As the political landscape shifts beneath our feet,
we're all vulnerable to a well-funded distraction economy
“determined to take our eye off the ball.”
Our weekly politics series, if you can keep it, is here to help, where our focus is not the horse race, but the state. We tackle the big political stories of the day and why they matter for our democracy. Join me, Todd's Willow.
And me, Jen White, on the one-ay podcast, from WAMU and NPR. Hey, everybody, it's Mario. The other day I woke up feeling sad. And I wasn't really sure why.
It just got worse as the day went on. I started wondering, what is bothering me? Is it a dream I had? Am I stressed about something? Some unresolved trauma?
I should dig up. Then around 2.30 in the afternoon, I found the headlunch. I bit into a juicy salmon burger with pickles and a oily on top. And realized, oh, I was just hungry.
Yeah, bad moods.
“Sometimes they have a big underlying emotional reason.”
And sometimes there's signal that we need to meet one of our basic bodily needs, like eating, or drinking water, or talking to another human. Now, let me be clear. It's okay to be in a bad mood.
As we know from inside out, all of our emotions, sadness, included, serve a purpose. But let's say you want to pivot. There are a lot of things you can do. On this episode of LifeKit with Help from NPR Science Desk,
we're going to hand you a menu of research backed mood boosters. These are actions you can take when you've got less than 15 minutes to spend, and you want to escape that gloomy cloud hanging over you. Just to note here, none of these actions on their own can treat serious mental health conditions.
But they can supplement your pre-existing mental health routine, and they can help you shake off that bad vibe, at least in the moment. This week on newsmakers, after more than a decade in comedy, I wasn't sure that we would get here.
Robbie Hoffman is fearless. I had a small feeling I wasn't sure. And fully or herself. My landlord. Hello.
You can go out and wash. Well, I'm not home now. I'm doing something. We plunge into comedy and success with Robbie Hoffman on NPR's newsmakers. Hey, you know that nagging voice in your head,
the one telling you to put the phone down and stop doom scrolling. Well, it's time. Look up. Take a daily curiosity break with shortwave and pair a science podcast. Let your mind wander to the edges of outer space,
or wonder about what's lurking in the depths of the sea floor all in under 15 minutes. Shortwave. Your daily mental reset. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. It's just not bathing.
Yes, yeah. So this is like when the Uber came out, and they're like, it's not taxi. It's right, chair. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games.
Listen to the week wait. Don't tell me podcasting me NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Our first mood booster is a cool one, a really cool one.
You ever heard of a polar bear plunge? That's when a bunch of people get together. Sometimes there's a new year's day tradition. And jump into the freezing ocean. Ready, guys?
Oh yeah, go walk in, walk in with attention. Wow, people are now doing this all year round. It's called cold plunging. Ready? Go.
One, two, three. And cold plunging is exactly what it sounds like. You submerge yourself in cold water. Usually in the studies, we're talking about temperatures lower than 60 degrees.
But there's no one definition. People are practicing it in different ways, depending on what they have access to. That's NPR health and science correspondent Will Stone. He lives in Seattle and cold plunges a few times a week. Let's see if I can do it.
You're hearing him on an outing with a group called the Puget Sound Plungeers. And some of their members told him that a cold plunge can feel transformative. There's this point where you hit a level where it's not cold anymore. And this like calm washes over you, it's pretty cool. Any anxiety, anything I'm struggling with, it's just gone.
And when I come out of the water, it's I've left it in the water.
“Okay, well, what do we know broadly speaking about the benefits of cold plunging?”
You've reported it a bit on what happens in those first moments when you get into cold water?
Yeah, that's right. There is a first kind of physiological reaction you have, which is called the cold shock response. This is when your body basically freaks out. Your heart rate jumps, your blood pressure spikes, it activates your fight or flight response. This is the called the sympathetic arm of your nervous system.
You'll have a release of like stress hormones, adrenaline, and scientists do ...
of the benefits that we see specifically around mental health has to do with that first intense
“this cold shock response that you have to deal with and encounter when you first get in.”
Okay, well, let's talk more about the mental health benefits. What is the evidence that you've seen? So I would say the evidence is still pretty thin. But I do see it as one of the most promising areas of research. There's a one small study from the UK that shows even a quick dip in the cold water can improve
your mood. And at this one study on mood, found it didn't really matter if it was five or ten or 20 minutes in the water, it all seemed to help about have the same effects.
All right, so that's our first mood booster. Try a cold plunge.
If it's your first time, will says find a body of water somewhere in the 50 to 60 degree range and prioritize safety. Make sure you have a friend with you and a plan to warm up fast after. And if you can't get to a pool or lake or the ocean quickly, a cold shower or an ice bath can give you similar benefits. Our next mood boost starts with the team of researchers aiming to answer this question.
“What is the least amount of movement needed to offset the risks of sitting?”
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center recruited a bunch of middle-aged and older adults and had them sit for eight hours, a typical workday. And then they started including breaks for them to walk in a treadmill. And PR's Alice and Aubrey reported on this. They learned that just taking a one or two minute walk once per hour helped to lower blood pressure. And this wasn't a huge surprise because it's known that when you stand up, when you move,
your muscles burn more fat and you increase blood flow. So that's very beneficial. That's helpful. But when the participants opted to twice an hour on the treadmill for longer periods up to five minutes, they saw more impressive results. So I have to tell you, I just did this. I put my shoes on, walked out the door, set a timer for five minutes, and just kind of walked around, walked a few blocks, had the sun on my face. Nice. How did you feel?
It felt really good. I mean, I do try to stand up from my desk, but the walking part of it felt there was something else about that. It was like, suddenly, my problems didn't feel as heavy. Wow. Okay. Well, that's big. That's worth noting. And I'll point out that there was one more benefit of these short frequent breaks that was noted in the study. I spoke to Kathleen Jans. She's a health promotion researcher at the University of Iowa. And she points out that the
participants in the study felt better when they built in more walking breaks. People felt less fatigue. People were in a better mood because they took those breaks.
“I wonder, do you have to walk to get the benefits of this? Can you just move for five minutes?”
Like, can you vacuum or can you dance around your apartment for five minutes and get the same benefits? Absolutely. So however you do that, however you build in movement, that's the goal here. And if you're bored by walking, you can dance, as you say.
That's our second mood booster. If you have 15 minutes, five minutes, one minute. Get
up at a bed or away from your desk and go on a walk or dance around your apartment or do some upright stretching or just do a lot of laundry. Move that body. All right, our next mood booster comes from lifekits digital editor, Malca Greep. Malca, I know that is your nine to five being our digital editor, but you actually have a five to nine. After that, what is your other job? Yeah, I actually love that phrasing. I do a myriad of things.
I am a cartoonist. I'm writing a screenplay. I'm a graphic novelist. Doing these things makes me feel really relaxed and it's my way of expressing myself and my emotions and helps me understand what's going on inside. It's like a compulsion. It's a compulsion to help me understand myself and the world. Yeah, so you've actually looked into this. Why it feels so good to make something. What is the benefit we get from whether it's doodling or some other creative hobby?
Yeah, so I reached out to experts about this. I talked to Girija Kymal and she's a professor at Drexel University and a researcher in Art Therapy. Things change in your body, your stress levels go down, your sense of perceived stress, your mood improves. And so one of the coolest things that she told me about this, this need and the reason why we make art is that it may serve an evolutionary
Purpose.
future. And she wrote about this in a 2019 study in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association.
“So this act of imagination is actually an act of survival. It is preparing us to imagine possibilities.”
And that makes sense, right? We've been making art since we were cave dwellers and maybe making art helps us prepare for problems in our lives or helps us imagine better futures for ourselves. I feel like I can also take emotions that are in here and get them out there so you can start to I don't know. It's almost like to remove them from your body and put them on the page. It all sounds like a cliche, but yes, it's helping you process what maybe you didn't even fully
understand you were feeling. Art can do amazing things and it can improve your mood in a big way.
In Gage in any sort of visual expression, coloring, doodling, free drawing, results in the reward pathway in the brain being activated, which means that you feel good. And it's perceived as a pleasurable experience. So the researchers have also found that
“coloring and other forms of art, they lower stress and anxiety, right?”
Yeah, there was this 2016 paper in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association that Gage worked on. And she and some researchers basically measured cortisol levels of 39 healthy adults. And they found that 45 minutes of creating art significantly lowered cortisol levels. Okay, so I wonder, Malika, is all art equally beneficial in this way? You know what? That's a really cool question. Here is a recommends using modeling clay to just mess
around with, take some in your hand and make a bowl or make a sculpture just do anything with it. Some media like clay, which engages perhaps both your hands and therefore many parts of your brain, your sense of touches, deeply engaged, your sense of three-dimensional space, site. Maybe a little bit of sound, all these engaged. So when you are using several parts of yourself and for self expression, that's likely going to be more beneficial.
But really, she says, just do whatever feels good to you. You know, if you really like making scenes, which is what I'd like making, make scenes. If you really like painting, paint, do whatever feels good for you. You just want to be able to keep coming back to do that art thing. All right, so Malika, what is a good creative exercise someone could do if they have say 15 minutes and they want to lower their stress or feel like they're getting that reward? Yeah.
So I'm the queen of micro art projects, love it. I'm a big believer of making things sloppy and fast just so that you get that high of having completed something. And so one of the things that I love to recommend to people is to challenge yourself to make a little mini-zine. It's an eight-page mini-zine in one sitting. And like in one sitting, it can be in five minutes or in ten minutes. You can finish a zine, just like tell a story,
in eight pages, and get it done. Mood Boost are number three, create something. And Malika says, "Don't be too precious about your creations. These do not have to be perfect." We will have more life kit after the break. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Rula. With Rula,
finding a therapist and getting the help you need is easier than talking yourself out of it. Because Rula offers personalized cost estimates and has no hidden fees. With sessions costing an average of $15 and over 120 insurance plans accepted nationwide. If you're ready to stop talking yourself out of finding care and making progress,
head to Rula.com. That's R-U-L-A.com and take the first step.
Rapid fire around of Mood Boosters with NPR journalist Ryan Kilman. Hey, Ryan. Hey, Mario. All right. So a few years ago, Ryan, you got together with some other
“folks at NPR to look at research-backed ways that we could make ourselves feel good, right?”
Yeah, that's right. So, you know, we were coming sort of out of the pandemic at the time, which was incredibly isolating for a lot of people. And, you know, people had been deprived of many of their sources of joy that they once had. So we had the idea to create an app to help counteract some of that. Shake off some of those, you know, pandemic feelings. Big shout out to Meredith Rizzo, come out Roth and the whole news apps team here at NPR.
And, basically, the app offers a menu of ways you can enter different positive emotional states,
Wonder, gratefulness, anticipation, that kind of thing.
Joy Generator. You can find it at NPR.org/Joy. All right, Ryan. Let's go into some of these techniques.
Let's have a look at this. Have a look. We test them out on you. Okay. I'm down. So what I want you to do is listen to this for me and tell me how it makes you feel. I don't like that. That's fair. That's not the sound for everyone. What that actually is is someone playing with slime. Sounds weird, I know. But for some lucky people like myself, sounds like that will give you this sort of ring-tingly sensation. It's called autonomous
sensory meridian response, otherwise known as ASMR. Yeah, I have, I have seen ASMR videos and some
of them, I like and some, I don't. I get that sensation when I watch people put makeup on other people.
Oh, I like that fun specific detail about you. Fantastic. Yes, so there actually isn't a ton of research. But in one study from 2018, that was published in the journal plus one, a team of researchers hooked up dozens of participants, people who got this ASMR feeling to biological feedback machinery. And they found that when they watched ASMR videos, hearing those sounds of things like plastic wrappers crinkling, appealing garlic, pouring a fizzy drink.
When they heard those sounds, their heart rates decreased on average by more than three beats per
minute and they got these pleasurable chills, you know, these goose bumps or shivers up your spine.
For me, personally, it's hard to describe, but it's something like what you might feel when you're listening to a really good song. I think what I like is about those makeup videos, is that often the person putting the makeup on is talking very softly to like their sort of talking like this. And I think that that's the kind of ASMR that I like. Absolutely. Yeah, whispering is a big
“in the ASMR community for sure. And how much, I wonder, like, how much ASMR would you need to listen”
to to get that mood boosting effect? Well, with the videos that the researchers showed and that's one study, they were showing about three minute videos. So, you know, conceivably, we can get those tingly sensations pretty quickly. All right, mood booster number four, tap into ASMR to calm your mind. Watch a soothing video online. Figure out the triggers that are most pleasing for you. What is the next mood booster? Well, let me ask you this. Are you a cat person or a dog person?
I would say dog person. Okay, good answer. No wrong answer there, folks. It's all good. But here, I'm going to send you this link of YouTube video, watch for me. Okay, so you're watching this puppy pile dog video, right? Yeah, it's just like, it looks like maybe a mama dog with her little baby puppies sleeping next to her and they're just like breathing and somebody was
“petting there for, is this a live stream? Yeah, this is a live stream. So, what's going on here?”
What's meant to be happening here is the the power of cuteness. Some lucky researchers at the University of Leeds actually have attempted to look into why we like watching puppies and kittens stuff like that so much and they showed 30 minute montages of cute animal videos to stress out college students and they found that their blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety all dropped. And it's like you don't actually even need to be with a puppy. You could just look at videos of
puppies. Yeah, right? There's a reason that, you know, so much of my social media is subscriptions to dogs doing things in a cute animals, right? Lood booster number five, maybe you could guess this one, but cute animals make us feel good. So, sidel up next to your cat or dog or parrot
“or rabbit or snake. If that's what you're into, no pets in your house, those live puppy”
cams and cat cams on the internet do the same thing for us. Okay, so I have one last thing for you to listen to and I just want you to sort of note what you're feeling as you listen to it as a vote, any things or a mind you of anything. So let's check it out. Ooh, it feels cozy.
I'm feeling like cozy mystical beach front cams cottage.
homey. So yeah, what we were doing in creating this app for this particular chapter of it, right?
We were trying to put together sounds and visuals that might evoke memories and for, you know, a broad generation of listeners, right? So from the sound of a disk drive booting up to cat purring to, you know, rain on a window pane. So these are things that might feel like familiar and take you back to your childhood, remind you of your past and what we were trying to tap into is nostalgia. And that's that bitter sweet yearning, right? We feel to go back in time.
And it's a pretty intricate emotion actually for one, nostalgia is actually a universal experience
“and even kids feel it. Okay, so why, sometimes when I think of nostalgia, I think it feels a little”
sad, so I'm surprised this is a mood booster. Right, right? So what science is think is that nostalgia
has a couple of different functions, right? For one tapping into these memories might help us when we're lonely, right? The good ones by reminding us of fond, personally meaningful times. And when we're nostalgic, people report feeling a stronger sense of belonging and described their lives as more meaningful. And these memories remind us also to strengthen our current relationships. Yeah, it sounds like nostalgia can be a little reminder of what we love or what
matters to us. Right, exactly. How would you put yourself in this state, apart from listening to some audio like we just did? Yeah, you can actually put yourself in the state. You could, you know, go through your camera roll and pull up pictures from years ago or even not even that long ago.
“You could cook an old family recipe or read your favorite kids book from growing up, right?”
You know, I something I like to do is like listen to the music I listen to in high school, which you know, I actually had like a different meaning for me then, but I still look back on it with nostalgia. There's that one song. It's like a fall-up boy. I hope it's fall-up boy. Sugar, we're going down. We're going down, down, and an earlier round. Oh, yeah. Sugar, we're going down, swimming in. Yes, yeah, who is that?
Fall-up boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah it is. That song takes me back. Thank you Ryan for all these mood boosters. Yeah, have it to be here.
So mood booster number six nostalgia is a powerful, complicated, but deeply enriching emotion.
“Spend a few minutes looking back in your camera roll. Maybe go through the pictures you took on this”
very day, 5, 10 or 15 years ago, or Ryan says you could listen to your favorite songs from high school, just to feel that connection to your younger self. Okay, it's time for a recap. If you're feeling low energy or less-less or just having a blood day, that's the scientific term for it, I've heard. We've got tips for you that research shows will help make you feel better. Shock your body was something called cold plunge splash at the pool, a cold shower,
move your body. Maybe go in a walk or a dance or on the house or wave your arms or out. Create something. Make it fast and messy. This isn't the time to be precious. Watch some ASMR videos to get those nice brain tingles going. Spend some time loving up on cute animals virtually or in person and tap into your nostalgia. Crack open the old Facebook albums, take a little virtual walk down memory lane.
For more life kit, check out our other episodes. We've got one on different stress resets to snap out of your anxiety and another on longer term ways to feel happier in life. You can find those at npr.org/lifekit. And if you love life kit and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/lifekit newsletter. 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 Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino. Our digital editor is Mallika Greb, and our visuals editor is CJ Rekalon. Meghan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Clare Murray Schneider, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Quasilee. I'm Mary El Sagarra. Thanks for listening.
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