Stop Trying So Hard to Sleep & Why New Things Are So Hard to Resist

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1:22Today on Something You Should Know, why your fingers and toes sometimes get cold when the rest of you doesn't. Then, people worry a lot about their sleep. They take pills, wear trackers and toss and turn. And it's causing sleep problems now because we're trying to biohack it, over-optimize it. And I just wish that I could take that worry away from people and help them realize how incredible your sleep is and how much it's looking after you, no matter what your expectations are. Also, what is the point of goosebumps? And who doesn't love new things? New car, new clothes, new gadgets. Research has shown that when we encounter something novel, our brains fire off dopamine, pushing us to explore it.

2:07So we are hardwired to gravitate to new things. The problem is that today, novelty is everywhere. We are overloaded with it. All this today on Something You Should Know. There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear. And my wife and son buy from Quince, too, all the time. What keeps bringing us back is the quality and the price.

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3:34Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support our show. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Have you ever had that experience where your fingers and your toes feel real cold, but the rest of you doesn't?

4:17Well, why does that happen? That's the question we're going to answer as we begin this episode. I'm Mike Carruthers, and welcome to Something You Should Know. So on a chilly day, your fingers and toes can feel freezing, while the rest of your body feels perfectly comfortable. That's not simply because they're farther away from your heart, which some people believe. You see, when your body gets cold, it deliberately reduces blood flow to your extremities. Blood vessels in your hands and feet narrow so that more of the warm blood stays around your vital organs, like your heart, lungs, and brain.

4:54In other words, your body is willing to sacrifice the comfort of your fingers and toes to protect the important machinery in the middle. That's also why warming just your hands doesn't really seem to help much. One of the most effective ways to get warm fingers and toes is to warm your core. Put on another layer, a jacket or a hat. Once your body is satisfied that its important organs are warm enough, it can then afford to send more warm blood back out to your fingers and toes. And that is something you should know.

5:31People spend an awful lot of time worrying about their sleep. Am I getting enough? Is it good quality sleep? Why did I wake up at 3 a.m.? Is my bedroom too warm? Should I be tracking all of this? Increasingly, we're trying to manage and optimize sleep with apps, watches, rings, special routines, and all kinds of advice about the perfect way to sleep. But what if that's part of the problem? What if sleep generally knows how to take care of itself, and the more you monitor it, judge it, and try to perfect it, the more anxious you become about getting something that is supposed to happen naturally.

6:13And of course, anxiety about sleep is a pretty good way to make sleep harder. Stephanie Romaszewski has a refreshingly different take on all of this. She is a sleep physiologist and co-founder of Sleepyhead Clinics. She has worked in chronobiology and assisted with sleep research at Harvard Medical School. And her book is called Think Less, Sleep More, From Panic and Perfectionism to Stress-Free Sleep. Hey, Stephanie, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you. Thank you for having me. My sense of sleep, and I think the sense for a lot of people, is that sleep is something that we have to do, that you pay a price if you don't get enough sleep, if you don't sleep well, if you don't sleep at the right time of the night.

7:03Everybody may be a little different, but you need somewhere around eight hours of sleep per night. And if you don't follow those general guidelines, there is a price to pay. Which is very interesting to hear you say that, and that is exactly how most people think, because I would add to that, and you're never going to stop sleeping. So it's a biological trait that you have that is never going to go away. And I think the reason that's important is because the way you just described it, Sounds to me like you really need to take care of it, that if you don't, terrible things are going to happen, like, you know, really worrying.

7:42And whilst, of course, we do have research to show what happens when it's severely restricted, it's a bit like talking about what happens when you don't have the most perfect nutritional diet. of course there are going to be pitfalls to not eating the way that your body needs on a day-to-day basis but that's going to change right and sleep is very similar so I find that we are our definition of what good sleep is likely needs to change in order for us to really take care of it in a in a much more realistic and rational fashion. So what's your definition of good sleep? My definition of good sleep would be the person who doesn't really think about their sleep.

8:31So that's the first, probably most important part is that it's not really, it's a bit like breathing to them. They're not overthinking it. they are taking care of it in the most influential ways so they likely have those key things in place they're likely not what you think so it's not a case of the a never-ending list of sleep hygiene and supplements and tech it's not all of that there's just a few key things and they don't worry when they have a bad night because that's going to be normal sometimes sleep is going to vary. It will not look the same from 25 to 55. You're going to go through loads of variations and it's not abnormal to wake up in the middle of the night.

9:19And actually it's completely impossible, even if you are an eight hour sleeper, which not everybody is, for you to sleep eight hours every night. So there's something, there's something amiss with this definition that we have at the moment. And actually you're doing yourself a bit of a disservice by trying to reach perfection each day. Because if your sleep was not flexible, how would you deal with jet lag? How would you deal with clock changes? How would you deal with sickness when your body needs a little bit of a different style of sleeping in order to really heal you? You know, what you need is triaged by your body.

9:57It doesn't need you interfering quite as much as perhaps we are. Well, it sounds like you're saying we worry way too much, that your body can't not sleep. If you don't sleep, your body will eventually go to sleep. Unless you're being tortured with sleep deprivation and being forced to stay awake, your body will go to sleep. So it'll all take care of itself. Absolutely. So the reason that, for example, sleep is used as a torture method or has been used as a torture method is because it's so horrific trying to keep yourself awake. I mean, I don't know if you've ever tried to actively keep yourself awake, but it's impossible.

10:37It's really hard to do. After a while, your body is going to shut you down. You literally have to have someone physically keeping you awake with very loud noise, keeping your eyelids physically open. Like it's not, it's not good what has to happen. So here's some things that I've heard are supposedly important for a good night's sleep. One of them is that you should go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day, to which you say what? This is a very confusing one. So I would argue that, yes, getting up at the same time every day is really key. It's a great anchor and it helps your body to understand when to build your sleep drive.

11:21In order to be sleepy, you actually have to build a drive to feel sleepy. and to do that you have to be awake. So if you were doing that consistently every day then you would feel predictably sleepy around about the same time most of the time. You know things are going to change that sometimes. Going to bed at the same time every night will be a happy consequence of getting up at the same time. However guess what most people do? They don't take heed of the getting up every day at the same time because that seems harder right? Especially in our society and how we work. But going to bed at the same time seems a lot easier.

12:00Now, without an anchor in the morning, you just going to bed when you feel the right time is, is not helpful. You can't just go to bed and feel sleepy, tired and go to sleep. You know, if you have a fairly consistent get up time, then you might notice that you can do that, that it feels quite predictably the same time. But it's likely to be more all over the place and more confusing when you try to go to bed at 10pm, but actually your body's like, well, no, you had a lie in of a couple of hours this morning, we're not going to be tired till much later. But of course, you get anxious about this.

12:33And of course, what does anxiety do? It pushes sleep away further. And so before you know it, you're up for three, four hours tossing and turning, maybe longer, freaking out because you're not sleeping, when actually the idea was to get up at the same time so that you could build a consistent, predictable drive. Yeah, right. Well, that just makes sense, actually. If you force yourself to get up at the same time every day, you will adjust at the other end to go to bed on time. Eventually, maybe today it won't work, but tomorrow you'll probably go to bed a little earlier because you went to bed too late the night.

13:09But like we said, it self-regulates. Exactly. So I've also heard that sleep hygiene, like a very dark room, cool, quiet, all those things are critical to a good night's sleep. So people over focus on what we define, I guess, as sleep hygiene, though everyone you speak to will say that list is slightly different and it's often added to with lots of different things. But usually it's around the environment. and whilst that is one sort of way of sort of making sure that you can facilitate the sleep process it doesn't really affect the sleep mechanisms most of sleep hygiene doesn't help your sleep drive and it doesn't help you to stay on time and it is those things that are actually more important sometimes they're called sleep hygiene and you know getting up at the same time some people say that is in sleep hygiene so that's one thing tick but the problem is is that sleep hygiene is full of other things which may have some influence so in the research we see that of course there is an effect they have an impact an effect on sleep but when do people look at sleep hygiene they look at sleep hygiene when things go wrong why are things going wrong usually because you've mucked up your sleep drive somehow or your circadian rhythm is a bit wonky because of the timings of certain quite influential behaviors that you're doing.

14:37And so that stuff needs sorting and no amount of you fixing your environment, taking the supplements, using all the tech is going to take away from those incredibly important foundational processes. In fact, I would argue that sleep hygiene probably is only going to improve about, maybe give you under 10 % improvement, nothing significant, nothing that's going to take away that problem. The only time where you might find that's different is if, for example, you started drinking 10 cups of coffee a day and then part of sleep hygiene is don't drink so much coffee, don't drink it before you go to bed.

15:16Of course, if you reduce that sudden increase, you will likely see a change in your sleep. But if that change did not come about because of the caffeine in the first place, why would taking caffeine away suddenly fix the problem? But part of the argument I've always thought for doing the, you know, dark room, cool, quiet is the quality of the sleep that I have spent many nights asleep and woke up not particularly rested because I knew that I was waking up a lot. I was hearing noises. Things kept waking me up. I was in bed all night, but I didn't sleep well. You make a really good point. But my point there at the end about if it is something that has started, for example, an extra noise that you can hear at night that you didn't realize was impacting you and you suddenly used ear plugs and you found that to be improving the situation.

16:11That's fantastic. But I would rather use sleep hygiene as a toolkit to see, has anything actually changed in my life recently? okay yes actually I've moved to a new neighborhood and perhaps I don't realize how noisy that neighborhood has become at night to me or perhaps I've moved and my curtains are not dark enough and it's there's more light than there used to be then I can totally understand focusing on those points but over focusing on sleep hygiene is really winding people up at the moment so there'll be at least a third of your audience that are listening to this thinking I do all of sleep hygiene and that does nothing for my sleep.

16:51And that's because there's this idea that if, even if, you know, none of those things are a problem for you, you still need to maintain them and they need to be perfect. And that's an issue because if you're telling people that that should make your sleep good, that's the underlying things you must do, then there's a fear there, right? What if I don't do those things? You know, even if it doesn't resolve your sleep issues, but what if I don't do those things, my sleep issue is going to get worse. What does that create? Sleep anxiety. What does sleep anxiety lead to? Chronic insomnia. It seems like a lot of people today take supplements like melatonin to help them sleep, or they wear sleep trackers on their wrist to help monitor their sleep so they can see how well they're sleeping.

17:37I want to get your take on all of that when we come back in just a moment. A big thank you to today's sponsor, vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility. Sell it. Every day people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted. Listing is quick and simple. And when an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you.

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19:08Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at HomeDepot.com. We're talking about sleep and how maybe we're overly anxious about our sleep. Stephanie Ramashevsky is my guest. She is a sleep physiologist and author of the book, Think Less, Sleep More, From Panic and Perfectionism to Stress-Free Sleep. So Stephanie, what is your assessment of taking supplements to help you sleep and also of the tech of the sleep trackers that monitor and tell you how well you're sleeping?

19:57Okay, let's start with melatonin. melatonin is like a signal that the melatonin you have in your body is a signal to your brain that you need to start winding down that sleep will come soon and it starts that physiological process off it's not something that makes you sleep and it's not like a sleeping pill but people are using it that way and we just don't see any evidence that that can improve things the only time that it might be able to improve things is if you're flying over several time zones and you want a little help getting to a specific time zone. And we sometimes see it helpful in quite severe circadian rhythm disorders.

20:38So people who have a problem with the timing of their sleep and their severe problems, they're not just, you know, I want to change the timing of my sleep slightly. That's likely not to help as much. And most of us don't have what I guess people assume they've got a deficiency or something, that's not really what we're seeing. So melatonin seems to be something that a lot of people take, but unfortunately is probably not giving them what they require. Or there's some kind of placebo effect going on where they actually have a really nice strong sleep drive. Or when they started taking it, they started doing some other quite healthy sleep techniques.

21:14But the melatonin itself, we just don't see any real benefit for the majority of people that are using it to try and resolve the most common types of sleep problems. Similarly with sleep trackers, what we see is I think trackers in themselves, they're not awful. I would use a tracker, a different type of tracker, but a tracker nonetheless to look at somebody who had a timing problem with their sleep. So those severe timing problems, we would look at a tracker data over time, usually just a movement tracker or something quite simple to just see or how many when and how many hours is this person going down for the night essentially and looking at that over time but that's the most important thing we look at it over a lot of time to try to find a pattern the ux experience so the experience that the user has at the end um the data that we get shown from these trackers is quite i would say noisy and very numerical and without the proper knowledge For example, you know, if you're told you've only got 10 % of REM, that number feels quite low, right?

22:23Because we don't really understand numbers apart from that maybe a high one is quite good and a low one is not very good. And there's an insinuation there that perhaps I need to improve my REM. But the problem is you can't improve your REM sleep. That's not a thing. You can't go, I'm going to target my REM sleep and I'm going to improve it. So first of all, it's giving you this kind of false idea of what you can do with your sleep. Secondly, they're not very accurate, not in the way that they are saying they are. And that's a problem. But, you know, accuracy aside, even if they were particularly accurate, the interesting thing is when you don't look at a sleep tracker and you just go by how you're feeling, you can have a pretty good day, especially if you felt pretty good.

23:07right? But if your tracker is telling you something which the algorithm is extrapolating as negative or just showing you a bunch of numbers that you don't really understand and, you know, there's a lot of false information out there like what you can do about sleep debt and sleep banking and, you know, you've only got this amount of REM and you only got this amount of deep sleep and it might not be very accurate, but it might be. But then you were feeling all right before you looked at your watch and then you look at your watch and you see that now you feel really negative about your day and interestingly in the research when we manipulate the watches to always make it look like you had a bad night you'll come you're having the same physiological experience during the day that you would have had if it was true so that means your your perception in your your idea and what you think has actually happened just changing it like lying to you literally will elicit the same response as you having a bad night's sleep.

24:08That's dangerous, that's worrying. And what's happening is it's increasing sleep anxiety, because once you start thinking about sleep, your mind starts bringing it up a lot. And the problem with that is that sleep isn't one of those things that you can perform to be better. You can't sort of overthink sleep and then make it better. It's a bit like breathing. The moment you start thinking about you're breathing too much you start breathing funny and it makes you feel like you're not breathing enough you know it's quite stressful and it's exactly the same with sleep the more you think about it the more attention you bring to it the more you change your behaviors usually to ones that aren't very helpful like spending more time in bed which might make logical sense but unfortunately tends to break up our sleep and make it more fragmented and more stress coming from that um and and just in general not make it what what you need it to be you know your mindset around it is shifted and you start counseling things and you start over worrying about things and essentially you're changing the chemicals in your brain your the anxiety is creeping in your heart rate is going up your temperature is going up all the things that physiologically are the complete opposite to what you need in order to have a good night's sleep.

25:24I know I've heard that exposure to morning light is crucial to your sleep. Yes? Yeah, your mornings are far more important than any over ritualistic bedtime routine. One, because of the get up time and two, because of light exposure. Your light, light is great at dictating to your body that it's time to be awake. It helps to reduce melatonin. So your sleepy levels, how you feel, it's going to reduce that. And it's really good at reducing fatigue. So even if you haven't had a good night's sleep at Harvard, we used to do these studies where we would deprive people of sleep and then expose them to quite bright light exposure.

26:05we couldn't obviously get rid of all of the effects of a sleep debt but we could certainly improve them you know on psychometric tests everything you know when light happened at the right time of day your body really responds quite well to it but of course during the winter most of us are not very good at getting enough light it can be artificial if you need it to be obviously natural is always better it's got all these other wonderful effects like vitamin d but if you can't get that, then absolutely expose yourself to more light in the morning in the first sort of three quarters of the day and then reduce it down in the evenings.

26:41What is it you think people really should understand in order to reduce the anxiety and help people sleep better? We don't understand how much variation there is in good sleep. You can wake up in the night. In fact, on sleep studies, it's very rare, very rare to find somebody who does not wake up in the night. But we're taught that you have to have a consolidated block of sleep in order for everything to be okay. When actually waking up in the night, not remembering it or remembering it and going back to sleep, or sometimes even not going back to sleep because of things that are going on, your hormones, the changes in your life, age, they are all normal.

27:22And us trying to get the sleep back that we had when we were 25 years old is so unrealistic and it's causing sleep problems now because we are over we're trying to biohack it over optimize it and i just wish that i could take that away from that worry away from people and help them realize how incredible your sleep is and how much it's looking after you no matter what your expectations are well this should come as a big relief to people and the way you look at sleep is very refreshing and it seems to make sense because you can't not sleep. So stop worrying about it. Stephanie Romaszewski has been my guest.

28:02She is a sleep physiologist, co-founder of Sleepyhead Clinics. She's worked in sleep research at Harvard Medical School and the name of her book is Think Less, Sleep More, From Panic and Perfectionism to Stress-Free Sleep. There's a link to her book in the show notes. And Stephanie, I appreciate you spending the time with us. Oh, thanks, Mike. It was really good. Purchase new carpet from the Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorators Collection, Traffic Master, or LifeProof with PetProof technology and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices.

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29:18Learn more at coach.com.

29:25We love new things. A new phone, a new car, new clothes, some new gadget we didn't even know we needed until we saw it. There's something about new that makes whatever we already have suddenly seem a little less appealing. But all that newness comes at a price. and not just the price on the price tag. Every new thing we bring into our lives takes some combination of our money, our time, and our attention. And often, what we already have works perfectly fine. So why is new so hard to resist? And what might we gain by resisting it at least once in a while? Eric Athas has thought a lot about this.

30:10He is an editor at the New York Times. He's author of a book called Saying No to New, Why New Things Are Stealing Your Time, Money, and Happiness, and How to Take Back Your Life. Hey, Eric, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Good to be here. So I want you to state your case, because at first glance, this seems so contrarian. So, like, what could be wrong with new? And people love new, and new means new and improved, and new is better than old. And so state your case here. What do you what's your point? Sure. Well, to start, it's true that sometimes new is better, but society has taught us to make new synonymous with better.

30:54New is always better. And to really understand what I sometimes that's not the case, you have to understand how humans are programmed to be drawn into new things. The human brain is programmed to pay attention to new things and ignore old things. And if you consider everyday life, you're probably not thinking too much about the shops that you pass on your commute every morning or the tools you use in your kitchen at night while you make dinner or the old sneakers you pull on. Those are all old things that your brain is familiar with. But when something new pops into sight, like a new restaurant that's opening or an advertisement for a new kitchen gizmo of some kind or a snazzy new pair of shoes, your brain will take notice.

31:44In fact, research has shown that when we encounter something novel, our brains fire off dopamine, pushing us to explore it. So we are hardwired to gravitate to new things. and sometimes that's very useful and and it can we can discover very valuable products and services out there but the problem is is that today novelty is everywhere we are overloaded with it we can pick up our phones and we can choose from hundreds of millions of different products and not just physical goods but also digital experiences that are designed to keep us hooked in part because they promise this infinite feed of newness.

32:30And we can end up spending a lot of our money on new things that we don't need or we don't want. And that can lead to some problems like clutter. It can lead to certainly financial cost, or it can really drain our time or attention. But who's to say you don't need it? If you think you need it, then who are you to say that I don't need it? Everyone should make their own choices for themselves. And I'm not here to tell you exactly what you need. But what we found is that sometimes we think we need something. And that's partially because businesses are really good at persuading us to think that we need something.

33:10And because it's so easy to acquire things, you can grab your phone and with a few caps, you can have something sent your way, or you can download something or subscribe to something. it's just far too easy to assume oh yeah i need this or i want this and then suddenly you have it and and within maybe a few days or weeks it's in the back of a closet and and that's a lot of that is driven by our own brain being drawn in by new things but also businesses that are very good at persuading us to think that we need the next new thing but it's so it's not all new things but But like you say, I mean, how many people have bought some weird exercise gizmo gadget that, you know, now they just hang their clothes on because they never used it or they used it once and that was the end of that.

33:59But I know people, in fact, I'm thinking of one person I know in particular who is so not into new. And frankly, it's frustrating. She doesn't text. She doesn't have a phone that can text. I mean, she's so not into new that that becomes a problem. If you don't keep up, then you fall behind. Of course, that's a great point. You can take this in either extreme where you don't buy any new things and everything's breaking and you're not replacing products that actually really need to be replaced. But generally, because our brains are designed to to go seek out and explore new things in a society where we're overloaded by them, it's very easy.

34:48It's far easier to fall into the trap of constantly upgrading and chasing the next new thing. And that's partially because we think these new things are going to make us feel happy. And for a moment, they do make us happy. but science says that that feeling of joy as you open a shiny new product it will never last forever that feeling is fleeting and so we can wind up on in this cycle where we're constantly chasing the next new thing the next new thing trying to sustain feelings of happiness but you're right you can take this into the other extreme and in fact i have this old coffee maker that i love because it just does the trick for me it makes my coffee every morning that's all i need, I could certainly go to the department store or go online and find a fancy new coffee maker that will certainly look better and work better.

35:39But this one works fine for me. Now, my wife would like to see a new coffee maker in the house. So this is a bit of a disagreement we have. But to your point, everyone has their own preferences and you can take it in either extreme. But human nature says that we're more likely to gravitate to the new thing that's being sold to us with all the new bells and whistles and features. But don't you think it's partly personality, just who you are as to how you fit into this? And here's my example. So there are people who will go to the new Marvel, whatever movie, you know, Mission Impossible, and they'll wait in line, or they want the new Apple phone, and so they'll sleep in front of the Apple store.

36:24And I'm the kind of person that I'll see that movie. I'll get a phone. It just won't be on day one. I'll wait a month or two till the lines die down. But I'm still going to get it. And I'm not going to get it much later than those people got theirs. But there's something for those people that being the first, being the newest new, that's part of it. And they like that. I used to be one of those people who woke up early on Apple device release day. Mike, I used to wait in line. I didn't sleep on the street necessarily, but I used to wait in line because I was one of those people. I considered myself an early adopter, and so I would feel like I had to have it right there and then.

37:08And for some people, that's fine. It's really about being intentional and understanding, am I making this decision? Am I driving to the store? Or am I spending all this money because I really deep down want this new thing? And if you take the time to ask yourself and it's within your budget and it's within what you value in life and what matters to you, then all power to you. Do it. But the way that technology is set up today is it's very easy to fall into this trap and just be consuming and consuming new thing after new thing. And that's what I discovered with my life is although I thought that I liked all of these new things, they ended up kind of, I ended up sort of falling out of love with them because they kind of distracted me from things that matter.

37:57They cost a lot of money. They created clutter. So it is a personal preference thing, but I think that it's also true that we can very easily slip into these cycles where we're just getting the new thing because we feel like that's what we're supposed to do as opposed to really thinking about whether it's something we need or whether it's something we really even want. I think one of the best examples of the appeal of new is when you get a new car. There is something about a new car that I think universally is really exciting. Cars are a great example, Mike, because like you said, you see them all driving around and you can see the newest models and the dashboards in cars look futuristic.

38:46And so that should be better. Although when you get in them, I personally find it really difficult to navigate those dashboards. They become so complicated when the old fashioned knob to turn the radio or to turn the air conditioner on and off worked just fine. So cars are a great example where you've taken something that many, many people need and certainly need to get to work or to get the kids to school and to travel. But you don't necessarily need all of the gizmos and all of the features within the car that, frankly, can just make your life a little bit more complicated. And rather than solving problems, may actually create new ones.

39:26Well, what kind of new problems? What's the real harm here? There is actually research that shows that when we seek out the next new thing constantly, when we're much more materialistic and we're focusing on what we don't have, we are actually a little bit less happy. Because one of the most important things underpinning happiness is gratitude. And gratitude is about looking around you and appreciating, feeling grateful for what you have. getting the next new thing is what you don't have. It's you focusing on looking outwards at things out there that you don't have. So that's one research, body of research that shows us that, yes, actually, if we're jumping from next new thing, the next new thing to the next new thing, that could actually be making us less happy.

40:20And not only that, but of course, you could end up spending a lot of money. There's research that shows that when we feel like we're not feeling where we're uncomfortable or we're not feeling well about ourselves and are, you know, we're maybe feeling a little bit down. Going out and buying something shiny and new and expensive can actually stand in for our self-worth. And you can see how you could get into trouble there where you're buying things to help yourself feel better and in particular buying expensive things that could really hit your budget. So I want to understand, is this more of a new problem than it used to be?

41:05And is it what is what's driving it? The fact that there are people making so many new things. In other words, you could like the latest new thing, but if the latest new thing doesn't come out that often, well, maybe that's fine. But if it comes out every other day, well now your addiction to new becomes a problem. Yes that's exactly right it is a much bigger problem than it used to be if you go back just a couple of decades if you came across a new thing in an advertisement on television or the radio it would take you some time to actually go out and acquire the new thing maybe you have to drive to the shopping mall or even ordering it took a lot longer than it does today.

41:48Now, when you encounter a new thing, you can have it within minutes or even seconds, and it could be delivered to your door very quickly. So one is speed. That has changed significantly. We can get new things, both new products for our home and our lives, but also new digital content and experiences much, much faster than we used to. And that's a really important change because when we make decisions faster, it's much easier for businesses to persuade us and we have less time to think about our choices. We're more likely to fall into a trap where we're buying something we don't actually need. So as you're talking, I just came up with a theory I want to test on you that I think is true, and I don't know if you've even thought about this, but one of the things that I notice is because I can go on Amazon and buy something and have it here tomorrow, and it's not even something I even was on my radar the day before.

42:47Because I have put so little effort into getting it, it's much easier to discard it once it gets here. That's absolutely true. And, and so you could find yourself, you know, I know I've done this. I think, you know, many of us have done this where you do that, where you order something, you didn't really think too much about it. And because it was so easy, you can quickly shove it aside and put it in the back of a closet and, you know, never think about it again or not think about it for a very, very long time. And I think that's a really great theory, Mike. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, if you can give yourself a little bit more time to think about these decisions and just take a peek, you might find that you're making some different decisions when you're out there shopping or consuming content online.

43:38One of the things that stores do that really annoys me, but I think they do it for what kind of the reason you're talking about is, you know, when you go to a grocery store for a long time, you know where everything is. and then one day you walk in and they've moved everything. And I think it's to get back your attention because you're on robot mode when you go in before because you know where everything is and you're not looking at new stuff. But now you've got to really be much more conscious about your shopping and then you notice new things. That's right. That is a strategy to get you to pay attention to the things in the store.

44:19and you'll notice the front of the store will often change with new products. And the other thing that they'll do is they'll change the layout to, to match with the season. So when Halloween season comes, they're going to put all the Halloween stuff out. Those are all strategies to keep you to sort of, to exploit this natural function of your brain, to ignore the familiar things, you know, where all of the products are in the aisle. And so you don't have to pay attention to them but if they change it around suddenly your brain is focusing on all the stuff on the shelves and the other thing that they might do the products themselves may change maybe their labels get a redesign but the actual product itself isn't any different so that's another tactic that can pull you in just by changing the way it looks i want to understand more about the price you pay for being obsessed or consumed by new things?

45:17So one other important thing to keep in mind is that we may be missing out on joy and excitement and the things that we already have that we've shoved aside in favor of new things. There is research done out of the University of Chicago that found that when we go back and explore old things that we have, like a book or an old product or an old movie or an old experience that we no longer engage with, we may actually enjoy it just as much, if not more than we did the first time. And so this is research you can apply to your daily life. I've done this where you just walk around your home and you look at some of the old stuff you have, and maybe it's an old book, or for me, it was an old board game that I hadn't used in some time.

46:01And just take a minute to engage with it. And you may find that there's something interesting in there. For me, I played the board game with my kids and it's true. It was just as fun as it was the first time. And we were able to do that instead of going out and buying a new one. So the old familiar things in our lives that we think we won't have fun with, that we think are boring and dull and been there, done that, there may actually be some interesting things left in there. There may actually be some enjoyment untapped that if you just gave it another chance, if you just forced yourself to re-engage with them, you might find that you'll find enjoyment from them.

46:42I don't know if this is a red flag, because this has happened to me. You ever like buy something like a movie or back in the day of maybe when people bought DVDs, but like a board game even or something and you get it home and you go to put it away in the closet and you realize you already have it. You've had it for 10 years. It's just, you just haven't used it. But you had it. And maybe it has a new design to it. And it's the same game, but it looks different from the outside. And so that drew you in. Well, I've just forgotten that I had it. Because, you know, especially something like a movie.

47:24This happened at Christmas with Elf. We bought the Elf DVD years ago. And we liked that movie. but once you watch a movie you tend not to rush to watch it again and it sat there for years and then we were we bought it again and then we looked and noticed that down by the down by the dvd player there was a case and the dvd was in it of elf and we had it we now we have two of them now you have two elves you know that research also found that when we go back and we rediscover something that we had previously pushed aside, you may actually find that there's a surprising sense of novelty within that experience.

48:06Because maybe you watched Elf, and then you didn't watch it for another few years. Well, Elf is the same, but you've changed a little bit. You're a few years older, and your perspective changes. And so what they found is when people revisited books and movies and other experiences, they were like, oh, I missed that detail the first time, or I never thought about that joke quite the same. So that's another feature of maybe not buying the same product twice like you accidentally did, Mike. But going back and rediscovering a product you have, you may actually find a surprising sense of novelty and newness within that old thing.

48:41Well, as you say, we're all wired to be drawn to the new, but most of us don't think about that or we certainly don't talk about it. And I think it's helpful to be aware of that. And as you said, maybe, you know, pause a moment before you get that new thing and make sure you really need it. I've been talking with Eric Athas. He is an editor at the New York Times, and he's author of a book called Saying No to New, Why New Things Are Stealing Your Time, Money, and Happiness, and How to Take Back Your Life. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Eric, I appreciate you coming on and talking about this.

49:18Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

49:23Why does being cold or frightened make little bumps suddenly appear all over your skin? Goosebumps are actually the remains of a very useful survival mechanism from our much hairier ancestors. When you're cold, tiny muscles attached to your hair follicles contract and pull the hairs upright. On a furry animal, standing the hair up traps a thicker layer of insulating air next to the skin, helping the animal stay warm. When an animal is frightened, raised hair also makes it appear larger and potentially more intimidating to a predator. Humans still have this same automatic response. We just don't have enough body hair for it to accomplish much.

50:09So when a scary movie or a cold breeze or even a powerful piece of music gives you goosebumps, you're witnessing an ancient mammalian survival reflex kick in on a body that no longer has much use for it. And that is something you should know. You're invited to, in fact, encouraged to leave a review of this podcast on whatever platform you listen on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox, wherever. We appreciate the reviews, we read them, and they really help grow the show. I'm Mike Carruthers thank you for listening today to Something You Should Know Purchase new carpet from the Home Depot and get it installed for free right now Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorators Collection Traffic Master or LifeProof with PetProof Technology and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at the Home Depot Offer valid October 15th through November 1st, 2026.

51:12Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers. Pink Panther us here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, built just for you based on who you are and how you listen. live your story with coach learn more at coach.com