Striving Is Bad For Your Health

Hey DreamListeners, if you like this podcast, you're going to love the book. Yeah, I wrote a book. It's called "Selling the Dream," and it's coming out March 12, 2024, on Atria. It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs, and some that you've never even heard of, I hope. Check it out. Have you ever heard the legend of John Henry? Before I did the interview you're about to hear, the best recollection I had of the story came from a Disney short I saw like 20 years ago. In that cartoon version for Kids, it's a story about the ultimate can-do man, a man with supernatural grit and determination. The story was first shared as a folktale among African-Americans in the late 1800s, and then it became a song performed by black folks, and then white folk singers about the magnificence of the steel-driving man that's the human precursor to a jackhammer or pneumatic drill. For over a century it's been upheld as a story emblematic of the American dream. Work hard enough and you shall overcome. The right mindset and the rest will fall into place, except that's not what happens in the end of the legend of John Henry, not even close. John Henry's life doesn't get better, no. The ending of the legend of John Henry is totally perplexing, so much so that scholars have argued about its meaning for almost a hundred years. One of those scholars, a retired Southern black professor Dr. Sherman James, used the story to come up with a hypothesis about why putting your mind to something and trying your very very hardest isn't necessarily a good thing for any of us, any of us, not just the person driving the steel. Here's how Dr. Sherman James tells the story of John Henry. According to this legend some time in the early 1870s, John Henry and uneducated African-American was working as part of a work gang, probably a group of convict laborers. So one day John Henry, who was a puter to be the best steel driver of the world I'd ever known, was challenged by his work boss to compete against a newly invented machine mechanical seam drill. He rose to the challenge, arguing that a man was nothing but a man, but a man was certainly better than a machine. And so this epic battle, man and gang's machine ensued. And after a long, long confrontation with the machine, John Henry won, but he dropped dead after his victory from complete mental and physical exhaustion. And what was that legend meant to teach us at the, or when it was created? Yeah, that's, that's a great question. It's probably debatable as to what the legend actually signifies the earliest work on the meaning of the legend was by an anthropologist by the name of Guy Johnson, who actually went to the area where this legendary contest was supposed to have taken place in New Taukot, West Virginia. And so he interviewed a number of black folks and he came away with the idea that John Henry may not have actually been a real person, but that really didn't matter. Here's what he wrote in his book, John Henry tracking down the Negro legend, first published in 1929. The question of whether the John Henry legend rests on a factual basis, is after all not of much significance, no matter which way it is answered, there remains the fact that the legend itself is a reality, a living, functioning thing in the folk life of the Negro. So the legend had this large meaning in the lives of working class African-Americans who felt that it sort of signified the triumph of the spirit of black people. So it was standing up to power and refusing to back down and winning, even at a very high cost. Now, in 2006, historian Scott Nelson wrote this really interesting book, Still Driving Man, the untold story of John Henry, and it's a wonderful piece of historical research. Scott Nelson concluded, after extensive archival research, that John Henry was probably a real person, and not necessarily a freed slave. Maybe he was born in New Jersey and he worked his way south shortly after the Civil War looking for job opportunities, and he got caught up in the black codes, but actually he was accused of petty larceny and was tried and convicted and thrown into jail, a very long prison term, and Wanda working as part of a working on the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad. And then was exposed to all of the toxic dust that men who carved out tunnels and mountains that were exposed to, and he probably died of what we might call coal miners disease. So since then, he was a legendary, John Henry was a victim of sort of the first wave of mass incarceration of black people. So Scott Nelson concluded that the meaning of the story for everyday black folks, it was like a cautionary tale, don't let this happen to you. Run away as fast as you can, don't get caught up in this system. So we have these, I'm going to say, competing versions of what the, what the legend means. For me, I sort of lean more toward the former, because I think it really taps more, taps more, more, more deeply, more authentically into the, into the spirit, you know, of black Americans to confront adversity, to not give up on their dreams, to succeed, you know, against the odds. So it's more of a, of a fight, if you will kind of response, than a flight kind of response. And then of course, I think that there are both rewards and costs associated with engaging in that kind of fight response. So with the story in the back of his mind, Dr. James headed off to college and became a professor of epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill. He studied diseases and their causes, and he decided to look at the problem of high blood pressure in black men in Eastern North Carolina. He said he chose this population because they were unlikely to regularly go to the doctor and very likely to die of heart attack and stroke. The end result of a life with high blood pressure or hypertension. And so a physician colleague of mine gave me the names of six of his black male patients who I could interview. So I drove about 55 or 55 miles north of Chapel Hill to a farm in Alamance County to speak to a man by the name of Mr. John Martin. And he was retired. He was 71 years of age at the time. He was waiting for me in his backyard. It was mid-July very hot. So I'm welcoming me warmly inviting me to sit next to him and chair in the big tree. And we just started talking and he began to tell me his life story. It was a phenomenal story, born into a sharecropper family in 1907. His father was, of course, uneducated and could never get out of debt because the sharecropper system was designed to keep particularly black sharecroppers perpetually in debt. And so when John Martin, Mr. John Martin was probably an early adolescent and he saw, you know, how his father just fredded and hardy worked and he could just never get ahead. He vowed that that would not be his fate on the new circumstances when he, he be caught up in that kind of exploitative system. So some years later when he became a young man, got married. And he was a sharecropper himself because he had the job out of school and the second grade in order to help out on the farm. His wife's brother was a landowner and independent landowner and his wife also came from a family that owned their own land. And so both of them, his wife and his brother-in-law prevailed upon him to take the risk and go to the bank and get alone and buy his own property. So with some considerable reluctance, he did and he got a mortgage, a 40-year mortgage to purchase 75 acres of fertile North Carolina farmland and he always had this sort of deep sense of vulnerability to powerful forces because he saw what had happened to his father and by working literally night and day for, you know, six days a week he with a lot of help from his wife managed to pay it off in five years and huge accomplishment. And so then he turned to me and he said, "I think that's the reason why my legs are a lot of whack. I pushed myself too hard in the fields." No, I knew that he had high blood pressure and he had two kings that were leaning against the chair in which he was sitting. So he was suffering from a very severe case of osteoarthritis and in the course of telling me his life story. He also told me that in his mid-50s or so, he had to go to the hospital and have 40% of his stomach removed because he had a very serious case of peptic ulcers. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So he had these three major diseases that had a huge stress component. Stress component meaning these diseases that can be caused or triggered by stress. Yeah. The stress plays a role. So he'd been talking for maybe a couple of hours and his wife came to the door and she said, "John Henry, it's time for lunch." And bring your guests with you, so I looked at him and I said, "Your name is John Henry." And he said, "Yeah, John Henry Martin." And I thought just like the legendary John Henry went up against the machine and in the case of John Henry Martin, the machine was the sharecropper system, which he beat. He won his struggle against the machine, the economic machine, that was the sharecropper system, but he paid a price. I began to think, "Well, maybe there's something here, maybe there's something here." Because his story reminded me, John Henry Martin's story reminded me a lot of the story of my parents, the story of my grandparents, my grandfather's on both my mother's side and my father's side were sharecroppers. So I could identify with what John Henry Martin was telling me. And I thought his story is not just his story. This is really the story of black people, black people in America, having to go up against these very powerful political and economic forces, these systems, these institutions that are in place to keep black people subjugated and forcing them to have to work extremely hard in order to make ends meet and in order to try to move ahead. So that really led then to the John Anderson hypothesis. Maybe that's the explanation for why we see so much eye blood pressure and strokes and heart attacks that affect African Americans, particularly working for African Americans, as this. And so I came up with 12 questions that constitute the John Henry's scale for active coping or high effort coping and I can give you if you wish a couple of sample questions. So here's the first question, when things don't go the way I want them to, that just makes me work even harder. Now the response options are strongly agree, somewhat agree, don't know, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree. So here's the second question, once I make up my mind to do something, I stay with it until the job is completely done. So the remaining questions continue to work this theme of tenacity, persistence, not giving up. So that's the John Anderson scale. And guess what? His hunch was right. He found a very strong correlation between scoring high on the John Henry's scale and having hypertension and all of its attendant problems like stroke and heart attack. The more these men strived for excellence, the thicker they became and the shorter they lived. And contrary to what Dr. James and his colleagues speculated, the link was there even for those who had already moved up the socioeconomic ladder, who had achieved success and stability and were aiming to achieve even more as we all do. This was very surprising to us, I can't emphasize that enough. So this is the late 1980s, when at the time they had been very little epidemiological research on the health of middle class black people. And we sort of expected to see that, oh, they would be doing so much better than they were in class counterparts, right? We're talking about the post civil rights movement, folks who came of age in the 1960s, who benefited from the 1964 civil rights act, 1965, civil rights legislation, and now they're moving into these white spaces from which black folks had, for the most part, been excluded. There may be a lot of physiological wear and tear that attends, going up a gang, taking on these intrinsic, shape shifting, institutional constraints against upward social mobility. That's wild, I mean, I understand it, I understand it, but, yeah. I mean, obviously, very disturbing, right, a very disturbing finding. So what the data are telling us, what these data are telling us, and I want to emphasize that this is not just one study, but there are multiple studies that have shown this effect. What this is telling us is that successful upward mobility in America, for people of color, not just black Americans, but for people of color, comes with a price just like we saw in the story of John Henry Martin. He achieved, there was upward social mobility, he became a land owner, he became an independent farmer, he had some wealth, but he paid a price. I kept wondering how Dr. James's findings extended to women. At the end of one popular version of the John Henry song, the story goes on to talk about his widow, Polly Ann, who just picked up John Henry's hammer and went right on driving steel in his place. So I spoke to a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, Dr. Arlene Geronamis. My area of study is health inequity. Okay, tell me more about that, I think that's something we all want to know a lot about right now. Yes, which is interesting to me, because 30 years ago, people weren't that interested. Dr. Geronamis began her research into health inequity back in the 70s, in a school for pregnant teen moms. She had a hunch about teen pregnancy in the way we thought about it, that it wasn't the very worst thing to ever happen to someone, and it wasn't nearly as negatively impactful on people's lives as other larger forces in society. It wasn't the root of all evil. But, in observing the poorer moms or the moms of color, she did notice that they often had health problems that usually don't appear until much later in life. Problems that had nothing to do with being pregnant. What was going on? Well, I came to the theory I now pursued for all these decades, which I called weathering, which was the idea that if you're part of a denigrated group, you're both exposed to more assaults that were down your health at earlier ages. So that's weathering as in a rock being weathered by wind and rain over centuries. But you're also in this, this is what I had seen initially in the school for pregnant moms. You're also weathering in the sense that you're having to, and this actually relates a lot to some of the concepts in Sherman James' work, having to expend so much effort and coping with all the things you're exposed to because you're still trying to withstand the storm. You're trying to survive it. You're trying to even overcome it or help overcome it for the next generation. If we're talking about racism and poverty, that keeps you chronically stressed, even while you're sleeping. It's not something you can just say, "Let me meditate or let me try to reframe the situation. Let me smile and put on my high heels and pretty dress, feel positive." These are things that are happening day in and day out, and they're happening to you, and they're happening as you, as I said, work very positively and assertively and proactively to survive and withstand them. I've come to believe some of that is just objective things in your environment, meditating isn't going to help you deal with environmental toxicity. Meditating isn't going to help you deal with the fact in order to feed your children, given that the value of real wages, which was never very high in the lower runs, has gotten even less, means you have to do two or three jobs, you're taking night shift jobs that impinge on your sleep, or that you don't have a car, so you're relying on really bad public transportation to try and get to your various jobs. You're also juggling how do you get to your kids to school, how do you have them taking care of when they're home, at the same time you don't have any control over the hours you work, so there's just this endless coping that is kind of psycho, I might call it psychosocial, and what I've come to understand and what I think goes beyond a lot of how people think about stress, besides that it's not just this individual thing you can manage or control, is that a very big part of what sets off all those stress reactions in your body, the cortisol, and all of that, is that we all, as human beings, need to have a sense of how safe we are in any particular situation, and safe can mean literally life or death safe, or it can mean are we somewhere we can be authentic, where we will be treated fairly, so it can mean things short of that life or death, or it could mean, you know, the intersection of them, such as if you're a black person stopped by a police officer, that's both something that you worry is unsafe, and it could be life threatening, also, so we set off these stress reactions that people kind of vernacularly know as fight or flight, but if you think about what happens when you set them off, you start to see how your health wears down early up long, the very things that cause the health inequities by race and class in the United States. I think when you were talking about the like, you know, having so many jobs and not sleeping and taking public transportation and all of that, I feel like for a large part of our society in America, anyway, those are the, actually the answers, those are the solves, right? Like get another work harder, if you don't have a car, take the bus, it's like just change your attitude, you know, be more positive, like be optimistic and have a better mindset. What I've seen is in the very same populations who weather, I've never seen more resilient people who keep going on in the face of adversity and who can be very optimistic and who have all these sayings and support from, you know, the people there in networks with or their loved ones about, you know, take one foot forward or, you know, keep on keeping on, but given that I've seen how optimistic and what a good attitude by, you know, by some measures, people in these communities have and they still get so sick, it certainly doesn't seem to me that that's much good evidence that that being optimistic or, you know, having grit or being resilient or making the best of bad situations is what's going to make you healthy, it certainly has worked in these circumstances. You know, you'd have people would have to, they'd have to accept how inequitably structured our world is and that they didn't really earn their right to have vacations and time off for yoga and me time, we're gonna get your me time when you're raising kids and working night shifts and then working another shift in the day and then trying to figure out do you pay your electricity bill or not do fight with your landlord that he hasn't fixed the heater in your building and you have to make these decisions all the time. Yeah. And then you're also being told you don't work hard, you don't have future orientation. Right. You're not a good person, you had your children too young which just proves you weren't a good person, if you just really, you know, pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you'd get all the same things we got, those are stressful things to work against too. I wish I could say that these findings shocked me, but instead they affirmed a feeling I'd been having about the self-improvement woo-woo coachy world. There's just something really privileged and toned up about the idea of picking yourself up by your bootstraps, an idea we've heaped upon people of color in this country, I think, to absolve white people of having to do any hard work to help their fellow man, an idea that we've gifted white people, convincing us we've earned everything we have, an idea designed to keep those in power and power, while blaming people we oppressed for their powerlessness. The mindset stuff from Napoleon Hill, the individual responsibility of the unemployed folks in Texas, ray Higdon's insistence that you just need to defy your negative feelings to overcome adversity, these are all just distractions from the larger forces that make it harder for so many people to rise in this country. Just like racism and sexism, all the isms I'm constantly banging on about. Despite what these pitchmen might say, "You cannot think yourself out of being the only woman in a business made and believe me I've tried." There are people, groups of people, for whom this think and grow rich stuff is just plainly detrimental, and that it's bad for society on the whole. When entire enormous communities suffer in an effort to not suffer, we all suffer. I want to put you in a room with Tony Robbins while he's screaming about how this rugged individualism and your mindset just needs to overcome stuff. It's more complicated. These motivational speakers have figured something out, right? How to speak to the aspirations of people, and how to connect their stick with the American dream. We Americans, our mind is conditioned to think about our country as a place where hard work pays off. I mean, we all of us have internalized to some degree that notion, that aspiration. They have been so the American dream a lot of us have been so the American dream. This is where I want to give them some grace if I may put it that way, but what they don't know is the kind of thing that you and I have been talking about. They really don't know the physiological costs associated with this. Not the question. For me, the question becomes, what would they say if they knew? How would it change their message? How would it change what they say to people if they knew, but they don't know? Of course, it's a very powerful dream, isn't it? I mean, what a wonderful idea the American dream is. It's a powerful idea. It has attracted people from all over the world. In search of opportunities to be freer than they're able to be free in their home countries to realize their potential, to be safe, to be successful economically, to gain wealth, to pass something on to the next generation, to make it easier for the next generation to live their lives and have been the case for them. There's nothing wrong with the dream, but it's a dream. The problem is, the problem is, and you mentioned this earlier, the record individualism that is such a core attribute of American culture, the notion that America, that the United States is a meritocracy. I was just going to say the meritocracy thing. That you deserve what you get, and you get what you deserve, and that in the end is really up to you. Don't ask me to pay higher taxes so that the opportunity structure can be expanded, and we can have some social safety nets that will make your striving to be successful less costly. Other countries have in place much stronger social safety nets, such as the kind of upper mobility striving, the kind of desire for self-realization, to realize your potential, to live a life that is meaningful and satisfying, does not come with it, and the pursuit of it of that kind of life does not come with a necessary cost to your health. That is one of the things that distinguishes our country from other rich countries in the world. One could argue that that is the most distinguishing factor that distinguishes the United States America, from our peer countries elsewhere in the world, is very sobering, but it is important to know that this phenomenon exists, and now that we know it, and we have to keep talking about it. We have to engage in educating the public, of course, there will be skeptics, but we have to, we have to do our best, certainly to educate policy makers, and advocate, you know, for social and economic policies that may upper mobility striving less costly. We're going to leave you today with a version of John Henry, sung by the Civil Rights activist Harry Belafonte, who died this year. Enjoy. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] The dream is a production of a little everywhere, produced by me and Dan Galucci. Our tip line is 3-2-3-248-1488 if you want to tell your story. Here he's set to the captain, look beyond the water sea. Hold on choke, build on brook and you care dry steel. Like me, Lord, Lord, care dry steel like me. Oh, you care dry steel like me, no, no, care dry steel like me. Well done Henry, drove into the mountain. His hammer was striking fire. It drove so hard, he broke his poor heart. Well, he laid down his hammer and he died, Lord, Lord. Lay down his hammer and he died. Lay down his hammer and he died, great God. Oh, it took John Henry to the White House and he buried him in the sand. Every locomotive come roaring by, says, "There lies a steve traffic man, Lord, Lord." There lies a steve traffic man, says, "There lies a steve traffic man, who he, there lies a steve traffic man." Says, "There lies a steve traffic man, Lord, Lord." There lies a steve traffic man.