Something You Should Know - What It Means To Be Rich & What You Never Knew About Your Heart

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

It's weird but true that a lot of people’s behavior can actually change just because they wear sunglasses or are in a dimly lit room. This episode begins with an explanation of why this happens and how people act differently. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301122344.htm Being rich is about more than just accumulating money, it is about living the life you want to live. In fact how much money you have is less important than how you spend it. That’s according to Ramit Sethi. For years now, Ramit has been helping people define what it means to be rich and helping them devise a plan to get there. And he is here to help you do the same. Ramit is author of the bestselling book I Will Teach You To Be Rich (https://amzn.to/3BB3K2E) as well as his new companion book I Will Teach You to Be Rich, The Journal (https://amzn.to/3flZA7G). He is also host of the podcast I Will Teach You To Be Rich https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/podcast/ and his website is IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com (https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com) Did you know it can be a good idea to smell your food just before you eat it to help you eat less? And that it is even better if the food has a vivid smell and taste. Listen as I explain how and why it works. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/smelly-food-leads-to-smaller-bites-study-finds/ Your heart is an amazing machine. For most people, most of the time it works flawlessly without fail until it one day finally stops. But what it does inside your body during your lifetime is truly amazing. Here to explain how awesome your heart is, is Sian Harding a recognized authority in cardiac science, is Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology in the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, and she is author of the book The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart (https://amzn.to/3R9bC1d) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Confidently take control of your online world with Avast One — it helps you stay safe from viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts, and other cybercrimes! Learn more at https://Avast.com Visit https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING  to start hiring now! Cancel unnecessary subscriptions with Rocket Money today. Go to https://RocketMoney.com/something - Seriously, it could save you HUNDREDS of dollars per year! 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, how wearing sunglasses can actually change the way you behave. Then, how rich people make money, how they spend money, and how you can do it too. When you make money, unless you choose where you and how you can do it too. When you make money, unless you choose where you want it to go, it will just vanish. I don't want people to blink their eyes and wake up and it's 15 years later and you never took that trip. I want you to start living that rich life today and a richer life tomorrow. Also, the benefits of smelling your

food before you eat it and the amazing science of how your heart keeps you alive. It never stops working, it just keeps beating. How many times does it beat? A hundred thousand times a day, so that's something like three billion in your lifetime. I've got the analogy that if you had a washing machine, to equal the heart, it would have to work for ten washes a day for 1,000 years. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. 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. Of course, every episode of Something You Should Know, we try to make as interesting as possible. But, you know, certainly some are more interesting than others,

and this episode, I think, is in the some are more interesting than others category. So, I hope you enjoy it, and we start today with this. As you know, dark glasses can make somebody look mysterious. It can also make somebody look shady, with good reason. It turns out a lot of us actually change our behavior when we wear sunglasses or when we're in a darker environment. Participants in a study were asked to divvy up money between themselves and a stranger. Those who were wearing dark glasses took more money for themselves. In another experiment, people were asked to complete some math problems and then score themselves on how well they did. Those in a dimly lit room gave themselves higher grades than they deserved. And that is something you should know.

Most people, I think, would like to be rich. And those who are rich, I suppose, would like to be richer. But what does it mean to be rich for you? What does your personal rich life look like in your head? Whatever it is, I have just the person to tell you how to get it. Ramit Sethi is a financial guru to many. He has a website and a podcast and a book. The website is IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. The book is I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The podcast is I Will Teach You To Be Rich. And he recently came out with a

new book. It's a companion book called I Will Teach You to Be Rich, the journal. Hi, Ramit, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much. So for the purposes of this discussion and your view, what does it mean to be rich? Most of us, when we think of the word rich, we have this old 1980s richy rich idea of wearing a fur coat and being chauffeured around and eating on these long tables. That's a Hollywood vision of rich. To me, a rich life today can be buying a beautiful coat, traveling two months a year, or it can be as simple as picking up your children from school every afternoon and having the freedom of time with them. So a rich life is your rich life. It's not mine. It's not anybody else's. Each of us defines our rich life and we can use our money to live it.

Yeah, I like that definition because the old definition of rich, I think, had a lot to do with how much money you accumulated. But it wasn't about how to spend it. It was more about how to get it. But okay, so once you get it, what do you do with it? Isn't that interesting? In our culture, everybody tells you how to save, but nobody teaches you how to spend it.

So you grow up, and if you're fortunate, you accumulate some money. Maybe you save some, maybe you invest some. And how are you supposed to know how to actually spend it? Many of us know people who retired. They have more than enough and they cannot bring themselves to spend anything. That's because spending money is a skill. And in order to spend it, you've got to know what your rich life is. You've got to build the muscle of spending money and becoming more comfortable using it to spend money meaningfully. See, that is such a great point because people are told you should save money,

that you really shouldn't spend. Spending is almost equivalent to overspending. Well, you really can't afford that. And there's this kind of fear that if you spend money, that somehow you'll end up broken. And so no one ever talks about it. Nobody ever says, how do I spend money? Because you're not supposed to spend money. I have a couple that I interviewed. They're on my podcast right now. And this woman wrote me, she said, I had a double lung transplant. I have five to 10 years left to live. Do you think I should quit my job? So I speak to her. You can hear the conversation live from the podcast. And I said, why are you still working? And she said, well, I like the income. But I know I have a limited time left and I want to create memories with my daughter. Okay, so far, okay, most people would say

quit. But okay, she likes the income. Guess what her net worth is $12 million. And she struggles to feel that she has enough. Now I want everyone listening to notice your reactions. It's easy to scoff and it's easy to say, oh, that's crazy. But actually, most of us believe that one day we will finally start living our rich lives. Maybe we need $5,000 or $50,000 or $5 million. Here we have someone who has $12 million and a ticking clock. And even she struggles to feel confident that she has enough. So do you think most people, if you were to ask them, what is your rich life look like?

They would go, oh, and they would tell you or they would like have no clue. This is what they do. I've asked thousands and thousands of people this question. They go, 85% of them say, I want to do what I want, when I want. They feel very proud of that answer. I go, Okay, that sounds pretty good. So what do you want? And then they just look at me and blink. Because they've never actually thought about it. Most of us answer that question with platitudes. But when I probe deeper, it all falls apart. That's because money to us is a source of restriction, guilt, and shame.

We grow up hearing that we should cut back on everything, but nobody talks about what to spend extravagantly on. And more importantly, how to spend money to create meaning. So no, most people do not know what they want, but with a little bit of guidance, they love to design their rich life. Every one of us intuitively knows what excites us. It's just covered up by decades of people telling us, you shouldn't feel that way. You shouldn't want that.

You should save, save, save. But when you get the right questions, people are thrilled to define their rich life. And so what are some of those questions? You tell me that you like to travel okay great tell me more where do you want to go and this is where it's kind of like pulling teeth but it's something I really enjoy they'll go I don't know you know one day I'd like to travel and see the world where Europe okay cool I like that I'm getting excited with them where where would you go I guess Italy okay tell me what that trip would look like. And all of a sudden, the floodgates

open up. And they've thought about it. They just didn't want to tell me. They go, well, I know I probably shouldn't say this, but I would like to go for two weeks. And I have this dream. I've even saved a picture of it. I have this dream of watching the sunset while sitting on a patio in Rome. Suddenly they realize what they are working for and what this money is supposed to be used for. It's not meant to be just saved in a bank account. Money is meant to be used to create a rich life. So it's great to have this vision of what you want to do, but then how do you get there? Because so many people are going to say, well, you know, that's a dream, but I've got a job. I'm probably spending more than I make. I've got all this credit card debt. I mean, I'm never going to get there. There are a lot of ways to make a

plan to optimize your money, right? And so some of that involves your conscious spending plan. It involves taking your money and redirecting it where it needs to go. But I have found that a lot of people believe that if they magically keep a budget, that somehow they will be in control of their money. Well, here's the honest truth. If a budget were really going to help you, there's a million free budgets online. Wouldn't you have already done it? I would argue that it's not simply about keeping a budget that is keeping you from living your rich life it's actually knowing what your rich life is and once you know it let's say it's a trip to Italy this is exactly how I would help people live that I would say okay how much is that trip to Italy gonna cost

they go I have no idea I go just ballpark it for me two people airline tickets hotel you want to go for a week ballpark it I me. Two people, airline tickets, hotel, you want to go for a week, ballpark it. I just want to get 80% accuracy. Okay, it'll cost me $5,000. Okay, great. How much are you saving for your dream vacation right now? They go, I'm not saving anything. I go, well, you're going to start today. Now you know the importance of it. So if you saved $100 a month, it would take you this many years. Let's look at your finances. And now that we look at their finances and they are armed with this beautiful vision of that Italian sunset, it becomes so easy for them to say, why am I spending money on that? I'm going to redirect that. Oh my gosh, I should be investing more. That will help me get there faster. And suddenly they realize that instead of being passive with their money, they can take

control of it and they can start to use it to create those memories that they want. It's almost like people are waiting for the lottery or to be left money in somebody's will and that's when they'll take the trip. But there is no plan. It's just like, hopefully one day I'll be able to do that. But if you don't have a plan to do it, how are you going to do it? Exactly. People actually think that they have a better chance of winning the lotto in some cases than becoming rich through investing. That drives me insane. Because I can tell you, if you show That drives me insane because I can tell you, if you show me your basic numbers, I can tell you the exact month and year when you will become a

millionaire. I can tell you the exact month and year where your credit card debt will be paid off or your mortgage or your student loans. Do you know that 90% of people in debt don't even know how much they owe and 95% of them have no idea when their debt will be paid off. These are basic things to know about your personal finances. I remember somebody saying, and I actually found this to be very useful, that if you have that dream, that trip to Italy, open up a bank account that's just for that rather than have it going into this kind of general fund that's used for everything, because then it becomes magical. I don't know what you think of that idea, but it actually

worked for me really well. Yeah, I completely advocate that. I talk about creating sub-savings accounts and how I have a variety of different ones. Some of them would be a vacation or a down payment. I had one called stupid mistakes because every year I made some stupid mistake like a parking ticket or something like that. And so one of the key distinctions between the rich and everyone else is they plan for things before they need it. So I always want to think ahead. Okay, what do we want to do this year next year 10 years from now and i love helping people think beyond next month for most of us it's like we're driving in the fog with our money we can see 50 feet in the future which is usually about a month but we never stop to zoom up and say what do i want to spend money on this year and eventually next year and five years from now. When you can think at that

level, that's when you can start to make real meaningful plans. I like what you said about budgets because people think that a budget is one way to really get a handle on things. But as you point out, if budgets were so magical, why does everybody hate them and everybody hates talking about them? You would think if they were so magical, people would be embracing them and they don't. Yeah. We have this weird puritanical thing in our culture where we hate certain things and yet we feel guilty about not doing them. And then we turn around and tell everyone else they should do it, even though we're not doing it ourselves. It's very perplexing. Listen, if you're not keeping a budget, which I know nobody listening to this is actually keeping a budget because virtually nobody does, it's not simply that you're a bad person. You're not.

It's not that. It's that budgets themselves are not exciting. Nobody wakes up and says, yeah, I want to track the price of asparagus I spent last month. And at the end of the month, after putting in all this data, what does it tell me? Nothing. It just makes me feel bad about myself. That's because it's backwards looking. So instead, I recommend a conscious spending plan. Here are a couple numbers you can all use right now.

There are four categories for where your money should be categorized. Fixed costs. That's 50% to 60% of your take-home pay. Things like your mortgage or rent, your car payments, your debt payments, your cable. Those are fixed costs. Then you have savings, which should be 5% to 10% of take-home. Investments, 5% to 10% of take-home. And finally, my favorite, guilt-free spending.

This is money you can spend eating out, clothes, whatever, 20% to 35% of your take-home. That helps you decide where your money is going to go in the future, and that allows you to start actually planning for your rich life, not just being reactive. We're talking about how to live your rich life, and we're talking with Ramit Sethi. His latest book is called I Will Teach You to Be Rich, The Journal. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures

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In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. So, Ramit, what's the recommendation? Because some people will start, you know, go, okay, great, I'll do that. But my current situation is I've got all this debt.

I've got all this. Should I be putting money away for my trip to Italy or should I be paying off my debt? The answer is yes. Yes and yes. You should have a debt payoff plan. So anyone who has any debt, whether it be mortgage, student loan, credit card, you should know how much you owe and you should know the exact month and year it will be paid off. You can simply Google debt payoff calculator, plug in your numbers, and it will tell you. And the larger your debt is, the more small changes make a big difference. For example, if you pay an extra $100 a month on your mortgage, you can often cut that payment down by years.

Okay, so that's part one. Secondly, should you be saving for your vacation or your rich life funds? Yes, even $50 a month is meaningful because it's automatic. And of course, when you finish paying your debt off or when you get a raise at work or a tax refund, you can take that money and drop it right into your debt payoff or your rich life goal. Again, totally different way to think about it. It's more structured. It's focused on the things you care about and it's less reactive. Like, oh, what do I do with this money? It's sitting in my checking account and then it just seems to vanish. I want you to have a system so your money's going where you want it to go. Isn't that interesting that, and I think everybody's had that experience of how money just vanishes. If you put money aside in another account somewhere, it actually stays there. But when you just throw it into the fund, it just disappears. It disappears. Yeah. You know, a friend of mine, very wise friend of mine told me, he said, when you have kids, if you allow them to, they will suck all the energy out of

your relationship. So you have to fight to prioritize your time with your partner. And I thought that was so wise. And it reminded me of money. When you make money, unless you choose where you want it to go, it will just vanish. And it's not that you're a bad person. It's just that that's the way it is. So you have to fight for your money to go towards your rich life. I don't want people to blink their eyes and wake up and it's 15 years later and you never took that trip or you never ate at that restaurant or you never surprised your friend with a generous gift. I want you to be able to make plans and start putting money aside and living that rich life today and a richer life tomorrow.

I don't know if you have an answer to this, but if you do, it's probably a pretty interesting answer that when you talk to people perhaps later in their life and they look back on their life, what are the big money regrets that people typically have? That's an excellent question. They don't usually talk about money regrets. The ones who do, who have answered the question when I've asked, they will say, I should have taken that trip when I could have.

It's some part of their rich life. Many of them have either, they don't have the mobility they used to have, or they have an ill parent, so it becomes difficult for them. But in my experience, it's very hard for people to look back and understand how the decisions they made and also the situations they were born into led them to where they are today. I spoke with someone, I can't remember who it was, about how we have things we need to do at certain times in life. If you wait till you retire to go mountain climbing, well, guess what's going to happen? Well, you're probably never going to go or you're going to go for 10 minutes and forget the whole thing.

Or if you're going to go surfing, you need to do that in your 20s, not in your 80s. But people don't think that way. We have seasons of life and we need to optimize for that. So in your 20s, for example, I remember my 20s, I wanted to go out with my friends five times a week. And that was awesome. I'm so glad I did that. When somebody in their 20s writes to me, I tell them, yeah, you should be spending more on guilt-free spending right now. You're going out, you're having fun, you're building relationships. In your 30s, people often shift. They start saving a little bit more. Maybe they start having a family. Certainly in their 40s, they become focused on a family. This is where some people start to spend more on a mortgage because they

believe they need to buy a house, et cetera. What I want people to do is really think, what are the things that we can only do in the next 10 years? What is on your bucket list for the next 10 years? Yes, there are seasons of life and we want to optimize for those because some of the things we cannot do down the road. Sometimes I hear, especially younger people, and I think I did this too, when you ask them what they want to do with their money, it tends to be fairly utilitarian. Like I want to buy a house or I want, it's, it's, I want to buy income property. It isn't fun stuff. You know what, Mike, I asked this, I asked this question on Twitter to thousands of people. I go, if you won the lottery of like 10 million or $50 million,

what would you do with the money? You know how many people wrote me back? They go, I'd buy income producing property. I think they thought I would be impressed. Oh, Mr. I will teach you to be rich. You must be so happy that I'm going to invest in income producing property. No, that's not impressive to only dream about wanting more money. That's actually greed. So I understand your message about spending money on things that make you happy, but everybody has that thing in the back of their head that when I get older, I'm going to need to have money in the bank because I will not be making as much money or I won't be making any salary and I need to have money for retirement. So a lot of people think in terms of not only how to spend money, but how to save money

because they will need it someday. So maybe we can do both. Maybe we can make sure you don't run out of money and we can calculate it so you know exactly how much you're going to have, but we can also start to use it and enjoy it. Because if you don't enjoy it today, you're certainly not going to magically flip a switch tomorrow and learn the skill of spending money. I could imagine someone listening to you thinking, well, he's saying, you know, just go out and enjoy your life and spend and it'll all work out. And that's not really what you're saying, but I can see somebody

hearing that in what you're saying. Yeah. Thank you for calling that out because I've had people do that. They go, I want to buy an $80,000 truck and I make a $95,000 income. And Ramit said, if I twirl around three times and say, rich life, rich life, rich life, I can go buy anything I want. No, that's not how it works. And we all intuitively know this because if anybody listening to this said, my rich life is to buy a private jet. Well, it's likely you can't afford that. And we all know that. So we wouldn't do that. And yet we often rationalize the things we want to buy, whether it be an expensive car, a house, gadgets, travel, et cetera. You need to define what your rich life is, but you also need to make sure you can afford it. We need to learn the basic language of personal finance. That's why I wrote, I will teach you to be rich because I want you to

understand how much you can afford on housing because I want you to understand how much you can afford on housing. I want you to understand how much you should be investing as a percentage of your income every month. Again, most of us don't know this basic language. That's okay. We can learn it. But I also wrote the journal because I want you to get excited about money. Nobody can come on a show like this and lecture you until you really need to start investing. You've heard a million people like that. Nobody cares. I think we can flip the entire equation. What do I love? Can I spend more on that? Can I start creating my rich life today and also live it tomorrow? Okay, great. Now that I have a clear vision of it, how do I get the nuts and bolts of my personal finances working for me?

You can do both of those things and live a very fulfilled life. Well, this has been fun because everybody dreams about, thinks about, fantasizes about their own personal rich life and probably feels guilty doing it. And it's good to listen to you because you give permission for people to not only do it, but you encourage them to do it and to create that rich life for real. And it has big benefits. I've been talking to Ramit Sethi. He is a financial guru and he's author of the book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, the journal. He also has a podcast and a website called I Will Teach You to Be Rich,

and there are links to all those things in the show notes. Thanks, Ramit. Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know. It's been a pleasure. 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 traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe.

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.

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Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your heart is pretty amazing, and I don't think you have any idea just how amazing it is. I mean, the precision at which it operates, as you're about to find out, is truly amazing. It never stops working, and most of the time it's working, it's working flawlessly. Still, heart disease is the number one killer in the U.S., so maybe we're not appreciating and taking care of our hearts as we should. Here to give you some amazing insight into the workings of your heart

is Shawn Harding. She's a recognized authority in cardiac science. She's emeritus professor of cardiac pharmacology in the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, and she's author of a book called The Exquisite Machine, The New Science of the Heart. Hi, Sean. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So just how wonderful and exquisite is the heart? What is it about the heart that you find so great? Well, it's just so beautifully put together. The five billion cells you've got in your heart all function as one fantastic large cell. And it's just so tough. You will have about half the cells in your heart will be with you right from your birth, right through to your death at 85, 100, whatever. It's very slow,

the turnover of cells in the heart, unlike pretty much every other organ in the body. It just annoys me that people don't understand how great the heart is. So let's talk about some of the details. I mean, how many times does the heart beat? So 100,000 times a day. So that's something like three billion in your in your lifetime and you remember you only have to miss four minutes which is like 240 beats and that's it you're gone so it has to be pretty reliable I think I've got the analogy and that if you had a washing machine and you have a spin cycle it spins for a certain amount of time, to equal the heart, it would have to work for 10 washes a day for a thousand years. Well, that brings up a question I've always had

about the heart. The recommendation is that if you want to keep your heart healthy, that you exercise and get your heart rate up and work it more. If I want my washing machine to last a long time or my car to last a long time, you would not want to use it very much. You would want to use it less, not more. You would want to push it less, not more, so it doesn't break down. But with the heart, you want to work it harder so it lasts longer. So can you explain that? That's a really interesting question.

And interestingly, how to increase your heart rate through exercise is good, but to have a high heart rate at rest is bad. So that's a kind of paradox, really. But one of the things that happens is if you exercise your heart, then at rest, it becomes quite a low heart rate. You can know that athletes have these very low heart rates. There is actually quite an interesting idea that you have a certain number of heartbeats in your life. So whether that is a real thing or a statistical anomaly, but certainly speeding up your heart, making it stronger, then lets it be more powerful at rest and it's contracting fewer times at rest. So when the heart goes wrong, what goes typically goes wrong?

There's a first, there's a, there's a, like what you might call an insult. And the insult is often a heart attack. And that's when the blood vessels that supply blood to your own heart muscle get blocked up, and a piece of heart muscle dies. Because it's so dependent on blood flow and oxygen and power, even just depriving that for a very short time will kill off muscle. And so then you have a lot of dead muscle in your heart. That's about half of what we're worried about. But there are lots of other things that can cause insults to your heart. High blood pressure is one because you're working against a big load the whole time. But then there are new things that we're finding out like chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy is very bad for your heart. Because people are living longer now after chemotherapy, because chemotherapy has been effective, we are now understanding that much more clearly. And you're more likely to die nine years after your first cancer treatment from the heart problems rather than the cancer problems. What, really? Yes. And it's a big problem. It's a big problem because we're being successful.

Of course, you've got to cure the cancer. That has to happen. And some of these drugs which have a bad effect on the heart are really very useful for the cancer. So it's a real sort of tightrope here. Something I hadn't really thought much about before until I saw your book is we use terms like heart disease, heart attack, heart failure almost interchangeably. But actually those are three very different terms and mean different things. That's absolutely right.

Heart disease is a kind of umbrella term. But a heart attack and heart failure are two quite different things. And so I talked about the damage, the initial damage that happens to your heart. But there's a second lot of damage. It doesn't really depend on what started it off. It could be a heart attack, it could be chemotherapy, it could be hypertension. But when your body senses that your heart is not working well, it starts to make adaptations like putting out adrenaline to stimulate it. And all these adaptations are from evolutionary times. But we didn't really have heart attacks

in evolutionary times or chemotherapy. And so what the body is responding to is something like the fight or flight, you know, exercise to run away from the saber-toothed tiger, or it's injury, hemorrhage, blood loss. And so it's thinking you're losing blood or something like that. It is trying to do things like retain water to stimulate your heart, etc. And that's fine, actually, that's fine for a temporary thing. But if it goes on as it does after a heart attack for years, months, years, then they start damaging the heart. They're in emergency response. They were never meant to go on for that long. And so the second phase of damage you have is what your body is doing to your heart and this is what tips it into

heart failure a heart attack is you probably know all these symptoms you know the the pain in the chest or the left side radiating into the jaw and or into the back sweaty nausea faintness so that's a heart attack you yeah don't hesitate get off to the emergency room heart failure it's completely different it's it's people say it feels like drowning it's it's your waterlogged basically all this water retention has gone around your lungs so you can't breathe properly or your gut so that you can't digest properly or you see it in your swollen ankles or hands. And people become very fatigued, very tired, very breathless. And that's what heart failure feels like.

Does the heart just ever stop? Like, you know, no warning, no nothing. It just ran out. It's done. It's worn out and it just stops. So if you think about heart failure, then the heart can either stop just because it gets weaker and weaker and can't function anymore. The other thing that can happen,

and this can happen in heart failure or during a heart attack or even to normal people, apparently normal people, is sudden cardiac death. This is where your heart rhythm suddenly becomes completely chaotic. The surgeons, when they see this, they might see it during an operation, they say it looks like a bag of worms.

It's just wriggling. The whole surface of the heart is just wriggling. And of course, because it's doing that, it can't really pump blood out efficiently. And so what happens is you might just faint and drop. And if you're not defibrillated, if you don't have somebody rush off over with the paddles and defibrillate you, then you're going to die within four minutes. So when it comes to what people can do to take care of their heart, what are the ABCs of good heart health? Stopping smoking, treating your high blood pressure, getting some exercise. Exercise is important. And just getting moving is the most important thing rather than running a marathon.

And so there's some lifestyle changes still. Keeping your alcohol down to a reasonable level. They used to say less than your doctor drinks, but now much less than your doctor drinks, really. And those things you need to think about. But the drugs that people are on, probably about half the people in Western hemisphere, when they get to, you know, the ages of 60 or 70,

will be on some kind of cardiac drug. What about body weight? I mean, is just being heavy a risk factor for heart disease? Yes, it's a risk factor for heart disease, and particularly a risk factor for diabetes. So diabetes is, as you probably know, not being able to control your blood sugar, so type 2 diabetes. Most people with diabetes will die from heart disease what is the connection between

stress and heart disease the sort of chronic stress is one of the predisposing factors a little bit hard to tease out because you know one person stresses another person's excitement but you've got some long-term stress. But one thing, socioeconomic stress. So being in the lower socioeconomic class, being in poverty, being in deprived circumstances, this is a stressful thing. And you know, you know, that the people in those classes will have a greater burden of disease. And it's true for heart disease, too. Now, people say that this is because they have unhealthy lifestyles. But that's absolutely not true. There is something about socioeconomic

stress, apart from that, that produces the stress that can cause heart disease. I mean if you have, I mean just to take an example, if you have just a cage of mice and you know that that mice are quite hierarchical, there'll be an alpha male and there'll be a hierarchy. If they live like this for a long time, the mouse at the lower end of the hierarchy develops atherosclerosis, develops heart disease, and they're all eating the same food and they're all doing the same kind of exercise, but it's just that socioeconomic hierarchy. I've heard reports about COVID, that COVID, if you get COVID, that can cause heart problems. I've also heard the vaccine can cause heart

problems. So talk about that. So the disease definitely causes heart problems. And this is not a surprise because other diseases like flu also have these damaging effects on the heart. Now the vaccines, actually, we were so lucky with those vaccines you know when I think of some other vaccines and and you know the risk benefit ratio there these were right on the edge of the most the best risk benefit you could have in they so there were some problems some particular clotting problems some some deep veins thrombosis in the brain, I think, which, particularly in the brain, which were specific for the vaccines. You know, when you were in the, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, risk benefit was absolutely clear. When you get to children, then, because the disease was mild, and it wasn't causing these problems, it was getting a little bit closer.

But still, the risk benefit was on having the vaccines. So talk about this idea of a broken heart. It's apparently it's a real thing, yes? Absolutely. You know, the statistic, just on a statistical basis, you're more likely to die the day after your spouse has died or your partner has died or a child than you are at any other day during that year and the risk drops over six months and so even for six months you're still more at or more at risk than for that and on the anniversary of that death as well.

And so broken heart syndrome is a real thing. You remember the case of Debbie Reynolds dying just after Carrie Fisher, her daughter. Sudden cardiac death is definitely triggered by strong emotion. Bereavement is a particularly strong emotion. But even things like arguments, very strong arguments. Football is another one. There's a big spike in heart disease, about a 30% increase in heart attacks and these arrhythmias and broken heart and this kind of arrhythmia from broken heart syndrome in the times when there's a World Cup final on. And particularly there's the penalty shootouts when, you know, the penalty shootouts,

when the match is drawn and they have to decide it with a number of individual kicks into the goal. That is an extremely stressful event. So it's a strong emotion, and it's adrenaline that's doing this. And so what it's doing is it's just very strongly disrupting the heart rhythm there. And so this is where you get the sudden cardiac death. So there's that. But I also have to say, and this is really interesting, that there's another kind of thing that's called broken heart syndrome. While the sudden cardiac death is very often seen in men, it's about 80 to 90% of the people who suffer from it are men.

For the broken heart syndrome, the other one, it's 80 to 90% women women but postmenopausal women and what happens with them is they think they're having a heart attack they have some kind of often very similar event argument bereavement particularly and they feel as if they're having a heart attack they have all the symptoms of a heart attack chest pain ECG changes etc and they go to the emergency room and then what happens is the doctors start to look for a blockage in the heart and they can't find anything. What they see if they look with the right kind of imaging equipment is that the heart has got gone a very odd shape it's that's the sort of top of the heart is

contracting really strongly but the apex of the heart the bottom of the heart is is like ballooning out and it's hardly contracting at all and so what they've got is a kind of acute heart failure and some some do die from this it's about 5% of the people who come in with this will die. But 95% can recover, and they recover very quickly. They recover in days or weeks, and they can look quite normal. And so sometimes, of course, if the hospital doesn't know about this or hasn't got the right imaging equipment, people can come in thinking they have a heart attack and then suddenly feel all right and go

home. And so this is a different kind of broken heart syndrome. And it's in this very small and specific group of people in terms of women, but only women of a certain age. Something that happens every once in a while in this country, you'll see a report on television or read it online about some teenage boy who plays football at a game or a practice just falls over and dies from something going wrong with their heart. And seemingly they're healthy, they're exercising, and they're young. So what is that? What's happening there, that sudden cardiac death, what's happening is with those boys, their heart, as they get to puberty, their heart is thickening. And with

the exercise, it's thickening too. And they may, and this is often the case, have a mutation. There's one called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is a gene that will make your heart wall thicker. And that's about one in 500 births have that gene. And so if you have that and you're exercising, you come to puberty, then you are very much at risk. And football teams, at least in the UK, now screen their players for this. Is there anything that you find particularly new, cool, innovative about the research into the heart? So one of the things we're trying to do is use stem cells to repair the heart.

But the heart doesn't repair very well as we've been saying. And so what we've been trying to do is make new tissue. There are stem cells called embryonic stem cells that occur in the very early embryo that go on to make all your organs. They're uncommitted cells, but they can multiply a lot. Then when you give them the right signals with something in the medium, they can become heart cells, or they can become liver, or they can become kidney. And these are the rather contentious cells because you have to destroy that early embryo to get them out.

But in the last 10 years, there's been a breakthrough. Somebody got the Nobel Prize for this in 2012. to make ordinary cells in your body, adult cells, like skin or like blood, go back in time and become like your early stem cells that are kind of wiping out all the programming they have and reprogramming them, like putting them back to factory settings, you know. And so now these cells can be made to turn into heart cells.

And we've done that in our lab. We've done it in many labs in the world. And so this is fantastic because, of course, they're matched to the person they came from. So if it was your skin cell, they'll have the same genes as you. And so if you put it back in, at least theoretically, you shouldn't have any immune rejection. That's one of the problems we have with transplants. You have to give immunosuppressants all the time. So this is probably the most science fiction-y part of the cardiac world at the moment and what we're trying to do.

Well, you've done a very good job of explaining just how amazing the heart is. And I think everybody can appreciate their heart just a little bit better. I've been speaking with Sean Harding. She's a recognized authority in cardiac science, emeritus professor of cardiac pharmacology in the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, and the name of her book is The Exquisite Machine, The New Science of the Heart. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Sean. Thank you very much indeed. The next time you're about to dig into some delicious food, you might want to smell it first.

A study out of the Netherlands found that you will eat less of that food if you take a big whiff first. Now, they used creamy custard for their test, and the folks who got to smell it first took smaller bites than the people who didn't smell it. The theory is that it's because the aroma of whatever you're about to eat starts to satisfy you even before it hits your lips. The author of the study also suggested staying away from bland food because that takes longer to send satisfying signals to your brain. The more aroma and flavor it has, the less it takes to satisfy.

And that is something you should know. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated. No matter where you listen, they probably have a thing there where you can leave a rating and review, and if you wouldn't mind taking a minute, that'd be great. 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,

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