Normalcy Bounces Back Quickly in Times of Stress and the Female Astronauts of the Mercury 13
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2020
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about how people under stress can find a “new normal” surprisingly quickly, and why the Mercury 13 should have been the first women in space.
Even under stress, our sense of normalcy bounces back surprisingly quickly by Kelsey Donk
- Sense of normalcy bounces back fast: New study. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-07/uom-son072920.php
- Anicich, E. M., Foulk, T. A., Osborne, M. R., Gale, J., & Schaerer, M. Getting Back to the “New Normal”: Autonomy Restoration during a Global Pandemic. https://www.newswise.com/pdf_docs/159604834166888_COVID-19%20Stress%20and%20Autonomy%20JAP%20-%20ACCEPTED%20VERSION.pdf
The Mercury 13 Should Have Been the First Women in Space by Reuben Westmaas
- Looking Back: The Mercury 7. (2011). NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_157.html
- Kat Eschner. (2017, June 16). Meet the Rogue Women Astronauts of the 1960s Who Never Flew. Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-american-women-who-trained-space-1960s-180963704/
- Potenza, A. (2018, May 29). We fact-checked Mercury 13, Netflix’s doc about NASA’s first women astronaut trainees. The Verge; The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17393698/netflix-documentary-mercury-13-women-space-astronauts-margaret-weitekamp-interview
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:04.8 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about how |
| 0:09.0 | people under stress can find a new normal surprisingly quickly and how the Mercury 13 should have been the first women in space. |
| 0:16.0 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:18.0 | If you've been in lockdown for the last several months, you may have noticed a change. |
| 0:24.0 | During the first few weeks, it may have been confusing and scary and impossible to focus on anything but the news. |
| 0:30.0 | But if you're like me, you eventually got used to this new normal. |
| 0:33.6 | If this sounds familiar, then this new study will too. |
| 0:36.8 | It finds that people under stress are able to bounce back |
| 0:40.6 | much faster than we might think, |
| 0:42.4 | even when they're still experiencing the stressful |
| 0:45.2 | event. |
| 0:46.8 | In the past, research on stress mostly looked at people's long-term recovery after the stressor |
| 0:51.9 | disappeared. |
| 0:53.0 | As a result, all of the evidence we have says that people recover slowly, |
| 0:58.0 | and only once they're not under stress anymore. |
| 1:00.0 | But this new research took a different approach, and it came to a much different answer. |
| 1:05.0 | For the new study, researchers had 122 employees fill out a quick survey three times a day for two weeks to assess how they were doing during the pandemic. |
| 1:16.1 | The questions were simple, asking about their current stress level, how powerless they felt, |
| 1:20.5 | and how much they felt like themselves. |
| 1:23.0 | The study came at the perfect time. |
| 1:26.0 | On March 16, 2020, it was the first week of stay-at-home orders and school closures in the US, |
... |
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