Pod Insights Something You Should Know The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice About this episode When you feel that urge to go to the bathroom – it just might be a good time to make an important decision. That probably sounds weird. What could the connection possibly be? Listen as I start the episode by explaining why and then it will make perfect sense. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/full-bladder-better-decisions-controlling-your-bladder-decreases-impulsive-choices.html
We live in a noisy world which is only getting noisier. Not only is there noise coming at you from the outside but also from inside your own head. All that noise can’t be good. What’s the solution? Simple silence! That’s according to Leigh Marz, a consultant and coach who is coauthor of a book called Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise (https://amzn.to/3yKi203). Listen as Leigh reveals the negative effects of noise that are often hard to notice. She also has some great advice to help you turn down the volume on noise and enjoy the benefits that silence has to offer.
Where do cravings come from? Why do we get them? Can you stop them? Should you ever give in to them? Here to discuss the science of cravings and how best to handle them is Amy Shah, MD. She is a board-certified medical doctor, having trained at Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard Universities. She is the author of the book I’m So Effing Hungry: Why We Crave What We Crave – and What to Do About It (https://amzn.to/3JCOHL8)
It would seem sensible that your homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy covers things related to your home. And it does. However, you might be surprised to learn what else it also covers including things that are unrelated to your home. Listen as I explain some of those likely benefits. http://consumerist.com/2012/04/12/stuck-with-a-forged-check-homeowners-insurance-to-the-rescue
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:27 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, why the next time you need to make a decision, you might want to wait till you have to go to the bathroom. Then, the power of silence. It's magical because we live in a very noisy world.
1:41 Speaker 01 One way we know that is we live to emergency sirens. So in the past 100 years, those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to cut through the noise around us. The estimates that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health.
1:59 Mike Carruthers? Also, you might be surprised, in a good way, what your homeowner's or renter's policy actually covers. And food cravings, why we get them, and how to stop them.
2:10 Speaker 02 Getting sunlight activates a hormone called alpha MSH. That hormone makes you feel satiated. It calms the cravings and it makes you feel fuller.
2:21 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know.
2:27 Mike Carruthers? I imagine most of us shop for clothes online at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. Is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered? We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures. But when they arrived, eh, not so beautiful. Cheap looking, disappointing. And that's one of the reasons we've become such big fans of Quince. When we order from Quince, we are confident we're going to get something really nice. The quality is consistently good and the prices are surprisingly reasonable.
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3:52 Mike Carruthers? 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 the show.
4:23 Mike Carruthers? Man, this is gonna, this is gonna sound weird to start off this episode, but if you have, if you need to, if you need to make a decision, wait until you have to go to the bathroom. Research published in Science Daily says, "People make better decisions when they have a full bladder. That's because when the mind is struggling to restrain a bodily function, it's easier for us to exert self-control in other areas." The authors of the study explain that "When you're preoccupied with thoughts of finding the closest bathroom, your ego is in check. You're much less likely to overthink things
5:02 Mike Carruthers? or give into unrelated impulses. Consequently, the decisions you make are simple and efficient and more likely to be right on the mark. And that is something you should know."
5:19 Mike Carruthers? You may not realize it, but we live in a very noisy world that keeps getting noisier, and that's not an especially good thing. When was the last time you truly got to experience silence? Total silence? It turns out to be really good for you, and all that noise, not so good for you. And it's more than just that. The sounds we hear have a real impact on our health and our well-being. Noise can affect your mood, your relationships, how well you think. It has all sorts of ramifications. And it's easy to brush it off and say, "It's just noise." But I invite you to take a few moments and listen to Lee Mars. She is a consultant
6:04 Mike Carruthers? and coach and co-author of a book called "Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise." Hey, Lee, welcome to Something You Should Know.
6:14 Speaker 01 Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.
6:16 Mike Carruthers? So I think everyone has heard the phrase, "Silence is golden." And there was a hit record in the 60s called Silence is Golden by The Tremolos. And I think there's this general belief that silence is good, that in the right situation, silence can be very profound and just good for you. I'm not sure how or why, but I think there's a belief in that. But why? Why is silence good? And maybe an even better first question would be, what is silence? I mean, is silence a thing? Or is silence the absence of something?
6:56 Speaker 01 That's a great question. Well, on one level, it really is the absence of noise. And we look at it coming, the noise coming to us through our ears and through our screens in many cases, and also the noise that's just generated by our own darn minds. But as we explore this question, the deepest silence is when we asked all those interesting people, neuroscientists, politicians, artists, poets, a man incarcerated on death row, all kinds of people, we asked them that question, and they pointed us towards a deep, internal silence. So it's not necessarily just about what's happening outside of us, although that's also a lovely type of silence, but a silence internal that brings about a type of presence
7:38 Speaker 01 where we believe there can be healing and enjoyment and connection and all kinds of things.
7:45 Mike Carruthers? And you believe that because why? Because you want to believe that? Or you have real evidence to believe that?
7:51 Speaker 01 Well, it's not so much that we're researchers studying that, but what we are doing in our work in the world is, for example, I work with a lot of scientists and engineers who are trying to get harmful toxic chemicals out of our products and out of our environment. And they were coming at these issues, these really complex and intractable issues, in a certain way, in the four walls of their offices and under fluorescent lighting and all these things. But we took them out into the redwoods and really contemplating these issues with big, open space and open calendars and no Wi-Fi. And they really came to some novel thinking, breakthrough thinking. So really, time and time and again, I am seeing the results of people tapping into silence, connecting with one another in a different way to come through that breakthrough thinking.
8:35 Mike Carruthers? In your definition of silence, is it all audio? Because when, like, when you say, "We went out to the redwoods," to me, that's also like a visual silence, like, you're getting away from the clutter of your life and you're seeing something, it isn't nothing, but it's very peaceful.
8:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, we, the taxonomy of noise we take on in this, and we could take on visual and things like that, but we kept it to auditory noise, that which happens in our ears, in the decibel levels, which has been exponentially on the rise, in case you're wondering, and the research really does bear that out.
9:10 Mike Carruthers? So let's talk about that.
9:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure.
9:12 Mike Carruthers? Because that's, that's something that, because it's so gradual, I think, that people don't realize that, but the world is getting louder, yes, and how do we know that?
9:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it feels like it's getting louder, and it really is getting louder. So one way we know that is we look to emergency sirens as a proxy indicator for the surrounding environments, because, of course, they need to cut through the din in order to get our attention. So in the past 100 years, to your point, it's been gradual, but those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to get, cut through the noise around us. And we do a better job measuring decibel levels in Europe overall than we do in the United States, but the estimates from the World Health Organization is that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health. So on that auditory level, it is definitely getting louder. But we also thought it was
10:07 Speaker 01 important to look at information. So in 2010, the past CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, estimated that every two days, we listen to as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. So we are taking in, the studies show, about five times as much information as we did just a generation ago. So there's just this overwhelming amount of information being generated and that we're trying to take in on a day-to-day level, and that, we believe, actually increases our internal chatter, our internal noise. So Ethan Cross, a professor at the University of Michigan, estimates that we listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses of internal compressed speech every day.
10:53 Speaker 01 So our concern is with all this auditory, informational and internal noise that we're really not able to tune into what is most important to us in our lives, our relationships, our work and our purpose for being here.
11:06 Mike Carruthers? So you mentioned a moment ago that all this noise, all this chatter that we have to turn the sirens up louder to get over is harmful to our health. Well, how so? Because I think people have a sense, just a sense without knowing anything, that quiet is nice and it's probably better than lots and lots of noise. But what, how do we know it's health-related?
11:32 Speaker 01 We know this through different studies, which look at not just the harm that comes to us in the ears, you know, certainly hearing loss is a serious issue that can lead to isolation and things, but it actually is also tied to cardiovascular disease, to diabetes, to loss of sleep and all of the downstream effects of loss of sleep as well. So there's a lot of science coming out. Initially, we looked at silence as more of a control variable. So the other side of that is the benefits of silence. So it used to be that silence was sort of where we considered a baseline to return to, but now it's actually showing in all these studies where they look at different inputs, say like pup sounds or music, classical
12:15 Speaker 01 music, or silence as a control variable or so on, that silence actually leads to growth of neurons in the brain and hippocampus in the area associated with memory.
12:27 Mike Carruthers? I've had the experience, being in the business I'm in, of being in, walking into certain recording studios, radio studios that are very well-built and that silence is different than the silence that you hear just because you turn everything off. It is a profound silence that is deafening almost. And it feels good. It's like, wow, that's real. It's just very relaxing and it's an amazing experience if you've never had it.
13:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I had that experience also walking into my brother's sound studio. And I noticed it wasn't just like what was happening in my ears, but what was happening in my nervous system. I just felt, ah, calmer. So it is a delicious experience to try to seek out if you can. Not all of us have a sound studio or an anechoic chamber available to us. But those who have really report to that being an extraordinary experience of sound being so different. The refracted sounds are being absorbed in those rooms. That's why it's so different.
13:36 Mike Carruthers? Well, I do love that experience. And it's not only a lack of sound, it's a feeling. You feel that silence. You not only hear it.
13:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's a great story of John Cage, the famous composer, who, walking into an anechoic chamber, you know, he was very excited about silence as a musician. He certainly understood the importance of silence, the silence between the notes that makes music what it is. So he walked into this anechoic chamber in Harvard University. And when he got in there, he heard two sounds, a high pitched sound and a low pitched whooshing. And so he stepped outside again after a while and asked the engineer, well, wait a minute, that room wasn't silent at all. I heard this high pitched, I heard this low pitched. And the engineer said, ah, the high is your nervous system and the low is your blood in circulation.
14:28 Speaker 01 So we asked this question, is there even really a thing as silence as pure silence in a world that is vibrating and whooshing and whirling? And the answer is probably not. But there is an experience of silence, an experience of our attention being able to put it where we want it, where we intend it.
14:48 Mike Carruthers? And so what about, because there's silence and there's noise, but there's also sound. And to me, I don't know how you define it, but the sound would be something that you, isn't noise, isn't chatter, isn't objectionable. It's what you want. It's music or whatever. And even a lot of, you know, people who meditate, meditate to music, people who study to music. And as if that's, well, I don't know why people do that. Why do people do that?
15:20 Speaker 01 Well, you're right in that when we're talking about noise, we're talking about unwanted distractions. So that is different from sound, or certainly music and things like that. It's also different on the informational level from data, which is neutral. You know, we like data. Or internally, it's also different from thought, which we also enjoy. So the distinction is that unwanted distraction.
15:43 Mike Carruthers? We're talking about silence and why it's so good for you. My guest is Lee Mars. She's co-author of a book called Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. If you listen to something you should know regularly, you know we talk about sleep quite a bit here. And one of the things I've learned from those conversations is just how important a good night's sleep is. And I've always been someone who loves his sleep. So I was intrigued when I heard about Beam Dream. It's a delicious nighttime drink formulated to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed.
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19:01 Mike Carruthers? So, Lee, how much silence is enough? Is it just the more the better? I mean, you can't sit in a room for 24 hours and have all silence. So when do you start to see the benefits or see the bad effects of noise deteriorate with how much silence?
19:20 Speaker 01 Well, we wrote this book not for the people who can run off to retreats for six months at a time. We really wrote this book for people looking for silence in their noise-soaked, full lives. And we argue that you can find those micro-moments, and that those micro-moments for finding quiet can make a big difference. So that can be even when you find yourself stuck in a long line unexpectedly, or maybe you're commuting and your radio or podcast goes out, that you could actually welcome that silence. Sink into it and take advantage of that unstructured time and that open space to just not have information again coming in to you all the time, but to just appreciate the openness of that.
20:05 Mike Carruthers? But is there a sense of you, you really optimally should have, you know, so many hours of silence every day, or no one's done that study?
20:15 Speaker 01 No one's really doing that study. And so we say, like, do the study yourself. Notice, notice what really the difference is. So the signals in the body that tell us that we are saturated by noise are different for each one of us. But I'll tell you mine, for example, I notice a clenching in my jaw when I'm feeling saturated by noise. I'll notice an irritability with those I love most, I confess. And I'll notice that I'll start to kind of lose track of things. I'm repeating tasks or, you know, going back over. Things are falling through the cracks. So that's when I'm saturated with noise. Those are the signals. That's the evidence, if you will. And then when I am actually getting enough quiet, what I'll notice is that my creative thinking is much more amplified.
20:57 Speaker 01 I'm more generous with myself, with my time, with others. I do more favors for people. I just feel more abundance in life. And so for each of us, it's to look at really, what are the signals that we're saturated by noise? And how can we take care of that? Maybe turn down the dial a bit? And what are the signals that we are finding the silence that we need and require to really be the kind of person that we want to be in this world?
21:20 Mike Carruthers? So I get that silence has its benefits, but it also seems sometimes that when you're sitting in silence, you're, you can start to ruminate and think about problems and things. And that really what you want to do is distract yourself and with maybe music or a podcast like this one. So you're not ruminating and thinking about your own problems as opposed to just, you know, sitting in total silence.
21:50 Speaker 01 What's like, I think we think of it as sort of it's the place to start. Because in this noise soaked environment where it is so loud and jarring. And the the impact of that on our health is, you know, is without without question is the science we lay it out. And then the desire to get into a place of a quieter internal state. It just doesn't require absolute silence on the outside, although that could help. That does help some, but you mentioned for yourself, it's maybe a little better to have a soundtrack or a podcast or a different place to focus. And so we're just trying to create a little bit more space for the ways that we find that internal silence that is so nourishing to us. That helps us get clear on what it is we care most about, where we put our energies and what is true in our life.
22:36 Speaker 01 And that could be in a loud environment, like I said, sort of like in my dance studio. That's that's how it is. It's loud, but I'm quiet.
22:45 Mike Carruthers? When you think about it, when there's a problem, when there's conflict, the tendency is to talk more about it, to argue about it. And and maybe maybe a little silence would help rather than trying to hammer it out.
23:01 Speaker 01 The Quakers have been doing that for hundreds of years. When there's a sense of polarity or positionality or rigidity in a meeting, the clerk will call for silence. And in that silence, an answer will come, some resolution. And so even if it means like, you know, taking a break from that problem at hand, sleeping on it for a night and coming back together, just giving a little space to it. The clarity can come through that place.
23:27 Mike Carruthers? I wonder why people don't seek this out just on their own, that because it does tend to feel good and relax you and make you sharper, why we don't tend to gravitate to this just because.
23:42 Speaker 01 I know if silence is so good for us, why aren't we doing more of it?
23:45 Mike Carruthers? Yeah.
23:46 Speaker 01 There's a few answers to that. I mean, we, there might be some things that we're, you know, uncomfortable with or not wanting to face about our lives or behavior or whatever the way things are going that make it challenging. And certainly Nietzsche spoke of that years, hundreds of years ago, the horror of the vacuum. So, and my teenager will tell you awkward silence is the worst thing under the sun to go through. So there's, I think, some nervousness and varying degrees of fear. So it's not just our personal choices that we're not, you know, choosing silence when it's so clearly good for us. It's also, we have systems that are driving towards more content and data, whether it's eyeballs on a page and click through the, our pristine attention is valued at zero, our time playing with children or looking
24:30 Speaker 01 at art or walking through nature. But if we're clicking through and eyeballs on a page, it's, it's being valued by GDP. So the, and so we, we're set up, the system is set up to make noise. So it's not just our own personal, you know, failings here. There are things we can do to bring more silence to our lives, but there's also a system that's driving us towards making more and more noise.
24:55 Mike Carruthers? Yeah. Well, again, there's not a lot of money in silence.
24:59 Speaker 01 Apparently not.
25:02 Speaker 01 But there is a lot of value, which takes us back to that silence, that silence is golden. So speech is silver, silence is golden is that aphorism that shows up in cultures all over the world. And the polymath, Thomas Carlyle, he liked to think of that as speeches of time, silences of eternity.
25:22 Mike Carruthers? But what you said a moment ago, that silence is scary, that, that, that rings true to me, that, that awkward silence, that somebody's got to be talking if there's two people together because you can't have silence. That's something odd about that.
25:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think for many of us, it's a new, it's a new terrain. And yet it's pretty old technology, if you think about it, just allowing for space, for people to be together. There's certainly cultures that value that more. We look at Japanese ancient principle called mah, where the empty space is seen as pure potentiality. So the, the kanji character is a temple gate with slats through it. And there's golden sunlight pouring through those slats. That's the kanji character of mah. So this, the synonym of silence, the synonym for silence, for emptiness, but pure potentiality, which is found in the artwork of, say, ikibana flower arrangements,
26:21 Speaker 01 where the petals and the, and the leaves of the art piece are as, are important and featured, but so is the silence around that, the emptiness around that. Or in scroll painting, the swoosh of the brush stroke is what's at the center of the scroll, but the empty space around it is, is also of equal importance. And we find that in conversation, there's more emptiness and more space to reflect. So it really trickles throughout the culture.
26:49 Mike Carruthers? Well, that's true too here. I mean, you know, there aren't too many people that are, it's your good friends that you can sit in a room with and each read a book or do your own thing and not feel compelled to chat. You know, you, there's something very comforting about that.
27:07 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Yeah. One of my favorite things is to share silence because silence is magnified when it's shared. What I mean by that is that there's something inherently close to sharing silence, is something that creates an intimacy in that space. And of course, when we think about rituals and ceremonies, often those moments of shared silence are, they feel pretty transformational. It's a little hard to explain this. It's a little bit in the realm of the ineffable. But what I notice in those shared moments of like a wedding or even a funeral or something, when there's just some silence where the, the collection, the collective is holding that silence together. It's not just, it's not just, you know, the poignancy of the importance of that moment,
27:50 Speaker 01 the sacredness of that moment is shared. And I feel like we come out different people with different, a different sense of connection.
27:57 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, that's, see, that's really interesting, that group silence at a, at a, an important event like that. You know, that's why people have, you know, we're going to have a moment of silence and that there's something very moving about that.
28:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's an old technology. This is not a new hack. We've been doing this for a long time. And our argument is really just, we need to bring a little bit more space in for more silence. We've swung a little too far in one direction. Let's swing it back.
28:27 Mike Carruthers? Well, it's interesting. This is, I think, the first time on this podcast, the topic has been not about something, but about the lack of something, that silence is that lack of noise and the power that, that's really in that silence. I've been talking to Lee Mars. She is a consultant and coach and co-author of a book called Golden, The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Lee. Appreciate you sharing this.
28:56 Speaker 01 Aw, thanks, Mike. What a pleasure.
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29:59 Mike Carruthers? I'm sure you get food cravings. I crave Thai food sometimes, and chocolate, sometimes Mexican food, and a few other things. Anyone who's had a craving knows, a craving can be very powerful. But what is a craving? It's kind of like hunger, but it's very specific hunger. So, how is it different from just being plain hungry? And perhaps more importantly, what can you do to curb those cravings, and maybe even prevent them, so they don't sabotage your diet? Here to discuss all of this is Amy Shah. Amy is a board-certified medical doctor and nutrition expert with training from Cornell,
30:42 Mike Carruthers? Columbia, and Harvard, and she's author of a book called, "I'm So Effing Hungry: Why We Crave What We Crave and What to Do About It." Hi, Amy, welcome to Something You Should Know.
30:53 Speaker 02 Thank you so much for having me.
30:55 Mike Carruthers? My sense is that a craving, that hungry is when you're hungry and you want to eat something, and a craving is you're hungry and you want to eat ice cream, or brownies, or something very specific. Is that a fair definition?
31:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I definitely think that that's one definition. I think even clearer to me is that it's two separate areas in the brain, in fact, working independently of each other, meaning that you could be hungry without activating the cravings area of your brain, and you could be craving something without actually being hungry at all.
31:31 Mike Carruthers? Really? That seems, that seems weird. It seems like every time I've ever had a craving is because I was really hungry and I, and I wanted that particular thing.
31:41 Speaker 02 Well, I'll give you an example. Say you finished a beautiful dinner, you have eaten all the things, when the check comes and they say, "Oh, did you guys want any dessert?" And everyone at the table looks at each other and they're like, oh, I'm full, but kind of do want to look at the dessert menu. You know, it's like, you kind of want to see what's on there. That's cravings. That's like, you want that dopamine release in your brain that would come from chocolate or ice cream or, you know, some kind of dessert-like item that even though you're full, you're willing to order something that will give you that feeling.
32:22 Mike Carruthers? And so what is that? Because I've been in that situation where I've been at a table and the waiter comes over and says, do you want to see the dessert menu? And I have no interest. But other times, I think, well, that sounds pretty good. Let's take a look. So what's the difference?
32:37 Speaker 02 Our brain will want something that creates a dopamine release. And it depends on so many different things. But in general, our brain loves the feeling of a dopamine release that comes from either food or enjoyment, like, you know, going to something that you really enjoy. Gambling and gaming kind of fits in that category where you get a release of dopamine by doing that activity. Sometimes it's a matter of, have I done it before and now my brain wants more of it? It's related to stress. It's related to what else has happened in your day. I'll give you this example. Dopamine in our brain is created
33:22 Speaker 02 this pathway, this cravings pathway is created to keep us going back for more. So if you've had a big dessert and you had a great dopamine explosion in your brain, what your brain will do is like, say, oh, I want that again. That's the dopamine pathways. Like, it's pleasure mixed with motivation to try to get it again. And it's our, it's a pathway that probably was created, we think, to keep us motivated to, you know, find more housing, to procreate, to find more food. So body does not want you to give up once you've
34:02 Speaker 02 found a beautiful food source. It wants you to keep coming back for more. And so dopamine, the cravings pathway, is a dopamine pathway that will keep you coming back for more. And that's what gambling is. That's what gaming is. That's what desserts do for you. That's what processed foods do.
34:20 Mike Carruthers? And when you don't want to give in to those cravings, you resist it. And resisting a craving can be very difficult and often it ends in failure.
34:32 Speaker 02 Instead of resisting your cravings, start retraining your cravings. Start retraining yourself so that you don't have to seek out that late night dessert, that alcohol, the drugs, the gambling, all of that. So I talk about like a five step plan, but the number one thing is changing the way you eat. So we now know that our gut bacteria is very responsible for sending signals to the brain about when we're full, when we need more, when we're craving. So getting that gut bacteria to feel full itself, to be happy, is the number one goal.
35:11 Speaker 02 Eating the right foods, foods that the gut bacteria love, will help you send signals to the brain that you're full.
35:20 Mike Carruthers? And those foods are?
35:22 Speaker 02 Number one is fiber, so probiotic and prebiotic fiber. Number two is polyphenols. These are the brightly colored fruits and vegetables and spices, teas and chocolate. Number three is high amino acid foods. So these are your high protein foods that really signal to the brain that you're feeling satisfied and full. Number four is dopamine producing foods. So like I mentioned, cravings pathway is due to your body wanting a dopamine release. And there are foods that you can be eating to raise your baseline levels of dopamine. Number five is omega three fatty acid rich foods. These are things like salmon and nuts. And these also trigger something called CCK, which is closely to kinein, is a satiation
36:06 Speaker 02 hormone. And number six is glucosinolates. Glucosinolates are a plant compound found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage. They are full of this glucosinolate compound that tell the gut bacteria or feed the gut bacteria and then in turn the gut bacteria tell the body that we're full.
36:32 Mike Carruthers? But when people crave stuff, is it typically?
36:37 Mike Carruthers? Sweet?
36:38 Speaker 02 It can be sweet, or it can be savory. Remember, there's people who love french fries, and they would have those over any kind of sweet. So, salt, sugar, and fat are the three things that people typically crave. And the thing is, Mike, is that food companies know this. Food companies know the science that we're talking about right now. They know how to rewire our brains to have the most explosive dopamine release from their foods. So what they do is, they figure out, okay, if we put this much salt, this much sugar, this much fat, we could actually create a food that would be so craveable
37:20 Speaker 02 that people would keep coming back for more. And that's literally the problem with the food industry today, is that they're creating foods that would never have this combination in nature. They're creating foods that are so craveable, that whether we're hungry or not, we're going to go after those foods. And I'm not, it's not just the food industry, the gaming industry, Instagram, gambling, porn. They all know how these pathways work.
37:54 Mike Carruthers? What are some examples of craveable foods?
37:58 Speaker 02 Doritos, Pepsi and Coke, McDonald's, Happy Meal. You know, it's called Happy Meal for a reason. It's literally creating a explosion in your brain of dopamine, and makes you feel happy in the moment. But remember, dopamine is very smart. It dissipates quickly, and you feel uncomfortable. You've all, right after you eat something that's got a huge dopamine release, you immediately feel a mix of pleasure and discomfort. Like, oh gosh, when am I gonna get this again? You know, I gotta, am I eating too much? Should I, should I be eating this? It's like this pleasure mixed with discomfort. And our processed
38:38 Speaker 02 food industry is full of those. So McDonald's is a classic one that everybody kind of talks about, but, and Doritos. You know, all the soda companies really work on this a lot, candies.
38:51 Mike Carruthers? So, I've always thought, I mean, I remember hearing the advice that, you know, if you're hungry for a Snickers bar... I mean, you can fight it, or, but if you just have the Snickers bar, shouldn't that and doesn't that, have you ever studied this, where you have the Snickers bar and you go, okay, that was great, and life goes on? Or does it create more problems? Can't you just give in to your craving and you're done?
39:19 Speaker 02 Absolutely not. It's actually the opposite. So when you understand how cravings pathways work, is that the more you do it, the more you reinforce that pathway. And so it's just like alcohol, exactly the same pathway. You have a drink, or you have a lot of drinks, and the next day you say to yourself, well, I feel like having a drink, and I feel like if I just have one, it's gonna be fine, I'll not have that craving anymore. And you know, we know now the biology behind it, you have one drink and it kind of reinforces that pathway to have, want more of that. And that's exactly the same thing with processed foods.
39:58 Speaker 02 If you have that Snickers bar today, just to, just to give in to your cravings, what it does is it reinforces the pathway, and it makes you want more of the Snickers. And then tomorrow, you're probably gonna want a Snickers and a half. And this is very true, if you ever know anyone who loves Starbucks, or those Frappuccino type drinks, you know, in the beginning, they taste really sweet, and you can only have a little bit, but then over time, you start craving it more and more, you can have a tall, and then you have a grande, then you have a venti, and then before you know
40:38 Speaker 02 it, you're having a extra large jumbo size Frappuccino when your craving hits.
40:46 Mike Carruthers? So is this primarily or exclusively a food problem? Or are there other things in life that affect this?
40:55 Speaker 02 No, this is a modern life problem. Actually gambling is the best example of very, very strong craving ability. So what happens is when you gamble, you lose, you lose, you lose. And then all of a sudden, without you anticipating it, you win. And you create this huge dopamine explosion. And it creates this pathway in your brain. Because now, once that dissipates, you're like, oh, my God, I gotta do that again. Because wow, that feeling was just so delightful, right? So that's what the cravings pathways does.
41:34 Mike Carruthers? Are there other things, things that might seem unrelated to the craving itself, that actually help to fight the craving? I guess what I mean is, so for example, if you sleep more, do you crave less? If you're bored, do you crave more? Are there other things that can affect how much you crave something?
41:54 Speaker 02 I would love to give you an example, easy, lazy. I call it the lazy example because people love this example. Getting sunlight into your eyes activates a hormone called alpha MSH. That hormone makes you feel satiated. And when you get adequate sunlight during the day, you increase your chances of feeling full after meals. It calms the cravings and it makes you feel fuller. And if you think about it, you know, some people will say, oh, yeah. You know, if I go for a nice sunny walk, not only is my mood better, but I'm not craving the bad foods or bad things in my life as much.
42:39 Mike Carruthers? What else, what else works besides sunlight?
42:42 Speaker 02 Eating foods with protein. So when you start to replace the right foods back into your body, you reset your hunger hormones and your neurologic pathways, and most importantly, your gut bacteria. The gut bacteria Will sense amino acids from proteins in your gut and it will tell your brain that, hey, you're getting nutrition. There is a very interesting hypothesis called the protein threshold hypothesis that says when you get enough protein in your GI tract, your brain starts to create satiation hormones, the neuropeptide YY, the CCK, the leptin,
43:26 Speaker 02 to say to your body, all right, we got what we need, time to stop. But if your eating foods are really low in protein, which is, you know, ultra-processed foods, snacks, you will keep eating because your body hasn't hit that threshold yet of protein. And so this might makes it so usable to me. I said, oh, well, okay, if I want to have better control of my cravings, I need to increase the level of protein in my meals, especially early in my meals, so that by the time I start to digest the protein, I start to get the fullness signals. And so I'm not diving into the cake or the dessert at the end of the meal.
44:07 Mike Carruthers? It seems that with food cravings at least, and maybe other kind of cravings, that just letting time go by will help, that the thing that you're craving to eat, if you don't eat it, pretty soon, you, I don't know, you just don't crave it anymore.
44:25 Speaker 02 Say you ate a meal. This happens to me all the time. Say you ate a meal and you did order dessert, but it took forever for the waiter to put in the dessert order and for it to come back. And by that time, your satiation hormones have kicked in, right? You're like, oh, I don't want it anymore. I'm done. That is a very common way to kind of get over cravings is after meal, just go for a walk, or maybe you do something else before you reach for that dessert. And often, your hunger hormones have kicked in and you are fine with not having that craving at the end of the meal. It's much harder, as you know,
45:07 Speaker 02 When your cravings are very strong, cravings are the strongest pathways in our body. They motivate us to move, to get up out of our seat, to get in the car, to drive across town, and have that thing that we're craving. So it's often not as easy as just saying, oh, well, just take a walk or distract yourself for 15 minutes. It just depends on how strong and how deeply rooted that craving might be for you.
45:34 Mike Carruthers? What are some of the other hacks, tricks, first aid, whatever you want to call it, that help to work on cravings in the moment?
45:43 Speaker 02 Oh, I love the peppermint one. So peppermint oil or dark chocolate with peppermint. Peppermint works to calm the craving centers in our brain. So what they did is, they actually experimented on people who sniffed peppermint every two to three hours, and then they actually looked at their brain waves through MRI, and they found that those people who had sniffed the peppermint were much less likely to have cravings for food than the people who didn't. So that's a really easy one, and you can allude that that would be true for, even though they used peppermint oil in the study, you can
46:26 Speaker 02 imagine that it could be like, you know, drinking a peppermint tea or having a peppermint dark chocolate, like it could help you with those. There was another study where they used walnuts, walnuts in a smoothie. And the interesting thing, Mike, is that they gave two groups smoothies. One group had walnuts in their smoothie, and the other group had something that had a texture of walnuts, but not walnuts, a placebo. And they found that over two weeks' time, the group that drank the walnut smoothie had craving centers in their brain that were calmer and less likely to light up at the visual cues of cravings as compared to the group that just had the shake with the placebo.
47:13 Mike Carruthers? Are cravings predictable? Can you then say, well, since, given this set of circumstances, I know I'm going to end up craving something, so maybe I can stop it before it starts?
47:25 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely. We are in control. Our brain is plastic, much more so when we're young, you know, zero to five, they're super plastic. But then even as adults, if you recognize you have a craving for something unhealthy, you can anticipate and change that. So I'll give you an example. When I know for me, for example, that baked cookies, like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, is something I often crave. And I know that if I keep it in the house, all I think about is when I can have that cookie, when I can have the next cookie, when I'm allowed to have that again.
48:07 Speaker 02 And I recognize that that was a craving pathway signal. And I recognize that I wanted to change that. So what I did is, instead of having chocolate chip cookies in the house, freshly baked, I had just some really high-quality dark chocolate. And what I would do is, when I would crave the chocolate chip cookie freshly baked, I would say to myself, well, you know what? I'm going to do a better thing. I'm going to give my body a reward, a dopamine explosion, but something that's positive, something that I could, like, live with and be happy with. So I gave myself the dark chocolate, and I call it the intermittent reward schedule. So what you want to do is,
48:52 Speaker 02 the best way to create a pathway for a new craving is to intermittently and randomly reward yourself with a positive food or item that can reshape that pathway. And so I actually retrained my brain to crave dark chocolate. Now, for some people, that might not be good enough. They might switch it for something else. But it has to be something that creates a dopamine response in your brain, so that when you replace one for the other, you still get a good feeling. So you can't replace the baked hot chocolate chip cookie with a celery stick, because that's not going to give you the dopamine response to help you retrain your brain.
49:37 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, well, you got that right. I'm pretty sure that's not going to work. I've been speaking with Amy Shah. She's a board-certified medical doctor and author of the book, I'm So Effing Hungry: Why We Crave What We Crave and What to Do About It. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Amy. Thank you so much.
49:59 Mike Carruthers? You probably assume that your homeowner's insurance policy covers your home, and it probably does. But it may also cover a lot more things than just your house. There's a good chance that your homeowner's policy covers you if you get stuck with counterfeit money or a forged check. It might also protect you if you get sued for libel. Fraudulent purchases and money transfers on your credit or debit card might also be covered by your homeowner's policy. If something gets stolen out of your car, your auto policy probably won't cover it, but your homeowner's policy probably will. If you have renters insurance,
50:41 Mike Carruthers? those things might be covered as well. It's a good idea to actually read the fine print of your policy. You might find some nice surprises. And that is something you should know. I know that leaving reviews for things can be a pain in the neck. I don't do it a lot, but I do do it for things that I do really like, or experiences I really didn't like. Hopefully, you have some good feelings about this podcast, and you would just take a moment and leave a rating and review wherever you listen. I'm Mike Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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