The surreal horror film "Back Rooms" is a smash.
The director is a 20-year-old YouTuber and it's based on his popular web series.
“Why is this online phenomenon taking off at the box office?”
We get into it on NPR's pop culture happy hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to "Life Kit" from NPR. Hey everybody, it's Mario. We all get stressed, right?
And one thing I've learned through our reporting at "Life Kit" is that while it's really important to ground yourself in these moments, that's not where the work ends. Because if you're constantly having these days where your fighter flight response is triggered, there's probably a reason.
Some underlying cause of your stress. It could be your health or the health of someone you love. It could be a relationship that's falling apart or the fact that you can't pay rent, or if you're for your safety.
These are things that never quite go away.
So that fighter flight response is always on at a slow hum in the background. That's Dr. Aditina Rukar. She's an internal medicine physician at Harvard, and she wrote a book called The Five Resets. The Five Resets has been laid out to be a road map.
A road map to recovering from chronic stress. Because stress doesn't just make us feel terrible in the moment. It can also have ongoing effects on our bodies. It puts us at higher risk for heart disease, high blood pressure and strokes, and it can also increase inflammation in our bodies
and weaken our immune systems. NPR health correspondent Ritu Chatterjee talked to Dr. Narukar. And on today's episode, they're going to walk us through these five resets and how they can help you live a healthier, less stressful life.
Richard Reeves is unimpressed by online influencers who pedal ideas about hyper masculinity. You're talking about boys and men. Whereas you're a policy agenda, you're good on podcasts, but we've actually done a bunch of stuff for boys and men.
Sorry, what have you done? Ideas about the next era of manhood. That's on the Ted Radio Hour podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
“Aditina says a key part of lowering one stress”
is finding ways to rest and recover. Breast and recovery are not just nice to have luxuries.
They are essential for our brains and bodies
and particularly for the biological features of our brains and bodies. To thrive. Now, if you're already stressed and overwhelmed, you might be thinking, I have no time for rest and recovery. Or the idea of adding one more thing on my plate,
even if it's to ultimately low a stress, makes me feel even more overwhelmed. Well, that's exactly how most of Aditina's former patients felt when they came to see her. Take for example, a patient she calls Wes.
Wes is a single dad of three. He works two jobs and his doctors had told him that it's important for him to lose weight because he has high blood pressure, is slowly starting to develop picolystral and may develop diabetes down the road.
She says, Wes knew he had to change his diet, but he just couldn't do it because he was living in survival mode. He would wake up early in the morning, take care of his children,
which was his first priority.
He would rush out the door. He would get to his first job. Then between jobs, he needed to eat. And so he'd swing by a drive through on his way to his second job and grab a burger and fries.
And it was easy, fast, and cheap. Then he would go on to his next job and he would finish that and he would come home, exhausted, fatigued. Having done the best he possibly could, he would go to sleep, he would wake up and he would do it all over again.
Wes is like a lot of people. His circumstances were tough. He didn't have the money or the time to join a gym or take a long vacation, although I'm sure he'd have enjoyed that. But Aditi's resets are small adjustments to people's daily lives
that have been shown to lower stress levels. So she began helping Wes with her first reset, which is also our first takeaway. It's called finding your most goal. Most doesn't acronym MOST.
M for motivating over objective and measurable as for small and tea for timely. Something you can accomplish within a couple of months. So stop thinking about what it is about you stressed out over well in life you want to change and why.
Is there something you can look forward to when you make that change in our feeling less overwhelmed? Ask yourself what matters to me most.
“Studies have found that when you focus on what matters to you most,”
it can help you increase your sense of self-efficacy. And self-efficacy is your sense and ability to feel like,
"Hey, I can do that.
Aditi says Wes wanted to get healthy,
“so he could be around for his kids for the long haul.”
That was his M de motivation for his goal. So Aditi helped him find ways to make a little tweaks to his daily routines. The stuff that makes up the rest of the most acronym, the objective, small and timely things that Wes could do right away. Things that could lighten his load within a short period of time.
Like buying healthier foods at the grocery store and... When he was packing, his three children's lunch the night before. He would do the same for himself. Once he started to do that, he stopped eating fast food for lunch. And he started to use those 20 minutes between his two jobs
to take a walk at a nearby industrial park. That 20 minute walk helped him so much in terms of creating a habit of daily movement. He was able to decrease his stress.
“It created a stop-gap measure for him because it helped him create a book end between one job and the other.”
All of which began to lure his daily stress levels and exhaustion. So, when you're thinking about your most goal, try to think hard about why you want to have less stress. Maybe like Wes, you want to have more time for your kids or other family or friends. Or perhaps you want to make room in your life for something else that brings you joy. If you figure out that why it will make it easier for you already exhausted overwhelmed brain to start
thinking about those other little changes you can make in your daily life to get to your goal.
Our second takeaway at the second reset is all about finding quiet in a noisy world.
By changing your relationship with technology, because most of our lives these days are filled with so much noise in information coming at us all the time from our devices, especially us smartphones. Studies show that on average people spend more than four hours on their phone each day. That's more than 28 hours a week.
“surveys also show that over 50% of respondents grab their phones within 15 minutes of waking up”
about 15% doing this as soon as they wake up. They are scrolling through the headlines or social media or their email. Think about what that is doing to your brain and your body. Think about what that's doing to your stress. Aditi also writes about a phenomenon that research a David Levy called "Popcorn Brain."
Think about what happens when you sit down to read a book and then grab your phone to look up a word and then check messages and social media updates. That urge to constantly bounce from task to task when you're online. That's Popcorn Brain. Our brain circuitry starts to pop from that extended time spent online and it makes it increasingly
difficult to live offline. Because the pace of life offline is much slower than the online one and needs more time and attention. A good way to counter that sensation of a popping brain circuitry, Aditi says, is by setting boundaries with your phone. Limits scrolling to 20 minutes a day.
One thing that can help you get there is by limiting the push notifications and alerts on your phone. During the day, she suggests putting your phone away in a drawer or if possible 10 feet away. So it's easier to resist that urge to grab it all the time. At night, she's just keeping the phone far enough so you can't reach for it first thing in the morning. So when you open your eye, give your body and brain the ability to open the other eye and just rest
in the moment for 30 seconds. For one minute, it doesn't have to be long but just acclimate to the morning, delight. And then you can check your phone.
But giving yourself that little moment of pause of grounding at the start of your day can be a game changer.
We'll have more life kit off to the break. An MPR's wildcard podcast, John C. Riley says he believes in endless possibilities. My wife is much more practical. She'd be like the forecast says 90% rain tomorrow, so we should not plan on kayaking. And like, but 10% likes, let's not get rid of the kayaks yet.
Watch her listen to that wildcard conversation on the MPR app or on YouTube at MPR wildcard. Our third takeaway at this third reset is about ways to tap into the mind body connection to lower stress. The mind body connection, it might be a new phrase to you, but you have been operating with the mind body connection in the background, your whole life.
What applies in your stomach when you fall in love, your heart racing before a big interview, or your muscles feeling tight and achy after a long stressful day at work. All examples of the mind body connection. Your mind and your body are in constant communication and inextricably linked. What's good for your body is good for your brain and vice versa. And she has a number of ways to harness this connection to our benefit. For example, regular
Deep breathing exercises, like one exercise called stop, breathe, be the chee...
When I had a busy clinical practice and I was a medical resident in training and I would see
“30 patients a day. And so my task was as I would knock on the patient door before entering the next”
room and I would stop, breathe and center myself and just be. It's three seconds and I would say that's to myself under my breath, stop, breathe and be. Aditi says this technique can be particularly useful before you do something stressful. Say a work meeting that you've been dreading. It only takes a few seconds but when repeated many times over the course of the day can have a dramatic effect on stress levels. Daily movement can also help with that.
Not only is movement good for the brain and the body, but in fact, not enough movement or rather
no movement being sedentary is in fact bad for the brain and body. And so try finding ways to sit
less and move more. Maybe you take five minute walks a few times a day. Or maybe like at these patient Wes, you do one 20 minute walk every day. Our next takeaway, the fourth reset
“in Aditi's book is about the benefits of doing tasks one at a time and taking regular work breaks.”
Because most people these days don't take breaks at work and multitasking has become the norm. The slack channel, the emails, everything going at once, multitasking. It is something that all of us do because it's part of modern working life and we are required to multitask. But she questions that even if we think we're good at multitasking, study show that only about 2% of people can effectively do it. We know that multitasking is a scientific misnomer,
there's no such thing. When we are multitasking what we are actually doing is task switching, doing two separate tasks in rapid session. Aditi says that's taxing on the brain. Multitasking or rather task switching, weekends are prefrontal cortex, weekends are cognition, our memory, our attention, and ironically our ability to be productive.
“What can help she says is a technique called time blocking. Essentially it means doing one task”
for you start at 5 or 10 minutes and then you take a short break and then you do another task for 5, 10, 20 minutes and take a short break and then do the next task. She says doing just one task at a time is better for the brain and so are regular breaks throughout the day. Aditi says the breaks don't need to be very long anywhere between 3 and 10 minutes. But she says be intentional about those breaks and do something to destress.
Whether it means getting up and stretching, taking a walk, going outside, doing something where you are intentionally creating a little bit of spaciousness in your brain can have an impact not just on feeling good but actually changing the biology of your stress. In your brain and your body. In fact, when you take a break you are enhancing your productivity. Her fifth reset and our last takeaway can help you counter one of the most common impacts of stress
on people's psyche by quiting the inner critic. So when there is a negative experience it becomes sticky in your brain like Velcro. The same amount of good and bad may be happening to you at the same time. But when you're feeling the sense of stress you hold on to those negative experiences and there's a heightened sense of negativity. She says when you're stressed the brain uses a part of it called the amygdala. Your amygdala is focused on survival and self-preservation.
And your inner critic has a megaphone during periods of stress because ironically it's trying to keep you safe and out of harm's way. And so when you are trying something new or when you're learning something new that inner critic is holding that megaphone and shouting from the rooftops.
You're not good enough. You're going to fail. You'll never get there. One proven way to
hush that negative inner critic is with a daily exercise of gratitude journaling. And he says every night before you go to bed, write down five things you're grateful for that happened that day. There will be days when you'll have plenty to write about. And on some days it might be hard to find things that you're grateful for. But still, she says stick to the exercise. Even if it's to acknowledge the basic things you have. One of those things could be
I have a roof over my head. I have food in my fridge and my pantry. Over time she says the practice makes the brain less like Velcro and more like Teflon to negative stressful experiences. And it does this to a process called cognitive reframing. Shift your focus to focusing on those good things. And that in turn will change your brain. It'll change your brain circuitry. And it
Will silence that inner critic and quiet down.
And now it's time for a recap. Our first takeaway is figuring out your most
“goal most as an acronym and for motivating or for objective and measurable. As for small and”
tea for timely, this will help your already stressed an overwhelmed brain feel motivated to make changes and figure out where to start. Take away number two, set boundaries with your phone and other devices, keep your phone out of reach at night so you don't reach for it first thing in the
morning and limits crawling to 20 minutes a day. Take away number three, tap into your mind body
connection to lower stress throughout the day. Deep breathing exercises and daily movement are a great
“way to do that. Take away number four, stop trying to multitask, focus on one task at a time”
and take regular breaks at work. Take away number five, practice daily gratitude journaling. It only takes about five minutes but can dramatically rewire your brain to be less stressed
and more open to positive experiences and parts. But regardless of which of these research you use,
are the advice is starting with just two things. She calls this the resilience rule of two. The resilience rule of two is how your brain responds to change. Change is a stressor for your brain.
“Even positive changes in your life can be a stress for your brain. This is why”
New Year's resolutions don't stick because we often have the everything but the kitchen sink approach and we try to do everything all at once, nothing sticks and so we throw in the towel and we say, "Oh well, didn't work." But starting with just two changes at a time she says will make it more likely for you to succeed in your efforts and for those strategies to become daily habits. And once the apartment of your daily life, she says then you can go ahead and try to more changes.
That is how we work with our biology rather than against it. That was Dr. Aditina Rukar, in conversation with NPR Health Correspondent Ritu Chattergy. All right, that's our show. For more life kit, check out our other episodes. We have one on how to get it to strength training and another on common sleep myths. Also, we love hearing from you. So if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share,
email us at [email protected]. This episode of LifeKit was produced by Claire Marie Schneider. Our digital editor is Malica Greeb. Our visuals editor is CJ Rekalan. Meghan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Margaret Serino, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Maggie Luther. I'm Mary El Sigada. Thanks for listening.
Hundreds of thousands of people came to the US as small children as the only home they've ever known. And although they weren't citizens, many got special protections to keep living and working here. Now, though, they find themselves in legal limbo as the Trump administration tightens the screws on immigrants. Listen to NPR's code switch podcasts in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
