Something You Should Know - Why Friends Are So Important & The Pros and Cons of Drinking

Starting point is 00:00:00 As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, can stress cause cancer? I'll tell you what the science says. Then the importance of friends in our lives and what

Starting point is 00:01:15 happens when we lose touch. Without 60 days of being in contact with a friend or family member, our feelings of closeness to both the family and friends drops pretty precipitously by close to 30%. But after that, our family members and our relationships with them stay fairly steady. But our relationships with our friends really plummet by close to 80%. Also, why some people have a more sensitive sense of touch than others, and the pros and cons of drinking and what it does to your body. If you drink a glass of wine a day, on average, that'll take maybe a couple of months off your life if you drink for 40 years. So, you know, most people think, well, that's okay.

Starting point is 00:01:54 On the other hand, if you drink a bottle of wine every night, that'll take 10 years off your life. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know,

Starting point is 00:02:13 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.

Starting point is 00:02:34 She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know.

Starting point is 00:03:17 Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. We live in stressful times, as if you need me to tell you that. But have you ever been really stressed out and wondered, you know, could all this stress lead to cancer? A lot of people think

Starting point is 00:03:47 that stress can cause cancer, particularly people diagnosed with cancer who often wonder if all the stress in their life had something to do with them getting the disease. So what does the science say about this? Well, according to Dr. Nancy Snyderman, former chief medical editor for NBC News and author of the book Medical Myths That Can Kill You, she says a study concluded that there is no connection at all. Actually, the study was a review of 70 other studies and was published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. And it said nowhere has it ever been shown that stress leads to cancer. Study after study has looked at people who have been under incredible stress, concentration camp survivors, parents who have lost children, you name it. And there has been no increase in cancer in those groups. Anywhere. This is good news for cancer patients as well as people who are under a lot of stress

Starting point is 00:04:50 and worried that all that stress will lead to cancer. And that's one less thing to be stressed about. And that is something you should know. You have probably heard, you've heard it on this podcast if you've listened for any length of time, that social connection is really important for human beings. And lack of friends and lack of social interaction is bad for you. It's bad for your health, physical and mental health. And now, with most of us limiting our social interactions,

Starting point is 00:05:23 this becomes something particularly important to look at and understand. And here to discuss and explain it is Marissa King. Marissa is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, and she is author of the book, Social Chemistry, Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection. Hi, Marissa. welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. So in a big picture way, just how important are friends and social interaction? Our social relationships are absolutely critical to our health and well-being. Prior work has found that the quality and strength of our social connections has an effect on our health,

Starting point is 00:06:05 for instance, that's the equivalent of smoking or obesity. And a lack of social connection really can lead to premature mortality, but also leaves us not just more likely to die sooner, but leaves us lonelier and less productive. And so how does that work when you say that, you know, you're more likely to die sooner if you don't have friends? Because what would happen? What could possibly happen that would kill you off just because you didn't have friends? In many ways, our social connections get underneath our skin. One of the strongest markers of this is when we're in a high-quality interaction,

Starting point is 00:06:42 when we're connecting with someone, looking them in the eye, feeling a really strong sense of connection, the cortisol levels in our body, which are actually a biomarker for stress, decrease. So we have a strong, our nervous system in many ways responds when we're in social connection to tell us that things are okay. And that ongoing stress, if we're not experiencing those social connections, it leads to not just mental health effects, but also negative physical health effects as well. And I'm sure everyone has experienced this to some extent and seen it in ways that are perhaps more profound

Starting point is 00:07:19 than I would have imagined. I mean, I have two teenage boys who have not been to school for a very long time, don't hang out with their friends. And the difference is horrible. I mean, it's terrible. Yeah, there's so many people right now struggling, I think, in very different ways. Everyone's struggling with social anxiety, with loneliness, with depression. And we're starting to see the effects of that at a large scale with increasing rates of suicide and problems with mental health. And in my own work, I've looked at this to try to understand how people are doing in the pandemic

Starting point is 00:07:55 by looking at their social networks. And I looked at close to 500 people's networks along with my colleagues in June prior to the pandemic and then in June when we were really all experiencing lockdown. And I was really curious about, are there certain types of social connections that seem to be important for preventing loneliness? And what my colleagues and I found is that the people who have fared best during the pandemic actually have five very close, strong ties or more. And the people that don't have these strong social connections, either with friends or families or coworkers, have really become increasingly lonely. And what's really difficult or I think challenging about that in

Starting point is 00:08:36 particular is that we know from a lot of research that most people don't have that many strong connections. On average, people will have around one or two very strong ties, people they could turn to in an emergency. So the vast majority of people right now are actually really struggling with loneliness because they don't have this strong core of social connection. That's just, that's frightening. And it is so sad to see it in children. I don't know, maybe because we're just so used to seeing kids together, playing together, having fun together. And when you see kids who haven't done that for a long time, I mean, the difference is amazingly obvious. Yeah, I have three kids at home, and there are varying ages, and you can see this playing out in very different ways. The school-age kids, I think, are increasingly distracted trying to spend time connecting online,

Starting point is 00:09:31 although we know that that type of social connection doesn't actually seem to be helping adults or kids stay connected and feel a sense of social belonging and inclusion. But even if you look at younger kids, one of the most disconcerting aspects of this, I think, is that we know that early formative experiences in childhood impact not only relationships with caregivers in the short term and the relationships and ability to develop friends, but those have long-term measurable lasting implications well into adulthood. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about online social connections because I've heard, and we've had people on this podcast talk about how online connections don't

Starting point is 00:10:13 really count in the way that you're talking about social connections being important to human beings, that online doesn't really do it. That's a fair assessment. And I have also investigated this in the sense of looking, trying to understand what is keeping people connected during the pandemic and what types of media. Connecting through video conferencing doesn't really seem to help at all. Voice connection may help a little bit, but it really is that we need face-to-face connection with other human beings, that we need to be present together. And I think it's not just that a lack of an inability to connect online is not keeping us close, but I actually also think that it is keeping us apart from the people that we are with. There's been a lot of work demonstrating that even simply having a cell phone present on a table when you're

Starting point is 00:11:05 having a conversation, even if you're not using it, both people in the conversation will report the quality of the interaction was lower and that they felt less empathy. So in many ways, we're trying to stay connected through online media by connecting with other people through our phones, but it's also keeping us from actually truly connecting with the people that are closest to us, which is who we really need right now. So you say that two people talking and there's a cell phone on the table, the interaction isn't as good as it would be if the cell phone was not on the table, even though it's not in play.

Starting point is 00:11:41 And that's because it could go off at any time, and then that would interrupt the conversation. So why bother? Or what's the significance of the phone just sitting there? It's a distraction. And there are many examples of one of the biggest problems with a cell phone, even if you're not using it, is that it distracts us from being present with the person that we're truly with. And that lack of presence, particularly if you're talking about something that really matters, comes across as a lack of empathy. And when they've dug deeper and we're trying to understand how important is this and in what context, they compared people, they asked people to talk about one of the most significant events in their life.

Starting point is 00:12:21 And then they also randomly assigned people to talk about plastic Christmas trees, something seemingly really irrelevant. And just simply having a phone present during that conversation, when people were talking about significant life events and really needed empathy and connection. If a cell phone was present, they might as well have been simply talking about the plastic Christmas trees. That was the extent to which just a simple presence of a device signals a lack of empathy and an inability to connect. But I'm still trying to figure out why. I mean, if you put a brick on the table, would it have the same effect? Or what is it about the cell phone? I'm sensing it's because it could go off, it could ping or it could ring. But what is it? What is it about the phone? I like that. The brick is a good

Starting point is 00:13:07 point, right? Because the brick doesn't have the same compelling connection. In many ways, I think that we are hooked on our phones because they provide a positive reward system, that we're looking to get some sort of positive reward, oftentimes through social connection or social approval. And that distraction and sort of continually monitoring for connection or reinforcement from someone who's not with you is really why the phone has so much more power than the brick. And so you said that we need to have five close connections, yes? Yes. And a lot of people would hear that and go, well,

Starting point is 00:13:45 how in the world would I do that? I mean, I don't have five close connections. Where would I go to get them? Exactly. And I think that that's one of the biggest misconceptions about our social relationships. And in particular, when people are thinking about, I need to strengthen my relationships or I need to strengthen my network, there's often this misguided idea that I need to go out and look for someone new or I need to connect with someone new. But regardless of who you are, there's extraordinary strength in our existing networks. And the problem is that oftentimes we don't pay attention to that. And instead of thinking about who could I go out and help build a new relationship with, particularly in the times

Starting point is 00:14:30 we're in, a much better strategy is to think about who's someone I haven't connected with in a long time that I could reach out to? Is there a mentor that really helped me along the way that I haven't had the chance to catch up with and reaching out to them and simply thanking them for what they've done. And research that has looked at this type of connection, which the researchers refer to as dormant ties, and found that when people do this, they get extraordinary benefit, both in the sense that they get new information, it helps them get outside the echo chamber that they're normally in. But the trust is really enduring in our existing relationships. I may not have seen you in two or three years, but the trust that had already accrued is likely to stay there.

Starting point is 00:15:13 And so if you need to strengthen your network, arguably the best approach to do that is to reach out to someone that you may not have seen for a while and try to strengthen that relationship rather than trying to meet someone new. But I imagine that you not only have to have these connections in the sense that you know you can call on these people if you need them, you actually have to call on them. You actually have to interact with them, not just know that you can. Absolutely. Simply knowing that someone exists, that you might be reaching out, be able to reach out to help, doesn't help feeling with friends' feelings of closeness or a sense of belonging. And we very quickly lose our sense

Starting point is 00:15:53 of connection. Research that has looked at how quickly do our feelings of closeness with friends and family decay, how quickly does that happen? Without 60 days of being in contact with a friend or family member, our feelings of closeness to both the family and friends drops pretty precipitously by close to 30%. But after that, our family members and our relationships with them stay fairly steady. But our relationships with our friends, our feelings of closeness really plummet after 30 days, our sense of closeness or connection can drop by close to 80%. So there's a really rapid decline, particularly with friends and how close we feel to them if we're not in

Starting point is 00:16:32 constant contact with them. We're talking about the importance of social interactions and why it is even more important now than ever. And my guest is Marissa King. She is author of the book, Social Chemistry, Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:17:15 People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:17:51 And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Marissa, what about spouses, siblings, other people that maybe live in a house? Do all those people count or do those people not count? They count. They certainly count. And oftentimes, particularly in times

Starting point is 00:18:34 of distress, we turn to our family much more than we would normally. So if you think about in day-to-day life, right? Far too often, I think we take our family, our friends, particularly in my case, my husband, for granted. But in times when we really need to ask for help, in many ways, that's who we turn to. And naturally, as human beings, during times of distress, we turn inward more. And that's what seems to be happening during the pandemic is that our relationships actually with our family have become much stronger. But it's at the expense, particularly of acquaintances. You know, what's really interesting to me about this is as important as friends and social interaction is, there's something kind of off-putting about being really intentional about

Starting point is 00:19:21 it. It's why people, they hate going to networking events because you're, it's so intentional that you're trying to make a connection to, for your own benefit or online dating. I mean, people still resist that because it's so intentional and that the better way is to just bump into somebody in a bar or, or meet a friend of a friend, but to be so intentional about it that there's something not quite right about that. And what we know is that the way to get over this, or one of the most effective ways to get over this, is to think about what can you give in an interaction instead of what can you get out of it.

Starting point is 00:20:00 And that reframing or reorientation towards thinking about what can you give instead of what can you get helps overcome some of this moral aversion because it gets over the selfishness or what seems like selfishness in that type of interaction. And I think that that's a little bit easier if you're thinking about something like online dating. It's easier to imagine what is the other person going to get out of this interaction, what they're going to get you, which how fabulous is that, right? But it's easier to see it as being less selfish because it's much more feels like this isn't your relationship that we're both going to benefit. So in order to overcome this moral aversion, really, if you can try to take that same idea and apply it more generally and thinking about like, what can I give to the other person or to the community instead of what I'm going to be getting out of it? You overcome this instrumentality that's so problematic when we're thinking about relationships. We all know people and have

Starting point is 00:20:54 worked with people who are really good at this. They've got a million friends. They're always the life of the party. They walk in a room and everybody wants to talk to them. What do they have? How are they wired differently than those people who really struggle with this? It's funny. I think oftentimes when you present people with a question you just presented to me, and if you ask them, what do they have that most people don't, you'll usually get an answer that says something like extroversion. But what's interesting is actually personality and extroversion in particular explains very little of the variance in how good someone is in actually working a room or building a network, explains less than 5%. But one of the biggest factors actually that allow people to do this, to do it well, is simply confidence. And the flip side of that is many people feel like they simply didn't get a playbook. They don't know how to do this. But in reality, all social skills are learned, right? So social intelligence is a developed skill. It's not necessarily just an innate skill. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So when people are confident, they're able to learn more and learn faster. And so it really has these

Starting point is 00:22:10 cumulative dynamic effects for where they get better and better and better. But you have to be willing to try. And oftentimes, it's that lack of confidence that really inhibits people from doing this. And human interaction is one of the strangest domains. If you think about, if you ask someone, for instance, how good they are as a driver or how smart they are, in most domains of social life, people think they're better than average. But in social interaction, it's one of the rare domains actually where people underestimate how good they are doing this and think that they're worse than average. And that self-perception is really critical to inhibiting people's ability to actually develop the social skills they need. So if you don't have that confidence, where do you go get it? One of the experiments that I love that showed how powerful this is, is actually simply telling people that social intelligence is a learned skill, not an innate one, can reorient their perception and make them much more likely to begin to develop it. But one of the examples I love to give about, rather than just telling people that this is a learned skill, is to simply imagine

Starting point is 00:23:17 walking in a room and to help them see how understanding social science can make these types of situations much easier by increasing confidence and reducing anxiety. So imagine that you're walking into a room. Oftentimes, people will walk into a room like a cocktail party and just see a wall of people. But what we know from social interaction is that people actually don't form walls. They form small groups. They form islands. So imagine now that you know that there's an island. Hopefully your anxiety levels decreased a little bit.

Starting point is 00:23:50 And you can ask yourself, well, then which island would you go to? We know that most people actually will try to find someone that they know already at one of these islands. If that doesn't work, your next most likely strategy is to look for someone who looks like you or seems like you and go there. But the most effective strategy we actually know is to look for an odd numbered group. People have two eyes and two ears. And because of that, conversations almost always happen in dyads or groups of two.

Starting point is 00:24:20 It's really difficult to maintain a conversation with an odd number of people. So by figuring out which island is an odd number of island and going to that, you're becoming someone's conversational partner. So if you imagine yourself just walking through this, and then there are many tips, right, based on social science that we can apply to this, the most powerful way that you can really make induce a sense of belonging and liking in a conversation is asking follow-up questions because it shows you're listening. But the idea is to understand that if we take social science and apply it to these situations, we can really reduce anxiety and increase confidence and hopefully make the situation slightly more pleasant.

Starting point is 00:25:00 So that social anxiety is something, I mean, I don't know what the numbers are, but I think probably everybody suffers from it at some point to some degree, depending on the situation and who they are and whatnot. But what is that? What is it we're anxious about? need for belonging that the idea of being rejected really just is one of our greatest fears. That certainly makes sense. And yet how often have you been, you know, outright rejected in a at a cocktail party or at a place where people go to talk to other people? And it almost never happens. Yeah. And I think one of the ways to start to realize that, other than just forcing yourself to do it, I mean, like, oh, wow, really no one just walks away when you're having a conversation, is just to try to engage in perspective taking.

Starting point is 00:25:57 It can be really powerful, as we were talking about, to reach out to someone you haven't been in touch with for a while. And then imagine doing that. One of the easiest ways to think about if you're feeling resistance is to simply imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end.

Starting point is 00:26:12 One of the most powerful things that I've gotten in the past few weeks was simply an email that said, hey, I was just thinking of you. I have no agenda. And when you're feeling that type of resistance, if you can just imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end, it can really help overcome this oftentimes irrational fear that we have of rejection.

Starting point is 00:26:30 So knowing what you know, what advice do you have? What can you impart that people could really use to make this better? Yeah, if I could give one superpower, interpersonal superpower, I honestly think that it would be listening. And one of my favorite examples of this is there was a study that was done by Ralph Nichols, who's often known as the father of listening. And this was done a long time ago. And he was curious among students who were the best listeners of all. And so he trained subjects to help him figure this out by watching observations in classrooms. And what he found that comparing elementary school children, middle schoolers, or high school kids, that the best listeners of all actually turned out to be first graders. So as someone who has a child

Starting point is 00:27:25 approaching that age, that might seem surprising. But what was so powerful or what the insight behind that was is first graders were good at listening. It's the way he conceptualized it because they didn't have preconceived notions in mind. And so often when we're in conversations, when we're theoretically listening to someone, we're either thinking of our own story, right, to follow up on theirs, or we're thinking about a question to ask, but we're not just listening with an open mind. And the ability to do that creates such a strong social connection, and it allows you to be giving the gift to someone else of presence that we so rarely receive.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Well, it's pretty funny that you think first graders are good listeners, because we certainly, anybody who's had a first grader wouldn't think that, but the way you explain it, it's really interesting. And all of this is so important, especially now. Marissa King has been my guest. She is a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. And the name of her book is Social Chemistry, Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Marissa.

Starting point is 00:28:37 That was a lot of fun. Thank you for the conversation. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games,

Starting point is 00:28:59 and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas

Starting point is 00:29:21 with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Just about all of us either drink alcohol or we know people who do. And probably more this time

Starting point is 00:30:01 of year than any other time of year is when people get thoughtful about their alcohol consumption. Perhaps you've thought about cutting back. Maybe you think you might be drinking too much. What does drinking do to your health, really? Or is it true that moderate drinking is fine, maybe even beneficial? Well, let's take a look at all of this with David Nutt. David is a neuropsychopharmacologist who teaches at Imperial College in London. He's former chief of the section of clinical science

Starting point is 00:30:33 in the U.S. National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the NIH, and he's author of the book, Drink, the New Science of Alcohol and Health. And you might think, well, he's obviously going to be a teetotaler. He doesn't drink and is very anti-alcohol consumption. And you'd be wrong. Not only does he drink, he owns a bar. So this ought to be interesting. Hi, David. Welcome.

Starting point is 00:31:00 Glad to have you here. Thank you, Michael. Good to be on. So the advice about alcohol or the wisdom about alcohol seems to be all over the place. We hear that alcohol is bad for you, but then we also hear a few drinks a day is probably fine. Or we hear, in fact, that maybe red wine is actually good for you. But then you also hear, well, but drinking is killing your brain cells. So it's really hard to know what to believe.

Starting point is 00:31:27 So scientifically, what is the real deal with alcohol? Well, the real deal is all of those are true to some extent. Alcohol is a complex drug and the effects are very dose related. I suppose the bottom line is the more you drink, the more problems you will have. There is no safe level of alcohol, but low levels of consumption are not associated with great problems over the lifespan. But as your consumption goes up, so the impact of drinking goes up very much more sharply than the amount you drink. So doubling your consumption on average increases the harms by about fourfold. And what are the harms?

Starting point is 00:32:13 Well, there's almost no organ system in the body that isn't affected by alcohol. And that is because alcohol, as all of you who know, who kind of use it to rub on the skin to kill some sort of infection that you might have or before you have all of you who know, who kind of use it to rub on the skin to kill some sort of infection that you might have or before you have an injection, you know, alcohol is toxic, but it's broken down in the body to something called acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde is a preservative, and it's very similar to the formaldehyde, which is used to preserve dead bodies. So if you basically drink a lot of alcohol, you get a lot of acetaldehyde and you

Starting point is 00:32:45 slowly pickle your body. Now, of course, the organ that everyone knows about in terms of alcohol harm is the liver. And liver cirrhosis is a consequence of heavy drinking and with the liver getting more and more damaged, pickled until eventually it stops working. But you get the same kind of impact, for instance, in blood vessels. So alcohol leads to constriction of blood vessels, the laying down of cholesterol and plaques, leading to hypertension. In fact, more people die of alcohol-induced hypertension than actually die of alcohol-induced cirrhosis. And then on top of that, you have the toxic effects of alcohol in the brain, where a combination of the effects of alcohol, but also particularly the withdrawal from alcohol, which most people get on a kind of

Starting point is 00:33:30 daily, nightly basis, leads to damage to the brain cells. And alcohol is one of the, maybe the most common preventable cause of dementia. Wait, alcohol is the most common cause of dementia? Common preventable cause of dementia. If you said to me, what could we do as a society today to reduce dementia, I would say two things. Reduce alcohol consumption and put people on things like statins to reduce the cholesterol in the blood vessels of the brain.

Starting point is 00:34:00 And yet, despite what you just said are all the problems with alcohol, it has been consumed by people for centuries. It has mass acceptance around most of the world. And people enjoy their drinks. Most of us, most adults in most countries in the world, most adults like to drink alcohol. And it's been drunk for millennia. The first recorded alcohol goes back to China, but we suspect it was being brewed, honey was being matured in Africa 40,000 years ago. So alcohol has been with humans almost the whole time we have been human. And most of us like to drink, and I

Starting point is 00:34:45 like to drink. And this is a paradox here. I like to drink. I run a wine bar. But I'm also a researcher, and I spent most of my professional life researching the harms and the damages that alcohol can do. So why do people like to drink? Because alcohol is one of the great social drugs. Alcohol relaxes people. It allows them to engage in social conversations. The vast majority of people engage in their first serious relationships when they've had alcohol because it breaks down the fear of talking with and becoming intimate with partners. So it's a very powerful humanizing drug in low quantities.

Starting point is 00:35:27 Well, that's really interesting that you run a wine bar and that I would have assumed that you didn't drink. But you do drink, but you preach the dangers of drinking. I'm trying to get people to understand that there is no right answer. I think before my book, there are hundreds. There's a book a month in Britain about someone who's been an alcoholic and has stopped being an alcoholic and how it's improved their life. And on the other side, you've got hundreds of books telling people how to appreciate wine and how to appreciate good whiskeys and even beer. But no one has actually sort of tried to go down the middle line,

Starting point is 00:36:04 which is basically alcohol is on one side, it's a great drink. On the other side, it's a very dangerous drink. And what I wanted to do was give people the information to make a considered choice. If you're going to drink, I think you should know what the harms are. You should know how to minimize those harms. You should also be aware of when things are starting to go wrong, how to pick up the facts that things are going wrong. And with alcohol, it's not so easy. You see that with eating. You know, we warn people, you know, there are plenty of books about how to stay healthy. Why shouldn't there be a book about how to stay healthy drinking?

Starting point is 00:36:39 Some people can have a glass or two of wine with dinner. That's it. Be fine. Other people have a drink and they can't stop. What is that? Well, that is a great question, and it's a very difficult question to give a single, simple answer to. But overall, we know that people who struggle with alcohol

Starting point is 00:37:02 fall into three main groups. There are those who, when they start to drink, find that it actually makes them normal. So I want to just tell you a story of a patient that I admitted to the research ward at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse in Bethesda, Washington, D.C. as part of NIH when I was running the research ward there. And he was about 28. He had been in and out of detox units from the age of about 18. And I said to him, the question I give, I used to ask everyone, tell me about your first drink. And it's surprising how many people with alcohol problems can remember precisely their first drink. And he said, oh, I was about seven. It was a wonderful afternoon. He was from the Midwest. He said, I'd gone fishing and dad had taken me to a lake. We'd gone fishing

Starting point is 00:37:48 all day. And we got back to the van and he said, hey, do you want one of these? And he gave me an ice cold beer from the cooler. And he said, I drank that beer. And for the first time in my life, I felt right. It was as if a missing piece had been put into my mind. And he said, from that day on, seven, I drank every day because it was the only way I could feel right. So there were some people like that. But then there are other people who start drinking heavily, perhaps in their 20s and 30s. And that's when they are going through periods of intense stress, maybe in relationships, maybe their marriage is struggling, they've got kids, they're not sleeping well, work is tough, and they start to drink to deal with stress. And those people end up often in their 40s and 50s having serious alcohol problems

Starting point is 00:38:35 because they're self-medicating with alcohol. So those are the two kind of extremes. And then there are people in the middle who binge drinking. And that is probably a biological process where when you start to drink, the alcohol turns on chemicals in your brain called endorphins. And those endorphins make you want to drink more because they're pleasure chemicals and you want to keep getting more and more of them. So there are many different reasons why people end up becoming alcoholic. I heard a comedian or somebody, I just remember hearing this conversation about, you know, people talk about, you know, how different wines and all the different nuances of beer and whiskey, as you were talking about earlier, but really people drink for the buzz. And if there was no buzz, there'd be no drinking.

Starting point is 00:39:30 You're absolutely right. Absolutely. So when someone says to me, oh, you know, I don't, you know, I hardly drink at all. I just drink my, you know, when I can get it, a 1964 Chateau Latour, you know, Bordeaux. And I say, the truth is, if you were offered that as the very first drink you ever drank, say when you were 18 or 21, you wouldn't take it because it's got such an unpleasant taste. I mean, those complex wines are actually aversive to children, to other people. The reason you like these expensive, complex wines is because over the years you have associated that taste with the buzz you get. And drink companies know this. Young people have to be taught to like alcohol. And so we see breezers.

Starting point is 00:40:13 People are out there buying, young people are buying drinks which have got a lot of sugar in them to offset the taste of the alcohol. Yeah, so without the buzz, nobody would be talking about this. But people have been looking for the buzz and making alcoholic drinks for the same drug, which is ethanol. So people often say to me, well, you know, is there a difference between beer and wine and spirits? And the answer is yes, but only in the amount of alcohol in a given mouthful. But it's the same alcohol. And so when you talk about the dangers of or the risks of drinking,

Starting point is 00:41:04 and it's all based on how much you drink. If you drink every day after work, you come home and you have a couple of glasses of wine. Are you in the green zone or the red zone? I mean, where's the line? Well, this is a myth. There is no line. For almost every harm of alcohol, there is no safe limit. The more you drink, the more problems emerge.

Starting point is 00:41:32 But if you drink a glass of wine a day, a small glass of wine, not a huge schooner, but a small glass of wine a day, on average, that'll take maybe a couple of months off your life if you drink for 40 years. So, you know, most people think, well, that'll take maybe a couple of months off your life if you drink for 40 years. So, you know, most people think, well, that's okay. On the other hand, if you drink a bottle of wine every night, that'll take 10 years off your life. And so that gives you two kind of extremes. And of course, a lot of people drink more. Some people drink three or four bottles a night, and that takes up to 20 years off their life. So there's a progressive increase in the harms the more you drink. So there's a doubling.

Starting point is 00:42:08 You double your consumption and the impact goes up about fourfold. So let me tell you about how I made the decision about my drinking. I looked at what I consume and I realized that what I've been drinking over the years would take probably about a year off my life over a 40-year period of drinking. So I've cut down so that now I'm drinking what we in Britain call a couple of units a day, and you would call them one and a half standard drinks in America. That I've worked out will probably take about a few months off my life. And I think the benefits I get from alcohol are quite substantial. So that's how I've targeted my drinking. And of course, I'm fortunate in that

Starting point is 00:42:50 I'm able to control my drinking. I don't crave, I don't lose control, unlike some people do. So if you can do that, if you can make a conscious decision about what to drink, then you're really in a much stronger position to protect yourself against the harms of alcohol. What about the cumulative effects? I mean, I know a lot of people who drink a lot when they're young, but, you know, become more reasonable as they get older and get married and have kids and they tone it down. But is the damage done or is it like smoking where if you quit early on that the harm pretty much goes away if you quit early enough?

Starting point is 00:43:30 It's not quite like smoking. It's similar. But the problem with alcohol is that when young people drink, they often get harmed not by the drink, but by what they do when they're drunk. So alcohol has a huge toll on young people. Hundreds of thousands of young people die every year as a result of road traffic accidents and when they drink. So when you say that, you know, if you drink this much, it will take so many months or years off your life. Is that a statistical computation? In other words, you're factoring in not only the health toll that drinking this much over this time takes on your liver and wherever else, but you're also factoring in early deaths from traffic accidents. It's a

Starting point is 00:44:21 complete picture. It's a complete statistic. Yes. So when we are looking at those statistics, it's a combination of the harms to the body and the other harms that are going to happen as a result of drinking. So for instance, many people will die in road accidents as a result of drinking. Others will die because they can't find their way home in the snowstorm and they fall asleep in a snow drift because they feel it's warm. So there are those external harms as well as the toxicities of the body. And interestingly, the body speaks very loudly about the effects of alcohol in the sense that if you drink too much you wake up the next day and you feel horrible truly horrible and and yet as horrible as that feeling is it doesn't persuade people to stop drinking well I don't know about you but I have many times said I will never drink again that was the most

Starting point is 00:45:21 stupid thing I've ever done. What a horrible experience. And usually within a week, you're back with your mates and you're drinking again because the pleasures of alcohol are so powerful. And also the human brain is rather well organized. For most people, it's quite good at hiding pain. You know, that's one of the reasons women go on having other children because, you know, the pain of childbirth gets forgotten. The pain of hangovers get forgotten. Well, it is interesting how people have talked about and tried to come up with cures for a hangover, and nobody's ever really figured it out. We don't actually know what hangovers are caused by.

Starting point is 00:46:02 It's an area we're doing some research on at present. And we used to think it was dehydration. So we always said, well, drink water before you go to bed, et cetera. But now we're thinking that some of it is due to inflammation, that the toxicity of alcohol will lead to the immune cells in the body pumping out the same kind of immune modulators that we get when you're ill with something like COVID. The sick feeling when you have flu with something like covid the the sick feeling when you have flu or covid is caused by immune cells producing chemicals and and you could get similar chemicals as a result of uh of heavy drinking i want to go back because because i i

Starting point is 00:46:36 asked you if if you know you drink a lot when you're young and then you stop or cut back if if that helps and then we kind of got off into the, well, there's behavior problems and car crashes. But just strictly health-wise, does the body repair itself later if you quit or cut back from your earlier drinking? Yeah, generally, if you stop, then your body can recover. I mean, for most systems, even the liver can regrow quite a lot. But the one part of the body where you do struggle relearning or regrowing is the brain. And so it's not clear that you can ever properly restore the damage that alcohol can do to the brain. And that's something we see

Starting point is 00:47:25 in a fascinating syndrome called Korsakoff syndrome. And these are people with alcohol, severe alcohol dependence, who become vitamin deficient. They don't eat. They don't get the vitamin B1. And they end up damaging their brain so that they can't lay down new memories. And once that circuit is damaged, you can never put it back. So that idea that drinking kills brain cells, talk about that. Is that a true thing? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I work in all forms of addiction and I get journalists ringing me probably once

Starting point is 00:48:04 a week saying, what about this new study showing that cannabis damages the brain or crystal meth damages the brain or cocaine, blah, blah, blah. And I say the only proof we've ever got for any drug damaging the brain really is alcohol. And I show them images of my patients where they've got brains which are as shrunk as people with Alzheimer's. Not everyone, not everyone.

Starting point is 00:48:25 I mean, you know, there are people who gain seem to, their brains seem to be resistant to alcohol. We don't know why that is. Some people just don't succumb in the same way that other people do, and no one knows why. Exactly. I mean, you know, perhaps the most obvious example is liver cirrhosis. You can have two people with exactly the same drinking histories,

Starting point is 00:48:46 and one's dying of cirrhosis, and the other's got relatively normal liver function. And you can't explain it? At present, we can't explain it. But here's an interesting angle. About 90% of all the patients that liver doctors see have got alcoholic liver disease. But less than 10% of all the investment in research on liver disease is into alcoholic cirrhosis. So even though it's the biggest problem, it's not researched. And why that is is complicated.

Starting point is 00:49:26 It's to do with stigma. It's to do with people denying the problems of alcohol, people not wanting there to be problems with alcohol. But we hardly study the damage that alcohol does to humans at all. And there is no difference when people say, well, I just drink a little wine as if that's like less harmful than hard liquor. But it's still the same thing. It may be in a lower concentration, but it's all the same, correct? Alcohol is the same. It's the amount of alcohol you take in which contributes or causes the damage and, of course, gives you the pleasure.

Starting point is 00:50:03 Now, there are a couple of subtleties here. For a long time, there's been this discussion of what they call the French paradox, which is why French people who seem to drink as much or maybe more alcohol than, say, British people or Americans have less in the way of alcohol-related harms. And one possibility that's been suggested by several different groups is that it's to do with chemicals in red wine. There are specific antioxidant chemicals in red wine which could be protective. It's actually hard to prove that, and it may well be

Starting point is 00:50:39 that the French paradox has got more to do with the cheese they eat and the unsaturated fats that they have with their food, et cetera. So it might be something to do with diet. It might be something to do with sunshine. It might be something to do with vitamin D. But there is a possibility that there are some mildly protective elements in red wine. But when people have looked at that very specifically, say, for instance, comparing the benefits of red wine drinkers, say, with the people drinking beer, it turns out that the benefits only occur if you drink a very small amount. So if you want to maximize the medical benefit of red wine, it's half a glass, half a small glass, say 50 to 60 mils, half a glass half a small glass say 50 to 60 mils half a standard drink for you that's the optimal level if you go double that then the benefit disappears well this is a really interesting discussion because usually when you talk about alcohol as a topic it's usually about

Starting point is 00:51:38 the evils of alcohol and why we should all stop drinking and or we joke about how much fun alcohol can be. But this is a really good, serious discussion down the middle of, yes, alcohol has a lot of problems, but people drink it, and if we're going to drink it, we need to understand it, know about it, and know what the dangers are. David Nutt has been my guest. He's a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College in London, and the name of his book is Drink, the New Science of Alcohol and Health. You'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, David. Thank you, Mike. It's been a real pleasure. Scientists have known for a long time that some people have a better sense of touch than others.

Starting point is 00:52:28 But no one was really sure until a few years ago. And the answer seems to be that it all has to do with finger size. The smaller your fingers, the better your sense of touch. Women have always been thought to have a finer sense of touch. But according to a study out of Canada, gender really has nothing to do with it. It's because women generally have smaller fingers than men do. More specifically, it has to do with the size of the fingertips. So a man with a small fingertip would have a better sense of touch than a woman with a larger fingertip. Although it does get a little complicated, in a nutshell, the touch receptors are more

Starting point is 00:53:11 tightly packed together in smaller fingertips, making the finger more sensitive to whatever it touches. And that is something you should know. That's it for today, and your homework assignment is to tell someone else about this podcast so they too become a listener. I'm Micah Ruthers. 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,

Starting point is 00:53:50 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. show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the

Starting point is 00:54:53 Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - Why Friends Are So Important & The Pros and Cons of Drinking

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