If you’re facing struggles in your life, listen up.
All of this month, the podcast and radio show "Hidden Brain," which airs Saturdays at 3 p.m. on WFAE, is looking into why people struggle and some possible solutions.
The series is called “Healing 2.0" — and "Hidden Brain" host Shankar Vedantam joined us on "Morning Edition" to talk more about it.
Marshall Terry: So why right now? What made you want to look at why people struggle and what they can do about it?
Shankar Vedantam: Marshall, when I look at the news and look out at the world, it just feels like there is a lot of hurt out there. I feel like when I finish listening to the radio every day, my heart feels heavy, and I think many people feel the same way. It's also the case that as we approach the holidays at the end of the year, they are a wonderful time of celebration and gathering, but they can also be a bittersweet time. People are reminded of the good old days or people they've lost, and we thought that we would pull together a large body of psychological research that can speak to the setbacks and concerns and traumas that people experience to try and offer some helpful ideas that could help people thrive and come through these difficult times successfully.
Terry: And it seems like a lot of people’s struggles have been made worse by the pandemic, lockdowns and general insecurity in the world now. What are you finding about the impact of COVID and world events on people’s personal struggles?
Vedantam: It's really hard to really quantify that very precisely because, of course, you can't run a controlled experiment where you have half the planet that did not suffer with the pandemic and half the planet that did and [then] you can compare the outcomes. I think it's fair to say that on a variety of different fronts, we are seeing that people are experiencing mental health setbacks across a range of age groups and a range of different kinds of mental health challenges. There's been a lot of work of late, for example, looking at increases in anxiety and depression among teenagers and asking why it is that that might happen. I came by some really shocking numbers recently, looking at the suicide rate in the United States. I mean, it is staggering, the burden of suicide in the United States is enormous.
I think the COVID pandemic has undoubtedly played some role in this, but to precisely delineate exactly what role is the COVID pandemic and what role is the other things happening in our lives, I'm not sure I’ve seen very good research that can really tease those things apart.
Terry: So, it’s a broad area, people’s struggles. Break it down for us if you will. What are the specific struggles you will look at in this series?
Vedantam: So, the series is trying to pull together a number of different psychological insights that people can apply to a wide variety of experiences and events in their lives.
The first episode in the series is titled “Change Your Story, Change Your Life,” and it's based on the idea that many of us think about our lives like an audience watching a play in a theater. So, we feel like we're observing our lives and of course, that is true, but it's also the case importantly, that we are the author of our lives, that we decide how we can tell the story of our lives. This is research by the psychologist Jonathan Adler, who shows how you break, what he calls, the chapter breaks of your story. If you think of your life as being a novel: Where are you starting each chapter and where are you ending each chapter?
The choices that you're making as an author as you tell that story, turn out to have profoundly important effects on your psychological being. So, if you start out these chapters where things start out very positively and end each chapter where things end very negatively, psychologists call this a contamination sequence or something that is wonderful has gotten contaminated and ends very badly.
But just as easily, because all our lives have ups and downs, you can start out the chapter with something that starts out being negative and ends up in a more positive place. Psychologists call this a redemption sequence and psychologists find that when we narrate the story of our lives as a series of redemption sequences, as opposed to a series of contamination sequences, we end up feeling better about our lives. We end up feeling like we have more agency and control in our lives. We end up with higher levels of well-being and mental health.
Terry: What’s something you learned in doing this series that surprised you, Shankar?
Vedantam: You know, I will say that one of the common tropes that I've heard and perhaps that I subscribe to, is this idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. If you think of all of our superhero movies, [it] involves something terrible, a catastrophe befalling somebody who's an ordinary person, and as a result of the catastrophe, they somehow acquire superhuman capabilities. And it's not just in our superhero movies that this trope exists.
I think in all of our lives, we are awash in psychological messages that say that when we go through difficult times, there is almost an implicit societal expectation that we're going to come out on the other side somehow being better, being wiser, being stronger. I think this episode sort of challenges that view. It looks at research that basically suggests that when we have this view, in some ways I think we intended to be helpful, we intended to be inspiring. To tell people, yes you’re going through cancer but I think you're gonna come out the other side being even stronger than before.
We intended to be inspiring, but it often has exactly the opposite effect on people because now people say, not only do I have to deal with the cancer, not only do I have to deal with the loss of a loved one, the expectations of everyone around me is that I come out the other side being wiser and stronger. And if you don't come out feeling wiser, if you don't come out feeling stronger, if you don't recover and get back on your feet in three months or six months, you start to ask yourself, what’s wrong with me? And in some ways, I think what we're trying to do in that episode is to bust a myth, and it's a myth that I think I subscribe to, myself.
Terry: So, what do you hope listeners will take away?
Vedantam: I think the biggest idea that I'm hoping listeners will take away is that we have agency and control over how we experience the events in our lives. It sometimes doesn't feel that way, but in fact, we do have some agency and control over what happens.
A perennial theme that comes up throughout this series, especially in one of the episodes featuring a psychologist named Lucy Hone, who experienced the unimaginable loss of her own child in a car crash, but the idea is that she experienced and found in her research as a result of the tragedy, echoes an idea that you find in many spiritual traditions that go back many, many centuries. I was reading a book the other day that talks about an idea from Buddhist philosophy, and it's called the lesson of the two arrows. And the lesson of the two arrows is [that] as we go through life, we're often going to be struck by an arrow. You know, something bad is gonna happen, and it's gonna strike us, and it's gonna cause us pain when that happens. The one thing that we shouldn't do is we should not add a second arrow to the sight of the first injury, and that is exactly what many of us do.
So, when we go through setbacks, we go through suffering, we go through trauma, not only are we suffering from the trauma that was caused to us from the outside, we add to that trauma by the ways in which we respond to the trauma — By our regret, by our recrimination, by our self-blame, by our lack of self-compassion. That second arrow, in some ways, is even more painful than the first — not only because it's self-inflicted, but because we are inflicting it, there's almost no end to the suffering until we choose to stop inflicting that pain.
Vedantam is the host of "Hidden Brain," a podcast and radio show that helps curious people understand the world through science and storytelling. This month, the show will look at why people struggle and what they can do about it, in the series "Healing 2.0."
You can hear "Hidden Brain" on Saturdays at 3 p.m. on WFAE. Find our full programming schedule here.
