Coltan Scrivner

Of course they suck, but it does give you some perspective.

on how bad things really are, which can have some psychological benefits as well.

And what you can do, you know, you're feeling anxious.

It's really hard to like just stop feeling anxious.

If it was that easy, we would be a lot more successful species.

But it's hard to just stop anxiety.

It wouldn't be a multibillion dollar prescription drug market.

That's right.

One thing you can do is fight fire with fire, right?

Give your mind something that's scary to compete with these scary thoughts you're having.

The story is told well, and you have this scary stimulus, scary movie in this case.

You kind of get sucked into the movie a little bit.

Now you're feeling anxious or afraid, maybe because of the movie instead of whatever thing you're worrying about.

And then when the movie ends, your brain gets a signal that like, oh, well, the thing you were scared of is now going away.

It will upregulate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest part of your nervous system.

And it can actually physiologically calm you down a little bit.

Yeah, yes.

A lot of my studies take place outside the lab because it's really hard to study true engagement with fear in the lab because the ethics committees don't like it.

And it's really hard to even generate something that people can engage with in a scary way in a laboratory.

And so a lot of my stuff takes place at haunted attractions around Halloween, for example.