Emily McDonald

Like, I have a music playlist that I think my chemistry TA sophomore year of college, like, was sending out everybody, and now I've added, like, hours of music to it.

But I've been listening to it for years and years and years now, and I only ever listen to it once.

when I am doing deep work.

And now when I do deep work, not only when I do deep work, but now when I put that playlist on, my brain immediately just goes into super focus mode because my brain has just so many prior associations of that.

Like that is what that playlist is, right?

And so for you, for example, your meditation room, your brain has learned this is where we drop in.

And so now it probably is just way easier now over time because that's the energy of it, right?

And that's what it feels like.

But then for something like this room, for example, where you're having other people come in and out, yeah, so they've actually shown, they did a study where they had people in a room watch like a scary or stressful movie.

And then they had them leave and they had a new group of people walk in and report how they felt.

And they also did this with like a happy movie too.

And what they found was that after walking into a room of where they had just previously watched this scary movie, people reported feeling like stressed or anxious.

And that's because people, we actually sort of leak chemical signals into the air through our sweat, our breath.

And these don't just affect the way that we feel.

They actually affect our performance as well.

There was a study with dentists and this wasn't like operating on real people, but they had them do sort of, you know, simulated dental tasks.

And what they found was, and they had them, I think,

I can't remember exactly what it was.

It might've been like a t-shirt or something.

I don't remember exactly what they did, how they gave them these chemo signals, but they essentially had these dentists, they exposed them to stress chemo signals or not.