This message comes from How to Be a Better Human, a podcast from TED for the Self-Help Skeptic.

Hear how you can laugh more in your everyday life, explained with science, insights, and hilarious stories.

Listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to Life Kit.

From NPR.

Hey, everybody, it's Mariel.

Every year, more than 350,000 people go into cardiac arrest outside of the hospital in the

U.S., meaning their heart stops beating.

Could be because of a heart attack or because they choked on something.

There are a lot of causes.

And people without existing heart conditions can also go into cardiac arrest.

But maybe the more shocking statistic is this one.

Only about 40% of people who suffer from cardiac arrest receives CPR from a bystander or layperson.

That's Catherine Y. Brown, the founder of Learned CPR America.

I have been teaching CPR for over 30 years. This is three decades of my life.

Catherine's mom was a CPR instructor with the American Heart Association.

And Catherine went on to open a CPR company on the American Heart Association. And Catherine went on to

open a CPR company on the south side of Chicago, where she's from. Now, at first, nobody signed up.

So she packed up her mannequin and started going door to door. Like, knock, knock, hello. If someone in this

house went into cardiac arrest, would you know what to do? I used to go into housing projects, biker bars, interrupt people's family reunions who I didn't know.

That's how she got her nickname, the CPR lady.

Oh, that's just the CPR lady. If you let her teach you CPR, she'll teach you and then she'll leave you alone.

...