Dr. Todd Rose

And cortisol is good in the short term when you're under threat and absolutely toxic, breaks down blood vessels, everything.

The study I'm referring to actually tracked women who have much higher rates of self-silencing and just found when you look at all the gaps in mental health issues, there's usually a gender gap, right?

Eating disorders, depression, anxiety.

Autoimmune disorders.

When you control for rates of self-silencing, the gender gap disappears.

This is a big deal.

This is a big deal for your physical health.

But when you remove the gender piece... When you remove the self-silencing, the effect of that, it turns out there isn't a gender gap in those things.

It's about self-silencing.

Like, that's not everything, right?

There's lots of reasons why we can end up with anxiety.

But I think the reason I say this is that when we self-silence, I think we tend to think that it's sort of benign, right?

It's not much of a cost.

Yeah, I don't feel so good, but look, I get to fit in.

What I want to show you is, no, there is a profound cost to your physical health, right?

There is a cost to your psychological health.

I mean, self-sufficiency is correlated with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, all these things.

And there is a cost to humanity, right?

in the false polarization, the distrust, the resentment that is pervasive in society today.

And democracies do not survive this kind of threat.