News and Statistical Updates On Health and Wellness – Episode Recaps-Part One-
The road is self-awareness, improvement, and mastery are best done in tiny nudges - not grand, exhausting gestures. Nobody should train for their first 26-mile marathon by trying to run 26 miles on the first day. Likewise, self-awareness should be a constant effort involving study, meditation, and reflection - preferably studies involving the newest peer-reviewed research and news.
Here at the REY, we can't exactly meditator reflect for you, but we can give you the latest studies and research that came out in the last year. In addition, the news that will be presented today are updates from prior episodes. So, if we cover something that sounds fascinating to you, we encourage you to go back and listen to that episode. So, here are your tiny nudges for the week. Call them more tools for your self-awareness toolbox because we love you, and we know you're capable of re-engineering a better you.
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Abe Lincoln and Vulnerable Leaders
Joe: In one of our early episodes (4#), we talked about vulnerable leaders and Abe Lincoln. I feel like we should have named that episode Abe Lincoln and Depression because so much of it was about that.
Todd: Talk about a man with a lot to be depressed for. I mean, that episode was great. Abe was just a small boy, 11 years old, and his mother died. He helped build the casket to bury his mom. When he was in college, he would study so hard that his classmates were worried that he would study himself to go insane. When he got older, he was so depressed that he would be seen wandering through the woods with a gun. So, the people in town would take turns watching over him, trying to keep him from probably committed suicide. A portrait painter painted portraits for all world leaders, and he said that Abraham Lincoln had the saddest face he'd ever seen.
Joe: Of course, we don't have any news updates about Abe Lincoln himself. It's not like they uncovered him for The Treasure of Oak Island. However, we have some news about depression that came out in the last year.
Depression isn't a bug, and it doesn't mean you're broken. It's a feature where 15% of the population is built-in with it. But that number is being exacerbated. According to a US News study, they found that depression among youth is climbing above it. It doesn't say whether it's exposing the normal rate of depression, but more so how many people would normally come predisposed to it. It may be that 15% of humanity could be suffering from depression right now. But according to this article, if you didn't think the pandemic was bad enough, young people are being hit by depression. In fact, 1 in 4 are suffering from depression as we speak, which is a record high. That's a quarter of our population of young people. Even more, 1 in 5 are struggling with anxiety.
We do talk about the difference between those two in that episode about vulnerable leaders. And it seems like the biggest contributing factor is being socially isolated, kept away from friends, their school, their routines, and away from extracurriculars. For reference, all of this is from The University of Calgary.
Have you seen videos of kids on Zoom trying to stay engaged in online learning, and they're just sort of losing their minds? Zoom is just not going to cut it for teaching and whether you believe in the right to get a vaccine. Eventually, we will have to figure out a better way to teach kids. I've always been a proponent of the Montessori style, which is letting kids learn at their own pace. Let them hold their own passion and interest. I think more concerning is that to have depression at this young age, I think it leaves a crack on these exits. You're not just going to get over it. It's going to lead down the road to a bigger brush. I also think that bullying and peer pressure could have been driven down by switching to zoom. But instead of losing that by going to zoom class, it just moved on to Facebook and Instagram. According to today’s news, it’s even worse when we get embarrassed in front of more people.
Do you remember episode 6? It was Pastor from Seattle, Mark Driscoll and covering the intricacies of ego. This egomaniac turned a church into a system that looked at him as the answer. And it was wild the way he got caught. He was posing online as William Wallace, and it was just the most toxic anti-feminine bullshit that I had ever seen. He was so popular and even on the New York Times Best Sellers List. He threw out the opening pitch for a Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball game and got caught for doing some perjury. One of his self-published books ended up on New York Times book bestseller list because his congregation bought 300,000 copies.
He then re-established a new church in Arizona called Trinity Church. But the latest news is he's at it again. Elders from the Mars Hill Church have reached out to some of the people who have been kicked out of the Trinity Church he's at now. They were very concerned that he didn't get disciplined and that he would take his show on the road like a carny. He's opened a smaller shop in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's not this big, huge church, but now the people coming out of the church were saying there have been concerns raised of him with his congregation separating families. So, let's say you and I are brothers, and I stopped going to the church. They don't want you to talk to me anymore. He's still a control freak and still an egomaniac. He's using whatever control he has, big or small, to use people.
Rick Springfield and Self-Esteem
We got a lot of listeners from this next episode. If you remember this, it's Rick Springfield and self-esteem. I listened to Rick Springfield while we were studying for this, and I watched interviews with him. Now, everyone has heard his one-hit-wonder Jesse's Girl. And our episode was all about how having a one-hit-wonder and not feeling like he had achieved his real potential lead Springfield down a self-esteem trap. It crushed his self-esteem, and a lot of the episode was about Americans' actions to win back their self-esteem. At the time of his peak, he was a rock star. He was a soap opera star, actor on one of the top shows, and a professional model. Somebody with that many measurable things have low self-esteem. He's literally a sex symbol. He's legit rich, famous, and talented. And again, self-esteem tied in depression, and he battled depression all his life.
Do you want to know what he's up to now, though? Since COVID hit, he since locked down and has been having lots and lots of sex with his wife, Barbara. This is the wife of 36 years. I mean, if you're in lockdown, it's a good time to keep the relationship alive and experiment.
He says the key to a happy and long marriage is doing things together that you both prioritize. Another problem with self-esteem is social media misery, which is one of our favorite ones. The right leak just exposed how toxic Facebook and Instagram are for everybody. It has been all over the news this past week. And, during the leaks, it was revealed that Facebook knew about this.
They promoted things ranging from eating disorders to genocide. Not genocide among teens, but it was like the Mayan Mar genocide that we covered in another episode. They say that Facebook and Instagram have different rules for different people. If you're a celebrity, you don't get blocked. You don't have the same strict content posting rules as the rest of us. They were allowed to post anything they wanted as long as they didn't get called out by the moderator teams.
Well, now coming down to self-esteem, it's making body image worse for teen girls who already have a lot of body image issues. Internal studies have shown that among teen girls who reported suicidal thoughts: 13% British users and 6% traced it back to Instagram directly. There's an algorithm there in a bubble. Once these young girls start clicking on models who they think they should look like, they're going to be shown attractive people again and again. And the reason why this is egregious, as far as I could read, was because Facebook knows about it. And that's been the whole controversy this week.
Stephen King had battled addictions, and I've listened to his audiobooks and read his books since I was a little kid. He struggled with cocaine and alcoholism in his young life and wrote some of his best work when he was high and drunk. He said something about being an alcoholic could have a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator they drink before bed. They need to either drink the whole thing or dump the whole thing out down the drain. There's no saving it for tomorrow. At the time, we covered an article talking about how it might be tied to the amygdala and how it doesn't take in serotonin correctly.
Coming from ScienceDaily, The University of Warwick, The University of Cambridge and co-opting with Fudan University in Shanghai tracked networks in the brain that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is part of the brain that senses emergency situations. They found out that a person is at greater risk for developing alcohol disorders when there's an imbalance in this alert system. An alcoholic can form in one of two ways from their research theorizes and has been darn near proven. They say that one way alcoholism works is it inhibits the area of the brain that processes adverse situations. It inhibits the part of the brain that can't respond to negative signals. So, if you feel like you need to escape from danger or anxiety, even if you're at just yellow alert and it's just a low level of stress, it can lead to alcoholism. You drink to make that yellow alert shut off. Another way alcoholism works with this system is an addict will have an overexcited DP AG. This means that it's making them feel like they are in unpleasant situations in which to escape. So, exactly what we said, the cause of impulsive drinking can be either you shut off this system and it feels good, or you NEED to shut the system off.
In that last episode, we talked about a researcher who experimented on himself in the full Stephen King and alcoholism episode. We talked about somebody who discovered that taking medications for nervousness for anxiety after he had tried everything else. He was like a heart doctor, and he took anti-anxiety meds, and it cured him. So, the idea is that part of your alert system is off. When you drink, it can be like getting rid of a danger sense. It makes sense that you would have the yellow alert stuck in the on position and alcohol would dull it. That is just a number button.
Arthur Bremer is the real-life person that the Joker was based on. The Robert De Niro classic about how dangerous it is to be alone for too long. Loneliness is not seen as the same kind of depression. It's not taken as seriously. Announcing that you're lonely is the least glamorous thing you can do, and it's kind of a good way to get people to stop talking to you. Arthur Bremer lashed out by trying to assassinate a governor in the tent. He didn't kill the man, but he ended up putting the man in a wheelchair. And the way that the governor turned around on racism, he ended up standing up for minority rights. He did a total 180.
So, a couple of updates on this one. Arthur Bremer’s probation ends in 2025. He's still alive, and he's going to be 75 when his probation finally ends. He lives in Cumberland, Ireland, and according to cops, he has a steady job, and he stays out of the limelight. So as far as we know, he's as repented as you can get., More importantly, because we can't have an episode about updates during covid without touching on studies about loneliness, we are going through what is being called a loneliness epidemic.
This is backed by research that came out and Harvard News. There was a study conducted last October, and the article is referencing making caring common. They found that 36% of responders to a national survey felt lonely frequently or almost all the time in the last four weeks compared that to one in four who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. That’s the important part. We're lonely because we're all locked inside, but this study asked revealed that people were heading down a lonely road before this pandemic hit. We could be lonely in our own marriages, relationships, and families, even an apartment or a house full of people. That's something we covered in the Arthur Bremer episode; you can be lonely surrounded by people, and you just need a different type of intellectual stimulation or a different type of love. And of course, this article also hits on the fact that young adults are particularly susceptible.
We did rejection resilience and deep diving on how rejection works in the mind. We also covered how we can make ourselves more resilient to rejection, which would have value in anybody's life. We found lots of TED talks about how you need to be rejected over and over again. It builds calluses. We also found the opposite to be true, but when the stakes are higher when your heart or your income, it hurts everybody the same. It came down to being rejected at the exact same thing repeatedly can build resilience. But you can't replicate emotional rejection in the exact same circumstances over and over. That circuit to feel rejection literally piggybacks on the pain circuit in your brain. So, you feel actual physical pain when you're rejected hard enough. Anyone who had their heart broken knows that it is not just a mental thing. Well, I ran into a bit of research from Mississippi State. I'm going to make this short because it was kind of inconclusive, but Mississippi State sought to identify what conditions will rejection lead to violent behavior. They broke it into three categories because they want to know if somebody gets rejected, say a young teen, will be come back and do something violent?
They went through a multi-mode model, which proposed three primary behavioral responses to rejection pro-social. Meaning, they respond by befriending other people, withdraw like Arthur Bremer, or go full-on anti-social acting aggressively. The results indicate that the saturated model provides a better fit for the data. They didn't come to a firm conclusion. None of the hypothesized associations and predictors of aggression led to the likelihood of aggressive responding. This also means that past studies that do claim this could have been inflated studies. So basically, that means they're calling out that previous studies of rejection. So, it gets a little muddy, but this is the first study seen where they try to take such a broad look at different responses to rejection.
Joe: We want attention just like the news does, but that's kind of the takeaway for me on this one - Not every published study should be a mind-blower worthy of clickbait. That's the reason people have stopped believing in certain academic papers. It's better to have studies like this, ones that get a broader scope of a social problem and begin to take things off the board to take off those lists.
Todd: And we know things like loneliness and rejection are serious problems and not something that you can simply cure with a post on Facebook.
Joe Exactly. A motivational poster won't help with this one. To me, this is like the psychology of finding a thousand different ways how not to make a lightbulb before you find the right one. This is a broad study that found a thousand different ways not to find the source of rejection. So, I like it. I want to give it attention.