What 'Inside Out 2' Got Right About Anxiety, Per A Psychologist

This episode explores the psychological insights of Pixar's "Inside Out 2," particularly focusing on its accurate portrayal of anxiety and adolescence through expert commentary from psychologist Lisa Damour.

1. Anxiety is Normal: The film and episode emphasize that anxiety is a natural and essential emotion, especially during significant life changes like adolescence.
2. Emotional Growth: Adolescence triggers intense neurological changes that amplify emotions but delay cognitive control, leading to dramatic responses depicted comically in the film.
3. Role of New Emotions: "Inside Out 2" introduces complex emotions like envy and embarrassment, reflecting an expanded understanding of the emotional spectrum.
4. Handling Anxiety: The episode covers strategies for managing anxiety, such as cognitive reframing and physiological techniques like controlled breathing.
5. Film's Relevance: Released during a time of heightened focus on adolescent mental health, the film provides a valuable perspective on the normalcy of emotional ups and downs during teenage years.

1. Introduction to 'Inside Out 2'

Overview of the film's plot and new emotional challenges faced by Riley. Discussion on how these reflect real adolescent experiences. Regina Barber: "Pixar's Inside Out was a profound exploration of emotions."

2. The Science of Emotions

Lisa Damour discusses the scientific basis for the new emotions introduced in the sequel and how they map onto real-life psychological theories. Lisa Damour: "We now identify at least 20 emotions that are universal."

3. Anxiety in Adolescence

Focus on the depiction of anxiety in the film and its alignment with clinical psychology. Discussion on managing anxiety in real life. Lisa Damour: "Anxiety is a valuable, protective, and natural human emotion."

4. Practical Strategies

Techniques for managing anxiety, including grounding techniques and cognitive interventions, are discussed, providing viewers with actionable advice. Lisa Damour: "Using your mind to ask questions can help bring anxiety down to size."

• Understand Anxiety: Recognize that anxiety can be a normal and protective reaction to stress.
• Use Grounding Techniques: Practice mindfulness and grounding techniques during anxious moments.
• Cognitive Reframing: Challenge catastrophic thoughts to manage anxiety by adjusting threat estimations.
• Deep Breathing Exercises: Use deliberate deep breathing to calm the nervous system.
• Seek Professional Guidance: If anxiety becomes overwhelming, consulting a mental health professional can provide structured support.

Pixar's new movie, Inside Out 2 came out Friday. It's the sequel to the 2015 movie Inside Out, which follows the life of 11-year-old Riley and her family as they move to San Francisco. In Inside Out 2, Riley is 13 and thriving in her new city. She has friends and is a star on her hockey team. But when puberty hits one night, four new emotions come into play: Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment and most of all, Anxiety.

Clinical psychologist and Inside Out 2 consultant Lisa Damour says the movie is surprisingly accurate when it comes to experiencing anxiety and puberty. Plus, she offers some guidance to help make the most of our anxiety.

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Lisa Damour

Companies

Pixar

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"The Emotional Lives of Teenagers" by Lisa Damour

Guest Name(s):

Lisa Damour

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NPR Warning
Npr warning shortwavers this episode contains many spoilers for the new film Inside out.

Regina Barber
Too, so continue at your own risk.

You're listening to short wave from NPR.

Pixar released Inside out in 2015 to critical acclaim and had me and my daughter bawling in the theaters. It was a movie that focused on eleven year old named Riley moving from the midwest to San Francisco. This move really shakes up her core joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger.

But as they try to make things better, they first make things worse.

In the new film Inside out two, Riley is 13 and settled in her new city. She has best friends and is thriving on the hockey team. But when puberty hits and her friends tell her they won't be going to the same high school next year, things begin to change.

Lisa Damour
And with the arrival of adolescents come four new emotions that appear all at once and are wildly disruptive for Riley and her family.

Regina Barber
That's clinical psychologist Lisa Damore. Her most recent book is called the.

NPR Warning
Emotional Lives of teenagers, and it's aimed.

Regina Barber
At helping parents support their teenagers while they go through this stage of their lives.

It's work like this that made her an excellent scientific consultant for inside out, too.

Lisa Damour
So what's interesting about the evolution of the films is that it's actually also mapped onto the evolution of our science of emotion. So at the time that the first movie came out, there was this idea that there are these basic universal emotions, and we now identify at least 20 emotions that we see as universal and easily distinguish from one another.

Lisa Damour
And so it makes sense from the.

Lisa Damour
Scientific perspective to start to expand the.

Lisa Damour
Landscape of Riley's emotional world.

Regina Barber
And for inside out, too, Lisa helped Pixar welcome four new emotions to Riley's inner envy, embarrassment, ennui, and hello, I'm anxiety. Where can I put my stuff? Riley goes through a similar emotional rollercoaster as the first film. But this time, anxiety takes over and locks Riley's core emotions in a mason jar.

Lisa Damour
You can't just bottle us up.

We are suppressed emotions.

Regina Barber
And for Lisa, getting to work on this movie has been a thrill, especially because she has teenagers of her own.

Lisa Damour
So I got a call from Pixar in May of 2020, letting me know.

Lisa Damour
They wanted to talk with me about a film they were working on. I was so excited because I loved.

Lisa Damour
The first film, and actually my older.

Lisa Damour
Daughter was the age of Riley at that time. And now I have a 13 year old daughter.

Lisa Damour
So in a very funny way, it's.

Lisa Damour
Mapped onto my own parenting experience.

Regina Barber
Today on the show, art imitating life anxiety takes center stage as we get into its depiction in Pixar's inside out two and how anxiety affects our brains in real life. I'm Regina Barbour, and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Regina Barber
So in inside out two.

NPR Warning
One morning, Riley wakes up and she's basically been launched into puberty, like, dealing with all these new emotions. Is this depiction of puberty accurate?

Lisa Damour
You know, it's surprisingly accurate, especially if you look at it from the perspective.

Lisa Damour
Of what it feels like for the teenager and for the family.

Lisa Damour
So she goes to bed one night and is a kid, and then the puberty alarm rings on the console and is suddenly extremely reactive to her mother.

Lisa Damour
Who'S trying to have a conversation with her.

Lisa Damour
And what is captured so beautifully in the film is the way in which the arrival of puberty sets off a.

Lisa Damour
Cascading neurological set of events that cause emotions to be much more intense than they used to be.

Lisa Damour
It's so quick and comical in the film, but it's very, very accurate where her mother says something to her and Riley flips out on her. Mom gets inexplicably angry, and it cuts to the inside of Riley's mind, and.

Lisa Damour
All of the emotions turn on anger.

Lisa Damour
Like, what are you doing? And he's like, I barely touched it. I barely touched it.

Regina Barber
I like that.

Lisa Damour
It was so funny. And sadness does the same thing. And she's like, yeah, no, I barely touched it. This thing's broken. And I think that's what it feels like for families.

Lisa Damour
And I'm so glad that it's on the big screen so people don't have to worry that that means that something's wrong with them or their kid.

Regina Barber
It's totally normal.

Lisa Damour
Yep.

NPR Warning
So how is this pubescent brain, then, different? Like, what is actually happening?

Lisa Damour
So what's happening is actually the brain is upgrading.

Lisa Damour
It's becoming faster, more powerful, more efficient.

Lisa Damour
And that involves pruning some neurons. It means adding some neurons. It means strengthening the connection between neurons.

Lisa Damour
And the thing that happens. And this is, I guess you could say it's a bit of a design flaw.

Lisa Damour
The brain remodels in the order in which it developed.

Lisa Damour
And so that's from the back up to the more sophisticated, more, you know.

Lisa Damour
Modern regions, which are behind the forehead.

Lisa Damour
And I guess the design hiccup, maybe, is that the emotions are housed in.

Lisa Damour
The more ancient regions, and so they get upgraded first.

Lisa Damour
But the perspective maintaining systems don't get fully upgraded until young adulthood.

NPR Warning
Right.

Lisa Damour
And so there's a period, and this is really where we meet Riley, where teenagers have what we call a gawky.

Lisa Damour
Brain, that their feelings and their ability.

Lisa Damour
To have emotional reactions has been, you know, sort of improved, but their ability to maintain perspective or get some distance on that experience is still lagging.

NPR Warning
So in this film, the new major character that's introduced is anxiety. Right. And I love her, but for you, as a scientist, what did you think? Was there anything about her that really stood out to you?

Lisa Damour
Well, the thing that was really interesting is, in the evolution of the work.

Lisa Damour
On the film, anxiety got a lot cuter.

Lisa Damour
She was initially cast as a bit more of a villain.

NPR Warning
Right.

Lisa Damour
And I'm really, you know, through conversations and through, you know, their own thinking and research, Kelsey Mann, the director, and Megala Fawtt, the writer, you know, came.

Lisa Damour
To a place of really treating her.

Lisa Damour
Like, you know, she's one of the team.

And it matters that she is adorable.

Lisa Damour
Because you want her around and seen.

Lisa Damour
As a valuable partner to Riley and.

Lisa Damour
To the other emotions, so long as she's within bounds.

Lisa Damour
And that's accurate.

Lisa Damour
We, as psychologists, we see anxiety as an important, valuable, protective, and natural human emotion.

We see it as having a healthy version, which is the kind that is accurately anticipated what could go wrong, having the right reaction to it, having the right strength of reaction.

We only see anxiety as pathological if.

Lisa Damour
Its anticipating threats that arent real or.

Lisa Damour
Overreacting to potential problems.

Lisa Damour
And so in terms of her relationships with the other feelings.

I think that over the evolution of.

Lisa Damour
The film, she went from being sort.

Lisa Damour
Of a bad guy on the outside to being treated as she should, as.

Lisa Damour
An uncomfortable but valuable emotion.

NPR Warning
Yeah. And for me, the most accurate depiction of what it feels like to have anxiety shows up when Riley's brain is hijacked by anxiety, which means. Well, but spoiler alert ultimately sends her into this, like, panic attack in the middle of her hockey game. Can you break down the moment Riley has this panic attack from, like, a clinical psychology standpoint?

Lisa Damour
Sure. So panic attacks are actually surprisingly common.

Lisa Damour
Many, many people will have panic attacks in their lives, and they're different from panic disorders. We don't see them as inherently pathological, though. They are miserable to have.

Lisa Damour
And, you know, she's put in the penalty box, and she starts to have a panic attack.

And it's depicted so.

Regina Barber
Vividly and so.

NPR Warning
Accurately to me, like, it was so good.

Lisa Damour
It was so good.

Lisa Damour
You know, anxiety is swirling and swirling.

Lisa Damour
And swirling around her, and that really captures what people talk about when they have panic attacks. It's a sense of feeling, like, cut.

Lisa Damour
Off from themselves and cut off from.

Lisa Damour
Everything around them and feeling, you know, like, that they just have lost all sense of place and time and, you know, very, very disorganizing to have a panic attack.

And then, you know, the ways in.

Lisa Damour
Which she sort of pulls herself out.

Lisa Damour
You know, starts to get in touch with the physical sensations around her when.

NPR Warning
She touches the wood. You know, like, I know that, like, my therapist is like, oh, just, like.

Regina Barber
Touch something, tap something, you know, like.

NPR Warning
Just to bring your brain out of it.

Lisa Damour
Yeah. And we call that using grounding techniques. And that is part of, you know, how you get yourself through and out of a panic attack.

And, you know, I just. I was sort of just blown away by that part of the film when I saw it for the first time. Just how aptly they capture an experience that is so uncomfortable and so unpleasant and also just the incredible tenderness that joy brings in that moment and helps to pull Riley back and bring her back to herself.

And, you know, the goal of, as.

Lisa Damour
Clinicians, our goal is not to rid people of anxiety. Our goal is to help people manage anxiety if it gets to an irrational level.

NPR Warning
Mm hmm. And how do we do that? Like, how do we work with it so that it can help us?

Lisa Damour
So there's multiple pathways in. So the first is, you know, given the definition that irrational anxiety is about.

Lisa Damour
Overestimating threats and underestimating the ability to.

Lisa Damour
Manage them, we can then engage in questions like, you know, okay, so you say you're not going to have any friends in high school, right? So that's an overestimation of the threat. We can instead say, maybe you won't.

Lisa Damour
Have as many friends as you want, right? So we're just bringing the threat estimation down a few notches.

Lisa Damour
And then if the person's like, I won't have any friends in high school, and there's nothing I can do about it, then we can be like, okay.

Lisa Damour
So you may not have as many.

Lisa Damour
Friends as you want. And, like, what could you do, right.

Lisa Damour
If you aren't coming across the kids.

Lisa Damour
You want to hang out with?

Lisa Damour
Like, what options do you have available.

Lisa Damour
And helping people to find, you know, a sense of some agency and empowerment that can help them address the threat? So that's what we call a cognitive intervention, right?

Lisa Damour
Where you're using your mind to ask questions that can help bring anxiety down to size.

There are also physiological interventions.

Lisa Damour
When we become irrationally anxious, the heart rate accelerates a great deal.

Lisa Damour
Breathing gets quick and shallow.

And this is all in the name of getting a whole lot of heavily oxygenated blood out to our large muscle groups so that we can run or attack.

And interestingly, breathing can help reset the body.

So when we're anxious, we breathe in.

Lisa Damour
A way that's quick and shallow.

Lisa Damour
When we deliberately override that and breathe in a way that is slow and deep, we hack into this network of nerves and send a competing message. And basically the message is, we're safe.

NPR Warning
This is really speaking to me because I also suffer from these things and gotten much better over time with breathing and many things and talking, naming, like you said.

Regina Barber
But why do you think this was.

NPR Warning
A film that needed to be made?

Lisa Damour
You know, it's interesting.

They got going with it at the height of the pandemic, and the pandemic led us into an adolescent mental health crisis and has us appropriately concerned about.

Lisa Damour
Teenagers and how they're doing.

Lisa Damour
But one unintended consequence of that is that I am now caring for teenagers and families who are more uneasy than they need to be about psychological distress.

So I've cared for teenagers for almost.

Lisa Damour
30 years and have known from that.

Lisa Damour
Work that ups and downs are part.

Lisa Damour
Of being a teenager, and a great deal of dysregulation is part of being a teenager.

Lisa Damour
And so the value of this movie now is so, so, you know, it's so well timed because we really do need the level setting that being a.

Lisa Damour
Teenager, having a teenager is an inherently.

Lisa Damour
Challenging thing and that uncomfortable and unwanted.

Lisa Damour
Emotions are not on their own grounds for concern.

NPR Warning
They're natural.

Lisa Damour
They're part of life.

Lisa Damour
They're protective.

Lisa Damour
They're valuable. They're growth giving. They guide us.

NPR Warning
Thank you so much for talking to us about inside out. I love these movies, and I'm glad.

Regina Barber
We got to talk to you.

Lisa Damour
Well, thank you so much for having me.

Regina Barber
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact checked by Rachel and me. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to short wave from NPR.

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