Dr. Daisy Fancourt

speaker

445 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Dr. Daisy Fancourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz · Why Creativity Belongs in Your Health Routine with Dr. Daisy Fancourt · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

Kids love reading about dinosaurs and about ghosts and these scary things exactly for that reason that their brains are working out how to come to grips and come to terms with scary things, how to process it.

And as adults, we still need that.

We often love a really sad song or we love watching a scary movie.

But as you say, some people don't like scary films.

And the reason for this is if you forget that it's a film, you start to think it's real.

And some people get so drawn into experiences, particularly cinema, where it can be very, very realistic around you, that it actually just becomes scary.

So instead of having the kind of distance that we normally have, because we know it's fiction, so our brain goes through the emotions, but there's that little bit of space that means we don't get quite as drawn in as in the real world.

For some people watching films, they get so drawn in that they literally just get scared.

They don't have that aesthetic distance.

But there is a hack for this, which is...

If you could put pictures of the actors of horror films like next to the screen.

So you're kind of reminding yourself that they are actors rather than real people.

So if you do things like that, if you read up the biographies of the actors or something so that you're remembering the actors, then that helps to maintain that aesthetic distance, which means that we actually get the benefits of it without just being scared.

I do feel I need to have a caveat though.

I've known about this hack for years, but I'm still too scared to try it myself.

So this one is fantastic.

I think there are two ways.

One is to try and down-regulate that chronic stress state that people can get into.

And we know that when we're chronically stressed, we see things like heightened levels of cortisol across the day, that stress hormone, and we also lose that nice rhythm, that diurnal rhythm we should have of cortisol going up and down across the day, and it just starts to be flat and high all the time.

What's really interesting is the studies that have looked at people doing arts, particularly if you're doing about one hour every week as a kind of set piece,

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