 So I just finished the movie Bird Box over on Netflix and it was an excellent movie but this movie actually shows perfectly the link between depression and loneliness and I'm going to tell you about a really cool study that proves it. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and what I like to do is pull different topics from pop culture to try to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being. So if you're into that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and if you're wondering about where I got that gorgeous scarf for the thumbnail, it's actually a Christmas present my son gave to my beautiful girlfriend Tristan because she loves owls but yeah, worked perfectly for the thumbnail. If you haven't seen Bird Box yet, there's going to be spoilers. It's a great movie. Excellent movie. I loved it and also I'm going to be using some of the ideas that I pulled from an awesome YouTuber who I just subscribed to. His name is ThinkStory. He explained it perfectly like even at the end I was kind of like confused like I made some of the connections he did but he has a great explanation of the movie. So I'm going to link his video down in the description as well as up in the info card if you want to get more of a breakdown of the movie alright. So just to kind of sum it up, I'm going to be talking about two different topics here alright. I'm going to be talking about the link between depression and loneliness and then I'm also going to be explaining the monsters alright. So we start off with Sandra Bullock's character Mallory and she's pregnant. She was left by her man named Ryan and it starts off with her seeing her sister and she's an artist and in her first painting that she's working on when her sister comes over she talks about how you know these people are there. They're all together but you can see that they're lonely right. And there's a lot of darkness in all of her paintings right. And when she goes to the OBGYN she doesn't feel connected to her baby and she's also thinking about giving it up for adoption alright. But you can tell that Mallory has this kind of like I look on life where she's disconnected right. She's disconnected from other people and maybe you know that's partially because the father of the kid left but you also find out throughout the movie that she didn't have a great relationship with her mom or her dad like her sister talks to her mom for her and that's how they get these updates and everything like that. But throughout this movie you see how Mallory has these walls up and she is just an isolated person right. And it's hard for her to make connections with other people and someone argued that that's helped her survive but this is actually something that we can look at with some psychology too. Some of these things that we do like the walls that we build up these are defense mechanisms that we built up as a kid right. And they served a purpose as a kid maybe when we got too close to people it hurt us and we carried that on throughout our life but later on it can actually hurt us okay. And that to me is kind of what this movie was talking about and later on as the movie goes forward we see how Mallory starts to build more connections. But like you really start to see it when the kids are how old are they like five years old. You see that she named these kids boy and girl alright like she was so disconnected and didn't want to build this bond with people so much that she named the children boy and girl and you know what what set her back a little bit but only briefly was the loss of Tom right. They fell in love and you know they were alive together until something happened to Tom later on but anyways one of the topics that I think was interesting too was how depression from a parent can can affect a child too so I think you know one of the one of the symbols in there was like she was sheltering those kids too so her and Tom get into this argument where Tom was telling them this story right this story about when he was a kid he was outside playing and all these other things and Mallory comes in there she ends the story and all this and she gets an argument with Tom and Tom's like yo we gotta give these kids hope like that's what it's about being a parent and Tom calls her out for her ways and the way that she's she's sheltering has these walls up and now it's affecting these kids too he even calls her out for the fact that he named them boy and girl but later on towards the end of the movie when girl who is later named Olympia almost gets taken by the monster you know Mallory gets her back by apologizing for what she's done right and she tells she she tells the rest of Tom's story and the daughter ends up coming back but I think this is this is a really important symbol too because as parents if you're a parent out there we have to work on our mental health we have to work on our mental health for a multitude of reasons it affects our kids in a variety of different ways but one of the things is it might push our kids away like if we try to shelter them from everything from the outside world it can affect them very very greatly right and towards the end of the movie like the ending of the movie is Mallory now having this connection okay we see that in a few different ways when she goes to the school for the blind she names the kids finally she lets them go and play she lets the birds go and all this other stuff these are old OBGYN and now Mallory has this connection all right but I want to tell you about a study because there is this great great link between depression and loneliness all right so this is actually a study that came from my favorite depression book of the year called Lost Connections like it's all about depression and anxiety I'm gonna link it down in the description and the and in the comments below that you have to have to have to have to read this book this book is like the number one at the top of my list for anybody out there struggling with depression or anxiety anyways there's a study in there that they talk about and scientists who did this his name was John Cassiopo all right Cassiopo I think I'm saying that right anyways he's a neuroscientist all right so and he ended up doing an experiment because he thought there was a link between depression and loneliness or being disconnected from people so for a long time for a long time even to this day they thought that our brains were just malfunctioning right these chemical imbalances and all of this so he was like well maybe there's something else going on maybe maybe we need to look a little bit further so he was a professor at the University of Chicago so what they did was they got a hundred students all right they got a hundred students and they told him to just go about their days for three days all right just live your normal life do your thing all right so on the first day on the first day they had a few things okay they had a notepad they had a beeper and they had a heart monitor okay so whenever that beeper would beep they had to write down the readings from the heart monitor and they also had to say whether they felt lonely or connected to other people all right so if you imagine maybe they were walking down the street by themselves they felt lonely okay but if the beeper went off while they were at dinner with friends or family maybe they felt more connected all right so on day two same thing with a beeper but instead of having the heart monitor they had these little plastic tubes that they had to spit in okay the reason they had to spit in them is because John wanted to measure the cortisol levels okay those of you who don't know what cortisol is that is a stress hormone so they had to spit in the tube and also write down how lonely or connected they felt and the the results were absolutely mind-blowing okay so when they got the test results back and they were measuring the heart rates and cortisol levels like first off the heart rates are up when somebody feels lonely okay but the the cortisol levels like that stuff was insane people have the exact same cortisol levels when they felt lonely as when you're being physically attacked all right like let that sink in for a second when you feel lonely and disconnected from other people you have the same amount of stress as when you're being physically attacked isn't that insane so this is why depression and anxiety fuel each other all right cortisol is a stress hormone it triggers anxiety so when you are lonely you are getting anxious as well so this is why we need to work on building our connections if you're ever interested down in the description of every single one of my videos we have a link to our Facebook group as well as our discord server I'm gonna do some other videos later on like using using technology to our advantage to connect with others is one of the best things that you can do for somebody who doesn't go out that much all right like we need to feel connected with other people in Mallory's case in bird box it was feeling connected with her children but she also started building connections with other people like she ended up naming the daughter olympia after the nicest woman she ever met right she named the son tom okay so like she ended up building those connections later so now let's explain these monsters let's explain what this big bad monster was so this is something else that um think story actually talk about so we never actually see those monsters all right we never see them now it was it was kind of confusing but i think think story kind of explained it well like there were people who could look at the monster so those of you who haven't seen it but hopefully you have because i just gave away like a lot of spoilers anyways if you looked at the monster if you looked right that's why everybody has these blindfolds like you go psychologically insane but there were some people who could walk around without blindfolds on and what we knew on a on a couple occasions was there was the first guy who took out our boy from the movie get out i forgot his name in the movie in this movie but anyways he was an ex convict all right and then there was also the men who escaped from the insane asylum or the psych ward right and those people were able to look so what they're saying is like people who had already faced their demons they weren't affected so what this was kind of symbolizing is when you're not facing these things they're going to come back and they're going to mess you up all right so what what happened was that Mallory didn't finally overcome these things until she faced her personal struggles and one of the reasons we don't see these monsters is because we don't see our depression we don't see our past we don't see these things they're all trapped up here but Mallory in order to save her kids she had to break down those walls she had to break down those barriers and save them all right so that is the theory as to why we don't ever see these monsters okay they're all up here but in order to heal you gotta feel baby that's what i'm trying to teach you but anyways i want to hear your thoughts if you saw bird box did you like it did you hate it do you understand the link between depression and loneliness let's have a conversation down below all right anyways that's all i got for this video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because i make a ton of videos and a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel 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