Curiosity Daily

Turn Anxiety into Productivity and Grapefruit Juice vs. Meds

Episode Summary

Dr. Wendy Suzuki explains how to use anxiety to your advantage. Plus: why grapefruit juice and some medicines don’t mix. More from Dr. Wendy Suzuki: Pick up “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion” https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Good-Anxiety/Wendy-Suzuki/9781982170738 Dr. Suzuki’s official website: https://www.wendysuzuki.com/ Follow @wasuzuki on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wasuzuki Combat social anxiety on HiHo: Download on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hiho-video/id1535845974?itsct=apps_box&itscg=30200  Curiosity on HiHo: https://hiho.link/g/curiosity  Cody’s Curious Clan: https://hiho.link/g/codyclan  Why can’t I drink grapefruit juice when I take certain medicines? by Cameron Duke  Bailey, D. G., Dresser, G., & Arnold, J. M. O. (2012). Grapefruit–medication interactions: Forbidden fruit or avoidable consequences? Canadian Medical Association Journal, 185(4), 309–316. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.120951 Drug Metabolism - The Importance of Cytochrome P450 3A4. (2014). Govt.nz. https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/profs/puarticles/march2014drugmetabolismcytochromep4503a4.htm Office of the Commissioner. (2021). Grapefruit juice can affect how well some medicines work. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/grapefruit-juice-and-some-drugs-dont-mix Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

Episode Notes

Dr. Wendy Suzuki explains how to use anxiety to your advantage. Plus: why grapefruit juice and some medicines don’t mix.

More from Dr. Wendy Suzuki:

Combat social anxiety on HiHo:

Why can’t I drink grapefruit juice when I take certain medicines? by Cameron Duke

Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/turn-anxiety-into-productivity-and-grapefruit-juice-vs-meds

Episode Transcription

CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. I’m Cody Gough. And… it’s just me today! No Ashley Hamer on this episode — but don’t worry, she’ll be back next time. As for today, you’ll learn about how you can use anxiety to your advantage, with help from neuroscientist Dr. Wendy Suzuki; and why you can’t drink grapefruit juice when you take certain medicines. Ready? Me, too. Let’s satisfy some curiosity.

Dr. Wendy Suzuki Interview — Good Anxiety

What if I told you that you can make your anxiety work for you? Well, uh… you can make your anxiety work for you. And that’s according to a world-renowned neuroscientist who just wrote a book about it. Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology in the Center for Neural Science at New York University. And today she’s going to share a couple tips to help you harness the power of what she says is a misunderstood emotion. But first, here’s Dr. Suzuki on what she means by “anxiety.” 

[CLIP 1:33]

Dr. Suzuki told us that there are a couple different types of anxiety: clinical anxiety and everyday anxiety. Clinical anxiety is an ongoing and debilitating issue, like general anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or obsessive compulsive disorder. And according to her, your best bet for treating that is with help from a medical professional. But for everyday anxiety, she has a couple tips she shared with us that she calls “superpowers of anxiety.” 

[CLIP 3:12]

I mean… can YOU think of anything we need more these days than empathy for each other? Yeah, me neither. Now, I know when you hear the phrase “have more empathy,” you might think, okay, that’s just a platitude, right? Like a motivational poster or something? Well NO. In Dr. Suzuki’s new book, she talks about actual neuroscience studies that back up all the concepts she talks about — stuff like research that’s used brain scans to help us understand the biology of “social intelligence.” There’s definitely a lot more than we had time to get into today, so if you want to learn more, then pick up the new book “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion.” As always, you can find a link to that in today’s show notes.

Why can’t I drink grapefruit juice when I take certain medicines? by Cameron Duke (Cody)

When you pick up a prescription at your pharmacy, your pharmacist will go through all of the things they think you should know about the drug. Most of the tips are obvious: stuff like when you should take it, and how much of it you should take. But sometimes, they tell you whether or not you can drink grapefruit juice with it. It seems weird, but this tip is for a good reason.

Lots of common medications carry this warning, like statins for cholesterol, some antihistamines, anti-anxiety drugs, and blood pressure medications. The reason comes down to a bit of human physiology. When you take a drug, it’s absorbed into your bloodstream and carried throughout your body. You need a certain amount of that drug in your system for it to be effective, which is why you’re told how much to take and when. Repeated doses are necessary because your body is constantly trying to break the drug down and clean it out of your system.

A lot of this breakdown happens directly in your small intestine, during digestion. As a result, a sizable amount of the drugs you take don’t even make it as far as your bloodstream. Pharmacologists know about this and adjust dosages to compensate so you get the proper amount in your bloodstream in the end. 

One of the enzymes your small intestine uses to break down drugs is called Cytochrome P450 3A4, or CYP3A4. It’s kind of a metabolic swiss army knife. It’s found in the lining of your small intestine, and it’s involved in disarming roughly half of the drugs you’ll find at the pharmacy. What it doesn’t help break down goes into your bloodstream. 

That brings us back to the grapefruit juice. See, grapefruit contains a class of chemicals called furanocoumarins [fyur-ANN-uh-KOO-mer-ins], and these are the kryptonite to CYP3A4’s Superman. The enzyme can break these chemicals down, but the byproducts generated in the process end up sticking to the enzyme and rendering it inactive. 

The result is that your doctor prescribes a drug at a certain dosage with the assumption that CYP3A4 is going to catch a lot of it before it is distributed to the rest of your body. If furanocoumarins have disabled the enzyme, then you get WAY more of the drug than you’re supposed to, which can cause side effects or even organ damage, depending on the drug. 

Avoiding grapefruit juice on a course of meds sounds like weird advice, but they give it for a reason.

RECAP

Before I recap what we learned today, I just want to share a quick programming note that you’re gonna hear a HANDFUL of Cody-only Curiosity Daily episodes over the next month or so. But for the most part, you’re gonna hear both Ashley and me on this podcast. Production schedules just got real weird this month. And I’m working super hard to make them sound as good as possible, so please be kind. In the meantime, I’ll try not to be too anxious about it. And hey, speaking of anxiety! Let’s recap what we learned today, starting with the fact that

  1. Anxiety is that feeling of fear or worry typically associated with an uncertain situation. We evolved anxiety and our underlying physiological stress response to protect us from danger, and it’s always been critical to our survival. It just becomes a problem when you have too much of it — which, you know… tends to happen during a global pandemic.
  2. One way you can turn anxiety into productivity is by turning your “what ifs” into “to-dos.” Anxiety evolved to be resolved, typically by running away or fighting, like your fight or flight response. So when you make a to-do list and take action, you help to resolve that feeling. For example, you might have a job interview and think “what if they ask me a question and I fumble the answer?” Well, you can RESOLVE that anxiety by doing a practice interview with a friend; researching the company you’re interviewing with; writing notes so you don’t forget any of the things you want to highlight. Take an active role in facing whatever you’re anxious about.
    1. Dr. Suzuki told us this can even work with anxiety around the pandemic or climate change. You can take steps in your own life to decrease your risk of getting COVID, or make changes to live more sustainably. Sure, you can’t “fix” either problem on your own, but when you’re proactive, it can actually help reduce the anxiety you feel about some of the world’s bigger problems.
  3. We also learned that a great way to conquer social anxiety is with a superpower called empathy. Try to recognize your most common form of anxiety, and when you see it in someone else, use that as an opportunity to connect with that person. In Dr. Suzuki’s book, she writes about how this fits into a relatively new area of neuroscience research focusing on the science of social intelligence, or SQ (not to be confused with IQ). And she says your social anxiety is giving you clues to help you — you just have to truly listen to what your anxiety is signaling to you.
    1. I’ve mentioned HiHo on this podcast before, remember HiHo? The asynchronous social video messaging app? To me, that’s actually been another really helpful way to fight social anxiety. Because like, you can reply to someone’s video about something with a video of your own, and then they can reply to you — but there’s no pressure, like you’re not put on the spot or anything, because you can reply whenever you want. I compare it to kinda like being at a party, but if you don’t have something witty to say to someone right then and there, you can wait, like, 12 hours, and send it off then. Or if like, in real life whenever someone asks for a book recommendation, you just draw a blank, then hey, you can literally walk over to your bookcase and go through your books and find that book you’re thinking about and pull it out and hold it up and shoot a little video. It’s awesome. And like, I don’t really have a lot of social anxiety, but I still found it really useful in the early days of the pandemic for connecting with people and even for making new friends. And by the way, in case you’re feeling anxiety over me leaving Curiosity Daily, then I encourage you to hop on HiHo, where there’s a Curiosity Daily channel that I moderate AND NOW a private group called Cody’s Curious Clan where I’m hoping to start some fun conversations with awesome listeners like you and just have a place to hang out once I’ve left the show. I’ll put a link to join that in today’s show notes, but yeah, man, HiHo. I’m all about it.
  4. Prescriptions sometimes come with warnings not to drink grapefruit juice with the medication because grapefruit juice can cause too much of the drug to enter your bloodstream. That’s because there’s an enzyme that usually breaks down some portion of the drug before it enters your bloodstream, and grapefruit juice contains a chemical called CYP3A4 that can render that enzyme inactive. The result? Bad results ranging from extra side effects to serious organ damage, depending on the drug. If the label tells you to avoid grapefruit juice with the drug, I’d heed that warning!

[ad lib optional] 

CODY: The writer for today’s grapefruit juice story was Cameron Duke. I’m Cody Gough, and I produced and edited today’s episode. Curiosity Daily is distributed by Discovery.

CODY: One thing you don’t have to be anxious about is whether you’ll have to deal with a Cody-only solo episode again in the near future — there’s plenty of Ashley Hamer to be heard on this podcast. So join us again next time to learn something new in just a few minutes.

CODY: …oh, that’s… that’s my line now. I have to say that. Wow. I was just kinda waiting there. Anyway! And until then, stay curious!