Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I am Henry Emmons and welcome back to Joy Lab.
Aimee Prasek: And I am Aimee Prasek. Today we are talking about our element of hope. And I'm gonna start us off with kind of a crazy story. Hang with me folks. We'll see if I can tie it to hope, which I, it is in my head completely tied to hope. All right, so as many of you might know, my husband and I have nine children.
Aimee Prasek: We have one human. We have two dogs and we have six tiny raptors [00:01:00] as we like to call them. Those are our chickens.
Henry: Raptors.
Aimee Prasek: I know We love our little raptors. So it was summertime and we were awakened to a rooster crowing.
Aimee Prasek: Now female chickens do not crow, just males. So we thought, "Oh man, someone's gonna get their bird taken away." 'Cause our city doesn't allow backyard roosters for good reason. And there's like three other families around us that have, raptors as well. So chickens. So the next morning we heard it again, but this time our window was open and it was loud, like coming from our backyard loud.
Aimee Prasek: And we had just gotten four new chicks about five months prior and thought, "oh, no one must be a rooster." And we didn't realize it, which can happen. They don't show all their sort of like rooster characteristics until some months old. [00:02:00] Anyway, we knew we had to figure out who the rooster was. Was it bluey?
Aimee Prasek: Fluffy, puffy, Bruno, or Barrette, and you'd guess Bruno based on the name, but these are the names you get when your 4-year-old is in charge of naming the chickens. And there's a Disney movie that's hot at the time Encanto, Bruno. Anyway, we, we planned it out. We were gonna get up early and peer out of the windows to catch the rooster.
Aimee Prasek: We knew it wasn't Hailey or Mina, our other two ladies, because they were five years old at the time, old gals in retirement. So there we were waiting as the chickens are out early in the morning, were just waiting with bated breath to see who crows. And then we hear it, the crowing. We look to each of the new chickens and they're just pecking around.
Aimee Prasek: And then we look [00:03:00] to Hailey. Our 5-year-old female chicken is standing on a log crowing. We were stunned. It's not a thing. Hens do not crow. So we went out there and we also noticed the bumps we saw growing on the back of her legs. We just thought were like old age bumps or something, were not bumps.
Aimee Prasek: They were spurs. So spurs are these like bones or talon kind of things that grow on the back of a rooster's leg so that roosters can attack, protect the hens. And she had been growing these over the last six weeks or so, and they had grown bigger since. So our five-year-old female chicken was becoming a male chicken or a phenotypical male chicken, you know, developing these male characteristics.
Aimee Prasek: First, I'd like to say that Hailey has stopped crowing and is still with us. [00:04:00] We did not have to, pass her off to a farm. She's as feisty and fantastic as you can imagine. But now, okay, so this may seem like a topic completely outside of mental health.
Henry: Well.
Aimee Prasek: There's a lot of threads here, but the one I'm gonna pull right now, when this happened, after I did some research to figure out what the heck was going on, the thing that really rang true for me was how capable, how wired we are to create big changes in our lives. And it was mainly after I read, this passage from an article on avian sex reversal, which is what what Hailey experienced.
Aimee Prasek: Here's what it said. "When there is a no rooster in a chicken flock, a hen may experience sex reversal to maintain the reproduction of the population." Think about that [00:05:00] in response to a community need, the flock, in this case, a chicken can change its sex. So things that we think are fixed, concrete, certain, even biological sex in this case, can be changed to support the wellbeing of the individual and the community.
Aimee Prasek: That's my thread.
Aimee Prasek: So to me, right to me, in times when we may feel helpless, overwhelmed, defeated, this is a science. This is the kind of message I wanna hold front and center. Even if you feel like change is impossible, there is an immense space for change. We are wired for it, for transformation, for healing.
Henry: Wow.
Aimee Prasek: Isn't that wild?
Henry: I did not see
Henry: that coming,
Aimee Prasek: I'm setting you up for a really weird episode
Henry: that that is an unforgettable image about how adaptable nature is.
Aimee Prasek: [00:06:00] Yes. Amazing.
Henry: And we are part of nature, of course.
Aimee Prasek: That's right. That's right.
Henry: And we are incredibly adaptable.
Henry: I love it. I love this topic of radical change.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: And I like that it comes so soon after we talked about emotional inertia and homeostasis.
Aimee Prasek: Yes.
Henry: Because those concepts focus on really on how we tend to resist change, even if change might be for the better.
Aimee Prasek: Right.
Henry: Once a system is stable, it tends to stay as it is. But this stories suggests that when there is a real need for things to change, it's not only possible, but it can be in a really big way.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: So I, I, like to put this conversation in the context of neuroplasticity. It helps me to remember that our brains are changing [00:07:00] all the time. All the time. Whether we know it or not, our brains are in a constant state of transformation.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: That's not a question. The question is, to me at least, what direction is this transformation going?
Henry: And what, if anything, can we do to influence it toward greater health and wellbeing and, and joy? So I also take heart in the science of epigenetics. You know, we tend to think of our genes as being immutable, unchanging, and that they have the last word when it comes to our bodies, or even the illnesses that we are prone to. And of course the research says that our genes do have a big influence. But remember, when it comes to mental health, at most genetics accounts [00:08:00] for about 50% of why some people get sick and others don't. So, epigenetics is a way of understanding that our DNA is not the only game in town. There are other mechanisms that are layered on top of the DNA and they have a lot to say about whether the information in our genes becomes manifest or not. And more so even if an illness is activated and let's say even something as as strongly genetic as bipolar illness or certain forms of depression, strong genetic influences, even if that illness is present, those genes have been activated. It is possible to turn those genes off again.
Aimee Prasek: Yes. We have so much power to create change.There's [00:09:00] this recent study that analyzed data from a bunch of cohorts over multiple time periods. I think it, it emphasizes what you're saying here, Henry, there were over 350,000 participants over 13 years, and the researchers were looking at how genetic and lifestyle factors influenced lifespan.
Aimee Prasek: And broadly they found that healthy lifestyle factors were more impactful to lifespan--nearly four times more impactful, actually-- than genetic predisposition to a short lifespan. amazing.
Aimee Prasek: So healthy diet, physical activity, adequate sleep, not smoking. Those were like four of the big factors. those powerful lifestyle factors that could help
Aimee Prasek: nearly turn off that genetic predisposition.
Aimee Prasek: So I think what we're saying here is that we are wired for change, [00:10:00] hope for change. And the way this relates, to hope is, is important. Here's kind of a dry but helpful definition of hope. "Hope is a motivational factor that helps initiate and sustain action toward long-term goals, including flexible management of obstacles that get in the way of goal attainment." So there are the facts. We can change. Healthy changes will benefit us, and hope can help us make those changes. It is a motivational force, and I think it's even more than that. I wanna highlight one more study that I really love to hopefully drive this point home.
Aimee Prasek: This is research from doctors, Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan, I think I'll, I'll put it in the show notes. So they had two groups of folks who were told they would be answering questions that were on a [00:11:00] screen, one by one, question after question. One group was told that before each question would appear, the answer would be flashed on the screen super quick, like too quick to actually consciously recognize the answer, but slow enough so that they could unconsciously get it. The other group was told that the flashes on the screen just signaled the next question were come, was coming. Now here's the really important point.
Aimee Prasek: Both groups received the same exact flashes, which were just random strings of letters. They were not answers. Neither group got the answer.
Aimee Prasek: But the group that was told they got the answer, they did significantly better. They answered more questions right compared to the other group. So that group who was told they were getting the answers, you could say they got a boost [00:12:00] of hope.
Aimee Prasek: They had some extra hope and expectation that they could do this. That they could get those answers right. I don't see that as any different as expecting that we have the ability to do something, to create change. And when we have that belief, it gives us the intention and it adds fuel, motivation to help us create change. That's a belief anchored by hope.
Henry: Wow.
Aimee Prasek: Isn't that cool?
Henry: I love it. It also reminds me how tricky researchers can be,
Aimee Prasek: I love it. Love it when they do those tricking studies, they have confederates in the room who are telling you different stuff. Yes.
Henry: But isn't that something? Expecting to know the answers helps you to actually know the answers.
Aimee Prasek: Yep.
Henry: You know, expecting to move in a direction of greater wellbeing, maybe we are more likely to create greater wellbeing. So [00:13:00] I think, one lesson to take from this is that we, we can be intentional, purposeful about how we work with the forces of change. And I think we also want to be patient because in order for that change to be lasting, it can take a while.
Aimee Prasek: Yeah.
Henry: So, this is, this kind of goes back to that conversation of homeostasis and how hard it is to change something even for the better that it, you know, organisms in our physiology resist that change. So we have to, we have to be persistent. That's kind of my point.
Henry: So here, this is just a very approximate way to measure this that I wanna, I just wanna share something I've observed over the years, and that is that when someone goes on a new medication, for example, as a treatment for some condition, [00:14:00] like just standard antidepressants. I think that it takes roughly six months for the brain to have really adapted to that medication and its effects on physiology and to create a new normal, roughly six months. And, you know, in the literature andthe protocols for treating something like depression, they always say stay on the medication for six months. And I think there's a, something to that length of time that it takes that long to have adapted and to have that change be the new normal. Okay. Likewise, when it's time to come off a medication, even sometimes people have trouble doing that because it is a change, and I believe that it takes, again, roughly six, or let's say six to nine months for the brain to have adapted to being off the medication and then kind of being left with another new normal that's [00:15:00] medication free. So, at least in my mind, I find that to be a good timeframe to work with. And I think it's, it's something that helps me to recognize that I am not the same person exactly as I was six months ago. And to ask myself, you know, this question, who will I be six months from now? Now of course, I look more or less the same and probably think and act more or less the same, but not entirely. So I can't say this for sure, but I believe that I can influence this process, I think I do that through the choices that I am making. Right now, today and tomorrow and the next day, these thousand little choices through which I am creating the brain that I am going to have and
Henry: the life
Henry: I am going to have six months and further down the road, the, the [00:16:00] future me is being created right now.
Aimee: Yes. We kind of hit on this a couple episodes ago. Brick by brick, we're building our lives day by day. That is our life. If Hailey would've looked in the mirror six months before getting her Spurs, would she have thought I'm gonna be a rooster in six months? No, she could have never predicted that. It took some time.
Aimee: They look great now on her. I'll put a picture in the show notes to show off my fantastical chicken. Give ourselves that time to change too, like you're saying. Yeah, we can create little and radical changes in our lives day by day, minute by minute, hour by hour, and of course, actually making those changes.
Aimee: Believing we can make those changes can be hard. So we'll tackle some of those obstacles in the next several [00:17:00] episodes for our element of hope this month. We'll raise some of those obstacles up. We'll talk about how we can overcome them. To close our time today, I have to share some lines from Emily Dickinson's poem called Hope is the Thing With Feathers.
Aimee: Here are the first few lines: "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all."
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