Why do my children stress me out?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 985 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
CrowdScience listener Leo gets stressed when his young children start screaming at the same time in the middle of the night. He wants to know why we haven’t evolved to deal with the stress more effectively. The challenges of bringing up a family are nothing new and we don’t face the same dangers as our ancestors, so why do we still react as if it’s a life-threatening emergency? Caroline Steel finds out what stress is for, what it does to us and whether we have in fact evolved to manage it.
Contributors:
Tashfia Ahmed, biomedical engineer, post-doctoral researcher, City University, London Anne-Kathrin Gellner, neurologist and psychiatrist, Bonn University James Rilling, anthropologist and neuroscientist, Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Emory University Gunter Wagner, evolutionary biologist, Vienna University
Presenter: Caroline Steel Producer: Jo Glanville Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris Studio Manager: Jackie Margerum
(Image: Frustrated father holds baby in his arms. Credit: Jamie Grill / Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. How does that alarm make you feel? |
| 0:34.0 | A bit. |
| 0:35.0 | A bit. |
| 0:37.0 | A camera, make, |
| 0:38.0 | a camera, |
| 0:40.0 | how does that alarm make you feel? A bit stressed maybe? What about this? |
| 0:48.0 | I'm Caroline Steele and you're listening to crowd science on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:55.0 | Well actually right now you're listening to the sound of a crying baby. |
| 1:00.0 | Which really bothers one of our listeners? |
| 1:05.0 | I'm Leo and I'm based in Vancouver. I have a newborn and a four year old and I was standing in the kitchen at 3 a.m. |
| 1:10.0 | Feeding the newborn and the 4 year old was up |
| 1:14.0 | everyone was screaming and it was |
| 1:16.0 | clearly triggering a stress response in me |
| 1:18.0 | which I was finding extremely unhelpful |
| 1:22.0 | in helping everybody which is what I was trying to do |
| 1:26.0 | and I found myself wondering about why we hadn't evolved better to deal with this because it seems like |
... |
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