Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Three hours on a shower floor
The week everything hit
Kelly McGonigal's father was diagnosed with a terminal, untreatable cancer, and her mother went through a health crisis that needed a lot of help. It was the most intense stretch of her life, with chaos unfolding all at once and demanding far more than she was used to: managing what was going wrong and trying to prevent the worst outcomes. The texts and calls arrived from family, health care providers, and social workers at the same moment, and she decided she did not have time to dry off.
Two daily anchors
Getting through it took holding onto a few things that renewed her. One was an instinct that she would not survive unless she had at least one moment each day when she laughed, and one moment when she let somebody who cared about her touch her.
Changing the nights
Nights changed too. Her mind wanted to run through everything that could go wrong tomorrow and everything she had to do, with the phone ready for texts at 3 in the morning. She used her attention to look back for one highlight of the day instead, which reminds the brain that good things are possible and that she is not alone.
Why does laughter help during terrible stretches?
Laughing together releases endorphins, the brain's own opioid-like chemicals. Robin Dunbar and colleagues at the University of Oxford reported in 2011 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that bouts of social laughter raised people's pain thresholds, which they linked to endorphin release. Laughter also pulls attention away from threat for a moment. The pain threshold effect did not appear in the same way when people merely sat in a group without laughing.
How does a comforting touch change the stress response?
Supportive touch quiets the brain's threat circuitry. In a 2006 study in Psychological Science, James Coan and colleagues at the University of Virginia scanned married women who were told they might receive a mild electric shock. When the women held their husband's hand, activity in threat-related brain regions was lower than when they held a stranger's hand or no hand. The effect was strongest in the happiest marriages.
Why does the mind race at 3 in the morning?
Cortisol, a stress hormone, follows a daily rhythm: it is lowest around midnight and begins climbing in the early morning hours before waking. That puts a rising stress signal in the same hours when many people lie awake. With no tasks or conversation competing for attention, the mind turns to unresolved problems, a pattern psychologists call rumination. Sleep researchers have long noted that worries feel larger at night than they do by daylight.
More from The Mel Robbins Podcast
