Stress: The Science of Chilling Out

0:00Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Versus, the show that pits facts against feeling frazzled.

0:12Today on the show, stress. It's everywhere. We're all feeling it. It's like we're swimming in stress. Does life just like stress anybody else out? I feel like every f***ing five minutes there is something going on and I have to pail a fire. I like want to throw in the towel. Like I just, I'm like, that's it. We're hearing more and more that stress isn't just bad for our mental health, but if we experience too much of it, it can screw with our whole body. We're talking about sleep disruptions, headaches and muscle tension, digestive issues, low energy and fatigue. No living organism was created to sustain these levels of chronic stress for an extended period of time.

0:51But don't stress, because online people say they have the solution. The thing to chill us out. So one thing that's blowing up right now are these devices that can stimulate a very specific place on our body.

1:10Holy crap. It's kind of nice, honestly. Oh, yeah. They're not telling vibrators, although maybe that could work. This is a vagus nerve stimulator. It is all over the internet and it is just the latest in a long line of these tips and tricks that people say can relieve our stress. They're telling us to buy a cold plunge tank, to use a sauna or even sign up for a breathing class. Inhale. This time we're going to let out a sigh.

1:49So today we are going to inhale the science of stress and exhale a podcast. We're going to find out how bad is stress really? What is it doing to our bodies? And what are the science approved ways to de-stress and regulate our nervous system? When it comes to stress, a lot of us are ready to throw in the towel. But then there's science.

2:20Science vs. Stress is coming up just after the break.

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3:22Offer valid September 24th, 2026 through October 4th, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers.

3:37Welcome back. Today on the show, we are looking into the science on stress. I am super excited to get to know the science here. And the only person who could tell it to us is the incredibly stressed out senior producer, Meryl Vaughan. Yeah, I could definitely use some science on stress. So I was excited to dive in too. I was joking. I was joking. How are your stress levels right now? I mean, they're like terrible, like everybody's. So yeah, I definitely wanted to know like what actually works and how bad is this really? Because I had heard that it's like, you know, on top of just feeling like crap, it's also going to destroy my body to be stressed out.

4:20So I wanted to see like what is the evidence there? Yeah, 100%. 100 % because the word on the street is definitely every time we feel stressed, every time your heart rate elevates just a little, you got to regulate, chill yourself out, go jump in some cold body of water. First question, is that true? Is all stress really that bad for us? So, yeah, I started diving in and right away I came across some stuff that was pretty surprising. So, like, there is a study done by this guy. My name is Mark Seary. I'm a professor in the psychology department at the University of Buffalo. And so let me tell you about what Mark did.

5:01So he wanted to see how living through like really stressful life events affects our mental health. Like how much does being exposed to hard stuff take a toll on us mentally? Great. And, you know, lucky for him, he had access to this really amazing data set to help answer this. So they asked about 2 ,000 people about all these really stressful things that had happened to them over their lives. Serious illness or injury to oneself or a loved one. Exposure to combat. Being divorced yourself. Your parents being divorced. Death of a loved one. Pretty terrible things. Terrible. Absolutely, yes. Major negative life events.

5:40And then they gave people a checklist. So it had 37 of these things and people could check off what's happened to them. And then they also asked them about their mental health, things like life satisfaction, symptoms of depression and anxiety. And then they looked to see whose mental health was worse. And one finding was pretty obvious right away. The people who are at a high level of adversity, they on average are the worst off across all these outcomes. So if you've had a ton of these really hard things happen to you, they are feeling the worst. Exactly right. Exactly right. Not surprising. Yes, it does make sense.

6:16But the really interesting part then is comparing people who are at zero adversity to people who are at like some adversity. And the people who are at zero were not the best off. They were actually worse off than the people who had experienced some adversity. That actually makes sense to me. Yeah, how come? I'll give you a sort of obvious example. The other day I had a really nasty stomach bug. It was so bad. My stomach pain was off the charts. I was crying. The physical pain was so bad. And after it, it kind of went away within a couple of hours. And all this week, my stress levels have been way lower than normal.

7:04I'm like, I'm healthy. I'm alive. I can eat ice cream again. There's something about you go through a difficult time. You know you can survive it. You're proud of yourself, you know, depending on obviously what happened to you. And you do come out the other side, as many songs have told us, stronger, I think. And that is just a stomachache for a couple of hours. A terrible thing like what these people have experienced. I could imagine that, do we want to call it a glow, lasting a little longer. Is that what Mark has found? Um, sort of. He actually thinks that it's basically like you're building up resilience.

7:48Yes. Sort of like exercise, he thought. Like, we need to work out our stress response to get good at stress. It's very much analogous to developing physical fitness. Like, if you never work out, if you never put your body through a physical stressor, you have zero opportunity to develop physical fitness. So yeah, maybe getting exposed to these big stressful things helps our body get better at responding to other stressful stuff without totally overwhelming us. Okay, so it's not just putting pain in context, which was how I was thinking about it. It's actually your stress response gets better and better with each stressor, potentially up to a point.

8:29It could be both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's actually a sweet spot was like four awful things happening to people. Oh, gosh. So you don't want to go too high either. But yeah, some stress seems like it, or some big stressful thing seems like it actually makes us more resilient. And he actually tested that in a separate experiment. He like brought people into the lab to see if they were basically tougher, if they had experienced stressful stuff in the past. What did he do? We asked them to put their hand in ice cold water for as long as they could stand and then report how painful is this. tell us at the end their level of what's called situational catastrophizing, like, I thought this was never going to end.

9:10Have you done this, by the way? I have. I do not prefer to do it. My hands get cold if I'm, like, rinsing kale under the cold water faucet. Okay, so the people who had been through some level of trauma, these terrible things in their lives had happened, they could cope with this painful exercise better than others? Yeah, yeah. The people, they ask people, you know, to do that same checklist and the ones who had experienced some adversity experienced less physical pain than those that didn't go through anything like that and they catastrophized less. Interesting. And then there's also animal experiments that back this up too.

9:52So does this, all this research change the way that you like go through life? Yeah. You know, it's a good question. Honestly, it's helpful to know this stuff. Because, like, how I explain you the meaning of this work is not that, oh, yeah, you should seek out to break some bones. Yeah. Like, these are bad things. And you don't need to seek them out. But invariably, almost, they do happen to people. But what this work says is that, you know what? At some point in the future, this actually does have the potential to be a net positive for you. Personally, I find that to be really comforting. Yeah, so bottom line, science actually does kind of support the whole, like, whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

10:36So Mark was talking about these kind of terrible, singular, stressful events that hit. You break a bone, someone you love dies, and how your body responds to that. But what about kind of day-to-day stress, just the relentlessness of life? What do we know about what that does to the body? Yeah, so the way that scientists kind of think about this is that our bodies are totally made to deal with stressors here and there. So it's not like every time you get stressed out by something and your heart starts beating faster, it's not like that's a bad thing and we want to eliminate that altogether. Right, you don't need to jump in some cold water or anything.

11:21Our body can deal with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our body can deal with that. And then if it recovers, then you'll be okay. Yeah. But we know that if you don't have like time and space to like recover, and the stressors just are like happening again and again and again and again, that can add up and take like a toll on your body. and the way we know this is by studying groups of people who experience a ton of stressors like if you're taking care of someone who's sick or disabled if you've been abused if you know you live in a low-income neighborhood if you experience racism there's all these like signs that in these kind of situations where you might experience stress day in and day out we can see this kind of bigger effects so what happens in your body when you have this relentless stress.

12:09So one thing that we think is going on is it does mess with your cortisol system. Yeah. So it's like normal for cortisol to be high at the start of the day since it helps us wake up. But and then maybe you'll like experience little bursts of it during the day as the stressful stuff comes up. Uh-huh. You can literally measure that, right? In studies, they'll get people to do stressful things and you see the cortisol spike and then it should go back down. Is that the idea? It should go back down. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so the system kind of turns itself off after you've dealt with that stressful thing.

12:43The little cortisol spigot is like, okay, stressor is gone. I'm going to turn off now. Yeah. But studies have found that when stress is incessant, that system gets dysregulated. So the cortisol spigot is like turning on too much or not enough or at the wrong times of day. And, you know, that is what's bad. and that can up your chance for cardiovascular disease or depression and anxiety. And can you feel that? As you're describing it. I do know what one is happening to you. Yeah, yeah, because I sort of, I feel like the times in my life where I have been overwhelmed with stress, I do feel like I'm just like vibrating at a higher frequency throughout the day and things will trigger me much faster.

13:32is that the response you're talking about? I was trying to find like what are the signs for like when you've reached this point of chronic stress and even though there's no like for sure signal that's like yes you are chronically stressed now one of the things that reviews say to kind of look out for is feeling irritable or overwhelmed a lot so maybe that's what you're describing yeah and like that kind of changes in mood yes uh feeling down, having trouble going to sleep. Like those are kind of some of the clues that tell us that you might be heading into the kind of chronic stress land. And then there are other things that happen kind of in the moment when we're feeling stressed out.

14:12So like your heart rate will get faster, your breathing gets faster. But then sometimes you get into this particular stress response that's bad is called the threat response, where even though your heart is pumping blood faster, it can't get out to your limbs and your brain more easily because your blood vessels don't dilate. And so that's part of the way we think it's kind of bad for us because like the blood isn't getting where it's supposed to go. Wow. So it's just totally dysregulated. The systems that are supposed to be, you know, heart pumps, blood vessels dilate, that something's just all gone haywire with this stress response.

14:55Yeah. But what's interesting is that there is another way, there is another stress response that doesn't seem like it's as bad as that. So that whole process that I just described, it's, you know, it's not inevitable. So I talked about this with Jeremy Jameson. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. And he told me that he noticed firsthand that people can have like more helpful stress responses back when he was a football player in college. You would see your teammates before a game who'd be like really amped up. And so there the stress response was seen as like a supportive thing for the performance.

15:30So like, yeah, we can do this. Yeah. Yeah, I want that stress response. So in this case, you know, your body actually, when you think you're prepared to take on the challenge, you have this different thing happening in your body called the challenge response. And in that case, your blood vessels will dilate. You'll, you know, everything opens up and the blood gets to where it's supposed to go. And so, yeah, Jeremy told me, like, what happens in this case? Well, he's like, great. I will do things, help get you all the resources you need to take that stressor on. And so you see dilation of the blood vessels.

16:05You see more blood going out the periphery. You see production of anabolic hormones. It's all these performance and health supportive responses. So the aim is like, I want you to take, I want you to approach the stressor because you think you can handle it. So your body is like, go, go, go. Like you can do it. Go get it. So sometimes I do have that response to stress. So it's not as if one person will always be f***ed by stress and another person will always be charged by it. The same person can have two different responses. Yeah. And then one key thing about the way these two responses are different is that we think your body might make less cortisol when you're having that good one and more of other hormones like testosterone.

16:49Less cortisol. Oh, how interesting. It's a stress response, but you don't have cortisol spikes. Instead, you have testosterone spikes? Well, you still make some cortisol, but the ratio is different. Yeah, you make less cortisol, we think, and more testosterone when you're having like the good stress response, which would be kind of, it's a performance enhancer, right? Yeah, interesting. It can help us do more things. It gets cleared out of the body faster. Here's Jeremy. And so once a stressor is dealt with, you go back to baseline, you go back to calmeriostasis very quickly. And yeah, so Jeremy wanted to see, like, can we teach people how to have that testosterone-fueled, like, Captain America challenge response?

17:33Oh, okay. Instead of feeling the, like, the scary, you know, ah, I'm not ready. Yes. So yeah, he did a study where he basically taught people that stress can be helpful, like, you know, stress isn't the enemy. So they got over 300 community college students. And before a big math test, they gave some information to teach them about basically what we've been talking about, how stress itself isn't necessarily bad. And so when they felt it coming on during the test. Hey, your hands are sweaty. Your heart's raising. Great. You just pull it around the way you need to. That's good. Yeah. And so I think when people see that, it's like, oh, this is fuel now for me.

18:12And this is how I can support myself in this performance setting. You take something that was seen as this hindrance, and now it's seen as something that's resourceful to you. So instead of trying to do the math test despite the stress happening in your body, try to use the stress? Yep. You lean into it. You use it. It's a resource. Wow. You can control it. You're not just a puppet to whatever your cortisol is doing. You can actually direct that energy. That's what Jeremy wanted to test, right? Okay. So they had some people learn this technique of like, try to use this, you know, feeling. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

18:51Ride the wave. Yes, yes, yes. And then they also had a control group where they just told people to ignore the stress. Okay. And then they looked to see what happened. Uh-huh. And they found that the students who learned this like lean into your stress technique, they did better. Like fewer of them dropped the course. they were about 15 % more likely to pass the class than the students who got the just ignore it advice. That was across a couple of different studies with different groups of students. And their bodies made relatively more testosterone and less cortisol than the other students. That's an inspirational stress story, Meryl, that you can try to redirect it.

19:32And it's as simple as just being aware that I'm in stress mode. Do-do-do-do-do-do. Write it. Write it. Yeah. Like that's kind of what we're supposed to do. Yeah. There's another study that did something even simpler. So my favorite one on this got about 100 people to do something else. So they weren't preparing for a math test, but it was something else. Yeah. Do you want to guess? Public speaking? It was karaoke, actually. Ah! So I just love to get people up there doing public speaking karaoke. That's true. Even better. Even better. Okay, did they give them the songs or they got to pick? They didn't get to pick.

20:14No, they made everybody sing Journeys Don't Stop Believing in front of other people. This is scientists really putting themselves on the line. You know, they would have had to listen to that song. People kill that song over and over again. How many people you say were in this study? It was about 100. 100 Don't Stop Believing. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And not surprisingly, when people found out they had to do this, their hearts started beating faster. And so they all showed a strut response. My heart is beating because I'm worried you're going to ask me to do it. I'm there. I'm there. Well, but then beforehand, the researcher assigned some people to say something out loud, like, I am excited.

20:57And then other people had to say something else, like, I am anxious. Okay. And she found that the ones who said, I am excited, they felt more excited. And not only that, they actually sang the song better than the people who said they were anxious. Wow. They were less off key and they were more accurate when they sang Don't Stop Believing, according to this like software program that they use to analyze people's responses. This makes me think, you know, when people today, they don't like science, they don't like facts. And you know what I want to tell them, Meryl? Don't Stop Believing. Yeah, that's right.

21:34so if you're not having to sing journey um can you use can you really use this in day-to-day life jeremy is like hopeful that this could actually help people more generally even not specific to like preparing for a like event but yeah like he did a preprint where he enrolled people who might be vulnerable to chronic stress. So these were high schoolers in like a low-income, mostly black community who went to a really challenging high school. And he taught them this, you know, stress can be positive, you know, use it mindset. And it seemed like it helped them too. Like just generally on their most stressful days, they felt better about themselves and their cortisol was lower.

22:19So he thinks that it can just like generally be helpful. Wow. And obviously, I don't want to make it seem like all you have to do is change your mindset and all of your stresses will melt away. There's a reason people are stressed out. Yeah, this isn't going to fix the causes of stress for a lot of people. And then there's also just situations where using this approach probably wouldn't be a good idea in the first place. Like if you're having panic attacks, Jeremy mentioned like you probably don't want to like lean into the stress in that case, right? You want to lower your stress. Right. But maybe as you're going through your day, maybe this tool can help with little moments to make your day a little bit better.

23:05That's the idea. Yeah, exactly. Okay. After the break, I want to look at that orgasm device, Meryl. Yeah. What the hell was that person doing? the orgasm device after the break. Coming up.

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