Mental health and resilience - the secrets of inner strength | DW Documentary

We live in an era of crisis around the world, around a billion people suffer from stress-related diseases and that number is increasing. The key to

resilience

is staying

health

y even when we face life's great burdens. What keeps people

mental

ly

health

y despite serious crises while others collapse? Resilience is a natural phenomenon that allows people to continue developing after experiencing a catastrophe or traumatic event. Leading researchers are trying to identify the secret of

resilience

. As resilience researchers, our goal is to identify strategies that can help prevent people from developing

mental

illness. Can we learn to be resilient? It was like a part of me had been torn away.

It is the greatest loss a parent can experience. Here Luca, Georg Ballmann's son, was murdered one January afternoon. Helen, Luca's mother, called me one Saturday morning, shortly after seven. She only said one thing: “Luca is dead.” After a birthday party at a nightclub, Luca and his friend Freddy, both 16 years old, argued with another group of teenagers. They tried to calm things down. But the situation got worse and ended when Freddy was pushed in front of an oncoming train. Luca was dragged with him. It is a tragedy that Georg Ballmann shares with Céline and Björn Wilke, Freddy's parents.

Everyone cries for their two children. In 2019, police showed up at the Wilkes' door early in the morning. They said we should sit down. It was the worst sentence of my life, actually just that sentence: Your son died last night. And you're sitting there at the table, you don't want to believe it, but you don't say “this can't be happening.” It's like the earth opens up and absorbs your entire soul. That your whole world is collapsing. The day goes by like a bad movie and you don't realize what happened. You call a few people and then you stay home.

We were lucky that some friends quickly came to see us and take care of us. I completely understand people who can't cope. I felt that too: why can I live and my son can't? The two families have an infinitely long and painful road ahead of them. Stress and even crises are part of life. However, many people remain mentally healthy. The question is how? Europe's largest resilience research center is located in Mainz, Germany. Professor Raffael Kalisch, neuroscientist and brain researcher, investigates the mechanisms of mental resilience here. What is mental health? My interest in this question comes from my early days as a university student.

A schoolmate and friend of mine suffered a nervous breakdown in his first year of school while I was having a wonderful time. For me everything was fascinating, great and new. And during that time, I watched my friend fall apart. And that made me wonder: Why does it happen to some people and not to others? What are the risk factors for mental illnesses? The interesting thing is that it's not just really big, extreme life events that can make people mentally ill. It is not just a serious accident, an act of violence or the death of a loved one, but also minor stresses that can affect people if they occur frequently and over a long period of time.

What do those with resilience do differently? To find out, Kalisch is conducting a long-term study in healthy people who are in a particularly difficult phase of their lives. We welcome young people who are in this phase of transition from family and school to adult life, who are leaving a family environment. We see that in this phase of life, stress-related illnesses tend to emerge for the first time or, if pre-existing, become more serious. Every three months, the 200 study participants answer a questionnaire about their mental state. To what extent have you felt calmer or more tense in the last two weeks?

Sitting on a crowded train on the way home from work was a bit stressful. But in the mornings, every once in a while I would make myself a cup of tea and relax for ten minutes and then I could calm down. Since we do this every three months, we get a very good picture of stress levels over a long period of time. So that we can see over that time how strongly they react psychologically to life's challenges. Some are more affected, others less. And in the end, this gives us an idea of ​​what mental resilience looks like when faced with stressors.

Participants periodically come to the institute for a thorough examination. Kalisch and his team use MRI machines to look for indications of how mental stress is processed in the brain. And they examine how stress affects the body. To do this, they take blood and hair samples. We can measure the concentration of cortisol, the stress hormone, from a hair sample. One centimeter of hair typically corresponds to one month of hair growth, so analyzing one centimeter, or in this case three centimeters, tells us something about the activity of the stress hormone system over the previous three months. The results have been recorded since the study began in 2016, so there is now a large database of information.

Ultimately, we want to understand what mechanisms people use to stay mentally healthy in the face of adversity. And once we know these mechanisms better, use or

strength

en them, especially in people who cannot do so. The study in Mainz will be completed soon. Kalisch has already identified certain resilience factors, one of which is how positively or negatively the participants themselves evaluate their stress levels. There seems to be a connection to optimism and the fact that people believe that they can somehow cope, that everything will probably work out somehow. This appears to be related to resilience, so someone who cultivates this type of positive appraisal style or develops it over time is less likely to be affected.

So, can we influence our resilience? Professor and psychiatrist Marianne Müller also researches at the Mainz Resilience Center what makes some people particularly resilient. I think this is promising in terms of better understanding psychiatric illnesses. For many decades, we have had only moderate success in trying to understand how psychiatric illnesses develop, for example stress-related illnesses such as clinical depression. While psychiatric research focuses mainly on the clinical picture, resilience science is more concerned with healthy people. Müller first explores the basics: What does resilient behavior look like? She and her colleague Ulrich Schmitz are researching it in mice.

Resilience can only be measured in the context of stress. That's why they put little brown mice in the cage with a much bigger and stronger white mouse. We took male mice that, like all or almost all other male vertebrates, show territorial behavior. This means that if you place a test mouse with a larger mouse in its cage, the larger mouse will not accept it and will try to scare or chase it away. This leads to social stress. The brown mouse is removed to prevent it from getting hurt. The experiment is repeated for 10 days. They want to know: What is the long-term effect of this permanent stress on the behavior of stressed mice?

After a day of rest, they undertake a second experiment: the brown mice are again exposed to the offending white mouse. But this time the white mouse is in a cage. The researchers are now looking at: How do previously stressed mice behave? Do they stay away out of fear? Are they brave enough to approach the white aggressor in the cage? We assumed that the mice were resilient if they always investigated the white mouse a lot, as if they had never experienced stress. However, we think that this might not be resilience at all, but rather the result of a non-optimal learning process over time that the test mouse has not learned, has not understood that this strain of white mouse is potentially dangerous.

If that were the case, this mouse could not be described as tough. So, is the intrepid mouse perhaps a little too... dumb? The researchers investigate this question in a third experiment. In this case, two large mice are behind the bars of the cage: one aggressive white and one brown, with which the stressed little mouse has had no negative experiences so far. Our test mouse was allowed to freely explore the box, examine and visit the different social partners and interact with them. And we were able to show that there are mice that are able to distinguish between the white mouse, which comes from the offending strain, and the brown mouse, which is neutral and with which it has had no negative experiences.

Is resilient behavior about being able to distinguish between threat and safety? Today we see a resistant mouse as a mouse that examines the brown mouse in a completely normal and unimpressed manner, but stays away from the white mouse because it has learned that the white mouse is a potential threat. We consider this to be a resilient behavioral phenotype. That means that resilient behavior in mice does not simply mean bravely facing each imminent danger, but rather weighing the situation and adapting behavior accordingly. This is directly transferable from mice to humans. There is a lot of data showing that people who can distinguish between negative stimuli and neutral stimuli are better protected against stress and the mental illnesses associated with it.

In this sense, we are also quite confident that we can use it to obtain more neurobiological findings. Forward. Finding her way back to life Céline Wilke tries to do so every day after the death of her son Freddy. I said goodbye for the last time on Friday night, when he said it happily to me. "Mom, I'm leaving." I told him to have fun. That was our farewell. I can still see it at that moment. He was in a good mood and was looking forward to the evening with her friends. And in retrospect, I'm glad that the last time we saw each other was really a nice time and that we said goodbye politely without knowing that we would never see each other again.

On the day of the funeral, the entire town mourned with the families. Luca and Freddy are buried together in the same grave. And then the whole congregation walked a good mile here from the church in a funeral procession. It was like being in a trance. And the funeral itself, of course, you realized that there were a lot of people there, but it passes by and somehow you don't have any clear memory of the moment. And at the funeral, I felt like all this heaviness, this coffin with both of them, I don't know if heaviness is the right word, this burden, which is so heavy.

As I already described, the earth opens, that someone accepts the burden for me, that I can now pass it on to other hands. Maybe there is a little religion in me after all. The physical part will be buried for now, but the emotional part will take a long time before this wound is no longer so open. Munich. Here at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, neuroscientist Elisabeth Binder wants to know: Why do some people remain mentally healthy despite severe stress, while others become ill under the same stress? One topic we investigated was genetic predisposition. Could it be that certain people are genetically predisposed to react more or less to stress and are therefore more or less at risk of suffering negative effects in the future, such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder?

Elisabeth Binder wants to know: Could it be a genetic variant that alters our perception of stress? To find out, it's tracking the hormone cortisol, a hormone important for our metabolism and immune system that is also released when we're under stress. It is regulated by something called the HPA Axis. When we experience stress, the brain activates. This triggers a complex cascade of events. In the brain, stress signals are sent to the hypothalamus. This, in turn, releases hormones that reach the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland then releases its hormones to the adrenal cortex, which tells our body to produce additional cortisol to deal with stress.

Cortisol allows all the cells in our body to be flooded with extra energy to assist in the fight or flight response. Cortisol is our main stress hormone and travels to all organs in the body. It is very important that we are well prepared for a stressful event. Cortisol binds to receptors on our cells, and that's a good thing because the receptors then tell the brain, “Thank you! “Now we have enough cortisol bound here.” Then the stress response turns off in the brain and we calm down again. At least when everything works correctly. Many people get nervous in interviews, but typically, when the situation is over, our stress hormone levels should regulate back down.

People with this particular genotype are not as good atthis. So for them, the stress hormone stays high for longer. The question Binder asks is: Why? Why are some people not as good at calming down as others? And this is where genetics comes into play. One of the genes responsible for our stress regulation is the FKBP5 gene. It is activated during stress and ensures the release of an important enzyme. It has the same name as its corresponding gene: fkbp5. Problems begin when too much is released. The enzyme then makes its way between the stress receptor and cortisol, thereby blocking the stress receptors' message to the brain that there is enough. cortisol.

The brain is misinformed: it continues to work and we can no longer calm down. We believe that stress causes too much of this fkbp5 to be released and that people simply release too much stress hormone after even the slightest stress. And we know that a long-term excess of this stress hormone is harmful to many processes, including in the brain, which also increases the risk of psychiatric illnesses. Researchers have identified the FKBP5 gene as one of several important causes of our stress hormone regulation. Variants of this gene could be partly responsible for why we react with more or less stress.

The researchers are now looking for a way to block activity directly in the FKBP5 gene. And here at the institute, this has been investigated in mice that researchers have given this FKBP5 blocker whether they are more resistant to stress and whether they can cope with it better to the extent that this can be measured in a mouse. The next step is to develop a specific drug for people in whom this variant of the stress gene can be detected in the blood and who, therefore, presumably have a higher risk of suffering from mental illness. The south of France.

The psychiatrist and neurologist Boris Cyrulnik lives and works in Toulon. He is considered a pioneer of resilience research. His own traumatic childhood experiences give him a personal perspective. I had a somewhat difficult childhood, which motivated me to dedicate myself to research because I wanted to understand how we can return to life after the war, since I had lost almost all of my family in Auschwitz. When he was four years old, Boris was left alone, without a mother or father. Hidden by foster families, he was eventually arrested and narrowly escaped death. The officers said: they should kill him.

Then I knew they wanted to kill me and I was completely alone. And I heard the adults say: he has no family, he is lost in life. When I was a child I thought: this can't be true. I reject this curse! At the age of 11, Cyrulnik already knew that he wanted to be a psychiatrist. After the war, he studied medicine in Paris. The memory of his beloved parents also helped him forge his own path. I struggled to study, although everyone told me: Don't bother studying, you won't make it. Well, I did it. When the trained psychiatrist came across the term resilience for the first time, he found his life's purpose.

When I came across the word resilience, I said to myself: this is a word that needs to be developed scientifically and we need to incorporate it into our culture so that people understand that if we abandon wounded people, there will be no resilience. Due to his own painful experience, a focus of Cyrulnik's research is child protection. He is particularly interested in the interaction between mother and child. We began our early childhood research in 1981 on the island of Embiez, near Toulon, where we assembled a team of international researchers. The question was: What makes one child more resistant to crises, while another is very vulnerable to them?

He sees one of the reasons for this in the mothers of these children. If the mother does not do well, her relationship with her son suffers. This is a vicious cycle that can begin during pregnancy. We have been able to scientifically demonstrate that when a pregnant woman is stressed, stress hormones enter the uterus and the baby ingests stress hormones such as cortisol, which are harmful to the baby's brain. This means that the baby is born with cognitive changes that are not caused by the mother, but by the mother's unhappiness. The researchers identified a particularly sensitive phase in the last weeks of pregnancy and the first two years of the child's life.

During this time new networks are constantly forming in the brain. If no one does anything, it is a neurological catastrophe. The brain atrophies. But we can intervene, we can intervene gently, very soon and easily. And the sooner we intervene, the easier it will be to trigger the resilience process. But if the child is left very isolated for a long time, it will be difficult to start the resilience process. Elisabeth Binder also studies this particularly vulnerable phase of life at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. The greatest correlation is a nearly 40-fold increased risk of having attempted suicide when someone experiences severe traumatic experiences as a child.

Even during pregnancy, too much stress or trauma can cause the embryo's natural barrier against the mother's stress hormones to break down. Why is chronic stress harmful to the brain? Because chronic stress causes our neural circuits to weaken. Binder suspects that the stress hormone cortisol is the cause of this. But to prove it, she would have to be able to examine the brain of a stressed embryo. Of course, it is difficult to reach the developing brain and expose it to certain factors and investigate how it reacts. Since this is obviously not an option, researchers are using a novel method to recreate a developing brain outside the womb.

A cellular structure similar to a brain is grown from stem cells. The researchers call this simulation a brain organoid. We can only adequately model very early brain development. We cannot model all types of brain cells and we cannot model how different areas of the brain communicate with each other. It's a very simple and limited model, but it's the first time we can do this. How old are these organoids now? These are about 40 days old. 40 days. So that means we could get started. Yes, this would be a good time to start. Once the simulated embryonic brain, the cerebral organoid, has reached a certain stage of maturation, Binder and her team add synthetically produced cortisol.

The effects of the hormone on the development of brain cells are then investigated. And then we see that this stress hormone actually alters the development and, in particular, the genetic expression of genes that have also been associated with the risk of psychiatric diseases. There is no doubt: already in the womb, a mother's stress influences the intensity with which genes manifest in the child and, therefore, can have a lasting effect on her mental health. A finding that could have real-life implications. It is also important to detect psychiatric symptoms during pregnancy. Some clinics already detect depression and treat the mother in time.

There are now many studies experimenting with the use of therapy during pregnancy to possibly mitigate the risk. Therefore, environmental influences have a direct impact on our genes. Scientist and psychiatrist Katharina Domschke in Freiburg is investigating exactly what this looks like. We believe that environmental influences can trigger diseases. So now the question is, how does the environment affect our genes? Domschke is head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University Medical Center Freiburg. In her laboratory she investigates epigenetic processes, how and why changes occur in our genes. Let's imagine that we have a certain genetic predisposition and a specific adverse environmental event occurs.

But how does this environmental event cause our genes to be expressed or triggered, so to speak, and ultimately lead to disease? This is where epigenetics plays a role. To understand this communication between environment and genes in more detail, Domschke and her team are studying another stress gene, the MAOA gene. Provides instructions for producing an enzyme also called maoa. This enzyme migrates to our nerve cells and attaches to the synaptic clefts, the area between nerve cells. This is where our happy hormones, serotonin and norepinephrine, are normally transported from one cell membrane to another. However, if too much maoa enzyme sticks to the synaptic cleft, it turns out to be a real happiness eater: it simply breaks down serotonin and norepinephrine.

One of the main suspects in the development of mental illness is monoamine oxidase A, or MAO-A for short. This is because MAO-A breaks down norepinephrine and serotonin. But in some of us, this happiness-devouring enzyme Maoa is more active than in others. Why does Domschke take blood samples to monitor the MAOA gene and see how much methylation has occurred? Methylation is a chemical process in which a methane derivative binds to specific sites on our DNA, deactivating them. This can be imagined as a kind of cap that is placed over our genes and put to sleep. If the cap is found on the gene, it is considered methylated and the gene remains inactive, silencing its activity.

However, if the cover is removed, it becomes active again. In the case of the MAOA gene, more happiness consumers are produced. The MAO-A enzyme is more active and breaks down more serotonin and norepinephrine. There are fewer of these hormones available in the synaptic cleft between nerve cells and it may be easier for depression and anxiety to develop. This means that we are in a state of risk. If these limits are in our stress genes, they protect us from producing too many happy consumers. This can make us happier and more resilient. But that doesn't always happen to everyone.

What we saw was that negative life events were more likely to lead to MAO-A being less methylated, meaning having fewer limits on the gene and possibly being at risk, while positive life events were more likely to be associated with higher methylation. So that means the caps were more likely to be in the MAO-A gene, possibly indicating resilience. Positive environmental influences and experiences can affect the way our genes are expressed. Domschke's next question is: can this also be demonstrated in the successful use of therapy? We have known for a long time that psychotherapy works. Psychotherapy is one of the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders.

What we don't know yet is how it works in detail. And according to the findings of our research, a possible mechanism could be operating at the level of the cell nucleus. Can we put these limits back on the stress genes with the help of psychotherapy? Domschke examines the blood of patients who are afraid of heights and climbs the tower of Freiburg Cathedral with them every day for two weeks. The patients did what we call exposure exercises, where they exposed themselves to their fear of heights. So they went up the tower, they had to look down and after the therapy we took blood samples again.

And what we saw was that in patients with a successful response to psychotherapy, MAOA methylation had returned to the level of healthy control subjects. Domschke also obtained the same result in a study on psychotherapy. The number of test subjects is still too small to make a definitive statement, but initial results are promising. So there are variants of the stress gene that we bring into the world with us, and yet we can have a great influence on our resilience if we can consciously and appropriately shape our environment. At first I was paralyzed, I couldn't do anything. The desire to move forward is gone, you are no longer capable of anything.

That was at the beginning. And then things got better. Music was like a prayer, a meditation, a connection that helped me a lot. Many people might ask where God is, but that didn't happen to me. For me, music was my religion, my family and my friends. That was what saved me during that time. Luca's father, Georg Ballmann, often thinks about going to therapy. The fact that his son had to die, the senselessness of it, almost drove him to despair. When you think about the trivial reason that led to this terrible ending, you simply don't understand that it doesn't make sense.

Georg Ballmann wants to do something about this. And that's why we quickly came up with the idea of ​​creating a foundation to turn this nonsense into something meaningful. Together with Freddy's parents, Ballmann created the “faustlos” foundation, a program that begins in kindergarten to prevent violence as early as possible. It allows him to stay active and keep his son's memory alive. At the resilience center in Mainz, psychologist Michèle Wessa focuses her research on very practical aids for people in crisis situations. She says resilient behavior can only develop very gradually. It doesn't work to develop training courses that somehow make people more resilient and more efficient in an hour and a half oreven in one day, which is perhaps what some people would like to see.

That won't work and that's not what we intend to do. For Wessa, resilience is self-regulated. He tells us his favorite story to help explain what he means. The Story of the Chained Elephant by Jorge Bucay is about a very small elephant, a newborn, chained to a small wooden peg in a circus. The baby elephant keeps trying to free himself from the chain, but in vain. But over time he grew bigger and stronger; in fact, it could have been released a long time ago. He lacks the belief that he can do it, and that alone makes him stay still and not try to free himself.

When we have the feeling that we can't do anything, that we are helpless and at the mercy of others, this is known in psychology as “learned helplessness.” Wessa examines this state in detail in several experiments. In the experiment, test subjects are first applied an unpleasant noise and at the same time a somewhat unpleasant stimulus to the skin. They are shown circles, triangles and squares, upon which they must press a different button. If participants press the right button, they will be able to stop the unpleasant noises. This applies to a group. In a second group, however, pressing the right button sometimes makes the noises stop, but other times it doesn't.

What a group learns is that I press the correct button, so I have the situation under control and the stimulus ends. The other group learns that no matter what they do, chance determines what happens. If this happens several times in a row, it leads us to an experience of helplessness: there is nothing we can do. We could recognize this in our work lives: I do a certain task and I always do it the same way. One day the boss is very happy, the next day he throws it at me and says it's terrible. In other words, I feel like I have no control over it.

And that's a very important aspect of how stressed I really feel. How does the experience of losing control affect future behavior? In a later experiment, the two groups will only be able to stop the unpleasant noise by finding the safe green squares in a field as quickly as possible. Do the two groups behave differently when searching for these squares? The result is that people who already felt they were in control in the previous experiment find these safe green places much faster than the group who experienced a loss of control. This experience that I have never been able to do this before also leads me to passivity and something like the elephant story: that I simply surrender, I submit to my fate.

And so I move further and further into this cycle of helplessness and passivity. According to Wessa, when we can free ourselves from this cycle, we can make changes in our lives. But what about life situations that you can't change? I may not be able to change the actual situation that triggered the stress, but I can always change something about how I react to stress. And I think it's very important that I learn for myself that although I don't always have control over the stressor, I do have some control over my reaction to it. Wessa puts the results of his research into practice at a school in Bad Dürckheim, Germany.

He is conducting a WHO-sponsored resilience training program in a seventh-grade class. Mental stress has increased significantly in recent years, particularly among children and young adults, largely due to the Covid pandemic. It is important to me that we give them strategies at an early stage that they can use themselves to protect their mental health. Work with students on how they can free themselves from a stressful spiral of negative thoughts and feelings. First, he asks the question: What happens when we are convinced we will fail at something? Your thoughts influence your actions. If you think you can't do it, chances are you really can't do it.

Then you'd say yeah, I can't do it anyway, so I won't even try. If negative thoughts lead to bad outcomes, shouldn't the opposite also be possible? That is precisely where we can do something for our health and resilience, that is, by taking a closer look at the things we have already achieved. We often pay much more attention to the things we haven't accomplished. And we remember the things that went wrong. And somehow we forget even the little things that have gone right. To do this, he does a simple exercise by asking students to remember what they did particularly well over the weekend, even if it's something small.

Last weekend was my grandmother's birthday and I made her a cake. I'm actually not that good at baking, but I managed to do it. She liked it a lot and that made me happy. Great, and it made your grandmother happy too. I helped my dad tidy up my room over the weekend. I never do that! I always throw everything in the drawers and that's it. But this time I actually did it with some structure and it was much, much better than just dumping everything somewhere. Remembering successes, trying not to judge experiences too negatively, and staying active despite adversity are key factors for resilience.

We have learnt a lot. Now I understand the term and know more about the topic of resilience. We also learned how we feel and that we can influence what happens inside us: our fears and how we can fight them. And yes, it was a great experience. We can equip ourselves mentally from an early age to better cope with later crises, which we will all experience in one way or another. But to what extent does being resilient also mean social pressure to optimize and be prepared to perform at all times? Resilience simply means finding ways to deal with stress.

And that doesn't mean you should try to endure as much stress as possible, but maybe you should admit to yourself: Well, if I have ten dates a day, that's too much. I'd rather try to go on fewer dates or I'll plan time to relax to compensate. And that increases general resilience to be able to better cope with the various factors of life. In Toulon, resilience researcher Boris Cyrulnik also believes that government and society have a duty to create an environment that allows us to stay mentally healthy. Resilience is genetic, biological, emotional and political. Because it is politicians who are going to make the decisions to keep pregnant women safe and create jobs in early childhood care.

These are all political decisions. In 2019, the French government launched a national program based on Cyrulnik's work. I am very happy to welcome you here and launch this mission for children's first thousand days. And I would like to thank Boris Cyrulnik, since this work is based on his reflections. The first 1000 days is the name of the government program. Under Cyrulnik's direction, projects are funded across the country in maternity hospitals and kindergartens to better protect children and future parents. The Ballmann and Wilke families receive the Bavarian Innovation Award at the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich for their volunteer work at the “faustlos” foundation.

It's a great honor. And with the cash prize of 10,000 euros they will be able to finance new projects. Working for the foundation means a lot to Céline Wilke. It's my way of dealing with the days when I don't feel well, when my husband doesn't feel well. That we have something to work on. Their lives can never go back to the way they were. The scars will remain forever. But families move on as best they can. A loss like that puts a lot of things into perspective. I don't think you get angry so quickly over small things anymore.

You enjoy the moment more because you know how quickly moments can change, how situations can change. You go through life with much more awareness. Resilience is not a state of being, but rather an ongoing process. Our psyche is a complex mix of environmental influences, genes and our own ability to act. Resilience is not about happiness, it is about living with all the gray areas of life, surviving crises without losing mental health. To have a realistic understanding. Everyone told me it's not even worth trying. I tried anyway, but that doesn't mean everything went the way I wanted.

Like everyone else, my resilience is never perfect, it is never 100%. I have achieved a lot despite everything, but I have not solved everything, and I think that can be said about you, about me, about everyone.