How (Literal) Pants-Wetting Anxiety Can Clarify Life, with Sierra Schlag

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Throughout professional skier Sierra Schlag’s childhood, her Japanese heritage and cultural practices made her the target of racist bullying. Then, when she traveled to Japan to visit family as a child, and later as an adult, she was referred to as “Nisei”—a person born in North America whose parent(s) immigrated from Japan. She couldn’t make sense of being seen as white in Japan and Japanese in America, but she found an unlikely method of wholeness: skiing. Turns out, catharsis comes in many forms, including with anxiety that ultimately helps us understand where we came from, where we are, and what defines us.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Outside Podcast with Paddyo.
0:11.7	Before every single mogul competition, I would pee my pants a little bit in the start gate.
0:16.1	Really?
0:16.7	Because I just, like, had so much anxiety.
0:19.8	Oh, my God. I think it was, like, fully a stress thing. Because before my runs, I would be like, I am going to the lodge and emptying my bladder, but that I'd get in the Stargate be, like, so stressed out. Your bladder would be like, we have a tank of nervousness. Do you know what I did not think that we were going to talk about today? Pea by pants. You peeing your pants.
0:39.2	Agreed.
0:40.0	Agreed.
0:44.4	I am fascinated by the world of psychology.
0:48.2	In fact, before I ever stepped foot on campus, I declared psych as my major in college.
0:53.5	But I jettisoned my plans to become a sports
0:56.1	psychologist after I bummed my first test. Crappy grades aside, the science still captivates me.
1:04.1	Like, did you know, Francine Shapiro discovered EMDR therapy, eye movement desensitization
1:10.1	reprocessing during a walk in a park.
1:13.5	Yeah, she was moving her eyes back and forth, thinking about something tough, and realized she
1:18.3	felt better.
1:19.4	Blammo.
1:20.3	Now, countless people have been helped because of a flip and stroll in 1987.
1:26.5	Or how about this?
1:28.1	Somewhere around 335 BCE, catharsis theory first popped up in Aristotle's poetics and has continually been refined through the ages.
1:38.1	What was true for the ancient Greeks is true for us today.
1:41.7	Expressing and experiencing strong emotions can lead to psychological relief
1:46.5	and emotional processing. Think of it as letting the air out of a balloon before it pops. This
	...

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