Stuff You Should Know - How Vomit Phobia Works
Episode Date: December 5, 2017No one - no one - likes to vomit, but there are some people who would prefer to die rather than vomit, people who spend their days worrying they will vomit at any moment and become so obsessed they cu...rtail their lives to prevent it from happening. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,
David Lasher and Christine Taylor,
stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,
bring you back to the days of slip dresses
and choker necklaces.
We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,
but we are going to unpack and dive back
into the decade of the 90s.
We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends
to come back and relive it.
Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called
on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,
Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.
Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass
and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?
If you do, you've come to the right place
because I'm here to help.
And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander
each week to guide you through life.
Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast
and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say.
Bye, bye, bye.
Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass
on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from HowStuffWorks.com.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,
and there's Jerry over there.
This is Stuff You Should Know,
a very special, surprisingly sad edition.
Oh yeah?
I think so.
Yeah, of course it's sad.
It's really gross.
It is gross.
I'm gonna have a hard time getting through this one.
So we should give everybody fair warning.
We are talking about a metaphobia,
which is a specific phobia, a fear of throwing up,
and we'll get way more into all of that
and what it means, but we're talking about vomiting.
It's basically tied for first
as the subject of this episode.
So we're gonna be talking about vomiting a lot,
and I found from researching this, reading,
and I imagine hearing about vomiting
for a good 30 minute, 40 minute stretch,
it can make one queasy.
So just fair warning.
I don't think it's actually going to make you queasy,
but it's possible if it starts to happen,
just plow through it.
Just say Josh and Chuck would want me to plow through it
and your queasiness will magically go away.
Oh yeah?
All right.
So like you said, it is a specific phobia
and it is actually listed in the DSM now.
Not sure how long it's been in there, but it is...
Well, a metaphobia isn't.
Oh, well, I thought the specific phobia of vomiting now.
I guess I think specific phobias are.
I don't know if it's specifically listed, Chuck.
So when this says it is a specific phobia,
a current according to the DSM, what does that mean?
I think it means that it falls under the umbrella
of a specific phobia.
Okay.
You see what I mean?
Not really, but that's okay.
This means, well, you're afraid you might vomit.
You're afraid someone else might vomit around you.
You're afraid what people will think of you
if you do vomit?
Yeah, and it's not this article.
Where'd you get this stuff anyway?
Was this sort of cobbled?
It was cobbled together from some pretty good sources,
including Psychology Today,
the American Association of Anxiety Disorders,
the National Institutes of Health Library, the BBC, VICE.
And I want to give a shout out to the listener
who wrote in to share her a Metaphobia story.
I had never heard of it before,
and she had a very harrowing experience
and overcame it just through sheer grit and willpower
and came through the other side of this very serious phobia.
Yeah, which we'll get to how to do that later,
but these articles make great pains to point out
that it is, I think all people think it's gross
and are very much repulsed and turned off by the sound
or the smell or the look or anything
that deals with somebody getting sick like this.
But this is different than that.
This is a debilitating fear that can overtake your life.
Yeah, that would specifically be a Metaphobia.
There's actually, it seems like a spectrum
where you can also suffer from what's called fear of vomiting,
which is much less overwhelming,
but still you're preoccupied with the idea of vomiting.
With the Metaphobia, your life does not resemble
what your life would be if you weren't afraid of vomiting.
Yeah, it's a real impairment to your life
in a lot of different ways, which we'll go over.
It seems like there's not a lot of study about it.
I mean, I ran across a few studies,
but even in the studies I found, they specifically say,
there's not a lot of studies about us.
So a lot of the guesses about the prevalence are guesses,
but one thing I saw was that in the general population,
8.8%, I think that's actually fear of vomiting.
I think a Metaphobia is more like less than 1%
of the population has actual Metaphobia,
but that it tends to be about four to one ratio
of women to men, women suffer from it.
They have a tendency to suffer from it more.
Yeah, and I certainly do not have it,
but like I said, like almost everyone in the world probably,
it is a trigger for most folks.
Yeah, nobody wants to throw up,
but if you have a Metaphobia,
just seeing the title of this come through your podcast feed
could have set off an anxiety attack.
And like I feel very guilty about that.
There's nothing we could do,
because even if we warned everybody in the episode
before this that this was coming,
that would set off a panic attack.
Just the mere mention of the word vomit
can set the anxiety disorder into full gear.
Yeah, this one article you sent,
one of the clinicians they interviewed
who treats anxiety disorder said it is in her practice
the most common fear among children that they see.
Yeah, and that's typically how it starts.
So it's a chronic disease,
meaning that if you don't treat this,
it's going to persist basically every day of your life
and it tends to get worse over time.
And it usually starts with a traumatic experience
of vomiting most frequently of all in childhood.
So it's more common I think among kids,
but it can survive into adulthood
and it can start in adults.
But what seems to happen is
you have a traumatic experience from vomiting
and just like with any other traumatic experience,
whether it's surviving a violent crime or being in war,
vomiting can have that same effect on the brain apparently.
And you develop something pretty closely akin to PTSD
at the thought of vomiting
and it overwhelms your life as a result.
I had a traumatic experience with this when I was a kid.
I might have told this story before for another reason,
but I was on the bus going to elementary school
and there was a scary kid.
Remember in elementary school, they were just the scary kids?
I remember my scary kids first and last night.
Yeah, right?
And they're scary for various reasons,
whether they were bullies or,
I mean, you could probably diagnose something
that was wrong as an adult.
But as a kid, they were just scary kids.
And I'm not talking about like,
I mean, I'm talking about like sociopathic behavior,
not something that, you know, like some...
They weren't goth, you mean?
Yeah, exactly.
Right, they had like real issues
that were affecting other people around them.
Exactly, so this one kid,
I remember his name was Tony something,
but he on the way to school one day would,
or many days, he would make himself throw up
outside of the, with his face out of the window.
And it would, you know,
the school bus was going down the road
and it would fly down and land on the windows
all the way down.
Oh my God. Come in other windows
and he would make himself vomit.
And it just, it scared the crap out of me, man.
Oh, okay.
And it wasn't like, oh, that's gross.
I bet it scared the crap out of the bus driver.
I was scared, scared, scared, scared of this dude.
Yeah, well, that's really bizarre behavior,
especially if he was doing it
to like intimidate or freak other people out.
Yeah, and I think I might remember.
You've never told that story before.
Story because it's, you know how sometimes
a certain event can tie something else in your brain?
You know, my dad was my elementary school principal.
I don't know why I was riding the bus
because he usually just went to work with him.
Oh, he wanted to normalize things.
Maybe, but I ran to my dad's office
right when I got to school crying.
He wasn't in there and the secretary, Dot Jones,
let me in the office and Dot,
let me stay in his office because I was sad.
And he had one of those big cabinet stereos.
Did you put on the Rosie Greer record?
So the stereo was already on,
but the song that was on weirdly was
The Bee Gees, How Deep Is Your Love?
Oh, that's good.
And to this day, I hear that song
and it makes me want to cry.
Really?
Yeah, it's just a trigger from that day with that guy.
You know what?
Isn't that weird?
That's a sad story because that's a good song.
I know, it makes me want to weep.
It makes me want to weep for you.
Thinking about Tony, making himself throw up
and I always wonder what happened to that guy.
He's in Jim Rose's side show right now.
Maybe.
Is that still around?
I don't know.
Pukie Tony?
But yeah, that was him.
Pukie Tony and hippy robber
in like a little jug band together.
But anyway, that's a long way of saying
that that was not enough even to traumatize me
to the point where I have a metaphobia.
No, but I mean, it could have been.
It just seems to be like,
and it's not even necessarily like a type of person
or it's the brain can just,
the synapses can fuse in a certain way.
And all of a sudden you have this phobia.
And the problem is this,
it starts from a traumatic experience.
So let's say that that had had this impact on you Chuck,
right?
What would have come next
if you were on the road to a metaphobia
would have been to start to fear throwing up.
Seeing somebody throw up
probably is how it would have started.
And then that would have spread to throwing up yourself.
Right.
And then you would have become hyper-vigilant.
You would want to protect yourself
from seeing somebody throw up or from throwing up.
Well, how do you do that?
To prevent yourself from throwing up,
you're gonna monitor every single weird feeling you have
to say, am I about to throw up?
I need to like tamp this down.
Or I can't eat that food.
It might make me throw up.
Or I can't read in the car.
It might make me car sick and I'll throw up.
Or that person looks kind of sick.
I'm gonna avoid them.
And then let's just take it a little further
and avoid everybody altogether
because anybody could really throw up at any given time.
And you start to become preoccupied with this
and you adjust your life and alter it.
And then you're constantly worried about throwing up.
And once that happens, the phobia is complete.
Your life has changed.
You're constantly worried about it.
And then the cherry on top of the whole thing
is that when you finally are confronted
with the word vomit, actually seeing somebody vomit,
something like that, you enter a panic attack,
an actual panic attack.
Yeah, you can for sure.
And the only way to overcome that is to get away,
to run, to get out of there to,
I'm not sure all the ways you can handle a panic attack,
but then it calms down and your anxiety returns
to normal levels, which is to say high
for the average person.
Yeah, so in my case in elementary school,
how that could have gone was I had another ride to school,
but if I hadn't, I might have stopped taking the school bus
and started skipping class and not going to school at all
because I was afraid to get on the school bus
because of Pukie Tony.
And gone weeks in a row and then my parents get a call
saying Chuck hasn't been in school for weeks
and what's going on.
And that's exactly what's going on.
Like it can get that severe.
And it all boils down to the, at least in most cases,
the anticipation of this more so than the actual act.
In every case.
Because the people that are struck with this
by all accounts are less vomitous
than the general population.
So much so because they've tried to avoid it so much so
that this one article said that most of these people
can even name like the three or four times in their life
they have ever puked and what they ate that day
and what they had on television and what they wore
because it stands out that singularly to them.
And then so that's horribly ironic
that the people who are the most worried about throwing up
are the people who are actually statistically speaking,
they're least likely to throw up, right?
But there's an even greater irony
to the whole thing.
And we'll talk about that after this break.
How about that?
We'll talk about that after this break.
On the podcast Paydude, the 90s called David Lasher
and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show
Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses
and choker necklaces.
We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point
but we are going to unpack and dive back
into the decade of the 90s.
We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends
to come back and relive it.
It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,
friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.
Do you remember going to Blockbuster?
Do you remember Nintendo 64?
Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?
Was that a cereal?
No, it was hair.
Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger
and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?
So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,
because you'll want to be there
when the nostalgia starts flowing.
Each episode will rival the feeling
of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,
blowing on it and popping it back in,
as we take you back to the 90s.
Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s,
called on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast,
Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.
The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to
when questions arise or times get tough,
or you're at the end of the road.
Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.
Do you ever think to yourself,
what advice would Lance Bass
and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?
If you do, you've come to the right place,
because I'm here to help.
This, I promise you.
Oh, God.
Seriously, I swear.
And you won't have to send an SOS,
because I'll be there for you.
Oh, man.
And so, my husband, Michael.
Um, hey, that's me.
Yep, we know that, Michael.
And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander
each week to guide you through life, step by step.
Oh, not another one.
Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.
You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.
Just stop now.
If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,
about my new podcast and make sure to listen,
so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.
Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass
on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts.
It's a check we were on the irony train,
and I want to keep going, okay?
Yes.
The irony of paying attention and being hyper-vigilant
about vomiting, especially when you are worried
that you're going to vomit.
Because again, there's a number of things
that you're worried about.
You're going to be worried that you won't be able
to find a bathroom in time to go throw up.
You're worried about throwing up in front of other people
and embarrassing yourself or being teased for throwing up.
You're worried about just the experience of throwing up.
It's just a horrible experience,
but once you start to get a metaphobia,
you lose perspective completely.
I've seen multiple, they call them metaphobes,
people with a metaphobia, I've seen multiple people say,
you would prefer to die than to throw up.
That's how much they fear throwing up.
And to the rest of us, it's like,
God, that would suck to throw up,
but I know I'll be fine on the other end of it,
not to a person with a metaphobia.
So the irony of all this is the more you start
to focus on this and you start to think about
every gurgle in your stomach or every weird twist or turn,
it actually produces more anxiety.
And here's the ironic part,
anxiety can actually make you queasy
when you're thinking about throwing up.
That's right.
So it makes the whole thing worse
and it becomes this vicious cycle.
Well, yeah, and they recommend trying to tell yourself,
like, I might feel queasy, but I'm not going to throw up.
My anxiety might be making me feel nauseous,
but I am not going to throw up.
Yeah, because there's a confusion of queasiness
equals nausea equals throwing up,
and that's just not the case.
Like you can make yourself sick with anxiety,
but you can't make yourself throw up from being anxious.
So the whole thing is just wasted worry.
Yeah, some of the other things you might do
because of this fear,
you might not shake hands with anyone ever again.
You, well, I think a lot of people avoid looking
at television puke scenes.
Yeah, you cannot watch.
You really can't watch those at all.
You can't watch Stand By Me or The Meaning of Life.
Those are so funny looking though,
but still probably not.
You might throw away food in your fridge
that is not even past this expiration date.
You might have a trigger there.
You might overcook your food on purpose.
And then before you eat it,
you will lift the bread a bunch of times.
It's called checking behavior.
Sure.
You might not eat on vacation as readily
because you only trust your trusted food sources.
You might go into a place and like,
you know, when some people go into a music venue,
like they check for the exits,
like you're checking for the bathrooms.
You may not even make it to the music venue.
A lot of people with a metaphobia end up being agoraphobic
and just don't leave their house.
Really debilitating.
It's often confused for agoraphobia by counselors
and shrinks.
I've got another one.
Apparently a lot of people who have a metaphobia
walk around with a plastic bag on them at all times,
something to throw up into.
An emergency throw up bag.
They walk around with this
because they're so afraid of throwing up.
But they never need to use
because they probably don't ever throw up.
I know.
And some of them will actually carry
a change of clothes around with them as well.
Really?
Mm-hmm, for the same reason.
If they throw up on themselves,
they can change their clothes.
Yeah, and of course, air travel, drinking alcohol.
Any of those things are, or car travel even.
Yeah.
Like any kind of travel is probably avoided.
Definitely don't booze it up or...
Yeah, they probably don't drink at all.
Yeah.
And subsist on things like pasta and bananas
and very, very safe, digestively speaking foods.
Although a banana could gag you.
Yeah.
You know?
God, that would be a nightmare if you had a metaphobia.
I wonder if they mash them up and eat it,
like mashed up with a fork maybe.
Maybe.
You could see it.
Yeah, and I could see cutting your food up
into the tiniest pieces
because you feel fear choking.
And that's one of the fears too,
what I think we mentioned.
They're not just afraid of the vomiting,
but they sometimes can fear choking on vomit
and dying and affixating or going to the hospital.
Or starting to vomit and the vomiting never ending.
That's another fear of a metaphobia.
One other thing that I saw people do
is prevent getting pregnant
because of a fear of morning sickness.
Yeah.
So yeah, so your life is altered and curtailed
because you're afraid of vomiting.
Everywhere you look,
there's some potential trigger out there,
so it'd just be easier to stay home and eat your pasta
and not watch movies, basically.
And to just lie there and monitor your stomach
for signs that you're about to throw up.
That's what they do.
That's what you do when you have a metaphobia.
That's your life.
Yeah.
It's no way to live.
It is not.
So this is not all just academic
and stuff we're grasping at straws
and pulling together from different cases.
Like this is, there's actually a case study
we found that was of an eight-year-old girl
who had a terrible experience throwing up
and really kind of encapsulates
the experience of a metaphobia.
She had full-blown a metaphobia.
She had appendicitis and had been throwing up
before the doctors figured out she had appendicitis
and had her appendix removed.
And that experience throwing up was,
well, it triggered a metaphobia in her.
When she came to and was recovering from her surgery
about 10 days later, she started getting really worried
she was gonna start throwing up like that again.
Yeah, it was a really sad case.
And pretty much covered everything we've said
and even then some to the point
where her father traveled for business
and she didn't want him to travel anymore.
Her father to travel anymore for fear
that he would get some sickness
and then bring it back to the house.
Right.
And I mean, that's pretty extensive.
Yeah, like she didn't want to eat herself.
She didn't want to eat any outside food.
She had her safe food,
but she also didn't want her parents
to eat any outside food either
because she didn't want them throwing up.
She stopped playing with other kids
because she was worried about throwing up in front of them
and being teased.
That was her big thing.
And as one of the clinicians who we came across
in this research said,
it's not the vomiting that's really the problem.
Like that's the focus, that's the obsession,
but the real problem is the worry, the constant worry.
It's the worry that's altering your life.
And it altered this little girl's life, you know?
Very sad.
So let's take another break
and then we'll come back and put a silver lining
on this thing and talk about treatment.
Music
On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called
David Lasher and Christine Taylor,
stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude.
Bring you back to the days of slipped dresses
and choker necklaces.
We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,
but we are going to unpack
and dive back into the decade of the 90s.
We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends
to come back and relive it.
It's a podcast packed with interviews,
co-stars, friends, and non-stop references
to the best decade ever.
Do you remember going to Blockbuster?
Do you remember Nintendo 64?
Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?
Was that a cereal?
No, it was hair.
Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger
and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?
So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,
because you'll want to be there
when the nostalgia starts flowing.
Each episode will rival the feeling
of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,
blowing on it, and popping it back in
as we take you back to the 90s.
Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,
Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.
The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to
when questions arise or times get tough,
or you're at the end of the road.
Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.
Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass
and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?
If you do, you've come to the right place,
because I'm here to help.
This, I promise you.
Oh, God.
Seriously, I swear.
And you won't have to send an SOS,
because I'll be there for you.
Oh, man.
And so, my husband, Michael.
Um, hey, that's me.
Yep, we know that, Michael.
And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander
each week to guide you through life, step by step.
Oh, not another one.
Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.
You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.
Just stop now.
If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,
about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,
so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.
Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
All right, so we've talked a lot on the show over the years
about CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or Exposure
and Response Prevention, ERP, basically Exposure Therapy.
And this is definitely probably the way
to go when it comes to a metaphobia.
So depending on who you go see, you
might undergo various kinds of treatments ranging
from starting out by literally saying the words,
bomb it out loud, or throw up, or puke, or just all the words.
Because that's literally the first step sometimes,
into getting over this, is just being able to speak the word.
Yeah, and you may have to start out by writing it down first
before you can say it out loud.
For real.
And so once you move past that, the therapies range from,
they're kind of all over the board,
from looking at fake vomit that your therapist has made
in a toilet.
Yeah, now you're starting to move into exposure therapy,
right?
Yeah, I mean, this is all of this stuff, ERP and CBT.
But they'll make up some fake vomit, put it in the toilet,
make you go look at it.
They themselves, the therapist might make the noises
in front of you.
They just have it nowhere.
Well, I imagine they probably prep them, or maybe not.
It may go in the bathroom and jump up and say,
I've got to go get sick.
And all of this is just exposing this patient over and over
to the point where they can handle hearing the sound,
seeing the thing, saying the word, hearing the word.
Smell is another one, too.
One of the recommendations for exposure therapy
is you make your own throw up, like in the toilet,
a little bit of cold soup, or something like that.
Maybe mix in some oatmeal with it,
and then pour a little vinegar in there
to make it pungent, and sit around and think
about that being vomit.
Maybe try to make the sound of throwing up yourself.
Try to make yourself gag.
And all this is to show you, when you have a metaphobia,
that this is, first of all, it's manageable.
That's the first part, is what you're trying to do
is get to this point without having a panic attack.
But then also, that if you gag,
it doesn't mean you're automatically going to throw up.
And if you do throw up,
it doesn't mean you're never going to stop throwing up,
or that everyone's going to ridicule you for throwing up.
And that's the point of any cognitive behavioral therapy
is just kind of change your perspective
and give you a more realistic view
of the thing you're worried about.
There's also a website called Rate My Vomit.
Have you heard of it?
Yeah, I wouldn't get to mention that, but go ahead.
You have heard of it before?
No, no, no, I read about it, but I just, yeah.
It just sounds like, I mean,
that's like classic internet stuff, right?
Somebody's like, oh, let's put pictures of throw up on there.
And you guys tell me how gross it is.
Well, it's actually used by people with a metaphobia
as exposure therapy at home.
To just go look at this stuff and see it.
There's also videos of people throwing up.
There's a lot of stuff.
The internet, unintentionally,
is this great place for people with a metaphobia
to go get over their fears.
And I'm sure like if you have a fear of snakes,
it's good for that too.
But so is like a time lifebook.
You're not gonna find a time lifebook
that's nothing but pictures of vomit.
No.
You're gonna find it on the internet though.
Yes, you will.
That's not in the Old West series.
No, and then I found this other type of therapy chuck
called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, EMDR.
And it's used for post-traumatic stress disorder
and it's the most bizarre treatment
I've ever heard of in my life.
But apparently it really, really works.
Yeah.
Are you ready for this?
Yep.
So say I was your therapist and you were,
you had PTSD and it's been used to treat
a metaphobia a couple of times.
But you're talking about the thing that gave you PTSD.
You're focusing on the worst aspect
of this traumatic experience
and you're talking about it out loud.
But while you're doing it,
I'm moving my finger back and forth and up and down,
maybe in a slow circle.
And I've instructed you to follow my finger
wherever I move it while you're recounting
this horrible traumatic experience.
Supposedly just doing this over multiple sessions,
but sometimes just in one long session,
PTSD can be treated.
And the way that they think this happens,
if it actually does work,
it just sounds like such just like totally made up
that in 50 years they're gonna be like,
I actually thought this worked.
But if it does work, they think that it works
because it taxes your working memory to follow the finger
and your recall then is not aided fully
by your working memory.
So the vividness of this horrible memory
isn't as robust as it would be
if your full working memory was working on it.
And so when you reprocess it,
when you file it away again, this memory,
it's lost its luster.
It's lost a lot of its bite
because you've gotten it out there and reprocessed it
in a way that's not nearly as traumatic
because your working memory was being used in part
to follow your therapist's finger.
Supposedly it works.
Wow. Yeah.
Isn't that nuts? It's pretty neat.
Yeah, I think so too.
I wonder if it really does work.
You should try it.
Anyone who has ever undergone eye movement desensitization
and reprocessing, I would love to hear your story
if it actually helped you or not.
For sure.
And if you have a metaphobia, Godspeed,
we hope you get well soon.
And to take this on or any phobia really
has so much courage and grit
that just taking a first step toward treatment,
my hat is off to you for life.
Yes, and chances are you probably
didn't even listen to this episode.
Yeah, but if you have a different phobia.
Yeah. You know, any phobia.
And since I said phobia a couple of times,
that means it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this our second PSA in as many weeks
if this releases the same week.
Okay.
But this one's about dogs.
It's very sad.
Hey guys, take me a while to write this
because it's been very difficult to talk about.
Now you're animal lovers though,
so probably a good majority of your listeners are.
I thought sharing our tragic story
would help prevent others from experiencing the same thing.
We lost our dog river about two months ago
because I left a bag of chips out.
We were at work while she got her head stuck in the bag
and we came home to find our dog stiff
and lifeless from suffocation.
We've always been careful about plastic bags
and stuff like that and kept them stored away
for recycling, but never occurred to us
that a chips bag on the counter
would something would need to be concerned about.
No, no one ever would ever think about that.
Everyone we've also told said it was something
they never thought about either.
So now we keep all of our bag foods in the cupboard
and cut the bottoms off of anything
that goes into the recycling and waste bins.
That's a good idea too.
Yeah, I started doing that since these guys wrote it.
Oh yeah, we were and still are extremely heartbroken.
I hope no one else will have to go through this experience.
It was the worst and if I can help save
just one other dog's life, it's been worthwhile.
So thanks for being you guys.
Thanks for being you guys.
No, there's a comment there.
There's not, but I think that's how I'm supposed to read it.
Hope we make it into your next Seattle show.
That's Jackie W. from Seattle.
Jackie, thank you for writing in.
I'm so sorry about river,
but I hope you guys are doing okay.
Yeah, that sounds like a guest list.
Yeah, agreed.
Action to me.
Yeah, right back in and we'll guest list.
Yeah, we're coming in January.
So 15.
Yes.
So just right back in, we'll throw you on there.
And she sent a picture of a river.
Beautiful dog, very, very sad.
River look very sweet.
If you have a PSA that happened to you
that you think we should share to warn everybody else
about, we want to do that.
You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.
I'm at Josh Shum Clark.
You can also check out my website,
R-U-SeriesClark.com.
Chuck's on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
And there's the official Stuff You Should Know Facebook too.
You can send all of us and Jerry an email
to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.
And as always, join us at our home on the web,
stuffyoushouldknow.com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.
Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips
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