Learn about how a planet-friendly diet also tends to be healthier and why we don’t have battery-powered airplanes. But first, social psychologist and author Devon Price is back to explain how we can all avoid burnout.
Learn about how a planet-friendly diet also tends to be healthier and why we don’t have battery-powered airplanes. But first, social psychologist and author Devon Price is back to explain how we can all avoid burnout.
Additional resources from Dr. Devon Price:
A Planet-Friendly Diet Also Tends to Be Healthier by Sonja Hodgson
Why don’t we have battery-powered airplanes? by Cameron Duke
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-dont-we-have-battery-powered-airplanes
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you'll learn about how a planet-friendly diet also tends to be healthier and why we don't have battery-powered airplanes.
ASHLEY HAMER: But first, Social Psychologist and author Devon Price is back to explain how we can all avoid burnout.
CODY GOUGH: Let's set aside some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yesterday, Dr. Devon Price explained how laziness can benefit us and why we need to be kinder to ourselves. Today, they're going to give us some solid tips on how to do that, especially, in the workplace. Dr. Devon Price is a social psychologist and Professor at Loyola University in Chicago.
They're also the author of the upcoming book, Laziness Does Not Exist, which makes the case for why what we think of as laziness really comes from the pressure to do too much. In our conversation, Natalia asked them whether there are any good tips for avoiding burnout. Here's Devon.
DEVON PRICE: Ideally, you want to not get even close to that burnout point. Obviously, prevention is key and I think the thing that really sets people up for burnout and for being really disappointed in themselves is biting off way more than they can actually chew. We have so many standards in place and kind of a sense of should that we should work eight hours a day and do an hour of exercise every day and cook meals and volunteer, all of these things.
And there's just no scientific research to back up that that's sustainable for most people. It just-- most people don't actually work a full eight hours a day. You have to slack off at work. Even if you're trapped in an office for eight hours, your brain just can't handle it. So the first thing to really do to prevent burnout is to study yourself, observe your actual habits, and assume that those habits actually reflect not a failing on your part and not something that you need to beat yourself up for, but that this data. That is information about what you're actually capable of.
So if I really only get a majority of my work done from 10:00 to 1:00 every day, which is true for me, then that means those are my core hours. The things that are most important for me to get done, I need to budget that and schedule that into that time point. Into that time chunk. That 10:00 to 1:00 period.
And anything beyond that, I need to really reframe as gravy. So one strategy that I always recommend for people is putting ghost meetings on your calendar. So if you work at a job where an Outlook calendar is key, block out time, block out meetings with yourself so you look like you're busy so that other people can't snatch all your time up.
And during those meetings that you've scheduled with yourself-- and you can have them kind of private and blacked out so nobody knows that it's just a personal meeting. Do the things that are most important to you to ensure that you keep your job, that you work on a project that you're most passionate about, that you're helping your kids with their homework. Whatever the thing is that's really essential to your day.
So those are some of the things that I most commonly recommend to people because I think, really, the first and most common source of burnout is the sense of, I should be doing so much. And I suck that I'm not getting all these things done. Instead of just really keeping track of what you are getting done and using that as actual data about what you're capable of and what's healthy for you.
ASHLEY HAMER: Again, that was Dr. Devon Price-- a social psychologist and professor at Loyola University of Chicago School of Continuing and Professional Studies. And the author of the upcoming book, Laziness Does Not Exist. It's set to be released on January 5, 2021, and you can find a link to pre-order the book in the show notes.
NATALIA REAGAN: If you choose the food you buy based on sustainability and environmental impact, first of all, nice work. Second, I've got good news for you. It turns out that a diet that's good for the planet is also good for you. Just take it from a 2019 study out of Tulane University. For the study, researchers use data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey which asks thousands of Americans what they had eaten over a 24-hour period.
Then the researchers rated the foods in two ways. First, by the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that result from their production and second, by their nutritional value according to the US Healthy Eating Index. So what did they find? Well, the diets with the highest climate impact had greater quantities of meat, dairy, and solid fats. For every 1,000 calories, then the low impact diets did.
Overall, high impact diets were more concentrated in total proteins and animal proteins. Diets in this group accounted for five times the emissions of those in the lowest impact group. Yikes. Meanwhile, people whose diets had a lower carbon footprint were eating less red meat and dairy. Those foods both contribute to larger greenhouse gas emissions and are high in saturated fat.
Instead, these people were eating healthier stuff like poultry, whole grains, and plant-based proteins. But while the lowest impact diets were healthier overall, they weren't healthier on all measures. There are plenty of foods that have a small carbon footprint but an unhealthy place in our diets. Think added sugar and refined grains.
People in this group ate more of those ingredients. They also had lower amounts of important nutrients like iron, calcium, and vitamin D, probably because they ate less meat and dairy. The researchers said this shows that we can have it both ways. We can have diets that are good for both our health and the planet's health. And it doesn't necessarily mean cutting out whole food groups. It can be as simple as reducing the amount of red meat we eat and swapping it with low impact protein like chicken, eggs, and beans. After all, a healthy population requires a healthy planet.
CODY GOUGH: Speaking of having a healthy planet, commercial air travel pollutes, right? And I mean, air travel is on hold for a lot of us right now, but it's going to come back eventually and that may be a problem due to the aforementioned massive carbon footprint, which is getting even bigger.
The environmental impact of flying has doubled in the last 20 years according to a recent study. And that leads to the obvious question, we have electric cars, so why aren't we using electric airplanes? Well, ultimately, that comes down to two related problems. Mass and energy density. So imagine we're on a flight from Los Angeles to London. To make this trip, a Boeing 777 fully loaded with people, bags, and emotional support iguanas can weigh as much as 545,000 pounds or 247,000 kilograms.
Talk about heavier than air flight. And nearly half of that weight as much as 212,000 pounds or 96,000 kilograms is jet fuel. One big problem with current battery technology is energy density. And that's the amount of energy per pound of mass. I'll spare you the physics and say that jet fuel has roughly 14 times the energy density of our current batteries.
So a 212,000-pound battery won't get that plane any farther than Salt Lake City, let alone London. Once it gets to Salt Lake though, we run into an additional problem. We can't land it. This is because as a plane flies, it loses fuel mass. Large international airliners are designed with this in mind. For long flights, they take to the sky at a weight too heavy for them to land.
For 777 to land safely, it needs to lose at least 100,000 pounds. Talk about a weight loss plan. And this is why airliners making emergency landings, sometimes have to dump fuel before making their landing attempt. But dead batteries are still just as heavy as charged ones. And this doesn't mean electric air travel will never happen. While batteries create significant engineering problems for intercontinental airliners, smaller electric planes might be possible for shorter trips.
An estimated one third of carbon emissions come from short, regional flights. And because of this, at least one European company is working on a fully electric 186-seat plane that could make hops like London to Amsterdam, which is a very short but busy airline route. With enough will and some smart engineering, this idea will get off the ground someday.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right. Well, let's recap the main things we learned today.
NATALIA REAGAN: We learned that the best way to avoid burnout, well, is prevention. And one way you can do that is just to better understand when you're most productive during the day. Is it between 6:00 and 8:00 PM? For me, it's usually, well, after midnight. So maybe that's the time you do all your real, high priority work.
You can also schedule these really cool things called ghost meetings, which are meetings with yourself that are blocks of time that you to get work done and avoid everybody else. That's something that I really resonated with. I think I need to have a few ghost meetings and maybe actually invite some ghosts, who knows? Keep it interesting.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I know I'm the odd person out between the three of us that I work the best in the early morning. I can get up at 6:00 AM and do so much work like before 9:00 AM. And then for the rest of the day, I'm so distracted and I'll look at Twitter and-- like I don't get that much done but my goodness, those first few hours of the day are so productive for me.
NATALIA REAGAN: I'm impressed.
CODY GOUGH: I have an accidental life hack regarding Twitter. Some extension on my Chrome browser is preventing any images or thumbnail previews to load on Twitter. And it's been like this for months. And I don't know which extension it is and I don't really care. Like if I open Twitter on my computer, there is nothing to look at. It's really dumb because like a lot of people just tweet a short comment with a link and like I can't even see the link.
So who cares. So I kind of inadvertently just-- and again, I have a work phone that I can just pull up Twitter on right in front of me. But still, it's a different device, it's a different screen I got to look at, you know?
ASHLEY HAMER: There you go.
CODY GOUGH: Unintentionally break your software. That's is my life hack.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. It's a start for sure.
CODY GOUGH: We also learned that diets that are planet-friendly are usually healthier for you than those that are considered high-impact and include a lot of meat and dairy. But the lower impact diets sometimes lack important nutrients. So it's important you get your vitamins somehow.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is hard for me because as an athlete, I really try to get my protein in every day. I sound like a bro right now but meat and dairy is the best way to do that. And so yeah. What I try to do is lots of eggs and lots of poultry. But you know, yeah. Whey protein, all that. That's all dairy. That's all dairy. But you know, I'll do what I can.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. I actually haven't-- and a lot of people don't know this. I haven't eaten meat or actually warm-blooded animals since 1995 because I sometimes will eat fish. I call myself a vegequarian. But it's something that-- when I became a vegequarian in 1995, it was really hard because all I like to eat vegetable-wise was potatoes and McDonald's French fries, which I'm pretty sure are cooked in lard, so there you have it.
But I did teach myself, actually, to have a new diet. And it's interesting like over time, I've taught myself to have a palate that is quote unquote, planet-friendly. But it took a long time. And I was vegan for a long time and even then, I was a little bit of a heftier vegan because I think I was eating the refined sugars and the grains and a carb-loading rather than eating more leaner proteins and things like that, which is kind of hard to do if you're vegan, you have to do it right.
If you're vegan, don't come at me. I know that there's a right way to do it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but well, for instance, the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burgers. By the way, actually, Ashley, I don't know if you've ever tried it or Cody. They have really great breakfast sausages and things of that sort. They don't have soy, so if you have aversions to soy. And they're really great. They're delicious and they're very high in protein. And they're getting cheaper too, which is great. So just FYI.
ASHLEY HAMER: But they are also high in saturated fat though. Is the problem. But it's better for the planet, at least. That's good. And we also learned that while battery-operated cars are a thing, battery-operated airplanes aren't. And that's because the battery you'd need to fly a plane would just weigh too much. It would be impossible to both fly and land and last I checked, those two things are pretty important for flight.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah. You know. I mean--
ASHLEY HAMER: By this time, we all thought that we'd have flying cars and now, I'm living in the future and I'm realizing that flying cars would be a collision hazard. How would we know where to go? How would we avoid running into each other? Maybe, this is a naive thing and people have thought about that but I think it's a problem.
NATALIA REAGAN: I just want to bring back the unicycle. It's just all right a unicycle. No. I'm still waiting for that hoverboard, honestly.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Sonia Hodgson and Cameron Duke and edited by Ashley Hamer who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting is by Natalia Reagan and Sonia Hodgson. Today's episode was edited by Jonathan McMichael and our producer is Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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