Learn about what your muscles go through when they get pulled, whether trees have heartbeats, and the real science behind the recovering alcoholics’ mantra “one day at a time.”
Learn about what your muscles go through when they get pulled, whether trees have heartbeats, and the real science behind the recovering alcoholics’ mantra “one day at a time.”
What Happens When You Pull a Muscle? by Ashley Hamer
Trees May Have a “Heartbeat” by Reuben Westmaas
Neuroscience backs up the recovering alcoholic's mantra "one day at a time" by Steffie Drucker
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Ashley Hamer and Natalia Reagan (filling in for Cody Gough). You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/what-happens-when-you-pull-a-muscle
[MUSIC PLAYING] ASHLEY HAMER: Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn about what happens when you pull a muscle, whether trees have heartbeats, and the real science behind the recovering alcoholic's mantra, one day at a time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity.
NATALIA REAGAN: Look, we all know what a pulled muscle feels like. Maybe you try to do workout on YouTube or help your friend move a couch, or you put on a shirt wrong. [CHUCKLES] True story. Then, all of a sudden, you feel a sharp pain in that muscle, and you're down for the count. But what is pulling a muscle? What the heck happens to make it hurt so much? To understand what happens when you pull a muscle, you first have to understand muscle tissue itself.
You have three types of muscles-- cardiac, visceral, and skeletal. Cardiac and visceral muscles are the ones that keep your body's processes running smoothly like circulation and digestion. Skeletal muscle is the only type you can control and, generally, the only type you can injure. Skeletal muscles attach to tendons at each end, and each of those attaches to a bone. All muscles are made up of thousands to millions of tiny muscle fibers that contract by shortening in response to nerve stimulation, thereby letting you kick a soccer ball or throw some jazz hands like you do.
Technically, a pulled muscle, a muscle strain, and even a ruptured or severed muscle are all just different degrees of the same injury, that is, tearing of the muscle fibers, which physicians refer to as a strain. A strain can happen in the muscle itself where the tendon attaches to the bone or, most often, where the muscle meets the tendon. A pulled muscle is the mildest of the three types of strains. It's when less than 5% of the muscle is torn. A strained muscle involves a bit more tearing, whereas a ruptured muscle is as bad as it can get. A ruptured muscle is completely severed, and it can sometimes require surgery to reattach. Ouch.
Some muscle strains are unavoidable. But the ones you could experience on the playing field or in the dance studio might be prevented with a good warm-up, and by that, I mean moving around, not standing still, holding a few stretches. What if it happens anyway? Well, while your first instinct is probably to stretch a pulled muscle, don't. Instead, your best bet is RICE-- Rest, Ice, Compression, and elevation. Listen to your body and take it easy until the pain is gone.
ASHLEY HAMER: Man, I feel like this just happens to me more and more--
NATALIA REAGAN: [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: --every year on earth I experience. [LAUGHS]
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, man. I'm a runner, but you are a runner. How often do you pull-- especially in a marathon, how often do muscle pulls happen?
ASHLEY HAMER: Honestly, it's never when I'm running. It's always when I'm doing some other exercise to supplement the running--
NATALIA REAGAN: [LAUGHS]
ASHLEY HAMER: --so if I'm lifting weights or if I'm doing yoga. My muscles are so used to doing one thing that if I do something else, it's game over.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh god, yeah, I really did pull a muscle putting on a shirt once, and it messed me up. I mean, it was bad. So yeah, it's the little things. Getting older, it's fun, guys.
ASHLEY HAMER: So fun.
NATALIA REAGAN: Beats the alternative, though.
[LAUGHTER]
ASHLEY HAMER: If you're a longtime listener, you may have noticed that pretty much every time we do a story related to trees, Cody brings up the Entwives. In case you don't have any idea what he's talking about-- and honestly, I'm not sure I even do today-- we thought we'd bring you up to speed with this classic clip from May 24, 2018. That's when Cody did his first tree-related story on Curiosity Daily, and boy, did we all learn a lot from this clip. Take a listen.
CODY GOUGH: Ashley, whatever happened to the Entwives?
ASHLEY HAMER: I have no idea what you're talking about.
CODY GOUGH: Seriously?
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe Ents, oh, from Lord of the Rings.
CODY GOUGH: Lord of the Rings.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Entwives?
CODY GOUGH: I'm in a Lord of the Rings book club right now. And Entwives are like--
ASHLEY HAMER: Are they the wives of the Ents?
CODY GOUGH: Yes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
CODY GOUGH: But they mysteriously disappeared, and no one knows where they went.
ASHLEY HAMER: So the Ents don't have wives anymore.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: What does this have to do with science?
[LAUGHTER]
Keep going. I love it.
CODY GOUGH: That's a great question. Well, today, we wrote about a new study that has shown that at least some trees seem to have a heartbeat, and that might provide a new explanation for plant physiology. And I thought I would have a brilliant segue into this story by talking about the Entwives--
ASHLEY HAMER: And I just ruined it for you.
CODY GOUGH: --which is the greatest unsolved mystery of all Lord of the Rings. I'm following somebody famous on Twitter, and they tweeted about it. So anyway, I'm-- hope The Lord of the Rings fans enjoy that.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: Entwives aside, this new study, again, has shown that some trees have a heartbeat. Researchers looked at 22 different species of trees in conditions where there was no wind or sun, and they found that the branches would move on their own over the course of several hours. That's too slow for us to really notice, but that's a lot faster than any other biological process we've seen in trees, who tend to be on the slower side of things. The bad news is that we don't really know exactly how that works.
One possibility is that it's part of the mechanism that squeezes water up the trunk of the tree. I don't know if you knew about this. Researchers have measured tree trunks in the past and found them shrinking up to half a millimeter over the course of a day. So maybe this movement is part of that process. There's more work to be done, and you might expect to hear more in the future from the study's lead author, [INAUDIBLE].
A couple years ago, he discovered that trees droop overnight, which he suggests might be a result of trees relaxing at night. And if trees are stiffening their branches to catch more sun during the day, then maybe they release tension overnight to recover, then it's time to stretch again in the morning. Who knows? We'll follow this very closely. Now, let's all do the tree pose.
ASHLEY HAMER: Ahh.
CODY GOUGH: And then figure out where the Entwives went.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
CODY GOUGH: I know I'm not the only person wondering this. [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: "One day at a time" is an important philosophy among recovering alcoholics. And now a new neuroscience study may have uncovered what makes it so effective. More than 14 million American adults struggle with alcohol use disorder, which means they abuse alcohol or are dependent on it. For many of these people, the idea of giving up alcohol for life can be overwhelming. That's why many treatment programs don't ask that of their patients. Instead, they ask them to commit to staying sober for just 24 hours at a time. Re-upping that commitment day after day adds up to weeks, months, and, eventually, years of sobriety.
And it turns out that taking it one day at a time isn't just effective from a psychological perspective. Yale researchers have revealed that, for every day an alcoholic abstains, something amazing happens in their brain. The team scanned the brains of 44 patients going into treatment for alcohol use disorder while they looked at a series of neutral, stressful, and alcohol-related images. Compared to social drinkers, the patients showed a disruption of activity between two areas of the brain responsible for decision-making.
Each of the participants had been sober for anywhere between 1 and 12 days, and the researchers could see that difference in their brain activity. The more recently they'd used alcohol, the greater the disruption was. The researchers say this disruption might explain why alcoholics have trouble resisting the temptation of alcohol when they're under stress or even when there's just alcohol nearby. Their brains have a harder time recruiting the regions responsible for executive control, which could make responsible judgment go out the window.
But here's the amazing part. Activity between these two brain regions got closer to normal the longer the patient abstained from alcohol. For patients with alcohol use disorder, it truly took one day at a time for their brains to normalize. Their chance of relapsing decreased by 14% for each day they abstained from drinking during the first two weeks of treatment.
Scientists hope this research can help identify patients most at risk for relapsing. Knowing which areas of the brain are most affected could help us develop more effective medications for alcohol use disorder. And at the very least, these findings underscore how crucial the first few weeks of treatment really are. The study shows that sobriety is a lifelong journey, and every day of it should be celebrated.
All right. Well, let's do a quick recap of what we learned today, starting with the fact that pulling a muscle is basically tearing the muscle. But it's one of the mildest types of muscle strain that we can endure when less than 5% of the muscle's torn. And if you pull a muscle, don't stretch it. For the best remedy, remember RICE-- Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation.
NATALIA REAGAN: RICE is nice.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES] Although, recent research has questioned how helpful ice really is.
NATALIA REAGAN: That's what I was going to ask because I figured that you would definitely know. A friend of mine actually had a knee injury the other day, and I couldn't remember if ice or heat was best recommended.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, I know a lot more about what to do for exercise recovery. And for that, ice is not recommended because inflammation is part of the muscle-building process, which I think I said in one of the reruns that we did in the last few weeks. [GIGGLES]
NATALIA REAGAN: I remember that, Ashley.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
NATALIA REAGAN: You taught me that.
ASHLEY HAMER: [GIGGLES] But we have run a story about how ice isn't all as cracked up to be, but at the moment, I can't remember the specifics.
NATALIA REAGAN: [CHUCKLES] There you go. Link in show notes.
ASHLEY HAMER: Mm-hmm.
NATALIA REAGAN: [LAUGHS] But just be good to your body. Be good-- yeah, don't want to hurt yourself.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: We also learned that trees might have something like a heartbeat caused by the process of pumping water throughout the tree. Researchers found that trees might actually relax at night and stretch in the morning, further proof that I can learn a lot from nature when it comes to chilling out.
ASHLEY HAMER: [CHUCKLES]
NATALIA REAGAN: And maybe those trees really do need all those hugs that we give them. So if you're a tree hugger like myself, keep hugging those trees. Maybe you guys can join heartbeats. This is the hippie in me.
ASHLEY HAMER: We can't hug anybody else right now, so might as well hug a tree.
[LAUGHTER]
NATALIA REAGAN: In Chicago today, a woman spotted spontaneously hugging birch, spruce--
ASHLEY HAMER: [GIGGLING]
NATALIA REAGAN: --maple, oak trees. Her muscles were not pulled. [CHUCKLES] Aww. And lastly, we learned the AA mantra "one day at a time" has science to back it up. It turns out that with each passing day, there's actually less of a desire over time to drink, and therefore, it really is about one day at a time. And I think this is interesting because it can be applied to a lot of different addictions. I had OCD really bad growing up, honestly. And I remember my therapist, when I was young, told me, think one day at a time. And it actually helped.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I have found that a lot of philosophies in Alcoholics Anonymous are really helpful for just the general public. I think they also talk about HALT, which is Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, which we've done a story on before. Basically, if you're feeling really terrible and you're arguing or if you're thinking about-- I mean, for alcoholics, if they're thinking about drinking-- you have to check in with yourself. And you have to be like, am I hungry? Am I angry? Am I lonely? Am I tired? And if you are one of those things, go fix that, and you probably won't have that problem anymore.
NATALIA REAGAN: Oh, man. Wow. I feel deeply [CHUCKLES ] seen right now because that--
ASHLEY HAMER: [LAUGHS]
NATALIA REAGAN: --I feel like that's the source of so many things in terms of any argument or--
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
NATALIA REAGAN: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is very good for relationships. [CHUCKLES]
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah, take a second, you know, halt. Halt what you're doing. [CHUCKLES]
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Don't keep arguing at 2:00 in the morning. That's not helping anybody.
NATALIA REAGAN: Go to sleep.
ASHLEY HAMER: Mm-hmm.
NATALIA REAGAN: Eat that midnight snack.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yup.
NATALIA REAGAN: No. I mean, even like-- I know they say, sit on your hands, in AA. And that actually-- that helps, too, when it comes to if you're an antsy individual or you have something that you want to do. It's a physical thing that also works.
ASHLEY HAMER: There you go.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Steffie Drucker, and Reuben Westmaas and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by me, Ashley Hamer. And our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
[MUSIC PLAYING]