Stepping Back Into a Happier Life
Also, if you're a night owl, early birds, and color blind dogs.
Chris Gethard finds more peace
I mean that’s what this episode comes down to. He’s taken a step back from the grind/hustle/glamour/fame/pressure cooker of show business to put more focus on his wife and child, get better health care, and just have a calmer world around him.
It’s not what you’re supposed to do, mind you, according to the edicts of society. When you’re in comedy, when you’re part of the Upright Citizens Brigade of comedy performers/creators, you’re supposed to be seeking bigger achievements, larger audiences, more projects, more of everything. And Chris had reached that. He hosted his own show on cable television, he had a one-man off-Broadway show that was turned into an HBO special. He was famous. He was also grinding his teeth so hard from stress that they were falling out of his head.
And there were signs that, despite all the stress and effort, things were heading in the wrong direction. An appearance years earlier at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival involved sold-out houses and massive buzz. A more recent appearance involved playing to 17 people in a venue that housed 150. After that, Chris applied to and was accepted at a graduate program for social work and counseling. Before he could enroll, he was offered a chance to develop a new curriculum for teaching young people about mental health through improv comedy so now that, instead of comedy hustling, is his main gig.
So our conversation is about his career path. But beyond that, it’s about the choices that we make in how to spend our time and effort. Chris points out that often, when you add up the pros and cons of a given decision, the pros on one side end up being pretty much “money” and the pros on the other side involve stuff like “peace” and “family”.
Mental health apps and colleges: does anyone know what they’re doing?
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is super smart and also very stingy about letting you read its articles, has a look at the rush by colleges and universities to address mental health through the use of apps. Problem is, there are like 10,000 to 20,000 mental health apps out there and they haven’t really been carefully evaluated.
A team of seven researchers hopes to start changing that with a new report, released Thursday. The authors review in some detail available evidence for nine of the digital mental-health interventions most often purchased by colleges for their students. In many of those cases they found little, no, or outdated evidence of effectiveness. More broadly, the researchers analyzed services at 200 randomly selected colleges and interviewed administrators and other experts at 20 institutions. In that wider look, too, the researchers found surprisingly little evidence on the apps’ use and effectiveness.
Which is better for mental health: being a morning person or being a night owl?
Here is where you expect me to say they’re both just fine. But nope: it’s morning person, says Stanford.
The results were clear — both morning types and evening types who went to sleep late had higher rates of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety.
“The worst-case scenario is definitely the late-night people staying up late,” Zeitzer said. Night owls being true to their chronotype were 20% to 40% more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared with night owls following an early or intermediate sleep schedule.
Evening types who followed an earlier schedule fared better. Morning types who followed a later schedule suffered, but not too much.
Morning larks who rose with the sun tended to have the best mental health of all, to no one’s surprise.
How do they know dogs are color blind?
That’s a question I’ve often wondered myself. Fortunately, smart people Adam Cole and Joss Fong have a new YouTube channel that will be taking on all sorts of How questions. One of the first videos, with Cleo Abram, asks about the dogs and the color thing.
Nate Corddry on Sleeping with Celebrities
Nate’s a friend of mine and happens to be one of the great That Guys in Hollywood today. He just seems to turn up everywhere in movies and TV shows. He’s That Guy. And he wants to help you go to sleep.
You may know the very funny and talented actor Nate Corddry from one million television programs and movies he’s appeared in over the years, including Ghostbusters, Mom, The Daily Show, and Yogi Bear. You may not know him as a high-level player of a style of baseball played with dice, pencils, and pads of paper, yet that is exactly what he has been for many years. Listen to Nate tell you all about how to play this soothingly complicated version of America’s pastime and soon you will be sleeping as soundly as Nate’s five-month-old twins who somehow remained peaceful for the duration of the interview.