Short Stuff: Why does it feel good to be scared?

**Josh** (0:04)
Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, sitting in for a day. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And we're here to answer a perennial question that everyone wants to know. Just why in the gosh darn heck do we make ourselves scared on purpose?
Yeah.

**Chuck** (0:21)
Here, scare me real quick. Do something. Let's do a little exercise.

**Josh** (0:26)
You're starting to look old.

**Chuck** (0:29)
No, no, no. Really scare me. Say boo or something.

**Josh** (0:32)
That's going to scare you more? Yeah, yeah. Okay, boo.

**Chuck** (0:36)
Oh my God.
Oh boy. As it turns out, that was really exhilarating. I feel great now.

**Josh** (0:41)
Yeah. Well, you overcame a fear, a real threat.

**Chuck** (0:45)
Yeah. It is an interesting question though. And thanks to our old friends at howstuffworks.com, as well as Psychology Today and the American Brain Foundation, who have all, as well as other places, looked in to that weird question like you were talking about. Like, why would anybody pay to go into a truly terrifying haunted house or a truly terrifying movie?

**Josh** (1:05)
And like, yeah, we all know anecdotally or personally why.
But like, if you step back and look at it from, you know, a rational standpoint, it makes zero sense whatsoever. Like, we're purposefully stimulating what's meant to be like an unpleasant experience, an unpleasant response in ourselves.

**Chuck** (1:25)
Yeah, for sure, you know, we'll get into that in a second. We need to sort of delineate, though, like what we're talking about. We did an episode on fear a while back. It was a long time ago, I think. It was a pretty good one, if I remember correctly.
But we're not talking about anxiety. Like, there's anxiety and there's fear. Anxiety is the stuff that keeps you up at night. They're like existential threats or am I getting old or is our country being ruined or is there a looming war coming to our country? Things that haven't happened yet that you're truly upset and anxious about is not the same thing as fear of something that is like somebody jumping out and saying, boo, something that happens right in front of your face.

**Josh** (2:05)
Exactly.
So you got that. Fear is about something jumping out right in front of your face. It's about an immediate threat to your well-being, maybe your life, and it triggers the fight or flight response.

**Chuck** (2:23)
Yeah, for sure.

**Josh** (2:24)
So a little more about that. When you have the fight or flight response, your pulse increases, your blood pressure increases, you just get ready to run or fly, which is the only time you can fly is when you're scared.

**Chuck** (2:40)
That's right. There have been people that research this stuff. There's a book that we want to shout out called Scream. Scream with an exclamation point from Margie Key and her colleague, Dr. Greg Segal, who was director for the Cognitive Neuroscience Program at University of Pittsburgh. But their description of what we're talking about, like paying to go to a haunted house or something, or a really scary movie, is voluntary engagement with negative high arousal stimuli.
In other words, it's like, yeah, I'll give you my hard-earned dollars to go into a nether world in October. And because the thrill of getting the doodoo scared out of me is like I enjoy that experience.

**Josh** (3:25)
Yes.
So yeah, that's a great, great term for it. I say we take a little break, Chuck, and then we come back and we go step by step how this whole thing goes for us.

**Chuck** (3:35)
Yeah, let's do it.

**Josh** (3:36)
Okay.
Okay, Chuck, so we're talking about fun, scary, not fun anxiety. I don't think there is such a thing, really, as fun anxiety. I mean, I guess like an existential or elevated horror movie, like that develops a sense of dread.

**Chuck** (4:18)
Yeah, okay.

**Josh** (4:20)
But it so rarely pays off in a good way. It's, yeah, I don't know that there's a good version of it. So we're talking-

**Chuck** (4:26)
Yeah, I think I agree.

**Josh** (4:27)
Like scary, the fun version, right? And one of the main reasons why we do this, it turns out, because we feel a sense of mastery over this thing that overwhelms us because we're choosing to do this. That's step one. We're choosing to experience this scary thing. And by saying like, I'm choosing to do this, although of course you don't do this step-by-step, it just kind of happens.
You're saying like, I'm in control, I'm in charge. Yeah, I'm going into this scary haunted house, but it's on the premise that I'm not actually going to be stabbed by the screen guy. He's just going to come up like he's about to stab me, but he's not going to follow through. Some part of me knows that.