Learn about how people under stress can find a “new normal” surprisingly quickly, and why the Mercury 13 should have been the first women in space.
Learn about how people under stress can find a “new normal” surprisingly quickly, and why the Mercury 13 should have been the first women in space.
Even under stress, our sense of normalcy bounces back surprisingly quickly by Kelsey Donk
The Mercury 13 Should Have Been the First Women in Space by Reuben Westmaas
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/normalcy-bounces-back-quickly-in-times-of-stress-and-the-female-astronauts-of-the-mercury-13
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how people under stress can find a “new normal” surprisingly quickly, and how the Mercury 13 should have been the first women in space.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you’ve been in lockdown for the last several months, you may have noticed a change. During the first few weeks, it may have been confusing and scary and impossible to focus on anything but the news. But if you’re like me, you eventually got used to this new normal. If this sounds familiar, then this new study will too: it finds that people under stress are able to bounce back much faster than we might think — even when they’re still experiencing the stressful event.
In the past, research on stress mostly looked at people’s long-term recovery after the stressor disappeared. As a result, all of the evidence we have says that people recover slowly, and only once they’re not under stress anymore. But this new research took a different approach, and came to a much different answer.
For the new study, researchers had 122 employees fill out a quick survey three times a day for two weeks to assess how they were doing during the pandemic. The questions were simple, asking about their current stress level, how powerless they felt, and how much they felt like themselves. The study came at the perfect time: on March 16, 2020. It was the first week of stay-at-home orders and school closures in the U.S., just after the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 had reached pandemic status.
So what did they find? Well, in the early days of the pandemic, people felt really powerless and very inauthentic. The world was changing fast, and they were being told what they couldn’t do and where they couldn’t go. It was scary.
But over just two weeks, the participants feel more in control and more like their old selves. But that’s not because their situation improved: they felt like their stress levels were rising at the same time. That shows that the people in the study were able to adjust to their “new normal” really quickly.
Interestingly, the more neurotic participants in the study — that is, those with a tendency toward anxiety and vulnerability — fared the best. They had more extreme stress reactions at first, but then recovered even faster than the other study participants. The researchers think this might be because they’re better equipped to navigate stress. After all, they do it a lot already.
Overall, this is very good news. As bad as everything continues to get, we can have faith that our brains will adjust quickly to help us feel normal again — even if the world is anything but.
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You’ve probably heard of the Mercury 7, the men who became the United States’ first astronauts — you know, John Glenn, Alan Shepard, those guys. Those But have you heard of the Mercury 13? They should have been the first women in space. They were qualified, trained, and ready. But it was the late ‘50s so they never got their chance.
The story began with Dr. Randy Lovelace, a NASA physician who designed the physiological tests for the Mercury Seven. Lovelace envisioned a future full of huge space stations staffed by dozens of people, and naturally assumed that traditional women’s roles would be needed there, too. So he set out to determine whether women could withstand the challenges of space travel — privately, without the support of either the Air Force or NASA. He invited 25 female pilots to his foundation and subjected them to the same tests he ran on the Mercury Seven.
Incredibly, many of the women tested better than the men had. On average, they showed superior cardiopulmonary function and lasted longer in isolation and sensory-deprivation tests. With those impressive results, Lovelace's program got its funding — from another female aviator named Jacqueline Cochran, who also happened to be a businesswoman with money.
Eventually, the program whittled its recruits down to 13. But they never made it into space. Remember, the military never had anything to do with the program, and NASA didn’t have any plans to put women into space. In 1962, with the bulk of their training behind them, the 13 women had to argue their case before Congress.
They didn’t win, and Lovelace’s program withered away. The next year the USSR became the first country to put a woman in orbit.
But even though the Mercury 13 didn’t succeed, they did pave the way for other women to head to the stars. It took the US another 20 years to finally sent its first female astronaut, Sally Ride, into space — and another 12 before U.S. astronaut Colonel Eileen Collins became the country's first female pilot in space. The good news is that we've come a long way. But the bad news is that it's taken a very long time.
CODY: Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Reuben Westmaas, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!