Jemma Spake
speaker
1,071 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Jemma Spake’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Like again, your brain doesn't have to prepare for the best case scenario because it's the best.
And so anytime you're thinking about the future, of course, I would say the majority of the time you're going to be thinking about the ways that it's not going to go well and all the terrible hypotheticals.
It's just skewing your perception.
And it's why when we actually arrive at the situations that we fear, it's often not all that bad.
You kind of just breathe a sigh of relief at times.
Maybe that's one of the, I don't want to say the benefits, I don't want to go that far, but one of the weird side effects is that when we get to situations that we feared so often, often there is a level of relief there that it's not as bad as we thought it was going to be.
Does that make sense?
There's been so many other studies that have, you know, repeated this finding again and again and again.
We anticipate the worst case scenario.
But what they also show is that when we anticipate the worst case scenario, being in a state of uncertainty makes our executive functioning worse.
And this is one of those weird human evolutionary biology ironies.
The evolutionary explanation would say worrying about the future allows us to anticipate things that we need to survive, allows us to practice or rehearse how we're going to cope.
But equally, the science tells us that being in that state of uncertainty and always imagining the worst case scenario actually harms our body's biological ability to cope.
So some evidence of this, there are studies that suggest that being in a state of uncertainty makes our executive functioning worse, makes our level of coping worse, makes our frontal lobe's ability to execute rational thought worse, makes even our body less physically prepared.
There was a study from 2020 that showed this.
they got a bunch of participants and they said to them, you're going to do a speech.
We're either going to tell you what you have to do the speech on or we're not.
Actually, I think it was like, they might have to do a speech.
They might not.
They did know the topic, but those who were uncertain about whether they were going to have to do that
Showing 121–140 of 1,071 · page 7 of 54
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