ASM078 Sunscreen, Breaking Up, and Making Changes that Last

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sunscreen breaking up and making changes that last all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and we are just one month away from the launch of my new book finding god in the waves if you haven't pre-ordered yet there's all kind of bonuses you can get a chance to win a one-on-one call with me learn more at findinggodinthewaves.com but for now let's get it [Applause] started our first question on ask science mike this week came in via patreon uh one of the rewards people get when they make the show possible by contributing on patreon is you can get a guaranteed question on ask science mike and even though we have several hundred patrons people don't do it very often but here we go really excited that patrick klein from denver sent in a patron question this week so we'll get started with it hey mike is there any correlation between where people land on the enneagram and what style or type of humor they might find more funny than people who land elsewhere as an example i'm a five observer so does my preference for dry sarcastic quick wit humor mirror my desire to intellectualize what makes me laugh versus another who might enjoy the light-hearted silly jokes which i do enjoy sometimes is there any science or correlation between the two looking forward to meeting you during the liturgist gathering in denver unless i don't meet you and in that case hello and goodbye first of all patrick there's a hundred percent chance you'll meet me at the liturgist gathering in denver unless you just don't want to meet me the reason we do the liturgist gathering is so we can meet the people who listen to the show because you're invariably interesting fun people to be around and thoughtful and the largest gathering is also we put those on so you can meet each other so there's like this this ruse where we try to put on a compelling day and a half event with like you know music from michael and he's a gungah and a string quartet and really interesting discussions and teachings but really it's just an excuse to rent a room and all hang out together and i'm super excited about denver that's actually going to be the week my book launches so i will know how the book is doing for the first time ever because it will actually be out uh but anyway uh let's actually talk about your question interestingly enough on the enneagram the first episode of the liturgist podcast for season three is going to be on the enneagram and we're just we're closing in on that that's going to be uh coming out a little bit later in august um i think august uh uh so august 23rd i think will be the day season three starts uh and so we have a whole episode on the enneagram it's like a like a two-hour episode one of the longest largest podcast we've ever done but it's because so many people have asked us about the enneagram uh and we'll talk a little bit about it right now the enneagram is this personality typing tool uh if you've heard of myers-brigg or myers-briggs excuse me that's one personality typing system the enneagram is another only the enneagram has more spiritual roots it's older and in the enneagram everyone is represented by a number one through nine so it's a pretty dynamic or flexible model and that there's an interplay between your number and your wing and then how you behave in stressful situations versus less stress versus normal so it's a pretty complicated system but because of that it seems to have a lot of descriptive power but here's the important thing in your question you asked about science or correlation and the enneagram is not a scientific model it is a spiritual model it's a tool for introspection but it's not based on like clinical research or empirical data it's really built more on observation and frankly speculation only recently have people even tried to apply any sort of psychological or clinical thinking to the endogram and that would be typified by like the risot hudson approach to the enneagram but there's nothing there's really no science or or clinical studies behind the enneagram at all it's just a thing a lot of people find useful for introspection and personal growth and it's it's a framework you can use to have common language to talk about your personality and your personal experience now dry sarcastic humor can be related to a defense mechanism called intellectualization which is a tendency to take apart our feelings by uh using the analytical part of our brain to think things through and in doing so kind of shut down the emotional parts of our brain it could also come from cynicism and we've talked about cynicism before in the program or a simple frontal lobe bias people who have more active frontal lobes in some science have been shown to have a drier or more sarcastic sense of humor so there is a correlation in brain basis now you could say well probably fives tend to have a frontal lobe bias that's why they're fives and that would be an interesting conjecture but to my knowledge there has not been a single study involving brain imaging and the enneagram so that would be something we could only speculate on that said i am fascinated with the enneagram i think it's a ton of fun i think it's interesting to examine yourself and contemplate your experience but it is not a scientific model it's not a clinical model it's something a little more useful than a party trick basically in my opinion which could be wrong but i am quite certain that there's just not a lot of clinical research around the enneagram [Music] hey mike my name's allie and i live in baltimore and i have a couple of questions for you that relate to the sun and our health as humans um so conventional wisdom tells us that wearing sunscreen is beneficial for protecting against skin cancer premature aging and other different health risks but at the same time i've recently been hearing that chemicals in sunscreen might actually be more damaging to our health than exposure to the sun itself so my first question is that i'm curious to know if you have any insights or know of any studies that speak to that topic and which one is really true and then the second part of my question is something that's a little bit more personally important to me i'm curious whether using a tanning bed or other form of artificial sunlight like a sun lamp or uv lamp has any scientifically proven benefits for treating seasonal affective disorder i've been living with depression and anxiety for about 15 years and while medication really helps it's significantly more effective for me in the summer months than in the times of the year when it's darker and colder out with summer winding to a close and the day's getting shorter where i live i'm starting to be filled with this sense of dread at the thought of losing the mental health benefits that the summer months have afforded me i asked my psychiatrist if he would recommend going to a tanning salon and he told me that it really doesn't have any proven benefits or that it really wouldn't help but i have gone in the past and i felt like it did help i'm curious if this was just the placebo effect taking place because i expected it to help or even just because it's nice to get warm in a sunbed when it's cold out in the winter or if there are any studies that show that using tanning beds and uv lights can have a benefit for those of us who suffer suffer from mental health issues in the winter if it is just the placebo effect are there any other scientifically proven things that i can do during the darker months to bolster my own mental health thank you for everything that you do your work means a lot to me and has really helped me in my own life and growth as a person i look forward to hearing your answers well this is a fantastic question and even though i had a pretty good idea of where i was going with the answer it took a surprisingly long time to fact check my answer and make sure what i was saying was backed with data so really good question i hope people pay attention because as the summer months uh go away and we enter the darker seasons there's some good science here and also man i've learned more about sunscreen and using sunscreen than i ever knew and even me who is really cautious about sun exposure i learned a lot about how to properly use sunscreen so this is going to be one of the more not only scientifically backed answers on the program but really pragmatic and useful this is great stuff so here's let's start with the sunscreen issue some recent studies has shown that some of the nano particles or chemicals and sunscreens there's basically two types of sunscreen one type of sunscreen is focused on scattering uv light away from your skin primarily using little particles of metal in this case nanoparticles which is more of a marketing term than a science term but it just means very very small metal particles or absorption chemicals that actually absorb uv light before it gets to your skin where your skin would absorb it and do dna damage in the process so some recent studies have shown that either nanoparticles or some of the chemicals in sunscreen depending on what type of sunscreen you're talking about can have adverse health effects in laboratory animals and that can include hormonal changes and some cancers that's a big deal absolutely that's a big deal and this is a valid claim this is real science this is not a conspiracy theory but there are some important caveats here's why some people have taken these studies especially alternative health advocates or holistic health advocates and they are now claiming that um sunscreen's more damaging than sun exposure or more dangerous and some are even saying that sun exposure does not cause skin cancer and that you need vitamin d and sun exposure is good you shouldn't get a burn just because it hurts but it doesn't cause skin cancer i want to be really clear these people are wrong they are completely off the wall nowhere near correct and people will die from getting that advice and taking it seriously the sun causes skin cancer the sun causes skin cancer we'll talk more about that later in the answer melanoma is a big deal and the uv light hitting your skin from the sun penetrates enough and into your cells that it will it's ionizing radiation it's the bad kind and it can cause damage to your dna and if that damage is not repaired it increases your risk for cancer also your risk of skin cancer is cumulative over time every second you're in the sun contributes over your life to an increased risk for skin cancer and some people like me who are gingers are a thousand times more likely to get skin cancer at the same amount of exposure as someone with darker skin this is a serious issue and if you're on a website that says the sun does not cause skin cancer close that website it's not a source worth reading i'm not usually that dismissive of people and their perspectives but this is dangerous so now let's talk about the actual science in these studies these very small scatter particles these nano particles the idea is that they can get through your skin and then start to collect in organs like your liver with unknown or detrimental effects now what i've read scientists and experts don't think this is likely these studies have involved typically injections of nanoparticles so obviously it's going to get through your skin and that's a perfectly valid test case to see what happens when these particles get in your body and in those cases they're finding they collect in the liver and other internal organs which we don't like to see but in normal cases it is unlikely they're going to get through your skin unless you have a wound or a scratch or a cut or would eczema do it like what skin conditions perforate the skin enough for these nanoparticles to get through and that's actually not clear that's unknown today that's a question mark in science so if you want to be safe and you want to use a scatter based sunscreen as opposed to an absorption-based sunscreen just go with a more traditional or older formulation that doesn't use nanoparticles now how do you know well if you're using a scatter based sunscreen it's going to look a little bit robotic it's going to be very thick it's going to be reflective it's going to look metallic and those larger particles are not going to go into your skin so that's one option now let's talk about absorption sunscreens the idea here is that some of the chemicals used in these sunscreens can cause cancer or hormonal disruption and let's talk about these studies first these experiments involved very very high dosages of these chemicals comparable to about 30 years of daily sunscreen use at one time and the chemicals were either injected inhaled or ingested by animals not applied to the skin again the testing here is designed to determine what happens when the chemical gets in your body but is not testing if the chemical gets in your body and that's a critical distinction so this is what can happen people take a valid scientific study and misapply the results because they fail to look at the methodology of the experiment and the intent of the experiment what is this experiment designed to test but this is actually instructive and here's why we have spray on sunscreens now and if you spray this mist and inhale it you have just inhaled the dosage of these chemicals into your body in a way that was not intended so in terms of lotions that you spread on your body what i'm seeing in the science is we don't believe there's a significant risk even if you're using a sunscreen that uses one of these these chemicals that the studies say are problematic or potentially troubling but if you use a spray on sunscreen you want to be very very careful not to inhale any of that mist and when you spray your head your face your neck your ears anything around there you want to spray it on your hands and then apply it to your face and that's going to mitigate or dramatically lower any potential risk of these chemicals getting into your body now let's for a second assume the worst that these chemicals really are carcinogens and that they do get in the body we're making an assumption here this is not what these experiments say we have decades of public health data on sunscreen use and what do we find it's not even close sunscreen is much much much much less likely to cause skin cancer than ultraviolet rays from sunlight and it's not even close it's not even close going out in the sun without sunscreen carries a much higher risk of cancer than going out with sunscreen on open and shut take it to the bank the science is clear now if you want to be cautious here's kind of the best sort of cautious approach to sunscreen use go ahead and avoid nanoparticle sunscreens altogether stick with lotions spf 30 or higher and be careful if you have a cut rash or other skin irritation if you do use spray on sunscreen don't spray your face head or neck spray it on your hands and then rub it on and by the way use more than you think you do with spray-on it's good to use two or three coats with lotions it's important to apply every two hours sunscreen is chronically under applied and if you're swimming or toweling or any sort of a friction or abrasion happens on your skin you're going to need to apply even more often now that's a pain and people don't like to do that so consider sun safe clothing as an option that's my own personal approach to sun exposure and it works really well with absolutely no chemical because at all if you look for clothing that is upf rated that's an actual standard where they measure the amount of ultralight light that moves through the fabrics you can get high upf fabrics and i wear a hat with a three inch brim all the way around it i wear a long sleeve collared high upf shirt and i typically wear long pants that are cooling fabric and closed-toed shoes isn't that nuts that's why i look like at the beach but then i just put a little sunscreen on my hands put a little bit on my face in case the angle of the sun gets under my hat i'm limiting the amount of sun exposure i have and the chemicals i swim and stuff like that uh why i don't want melanoma i would rather look silly at the beach then have melanoma and potentially lose my life now here's the second part of the question seasonal effect disorder it's a two-part question that's the long answer this is a little quicker really clear science tanning does not treat seasonal affective disorder uh it's ultraviolet light and uh seasonal affective disorder has nothing to do with uv light it's all about visible light now you went to a tanning bed you felt better why probably some placebo effect probably sitting in a calm quiet space and resting lifted your mood i think it's that simple but the bottom line is tanning is really bad for you you should not tan the science is clear it's a skin cancer risk now but you say well i want i want to combat these shorter days i want to help myself feel good great we have a way to do that 25 minutes in a light box so you get a small enclosed area with with white walls that can literally be a box and you get uh 10 000 lux of white light in that box not uv light not not a uv bulb but a broad spectrum white bulb at least 10 000 lux for 25 minutes is going to help your brain produce the chemicals that you get in the longer days now if you can't afford a light box or that's too much trouble science has shown that watching your diet and exercising are both incredibly helpful in combating the symptoms of seasonal affective disorder so a light box exercise and diet really effective tanning not effective and actually dramatically increases your risks of skin cancers so i don't recommend it fantastic question thank you so much our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike i really love and appreciate all the work you do this podcast and the liturgist podcast has been a real lifeline to me and have helped me to make sense of my experience my question for today is related to the upcoming election i was wondering if you could give us a scientific breakdown of the election and voting process for the presidential election we are always told to vote but it often seems as if the electoral college is really what decides it we also hear talk of red states blue states and swing states i guess my most basic question is does our vote truly matter i want to believe it does but it is hard not to be cynical about it thanks again looking forward to your answer well let's start here i understand the cynicism i really understand political cynicism if there's anything we can agree on as a country it's that it is very reasonable to believe politically cynical i was watching the news this morning uh it was cnn who um you know i think tries hardest of all the networks to be without bias uh and in doing so has this huge centrism bias but anyway they were talking about trump versus clinton and they had these talking heads on about that and to the anchor's credit he was working really hard to get specific answers to policy questions from these talking heads and all they offered him was like sound bites and political spin and it disgusted me so much i turned the tv off so i get the cynicism uh our two major parties often seem like parody it's so ridiculous but you asked a question so i will answer it and only after i offer this disclaimer i am not political science mike i'm not a lawyer i'm not a historian i am stepping outside of my expertise to answer this question i have thoroughly researched it i've included links to additional resources on sciencemic.com so you can check my answer but there's a real risk that i'm going to be less accurate on this question than most of what i say on the show because i'm speaking outside of my expertise so let's start with the electoral college which is a weird name for something that is not a college instead the electoral college is a temporary political body elected by the states that elects the president and the vice president and it's set into the constitution how this works each state gets electors those are people that get to cast a vote in the electoral college you get one elector for each representative your state has in the house of representatives and two for each senator and the district of columbia gets three electors so that they get to weigh in on the presidency today that leads to 538 total electors and for someone to be declared president of the united states they have to get at least 270 electoral college votes and you're right they are the ones who legally elect the president and not the popular vote when you vote you are not voting for the president you are voting for an elector who will vote for the president isn't that weird now here's something kind of weird states decide how their electors are allocated so in most states the winner of the popular vote gets all the votes of all the electors from that state but some states fragment their electors and you can partially take a state it's pretty rare but it happens now here's what's even crazier electors from states are pledged to vote for the candidate the state party chooses but the constitution doesn't explicitly require them to vote for who their pledge to vote for now some state constitutions require it but the constitution of the united states of america doesn't actually require that electors vote for who they are pledged to vote for in practice it's what happens people vote who they pledge to vote for now mathematically it's it's extraordinarily feasible that you can lose the national popular vote but still win the electoral college even if every elector votes exactly as they are pledged to vote we saw that in the year 2000 with bush versus gore what happens there is you win by a narrow margin nationally but you win by smaller margins or lose by narrow margins in key states that have a lot of electoral college votes in fact you can actually win the presidency just by carrying 13 states and getting no votes anywhere else that's mathematically possible it's extremely unfeasible because the states don't have a lot of political affinity together but in theory you could become the president by winning 51 percent of the vote or even 50. you know 05 of the popular vote in just 13 states it's nuts now here's why we have it though why do we have such a weird system it was a compromise the founders some of them wanted the congress to pick the president and vote for the president and others wanted a national popular vote so they built this hybrid model as a compromise that kind of made everyone miserable it wasn't what anyone wanted and so it got selected and it's super weird and i certainly don't think it's ideal but believe it or not it actually favors more populous states over less populous ones and since our most populous states tend to be our most liberal states the electoral college actually offers people on the left side of the political spectrum a little bit of a boost in the national presidential election which is something we don't think about a lot but that's that's how it works it's funny i i kind of anecdotally notice that republicans and democrats tend to gripe about the electoral college pretty evenly but it makes a little bit more sense for republicans to gripe than democrats because democrats it bush vigor being an exception but in general the electoral college gives more populous states more influence in electing the president okay so let's talk about swing states what's a swing state that is a state in the united states where the two major political parties have very similar levels of support among voters and swing states are especially noticed by politicians when they have a lot of electoral votes the two most prominent would be florida my home state and ohio and man when you live in florida you get to see presidential candidates a lot they really want to carry this state and it's a true swing state in the last four elections both florida and ohio have each voted each way 50 of the time really true swing states so do votes in swing states count more than votes in safe states yes in this system politicians should pay more attention to florida or ohio than other states because my vote as a floridian carries more weight in affecting the statistical outcome of the presidency than people in smaller states or safe states safe states are states that consistently vote for one party california you're a huge state with a lot of electoral votes but you're a safe state new york safe state texas today is also a safe state but they're big states but they're safe so you hear that you say well that's not fair why does science mike's vote for president count more than mine well yeah that's really ridiculous i think a national popular vote makes all the sense in the world it's not the system we have but that does not mean your vote doesn't matter and this is critical blocks of voters matter a whole lot and here's why statistically speaking older wealthier and wider voters not not wider like more wide but whiter as in more demographically white older wealthier and whiter voters are much more likely to vote which means they're less likely to say their votes don't matter and because of that their votes disproportionately determine the outcome of elections and disproportionately shape public policy when we talk about money and politics yeah part of that is carrying favors but why those favors matter people need the money to buy ads and build organizations to convince people to vote because voting is the only way to hold office in the united states of america votes matter and young people and poorer people vote a lot less often now i have some empathy here people on the bottom of the income spectrum it's actually a real challenge to vote we have all kinds of laws that make it more difficult for them to vote their polling places have longer lines and less resources they tend to face voter harassment voter disenfranchisement and they have less travel options they have less income it's more difficult to get time off of work so i have a lot of empathy there but it's still really important that they vote if they can and young people especially you know young able-bodied people uh that are higher up on the economic spectrum it's critical that they vote young people are much more progressive than older people statistically speaking and they just don't turn out to vote as much because when you decide your vote doesn't matter you just gave public policy to the person who believes that their vote does i think it's that simple and we're just talking about the presidency in the in in the math yeah in the presidency me as an independent state voter in florida i have a little bit of extra say but the presidency is not the most important election it gets all the press it gets all the social media love but it doesn't affect your life as much as other votes what what votes are important congressional votes senate and house of representatives state and local elections affect your life more than federal elections they set more policy and they drive more change and they draw congressional districts listen to this the president can't set local policies and taxes the president can't establish leadership of local agencies like the police force we're talking about police brutality today the president does not have authority over your local police force the president can't set congressional districts the president can't make laws the president can't declare war the president can't set local tax rates or neighborhood zoning or housing policy the things that affect our lives the most happen in congress state legislatures local city councils elected officials and your vote matters in those elections the down ballot elections and the midterm elections they don't get the national news they don't get televised debates but they affect your life more take a few seconds google a voting guide for your city for your district learn about the options learn about ballot initiatives and amendments make informed choices and show up to vote because your vote matters most in the elections that affect you the most so yeah let's have a conversation about reforming the presidential election let's have a conversation about an amendment to get rid of the electoral college in a national popular vote but in the meantime go vote because your vote matters in the elections that matter most i am so excited to tell you about our sponsor on this week's program journey box media the people at journeybox are really good friends of mine they've i've worked on projects with them and even some of the work you'll see in a few weeks related to my book was done with journeybox media they are amazing people and i want you to get to know them journeybox media makes engaging short films for the church and i think it's important because let's be honest a lot of church media leans towards really safe really oversimplified conservative theology and frankly it's really cheesy it's just so cheesy and journey box media strives to tell stories in a way that is authentic to the human experience and is inclusive they deal with topics like social justice and dualistic thinking and if you go to journeybox media you can search by topics or seasons to see what they've talked about and get digital downloads in high definition in multiple formats you can purchase films individually or get unlimited downloads with annual memberships these are resources for churches that are trying to make a difference in the world today not trying to look back not have you known a stall different age that never really existed anyway but instead trying to make a gospel that is real and relevant to the needs people have now you can learn more at journeyboxmedia.com they are really good friends of mine and i hope you'll take a couple minutes this week to learn more about them [Music] hey mike this is josh i'm a pastor at a methodist church in fort lauderdale florida and i'll be tackling a question in a few weeks that deals with really the question why doesn't god just plainly reveal god's self to everybody it comes from a passage in john 14. and kind of the idea why don't why don't you just god why don't you just write in the right in the sky um you know just show up in everybody's mind or in a dream so that people can't can't deny that you exist and uh as i read the passage jesus doesn't even answer the question he he kind of sidesteps it and says well this is the way that i will reveal myself and so i've been thinking about it wrestling with it i haven't really found any good satisfactory answers but it's led me down some thought paths about how much a singular experience does permanently or produce long-term change in a person's behavior mindset thinking way of life and so as i look at the biblical narrative i you can kind of see this cycle of god doing something or revealing god's self people changing initially and then over time kind of drifting back to old patterns and i've i've noticed this in my life i've seen it in friends lives families lives this a an experience whether it's tragic or joyous just a meaningful experience where it produces life change in some meaningful way but then there is a drift back to old patterns and old habits and so it makes me question um if god did show up in the sky how how much of uh how much of a meaningful effect would that have um in changing people's lives and um i know your story is largely based in coming back to god in an experience with god that did change you and so from your experience and from science what are ways that people can produce long-term change that may be a little more effective than just a one-time experience i love to hear your thoughts i love what you do it's uh really helps me helps me wrestle with some with my faith in life and i love it so keep it up and god bless really interesting question let's start with the obvious some research has actually shown that extremely powerful spiritual experiences can drive permanent personality and or behavioral changes a few books i would recommend one would be how god changes your brain by andrew newberg my go-to recommendation it sings for almost every single question on the show his new book uh how enlightenment changes your brain would really be good uh talking about how to seek out spiritual experiences that drive the kind of change you're talking about uh another book would be when god talks back by the anthropologist tanya lerman those are three books that will all go into that how enlightenment changes your brain will have the most to say about it but some of the nuggets from those other two books are absolutely fascinating and helpful so definitely recommend those three books but those kinds of experiences really radical like i had on the beach when i when i saw god they're rare they don't happen a lot they do drive long-term change my life it's been a few years now and my life has been completely changed how i see the world how i relate to others the work that i do there's not a corner of my life that wasn't changed by that experience and research validates that now there's more common but still profound spiritual experiences that do drive behavioral change but interestingly enough those kind of experiences often called mountaintop experiences don't tend to drive lifelong change and the same is true when we have intentional or directed experiences where we try to make a lot of life change at the same time as you know why is this the case why are habits so tough to break why are our patterns of living so hard to shift evolution whatever you're doing right now works well enough to keep you alive in your situation in your context while letting you consume more energy than you spend and uh evolution calls that the sweet spot what we've seen in science is our situation has to be horrible for us to leave it and change suddenly and dramatically why do people say with abusive partners why do people eat food that makes them unhealthy why do people live sedentary lifestyles because if you can get away with it it's not literally killing you right now your brain thinks it's a pretty good deal spend a little time watching the wild world the animal kingdom even even plants it's a brutal world out there civilization tends to give us the necessities that we're wired to seek out and we don't like to risk losing the necessities our our our instincts recognize how good we've got it um and in some perspectives don't don't misunderstand what i'm saying i'm not saying they're a person that's an abusive relationship has it good i'm saying they have someone in their life they have food they have shelter and part of their lizard brain says this is good enough this is this'll do that's how our brains work so lasting change according to science if uh you want to intentionally change your behaviors actually comes more effectively from small consistent efforts than sudden sweeping decisions or experiences so if you want to drive change in your life how would you do that if you have a vision for like a big sweeping change i want to lose a hundred pounds or even lose 20 pounds or or write a book or start a new career or start a company these are huge audacious goals that are going to be overwhelming difficult to measure so you want to break those down into smaller attainable goals if you want to lose 100 pounds the best way to start is by losing 5 pounds the best way to change your diet is one item at a time and as you make these goals you want to write them down you want to write down your big goal and you also want to write down the smaller goals you'll take to get there and then after you've written your goals you want to think about ways you can measure your progress toward those goals if your goal is weight loss that would include getting a scale and standing on it in some measured way some consistent period of time in between weighings to produce some accountability and then since your brain will lie to you about the number it saw on a scale you'll want to write down or record in some way the number that appears on that scale and compare that against the goals it's really boring it's really unsexy it's how humans drive change so once you have their goal broken into smaller attainable goals and ways to measure it then you decide on times to measure and continually check your progress towards your goal here's the important thing you don't try too many things at once so if because weight loss is just a really easy analogy let's keep going with it you don't on the same day decide to launch a a gym regimen a marathon training radical diet change you don't do all those things at once maybe for the first week you weigh yourself every other day you literally don't do anything but what you do everything like you do now you just add the routine of weighing yourself and then you stop drinking soft drinks and then you stop drinking sweetened drinks at all and you're letting time passage you think and then you start eating a little bit better and then you start walking and just one by one you incrementally add little changes writing them down and watching what it does to the scale and that's the way it works liquid diets crash diets sudden bursts of gym activity or cardio they don't last the only way you make change to a human being is to do it slowly and with some form of accountability when you do the things you say you're going to do figure out a way to reward yourself literally condition yourself train yourself like you would train a dog and give yourself some kind of treat some kind of affirmation when you start to move towards these measurable attainable small goals that's the science of change that lasts and this is this is true for spiritual context now again if you're like so how do i have a spiritual experience i don't want to just adopt habits you know that that's probably more than i can do in this episode other than to say adopting some sort of prayer practice will help well gosh i've never prayed i've never meditated how do i do it think back to the answer i just gave you write down your goals and kill small attainable goals tomorrow i will meditate for two minutes you can meditate for two minutes you can do it you can sit down in silence for two minutes and write yourself attainable goals toward a meditation program and science shows us that meditation will increase your chances of having a deeper spiritual experience right that's how it works humans are amazing creatures that are trained like any other animal on the planet that's not true we're trained like any other large-brained vertebrate on the planet and that's it that's the secretive of change that lasts this is the system by the way i use to change and manipulate my own behaviors exactly to the most minor detail this is the way i do things in my life this is how i release so many podcasts how i write that's how the things i do it's because i've built a a attainable goal with written accountability methodology for how i live my life and it's boring but wow does it feel good to accomplish the things you want to accomplish and to make the changes that you want to change by hacking your brain using science [Music] our last question came in via email and it reads hey mike my girlfriend recently broke up with me and i've spent the past month trying to cope with heartbreak and its fallout i thought i would have started to heal by now but i still fight to get out of bed in the morning one of the ways i process deep pain is by skipping straight to an attempted answer of why it happened i have the tendency to jump into figuring out what i can learn from an experience in order to avoid being forced to sit with the loss i circumnavigate my emotion by analyzing it as opposed to processing it rob bell recently did a series of podcasts on the biblical book of lamentations that provided a lot of insight so i think i'm starting to understand what healthy grief looks like from an emotional and spiritual standpoint however from an intellectual standpoint this experience has sparked an interest in the science of heartbreak what is the science behind it what's going on in the brain and what sorts of physical manifestations follow also are there any consequent studies that address practical steps for healing and moving on science aside what's been your own personal experiences with these things i'm really no longer trying to put my pain under a microscope i've just become genuinely curious thank you so much for taking the time to think about this and offer an answer i'm so incredibly grateful for your work the safe space you've created and the solidarity you provide cheers jonathan well jonathan the first thing i would say as i read your question i feel like i could have written it to myself my own personal experience is very similar now i haven't had a heartbreak from a lost relationship in a long time i have been happily married for 16 years that really helped me deal with romantic loss was not to have any but this this pattern of intellectualizing loss and grief and pain avoiding the feelings by jumping to what we'll learn from the experience you're just describing my natural tendency oddly enough i too learned about healthy grief from rob bell it was talking with rob about grief a few times and going to a couple of his events in person and hearing him talk about that led me to go to therapy and learn about grief and caused a real period of growth in my life so um rob man he's a it's so funny to me like people uh talk about rob's theology or whatever and he's like a pretty orthodox christian and i don't know anyone who works as hard as just helping people live lives of peace as rob bell it's just we he is the worst boogeyman possible for the church because he's just a really good decent human being who loves jesus a lot so it's it's just i just sigh every time i see somebody go on a rob bell tirade like pick a better adversary honestly anyway that one's free rob bell rant in your answer but like like you rob's talks on grief helped me learn a lot about grief that led me to the science of grief and there is a lot of science on grief and loss first of all we call it heartache for a reason it literally hurts and by hurts i don't just mean emotionally when we've done brain scans on people who are experiencing romantic loss the parts of their brain that respond to physical pain are also involved in feeling heartache so if you show someone a picture of their ex and they're in a brain scanner their pain centers activate man isn't that wild now this thing of of figuring it all out isn't actually all bad introspection is an important part of healing but if you use that as a strategy to avoid your feelings then it's a psychological defense mechanism called intellectualizing it's my absolute favorite defense mechanism i use it all the time and in my experiences in therapy my therapist just said something over and over and over to me but how do you feel yes you've done an excellent job explaining the event in detail yes i can tell you've learned a lot from it yes i see you've gotten insights about the world but how do you feel i hate that question i hate that question i don't like grief i don't i don't like ugly crying because i'm heartbroken i don't like it if someone's made actions that make me angry but denying those emotions is unhealthy using intellectualization to drive them from my mind and turn them into abstract concepts is not healthy sometimes we do just have to feel why well the core drive behind heartbreak is separation anxiety we're social animals we love to be around people and we fear a loss of social status when we lose relationships especially romantic relationships which by the way humans are predisposed to like having a mate we're pair bonding animals so you're you're creating these two powerful drives your social drive and your pair bonding drive and then you're breaking them both it creates separation anxiety it creates a type of grief very similar to when a loved one dies it's a it's a separation anxiety that can't be reconciled or can't be reconciled easily and by the way it's not always a good idea to try to push through breakups statistically people who are on again off again report much lower levels of relationship satisfaction than people who don't if you can't make it work maybe you shouldn't try to make it work so how do you move on according to science first of all talk about it it is important to talk about it with friends with uh with a therapist if if you're feeling your feelings are too difficult to handle or it's impairing your ability to live your life but you don't want to wallow in it you want to talk about it but you don't want to just you know put on records by the cure and sit in the dark and and eat chocolate ice cream i'm not speaking from experience i promise uh you want to talk about it not while on it but it's really important you start to regain your sense of self you start to realize who you are separate from that person your wants your desires your experiences and you want to do things just for you you want to become socially active [Music] you want to indulge yourself a little bit whatever it takes to regain your sense of self is going to help you move on from that breakup and that sense of loss which by the way jonathan i'm sorry you're heartbroken um i really am you know you you asked about my experiences i handled heartbreak and separation universally terribly when i was younger i was like the worst ex in the world i never handled it in a way that was healthy or beneficial for me or the other person oh man if i told you specific stories i would be too embarrassed to keep doing the podcast if any of my exes are listening let me say in all sincerity i am sorry wow i guess my best piece of advice on how to handle breakups is don't handle them like i did [Music] well there's another episode of ask science mike that you have listened to thank you for doing so if you've got questions i'd love to answer them you can go to ask sciencemike.com to record a question or send a question via email or you can use the hashtag ask sciencemike on social media and any of those will give you a chance of being on the show of course the people who pick the questions that come on at science mike are my patrons on patreon those are the people that have made a decision to help make ask science mike financially possible if you enjoy the show and you want to send me a dollar or two or five a month just go to asksciencemike.com and click on the patreon button to learn more and you can get perks like early show access or even guaranteeing that you get a question on the show and of course the ability to pick the questions that come on to ask science mike i want to thank andrew golucky for his pre-production work on ask science mike i want to thank greg nordeen for his production and sound design and jeb bottaford for writing the ask science mic theme song thanks for listening everyone and i'll see you next week [Music]