Something You Should Know
The Trouble with Thinking Outside the Box & What Hunger is Really Telling You
04 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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today on something you should know why you sometimes think your phone is buzzing when it isn't then how many times have you been told to think outside the box no boundaries no limits that may be bad advice boundaries and limitations force us to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration
We think we want more freedom, but in fact that leads us to just do basically the same old thing and in many cases isn't good for our work or our well-being.
Also, if the first date wasn't great, should you try a second date? Probably. And understanding why we eat and overeat. Sometimes it's just conditioning.
For example, like it's breakfast time, you eat. It's lunch time, you eat. It's snack time, you eat. You go to a sporting event, you eat. But it's not the physical hunger, it's the conditioned hunger that's causing this food noise.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and, of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.
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Chapter 2: What is phantom vibration syndrome and why does it happen?
Oh my God. So when Gloria March started studying this, when she started studying in the early 2000s, she was sitting behind people at work with a stopwatch. Later, her methods got more sophisticated and she was monitoring people's computers remotely and all these sorts of things. And when she started, the average worker was spending about three minutes on a task before they would change.
And then around about 10 years in, around 2012, she found it was down to more like a minute and a half. And by 2022, it was 45 seconds. And that's about where it's leveled out. It stayed at about 45 seconds between people switching windows or tasks or whatever they're doing. And again, that toggling predicts lower productivity and higher stress as measured by heart rate variability.
There's even some evidence now it might affect your immune function if you're toggling a lot. It turns out to be a very stressful thing for the human brain to do. You may have to do a lot of different things over the day, but the extent to which you can monotask during any given block you'll lower your stress, and you'll improve your work quality. I know that's hard to do.
It sounds impossible for the way a lot of people work, but maybe even if you just start with half an hour where you're monotasking and not checking phone, not checking email, and just see if you can expand from there.
So talk about the problem of maximizing, because I do that. I do this. Well, explain what that is.
So maximizing again is this tendency to try to always make the best decision, whether you're buying something on Amazon, whether you're dating, whatever it is, whether, you know, finishing a work product or even maybe something that feels more personal if people are flipping through Netflix or something like that and you find something good, but you know, could there be something better still out there?
They're like less satisfied with good enough, essentially.
And it's insidious because since the introduction of infinite scrolling on our phones, international surveys show that people have been getting more bored and researchers who've tried to figure out why that could be did experiments with things where they would give someone say a set of 20 videos and they could pick and watch whichever one they want.
Or they would give other people just one video from that set, and that's the one they had to watch. And the people with the option to flip through the 20 looking for the best one were more bored than the people who were just given one to focus on.
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Chapter 3: How can constraints enhance creativity and problem-solving?
it's really about the hunger because we eat when we're hungry and we stop eating when we're full. Therefore, the sort of driving force behind most eating behavior is hunger. So we need to understand the different types of hunger, what drives it, what you can do about it. Because really, if we didn't have hunger, none of us would have trouble losing weight, right?
And that's the lesson that a lot of these new weight loss drugs have. When you squelch the hunger, weight loss isn't all that difficult.
Right, sure. But when you say there's different kinds of hunger, what do you mean? Because when I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I don't feel different. It just feels hungry.
Yeah, so there's different reasons we eat. So most of us think about the physical hunger, which is in scientific terms is called homeostatic hunger. And this is driven by hormones. So if you think about it, people think about that they're hungry. You know, they think it's because they haven't eaten in a while. But that actually isn't the case.
Because if you think about body fat is a store of calories. So if you have body fat, say you have 50 pounds to lose, you have 375,000 calories sitting on your body. So why can't your body simply release some of those to take care of the hunger? If hunger is simply you needing calories, right? So therefore it's clearly not the case. Certain hormones,
produce more hunger, certain hormones reduce hunger. So there's two other types of hunger. There's something called, which is something called hedonic hunger, which is sort of an emotional hunger because we eat because it feels good. We like it. And there's, you know, a lot of people, you know, if you think about it, eat for emotional reasons, they're bored, they're feeling a little low.
So therefore you eat to feel better. And we know that Eating is pleasurable. It's one of life's great pleasures. It releases dopamine and stimulates our brain reward systems, all these sort of things. This is the whole idea of dessert. You're not eating it because of the physical hunger. You're eating it because of the pleasure of eating, the emotional side of things.
That's important because a lot of the reasons we eat can be tied back to this sort of hedonic hunger, particularly for ultra-processed foods, which have been sort of engineered to maximize the pleasure of food while minimizing the sort of satiety. And that's actually not even the whole of it because there's a third type of hunger, which is called conditioned hunger.
That is, certain things can stimulate hunger just because you associate them with food all the time. So for example, like it's breakfast time, you eat, it's lunchtime, you eat, it's snack time, you eat, you go get a coffee, you eat, you go to a sporting event, you eat. But it's not the physical hunger, it's the conditioned hunger that's causing this food noise, which is what a lot of people feel.
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Chapter 4: What examples illustrate the benefits of working within limits?
Just like when you're really, really full and somebody says, here, have another pork chop. It's not that pleasurable, right? So yes, you can use that to squelch it, but the problem is that the focus so far has been so much on diet, right? Weight loss is diet, diet, diet. It's not. A lot of it is environmental. A lot of it is emotional.
Well, it is interesting to me how this is very much seemingly a Western problem. You don't see this in a lot of other countries.
Look at Italy. An Italian has very low risk of obesity in Italy, right? The difference, a lot of the difference, is that they don't eat everywhere they go. You don't see Italians sort of walking on the street eating. You don't see them, you know, at their desk eating. doing work and eating, right? It's different. They have a different food culture where you eat real food, right?
The level of ultra processed food is much lower. So therefore they don't have the same problems with hedonic hunger. So that condition makes them have a much lower rate of obesity. One of the lowest in the developed world. Now you take that Italian, plop them into New York City or move them to somewhere else, and their rate of obesity just skyrockets. What's the difference?
It's not the diet necessarily. It's not the person. It's those other conditions, the food environment and everything else.
Doesn't it seem to you, I mean, it seems to me as if people to some extent are just giving up, that bigger is the new normal and that that's okay. And I really worry about that.
Yeah, I do too because there is this whole idea. I mean, first, you have to understand about fat shaming, right? So the reason people were fat shaming was this whole calories. It's really the calorie bullies that sort of led to fat shaming because the story that they sold us was, of course, that it's all calories, calories, calories.
Since you decide what you eat and you decide how much you exercise, calories is about discipline and willpower. So if you get fat and can't lose weight, you don't have discipline. You don't have willpower. So in other words, it's your fault. So we can make fun of you and shame you. That's actually not true at all. Because again, this is a very simplistic way of looking at it.
Yes, you can decide what you eat, but you can't decide to be not hungry. You can't decide to burn fewer calories, right? You can't decide how you metabolize your basal metabolic rate, right? So it's not their fault at all, because if you're hungry, that's why they're eating, right? They didn't decide to be hungry. Nobody asked to be hungry so that they could eat more and gain weight, right?
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