescription drugs. They may not be as safe as you think. This is what the FDA scientists told me, and I abide by this. They don't take a drug unless it's been on the market seven to 12 years.

They say the process is so less rigorous than it should be that until a drug is on the market for seven to 12 years, we don't really know the side effects. Also, if a recipe calls for half an onion, which half should you use? And anger, it's a universal emotion and it can be dangerous. Anger carries with it a felt sense of certainty. When we're angry, we know we're

right. Even as our critical thinking, our ability to weigh consequences and options, our ability to empathize, all that kind of goes out the window. All this today on Something You Should Know. toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow melissa and doug the play is pretend the skills are real look for melissa and doug wherever you shop for toys 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, thank you for joining me for another episode of Something You Should Know. And I want to start today talking about lunch. If you go to work, if you go outside the home and work at an office or at some other workplace, do you brown bag it and eat at work? Or do you maybe go out to a restaurant or a fast food place at lunchtime and get your lunch? Because it matters, especially if you have important work to do in the afternoon. Scientists took a look at the quality of afternoon work and found that those people who ate lunch at their desk were mentally sharper and did a much better job after lunch. Employees who left their desk and ate outside of the office, like in a restaurant, took longer to bounce back. While the people who

went out came back more relaxed and upbeat, it took a toll on their performance. The people who went out to lunch got less done with more errors in the afternoon than the ones who stayed and ate at work. And that is something you should know. As I'm sure you know, medicine is big business. As you look back through the last hundred years or so, there have been new drugs introduced that do amazing things. It is the world of big pharma, the large pharmaceutical companies that create, test, and introduce new drugs to the world to help fight sickness and disease.

But it isn't all rosy altruism. Apparently, there is a lot going on behind the scenes of big pharma that you probably don't know about, but should. That's according to Cheryl Atkison, who's been a working journalist for more than 35 years and is host and managing editor of the nonpartisan Sunday morning TV program, Full Measure with Cheryl Atkison. Formerly a journalist with CBS News, she has authored a couple of best-selling books, and her latest is called Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails. Hi, Cheryl. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thanks for having me, Mike. So you've been investigating pharmaceutical companies and their practices for a long time. And so I'm wondering what is going on behind the scenes that I don't know that what what what are they doing that I should be concerned about? Well, number one, they contribute to both political parties in a way that calls the shots. government government agencies and political figures decisions that they make on our health and on our medicine and what hearings to do regarding oversight on potential corruption and fraud those decisions are largely made not on the basis in my experience of what we need but based on what the people who donate to the political parties these big corporations and special interests what they want number two've wormed their way very effectively into media and news media.

And I watched this when I worked at CBS News as their influence grew once pharmaceutical advertising became legal on TV or one of the few countries that allows that. And the pharmaceutical industry lobbied with the news industry and the broadcast industry and so on to be allowed to do these ads. There was basically a multi-billion dollar handshake that gave them so much influence over the media because the media wants those ads. And that meant at CBS News, for example, when I worked there, we began to even self-censor what we covered because we knew our advertisers that gave us so much money would be offended. And not only did we know intuitively, they even called and would try to interfere

with some of the stories as an investigative reporter that I was working on. So they have a great deal of influence. So I assume, I think most people assume That for a drug to get to the pharmacy For a doctor to prescribe it That drug has gone through some hoops Clinical trials, has to be approved by the FDA There's some safeguards in place So is it the drugs that are a problem that you see

Or is it the people behind the scenes The shenanigans going on that is the big problem? Maybe a little bit of both. And I've reported in great detail how even the editors of the medical journals, like at the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marsha Angel, who is editor-in-chief, and even the current editor, Richard Horton of the British journal Lancet, has said that much or most of the science in their own journals cannot be believed because the scientific process and the studies you refer to have been so co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry that you can't count on the fact that they've been through a rigorous

process where they really have had to prove what we hope they would have to prove before they go to market. That's just no longer the case, unfortunately. And can you give me some examples of drugs that made it to market that just didn't really hold up? The first one I covered at CBS News, I was assigned to look into a drug called Resilin for diabetes. But after about 12 weeks of me covering it, they pulled it off the market. And it was really all there in black and white, just nobody had put it together, for diabetes. But after about 12 weeks of me covering it, they pulled it off the market. And it was really all there in black and white, just nobody had put it together, the problematic history that the drug had even prior to market. And one of my FDA sources who was part of the drug approval process told me that when the drug was pulled for liver failure problems and all kinds of issues with patients, he said, what did I miss in the drug approval?

He had to look through his records. And one of the tactics or tricks that the drug companies use, according to him, is that they, in these studies, when they report what side effects happened in a study, they split them up so that they're not all necessarily in one nice ball where you can say, hey, there was a big liver signal with this drug. So, they called some of the liver injuries in their trials, in their studies, hepatic injury. Maybe they called some of them something using the word liver. And when you added them all together, it was a giant red flag, according to this FDA scientist. But it was hidden in the documents

in such a way that they didn't put it together prior to market. So what I learned, and this was many years ago, from these FDA scientists, they say the process is so less rigorous than it should be that until a drug is on the market for 7 to 12 years, we don't really know the side effects until it's been used in a large population. We don't have a good picture of what side effects are going to emerge. And that's why so many drugs that are pulled, they're on the market for quite some time before the drug company and the FDA will pull them off the market. What I'm so curious about is when you say, you know, they use different words to describe the same thing. So it sounds like, like, is somebody actually sitting down and attempting to deceive people,

or is there a flaw in the process, or is this just really bad faith? It's deliberate sometimes, and it's a flaw in the process that should require a standard format, so that can't happen. But the FDA itself at high levels is conflicted in partnership with the industry, so they don't make the rules that, in my view, could change a lot of this. And we have evidence in cases where it's been shown that the drug companies or officials there conspired to hide certain side effects and drug events. And we also have testimony from researchers themselves. All these years later, a lot has changed, whereby researchers used to be allowed to publish,

let's say you work at an academic institution for a drug company, you know, maybe Harvard's doing a study for a company we'll call theater company. And back in the day, whether the study turned out good or bad for the drug, the researcher would publish. And a lot can be learned even from a drug study where it turns out the drug failed or had safety effects. A lot of knowledge comes from that. Well, now, according to the researchers and the journal editors and so on, the drug companies

have tight contracts whereby if you as a researcher find something negative about a drug, you're not allowed to publish it. You're not allowed to talk about it. So they may do 40 studies. And for the sake of example, 39 turn out bad. One of them happens to find some positive potential part of the drug that works well for a period of time. And that's the thing that gets published. You as the consumer don't know that there were 39 other studies that showed something bad. When you say they're not allowed to talk about it by law or by policy or who says they can't talk about it? By contract. So they're very strict contracts that the drug companies have learned to draw up for these researchers to sign. Some years ago out in California,

some researchers who were researching a new drug to a new vaccine for AIDS found out the drug didn't work and the study was stopped by the drug company midstream. And, you know, this was on the leading edge of this trend where the drug companies didn't want this bad stuff published. Well, the publishers, the researchers at University of California were going to publish because that's what you do or that's what you did back then, good or bad. And the company told them not to.

And there was a big fight. Ultimately, the contract had said that there were certain things they couldn't do or talk about back then. They published anyway. And the company sued this researcher for $7 million. Ultimately, the scientific community rose up. This was probably 20 years ago. The lawsuit was dropped against the university and the researcher that went ahead and published the data. But this was the beginning of those fights where the drug companies started tightening

down their contracts with their academic researchers so that negative information could never be discussed or published unless the company wanted it. Can you talk about the approval process in terms of how long it takes? Because I've heard people complain that some drugs take too long, and then other people claim that they're not long enough. So talk about that. I think part of the reason some drugs are approved, many people think too quickly now without the proper oversight has to do with some years ago, there was a complaint that took too long. By the time they went through all the processes to get

a drug to market, they had spent so much money and it had taken so much time that a lot of lives could have been helped or even saved in the interim. So the FDA went about a positive process to try to make the drug approval process far more streamlined. And as part of that, they require the drug companies to help finance the process. So the drug companies pay for some of this FDA budget that helps approve their drugs. That was supposed to be all good. Now, the analysts say it's resulted, unfortunately, in a conflict of interest where the FDA, in some respects, at some level, feels like they work in part for the drug company, not the public, and are perhaps pressured by higher-ups in many instances to approve drugs too fast.

A more recent example is an Alzheimer's drug called aducanumab that was held out in studies as a great hope. I mean, if something can really do something about Alzheimer's, how many people can be helped? But it turns out they stopped that study as a futility study because it was showing to do no good and it would be a waste of money and time and study subjects to continue. About several months later, the drug company came back to the FDA and said, you know, we've we've relooked at the data from the studies we

never finished. And we want you to approve it anyway, because we think we were wrong. We think there's some teeny tiny benefit, which is better than nothing. So that issue went to an FDA advisory board and not one advisor said this drug should be approved, that they thought there was proof of effectiveness and safety. The FDA approved it anyway. That drug went to market not long ago under one of the most controversial approvals probably in the FDA's history. And this type of thing is becoming more common. How did that happen?

If the advisory board's recommendation isn't listened to, what's the point of having an advisory board? Thank you. I asked that question of the advisors that I interviewed. Two of them quit, which is very unusual because the advisors chosen typically lean fairly friendly in a reasonable way toward drug approvals. So the fact that two of them quit and none of them said this drug should be approved and the FDA approved it anyway was a huge scandal, which is still under investigation. We're talking about drugs and pharmaceutical companies. And my guest is Cheryl Atkison. She is author of the book, Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures and Prevails.

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And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. So Cheryl, what about the relationship between drug companies and doctors? Because it's doctors who prescribe these drugs. They must know something about them. So they're part of this process. So what about that relationship? Yes.

I mean, I think this is what will really surprise a lot of people when they go to the doctor and they wonder why the doctor doesn't seem to listen to them or doesn't seem to look for root cause. Maybe they're pushing a medicine and not terribly interested in a lot of other stuff. This starts in med school. And if you look at one of the most popular textbooks that med students say is the one they refer to the most, believe it or not, it's called the Merck Manuals by Merck Pharmaceutical Company. Merck writes the most popular textbook that teaches doctors what to believe and what to know as they're going through med school. And of course, Merck says there's a firewall between their editorial side

and their corporate side, which invents and profits off the drugs, and that the two don't cross. But I looked into it to see what Merck said about, for example, its own controversies, its criminal penalties for marketing dangerous drugs in an improper way, for settling charges of fraud and bribing doctors. Nothing's in there in these medical references that tells doctors to be warned about potential conflicts of interest, number one. there in these medical references that tells doctors to be warned about potential conflicts of interest, number one. Number two, I wanted to see what Merck says about its own medicines that have gone through controversy that have been pulled from the market or where they've been

convicted of or settled charges on fraud, nothing. And then number three, I looked at one of their vaccines that many people say has been problematic. And they literally say there are no serious side effects reported with the vaccine. But if you compare that to the FDA approved label, which Merck also wrote, there's dozens and dozens of serious side effects from paralysis and even death and brain damage that doctors are being told in med school, there aren't any. And I think this goes a long way to explaining when doctors are learning the skewed information starting in medical school from a pharmaceutical standpoint, why they practice the way they do, so many of them, when it comes to their professional careers. When I listen to you talk the way you're talking, it almost sounds evil in a sense that people are actually manipulating things and doing things that either because a drug doesn't work or because it has bad side effects or something that people are getting sick, that people may lose their life and that they know this is a problem and they go forward anyway, is it evil?

Well, that's for people to make up their own minds about. I don't speak in those terms. I think in some cases, it's a simple corporate structure and incentive that is focused on making money and making profit and so so on and certainly not everybody obviously at drug companies is involved in that that system that we talk about but in cases where fraud has been proven where test results have been changed where adverse events have been covered up you know that that's intentional that's not an accident that someone did that and hey we just found out later that the drug caused problems. Another example is there's a whistleblower case happening right now of a person who worked for a drug company out in

California. And this is some years ago. These take a long time when they get to court to go through court. And they were trying to switch the results on a longstanding vaccine to try to meet the FDA's bar on effectiveness. And no matter what they did with their new testing to try to prove it was effective, they could not reach the bar. And the scientist said he was told ultimately to change the results. And when he didn't, he says the supervisor came in and scratched out the results and just made up new ones and turned them in. I saw those documents some years ago before he went to court to blow the whistle. And the FDA actually investigated that case, never made news because these stories don't seem to make it in the news because of the conflicts of interest I discussed

with the media. But the FDA actually did say the drug company had fabricated results and that that was wrong, but there were no really stiff, harsh penalties. And the drug companies go on to live another day because even if they're fined for some of this behavior, it can still be worth it to them to engage in that behavior if there's a chance they could get away with it because they make so much money if they do, and the fines don't amount to too much of a nick in the profit system. So it's the cost of doing business. Right. In fact, years ago, another investigative reporter had uncovered some documents.

I think it was in the FinFin diet drug scandal before these drugs were withdrawn from the market. And the document showed that the drug companies discuss, I think I called it in a story that I did, like the cost of death. They anticipate when they know they have a drug that could be dangerous, how many deaths it might cause and how many lawsuits they will ultimately have to settle when they pull the drug off the market or have to pay on. And they factor that in to the cost of the drug when they keep it on the market as long as they can to build the profits and pay for the lawsuits

they know they'll ultimately have to face. Do drug companies typically green light a lot of drugs in hopes some of them will succeed, throw enough stuff against the wall, something will stick, or are they very targeted? They green light a few drugs and they put everything behind them. That's a good question. I don't have a lot of visibility on that. I do know that once they've committed to a medicine that they hope will be a blockbuster and invested a lot of money in it, it's crucial for them from a business standpoint to recoup. And that's why there was so much controversy with the invention and release of the HPV drug Gardasil, which was a Merck drug,

which is a Merck vaccine. If it works, which we won't really know for years, if kids given the vaccine at age nine, when they're at the age where they really would get this type of cervical cancer, like in their 50s, does the vaccine still work? We won't know for some time, but let's say it does. The company was doing research early on. This was another whistleblower case. And one of the researchers said they saw that it was problematic, but by then they felt they had to stick with it. And the researcher said he was personally in a meeting where the company said, in essence, this is a paraphrase, I doubt it came across exactly like this, but when he blew the whistle, he said, they knew the drug didn't work and it could cause problems, but they said they were going to launch this vaccine with the biggest, most expensive marketing campaign

ever seen, a billion-dollar campaign. And he says they did. And this included the company going state to state and donating money and making deals with governors, a lot of it kind of secretly trying to get this on the mandated list for school. Because if you can get a vaccine on the school mandated list, I mean, that is a billion dollar blockbuster for sure. And they were trying to do that in the words of the whistleblower to recoup the great deal of money they had put into this

research on a drug that they didn't think would work very well. And after the vaccine came out, I interviewed the lead researcher for Merck, who told me she felt guilty because she thought Merck was overselling its effectiveness, and that it had safety issues and she thought that the vaccine posed more issues than the cancer that it purported to prevent even if it worked so that's pretty stunning to hear from you know the researcher who did the work for mark and of course as soon as she spoke out this is what happens to these researchers they become attacked controversialized there's a propaganda machine and a very big marketing campaign that goes against them so that people won't listen to them.

I try to listen to those people. I vet them and I have a lot of sources now, but these are the voices that I think need to be heard. So given all you've said, what's a consumer to do? What does a person do? Maybe a better way to ask the question is, what do you do? Knowing what you know, all the research and investigating you've done, what do you do different probably from me because you know what you know? Listen, this is what the FDA scientists told me 20 years ago, and I abide by this. They don't take a drug unless it's been on the market seven to 12 years. Well, there's an exception to that. If there's, in my book,

if there's a life-saving drug, of course, if there's something you have to try that's going to make a huge difference, absolutely, you should try it if that's what you think you should do. You shouldn't not try it because it hasn't been out long enough. But in general, I only take drugs that have been on the market a long time. And when I'm prescribed a drug, rarely, because I don't take many drugs, but let's say a doctor says my daughter needs an antibiotic. I don't take the new flavor of the day antibiotic, which is what they're usually trying to get you or give you. I say, what is the oldest effective antibiotic for that? And I take the one that's been on the market longest. And they're usually happy to switch out to the thing that you asked for.

So I think that's a great policy. Well, this is really eye-opening. As I said earlier, I think people like to believe that if a drug is on the market, if it's been approved by the FDA, that it's safe, it's effective, and we don't need to worry too much about it. But what you've said today about what goes on in the development of these drugs and at these big drug companies, it's eye-opening. I've been speaking with Cheryl Atkinson.

She is a journalist, formerly with CBS News, now the host and managing editor of the Sunday morning TV show Full Measure with Cheryl Atkinson. And her book is called Follow the Science, How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails. And there is a link to her book in the show notes. Thank you, Cheryl. I appreciate you coming on today. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all

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wherever you get your podcasts. My guess is you get angry from time to time. We all do. There's getting angry, and then there's expressing your anger. And we have all seen people express anger in inappropriate ways. Anger, it seems, can be a very useful emotion, but it can also be very destructive. It's good and bad. It's all in how you deal with it.

And here with some really good insight into that is Russell Colts. He's a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University and an internationally recognized trainer in compassion-focused therapy. He's the author of The Anger Workbook, Discover the Strength to Transform Your Anger Using Your Compassionate Mind. Hi, Russell. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. Thanks for having me. So let's start by talking about the difference between good and bad anger.

As I said, anger seems useful, but can also be destructive. So where's that line between the two? Well, I think the line comes when it gets in the way. I actually really appreciated the way you framed anger just now, because a lot of people, you know, they tend to talk about anger as it's good or it's bad. But as you sort of framed it, it's something we all experience. We all have anger sometimes, and it's sort of built into the way our brains work. But for some people, it gets in the way. And the question of how do you know really involves looking at your life and asking, well, how are my relationships going? And how is my career going? And am I generally content most of the time? And if the answer is, well,

I've got a lot of problems there and they seem to be linked to this experience of anger, then that's probably a good time to pay some attention to it and maybe to think about doing something about it. And people who have anger as a problem in their life have it because they get too angry, they get angry too often, they're explosive. What is the problem? Well, there are lots of different ways that can play out. And that's due to lots of different factors in terms of differences in temperament. Some people, for example, go through the world and experience anxiety, right? Really, really easily. It doesn't take much for them to feel anxious.

Well, anger and irritability is the same way. There are people who just, they're wired up in such a way that it's real easy for anger and irritability to arise. Other people may or may not have that experience, but may have grown up in an experience or in a context in which anger was modeled a lot. Their primary caregivers or other people would demonstrate, would respond angrily in a way that sort of taught them implicitly, this is how you behave. Other people may cling to anger as a way of feeling strong. One thing about anger is when we talk about fight or flight, anger is really sort of the fight part of our threat response.

So it activates our bodies in ways that can feel really powerful and so for some of us it can be it can be hard to give that up or it can be hard to be motivated to do anything about it because it can feel powerful in us and and that can be really seductive when we don't particularly when we don't feel powerful in other areas of our lives. Are the symptoms of anger always the same or can anger sometimes look like something else? There are anger problems that actually don't look like anger problems. And when people present to psychologists like me with them, they're usually not presenting with anger problems. They're presenting with things like depression, right? These are folks who may have learned in their environments they grew up in that you're not allowed to ever express anger, right?

To ever express anger is bad. And if you're taught that, particularly from an early age, it's not hard to figure out that probably I shouldn't even be feeling it. So you can end up with people who, when anger comes up in them, when the feeling of anger comes up in them, they immediately become very anxious and they push it down. And that can get in the way of being appropriately assertive. For example, being able to stand up for yourself at work or in relationships, if you can't channel that sort of activation of anger into assertiveness, it can be really hard.

So I guess there's not just one problem or one challenge with anger. It can play out in a lot of different ways. And so if I'm working with someone who struggles with it, the first thing I want to do is help them sort of reflect and just get really curious about how it plays out in them and how perhaps it gets in the way of them having the life or the relationships they want to have. You mentioned earlier that it's all about whether it's really a problem in your life, if it's interfering. Do you think most people who have anger as a problem that's interfering in their life know it and could say, oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, I have a real problem with anger or they just think the world doesn't get them? I think it can be both. I think that there are a lot of people that if they felt really safe and could just sort of reflect in a completely safe environment would say, perhaps in a hushed voice, well, you know, I behave in ways that cause real problems.

Right? They probably have some awareness of it. Some people, I think, clearly don't and would say things like, well, the real problem is everyone around me is a jerk and I'm just reacting to that. I think one real barrier for people to be able to take an honest look at themselves and ask, am I having problems with anger or not, is shame. I mentioned, I think in my TEDx talk, when we see someone who's sad, you know, our tendency is to want to comfort them, right? Our natural tendency.

If we see someone who is anxious, we might want to reassure them. But anger, again, it's the fight part of fight or flight. And so we have really powerful responses. And if we someone see someone who's angry or hostile, we don't experience them as struggling, we experience them as a jerk, I want to get away from that person. I don't want to I don't want to approach them. And so, so I think there's this stigma around anger, you know, anxiety is something people struggle with sadness or depressioniety is something people struggle with. Sadness or depression is something people sometimes struggle with.

Anger is often not seen as a struggle, but it really is. about their life and their experience and their relationships and how those play out and be able to look at how does their behavior contribute to that in a way that frames their struggles as legitimate struggles and not just evidence that I'm really a jerk. Because I think there are a lot of people who struggle with anger who are actually really afraid that that's what that means. When they sort of have this fleeting awareness that they've said or done something that causes problems, you know, it's really easy to get really defensive and to blame the other person.

But I would experience that as an avoidance strategy. Because if I, you know, if I blow up at you, but then I can find a way to blame you for it, then I don't have to accept responsibility for the fact that I just behaved in a way that doesn't fit with the kind of person I want to be. Help me understand something. Let's take two people, maybe you, because my guess is you probably handle anger pretty well, and somebody who doesn't. And the same thing happens, and you get angry.

Are you feeling the same thing, just expressing it differently? Or are you feeling it differently? Is it not, is it not to you what it is to that other guy? I think the essence of the feeling is similar. Now there is some, there's almost certainly some variability in that. And actually I think I do most of the time handle anger situations pretty well. But I'm someone who has an irritable temperament. I don't feel anxious very often, but it's really easy for me to have a spike of anger or irritability. I know other people for whom that just doesn't happen very much. So I think there can be a difference in the feeling.

But the point I want to make here is even if the feeling is the same, we've got the similar opportunity to notice it. And I think what often happens for people who, even people with difficult, tricky, kind of angry temperaments or irritable temperaments, people who handle it well become good at noticing, right? They notice, oh, here it is. I'm seeing this coming up in me.

What do I want to do? Do I want to hop on this train and ride it? Because I know where it goes, right? If I just follow the anger and act it out, that's probably going to cause problems for me. So do I want to do something else? That moment of awareness creates a space in which, in which you can do something different. Uh, whereas I think people who have ongoing anger problems, a lot of times the, the, the physicality of it comes in, the feeling of it comes up and they just, they don't notice it.

And they just kind of lose themselves in it. And there's a lack of awareness. And then they start sort of embodying the anger and their speech or their behavior and things like that. And that's where the trickiness is. I quite often get the question, is anger good or bad? I like to say anger is a wonderful signal and a terrible strategy. I think anger is really good at helping us identify things that, you know, run across our values or things that are problems for

us or things that we probably want to address in our lives. But if we follow the strategy of anger, if we follow the energy of attack which anger carries with it very often That's not very well suited to the demands of the situation. We're in right there are very few Experiences in my family or professional life where raising my voice and yelling or stomping around or things like that Physical aggression would be helpful, but everybody knows that everybody knows that screaming at the customer service guy, flipping off the driver who cut you off, does nothing good. There's no good in that. But it must serve some purpose, whether it's, you know, just the satisfaction of...

Because I always, especially when I see those people who get in these road rage incidents and they end up in jail and I think, happy now? I mean, why? But what's the satisfaction that forces that to happen? Well, I don't know if it's a satisfaction so much as a relieving of tension, right? Threat emotions carry with them a felt sense of urgency. There's a feeling that I need to do something right now. And if you actually look at the scientific literature, there are people who have studied the way anger plays out in our minds. And it's really interesting.

Anger carries with it a felt sense of certainty. We know when we're angry, we know we're right. Even as our critical thinking, our ability to weigh consequences and options, our ability to empathize, all that kind of goes out the window. Our attention and thinking narrows onto whatever the perceived threat is. And there's this felt sense of this energy, this felt sense of urgency that I need to do something right now. Now, if you think about anger through an evolutionary lens, it makes sense, right? Our ancestors, when they had to fight to defend themselves, you know, you needed to activate and act immediately, right? So, anger carries with it this sense of urgency and this certainty, right? We know we're right. And so when we act on that anger, there's a release of some of that energy. We're using some of that energy that's built up up. And so there's a sense, a felt sense of relief because we did something. And so part of what working with anger effectively involves is being able to notice that energy and find other ways to work with it. So you've mentioned irritability a couple of times, and clearly those anger and irritability

are fairly closely related. But what's the difference? I think the energy level. I think irritability really has to do with the threshold it takes to activate that sort of response, that felt sense of being bothered, of being, you know, it's hard, a lower level form where anger tends to be much stronger and much more linked with specific threats. and you know if you're it's the end of the day whatever but like sometimes I'll ask somebody a question and they don't and they answer another question and for some reason for some reason that drives me nuts and I get irritable like I'll say do you want to go to the store now or later well it's pretty crowded now well that's not that's really not what I asked is it it's I asked you do you want to go to the store now or later? And for some reason, that bothers me. But I don't get angry, but I do get irritable.

Yeah, yeah. Well, probably because during your upbringing, you learned ways of working with those emotions so that that irritability doesn't lead to anger. So let's talk about, like, what can people start to do? I mean, obviously this takes a little work, but what can people start to do when they see themselves getting angry or they look back and see, well, I could have handled that better. Like, how do you start to make the shift?

So the first thing I would do is actually to ask them to ask themselves two questions. And the first may be counterintuitive. But one thing about getting people to work with anger that's really important is motivation. You know, you said something earlier that I really appreciated. You said everyone knows you shouldn't yell or scream. You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do that. And one kind of problem I've had with some of the historical framings of anger management techniques, I mean, there have been loads of books and things for decades on here are techniques for managing and handling anger. And in a big way, there's a lot of good information in those.

But in a lot of those resources, there's also this underlying message that communicates, you're doing badly and you need to do better. There's some shaming underlying that. And in my experience, people who struggle with anger sort of know that. Many of them know, I'm not doing as well as I want to do. I'm doing badly and I need to do better. So I think too, the first thing we need to do is help people approach their anger and the problems they have with it in a way that motivates them to try and do something about it rather than makes them feel ashamed and makes them more likely to avoid. So, you know, one thing that I

encourage people to do, and this is just a real quick sort of easy intervention, is just to bring to mind a situation you've struggled with. Maybe struggling in terms of anger, maybe a situation in which you felt really angry or irritable, or you responded in a way that you're not proud of. So with that situation in mind, I'd ask you to consider, does it make sense that I would struggle with this? Now, the answer to that question, by the way, is always yes. Our struggles occur within contexts in which they make sense, almost by definition. And I won't go into the behavior of explanation of that. But I think it's really useful to pause and ask ourselves that question and to answer it, because that helps alleviate some of the shame that we may have for struggling.

We can just go, yeah, yeah, of course I would struggle with this. It makes complete sense. It doesn't mean, like if we behaved in a way that was harmful, it doesn't mean that what we did was okay. But what it means is we can see that behavior in the context of a life in which it makes sense that we would struggle in this way. And we can frame that as struggling. And I think that can motivate us rather than condemning the angry version of us. It can set us up to ask the question, well, what does that version of me need? What would be helpful to the version of me that struggles in that situation? And that's the second question. So once you've asked the question, does it make sense that I would struggle with this?

The second question is, given that, what would be helpful? What would be helpful in addressing the situation? And sometimes I can do something that addresses the situation. Sometimes I can't, right? A lot of the things that I get worked up about or struggle with are things that in an immediate sense, anyway, I can't do much about. So sometimes the question is, what would be helpful in helping me be the best version of me as I go through this sort of tricky situation? And part of considering what can be helpful too is considering what kind of person I want to be,

what kind of relationship I want to have. You know, when my kids remember their father, what do I want them to remember? What do I want their emotional experience to be? You know, I don't want my son to think of his father as a guy who's yelling all the time. You know, I want him to think of his father as someone who loves him and is there to support him and help.

Well, there is a lot to think about in what you said because everybody struggles with anger. I can't imagine a person not. And having some insight into how to approach it, how to frame it, and how to deal with it is really helpful. I've been speaking with Russell Colts. He is a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University, and he is author of the Anger

Workbook, Discover the Strength to Transform Your Anger Using Your Compassionate Mind. And if you'd like to grab yourself a copy, there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Russell. I've mentioned several times before how much I hate wasting food, I hate throwing food away, and I found some great tips on a website called Robbie's Kitchen that will help you keep food longer so you don't have to throw it away. For example, wrap celery in aluminum foil before you put it in the refrigerator, and it will keep for weeks.

Apples will last ten times longer in the refrigerator than they do at room temperature. You should line the bottom of your vegetable crisper with a paper towel to absorb liquids. Those liquids will make your veggies wilt. When you're boiling corn, cooking it for 3 minutes is all that's necessary. Any more than that and you just boil the flavor right out of it. To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes. And if your recipe calls for just half an onion, save the root half. It will last longer than the other half.

And that is something you should know. I often ask you at this point in the podcast to share it with someone you know and help us grow our audience, but you don't have to just share it with someone you know. You can share it on social media, you can share it to your email list, you can share it with anybody. So I urge you and request and support your efforts to help spread the word about this podcast in any way you can. 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. 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.

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.