Striving Is Bad For Your Health

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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.

His story was first shared as a folk tale 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.

Have 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 100 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, sometime in the early 1870s, John Henry, an uneducated African-American, was working as part of a work gang.

probably a group of convict laborers.

And so one day, John Henry, who was reputed to be

the best steel driver that the world had ever known, was challenged by his work boss to compete against a newly invented machine, mechanical steam drill.

And 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 against machine, ensued.

And after a long, long confrontation with the machine, John Henry 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 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,

near Talcott, 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, you know, 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, Steel 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.

he but actually he was accused of petty larceny and was tried and convicted and thrown into into jail a very long prison term and uh wound up working as part of a a work gang on the chesapeake and ohio railroad and then was exposed to you know all of the toxic dusts that uh men who who carved out tunnels and mountains were exposed to and and he probably died of you know what we might call coal miners disease.

So that in a sense then, he was a, you know, the legendary John Henry was a, was the victim of sort of the first, 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 legend means.

For me, I sort of lean more toward the former

because I think it really taps more, it taps

more deeply, more authentically into the

into the spirit

of Black Americans to confront adversity, to not give up on their dreams, to succeed

against the odds.

So it's more 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 whom I could interview.

So I drove about

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 welcomed me warmly, invited me to sit next to him in a chair under a 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.

He saw

how his father just fretted and hard he worked and he could just never get ahead.

He vowed that that would not be his fate.

Under no circumstances, would 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 to drop out of school in the second grade in order to help out on the farm.

His wife's brother was a

landowner, an 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 a loan 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 six days a week,

uh he,

with a lot of help from his wife, managed to pay it off in five years, a huge accomplishment.

And so then he

turned to me and he said, I think that's the reason why my legs are all out of whack.

I pushed myself too hard in the fields.

Now, I knew that he had high blood pressure

and he had two canes

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 about 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, that 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.

You know, 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 grandfathers, on both my mother's side and my father's side, were shackrobbers.

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 Dehanarism.

hypothesis that maybe that's the explanation for why we see so much high blood pressure and strokes and heart attacks that affect African Americans, particularly working class African Americans, as this.

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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.

Yes.

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, you know, the remaining questions continue to work this theme of tenacity, persistence, not giving up.

So that's the John Henry scale.

And guess what?

His hunch was right.

He found a very strong correlation between scoring high on the John Henryism scale and having hypertension and all of its attendant problems like stroke and heart attack.

The more these men strived for excellence, the sicker 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 there had been very little epidemiological research on

the health of middle-class Black people.

And we sort of expected to see that, oh, they will be doing so much better than their working 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, the civil rights legislation.

And now they were moving.

into these white spaces

from which

black folks had, for the most part, been been excluded.

There may be a lot of physiological wear and tear that attends

going up against 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 so what the data are telling us, what these data are telling us, and again, 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 landowner, 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, Pollyanne, 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's School of Public Health, Dr.

Arlene Geronimus.

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.

Geronimus began her research into health inequity back in the 70s in a school for pregnant teen moms.

She had a hunch about teen pregnancy and 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 this theory I've 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 wear down your health at earlier ages.

And so that's weathering, as in a rock being, you know, weathered by wind and rain over centuries.

But you're also, and this, you know, 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's work.

having to expend so much effort in 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.

And I've come to believe, you know, some of that is just objective things in your environment.

You know, meditating isn't going to help you deal with environmental toxicity.

Right.

Meditating isn't going to help you deal with the fact in order to feed your children, given that, you know, the value of real wages, which was never very high in the lower rungs, has gotten even less,

means you have to do two or three jobs or take 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 your kids to school?

How do you have them taken care of when they're home?

At the same time, you don't have any control over over the hours you work um 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 um

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 where 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 your health wears down early

along the very things that cause

the health inequities by race and class in the United States.

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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 on other, 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, 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 they're 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 being optimistic or

having grit or being resilient or making the best of bad situations is what's going to make you healthy.

It certainly hasn't worked in these circumstances.

You know, you'd have people would 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.

Where do you 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 you 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, you're not a good person, you had your children too young, which just proves you aren'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've been having about the self-improvement woo-woo coachie world.

There's just something really privileged and tone-deaf 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 in power, while blaming people we oppress 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.

Things like racism and sexism and all the isms I'm constantly banging on about.

Despite what these pitch men might say, you cannot think yourself out of being the only woman in a business meeting, 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 like screaming about how, you know, this like rugged individualism and, you know, your mindset just needs to overcome stuff.

And no, it's more complicated.

It's more complicated.

These motivational speakers have figured something out, right?

You know, how to

speak to the aspirations of people

and

how to connect

their shtick

with

the American dream.

And, you know, we Americans,

you know,

our mind is conditioned, right, to think about

our country as a place where hard work pays off.

I mean,

all of us have internalized to some degree that notion, that aspiration.

They have been sold the American dream.

A lot of us have been sold the American dream.

This is where I want to give them some grace, if I may put it that way what they don't know is the kind of thing that you and i have been talking about they don't they really don't know

the the physiological costs associated with this now the question for me the question becomes what would they say if they knew how would it change their their message how would it change what they say to people if they knew but they don't know and of course

It's a very powerful dream, isn't it?

I mean, I mean, what a wonderful idea the american dream is i mean it's a powerful idea it attracts it has attracted people from all over the world you know in search of opportunities um

to be freer than

uh you know they're able to be free in their in their home countries to to realize their potential to to be safe from harm uh 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

rugged 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, yeah, the meritocracy thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, that you deserve what you get and you get what you deserve, right?

And that, yeah, in the end, it's really up to you.

So don't ask me, you know, to pay higher taxes

so that, you know, opportunity, 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.

And other countries have in place much stronger social safety nets such that 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.

The pursuit of it, of that kind of life, does not come with an unnecessary cost to your health.

And that is one of the things that distinguishes our country from other

rich countries in the world.

Right.

Right.

One could argue that that is the most distinguishing factor that distinguishes the United States of America from our peer countries

elsewhere in the world.

It's very sobering, but it's important to know that this phenomenon exists.

And now that we know it, and we have to keep, you know, have to keep talking about it.

We have to engage in educating the public.

Of course, there'll be the skeptics,

but

we have to do our best certainly to educate policymakers and advocate

for social and economic policies

that make

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.

John Henry, he could hammer.

He could whistle,

he could sing.

He went to the mountain early in the morning.

Just to hear his hammer hurring, Lord Lord.

Hear his hammer hurring.

Just to hear his hammer hurring, Lord Lord.

Hear his hammer hurring.

When John Henry was a little baby, sitting on his daddy's knee.

He picked up a hammer, a little piece of steel, said, Hammer be the death of me, Lord Lord.

Hammer be the death of me.

Well, John Henry's family needed money, said he didn't have but a dime.

If you wait till the rising sun goes down, I'll get it from the men in the mine, Lord Lord.

Get it from the men in the mine.

I'll get it from the men in the mine, Lord Lord.

Get it from the men in the mine.

Well, John Henry went to the captain.

What happened?

Said the captain,

What can you do?

I can hoist the jack, I can lay a track.

I can pick and shovel to, Lord Lord.

Pick and shovel to.

I can pick.

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If you want to tell your story,

Lord Lord, whoop that steel on down.

But your Henry said to the captain, Oh, a man ain't nothing but a man.

Lord, let your steam drill beat me down.

I'll die with my hammer in my hand, Lord Lord.

Die with my hammer in my hand.

But John Henry said to the captain, Look yonder, what I see.

Hold on, choke, mill done, broke.

And you can't drive steel like me, Lord Lord.

Can't drive steel like me.

Oh, you can't drive steel like me.

No, no, can't drive steel i hate me

well john henry drove into the mountain

his hammer was striking fire

he drove so hard

he broke his poor heart

well he laid down his hammer and he died lord lord

laid down his hammer and he died

Laid down his hammer and he died, great God

Laid down his hammer and he died

Oh, they took John Henry to the White House and they buried him in the sand

Every locomotive come roaring by says there lies a steel driving man Lord Lord There lies a steel driving man

says there lies a steel driving man who

there lies a steel-driving man,

says there lies a steel-driving man, Lord Lord.

There lies a steel-driving man!

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Hey dream listeners, it's finally here.

The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.

It's $5 a month.

It's the only tier.

No commercials.

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We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.

The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything.

But I don't love rules.

So what I did is started a bunch of threads like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff.

And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there.

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It'll be fun.

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