Coltan Scrivner

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.

And one of the studies we did found that there does seem to be a sweet spot, a Goldilocks zone for the perfect amount of fear in order for you to have the most amount of fun.

And so it looks kind of like on the X axis, like a one to 10, a Y axis, one to 10.

And on the X axis is how scared are you?

And the Y axis is how much fun are you having?

That it peaks around like seven or eight for most people.

This was, of course, people at a haunted house.

Maybe they have a little higher sweet spot, but about a seven.

But everybody's seven is different, right?

Like what gets me to a seven is different than what gets you to a seven.

But if you know that there is this, it's at the cusp of I can handle this, but it challenges me a little bit.

That's where people thrive in general in life.

If you're trying to learn something new, you tend to want something that's about a seven out of 10 in difficulty as well.

Something that kind of challenges you, but it's not so hard that you're just incapable of making progress.

Yeah.