I saw this TED Talk A while ago, and I'll provide a link to it in the online course. But basically, the premise of the TED talk was that a lot of what we know about addiction is wrong. And that the antidote to addiction, his connection with other people, and kind of the 32nd summary is that there used to be all of these experiments with lab rats back in the day, where they would place two bottles of water when water had cocaine in it, and the other water had nothing. And they placed a rat alone in the cage, and inevitably, the rat would drink too much of the cocaine, water and overdose and die. And so the conclusion was, look, cocaine is extremely addictive. The rats always drink too much of it and die.
And so it's got to be something about the the addictiveness of the cocaine. But another scientist saw this experiments and was like, Hey, wait a minute. The rats always alone in the cage. He's probably miserable. Why don't we try another experiment? In the second experiment, they created what they called rats Park and rat Park was this park.
It was a cage, but it was like a park where they had all of these things to play with. They had a bunch of other rats that they could hang out with and have sex with, and basically have a community with so in rat Park, they were no longer isolated. They actually had a community of other rats that they could have a good time with and and hang out with. And in those experiments, none of the rats got addicted to cocaine, none of them would use it compulsively. And they would generally just prefer the regular water. So what this really kind of sunk into my mind is that community is extremely important in just overall wellness.
And a situation in my life personally, is when I was at my old job In fact, the the job where I began to experience panic attacks, I didn't have community early on. And in fact, I thought the job was going to be temporary. So I kind of just isolated myself. An additional aspect of that was that I was working with people that were much older than me. And so it was really difficult for me to relate and to build connections with. And eventually, as I was at the job for a while, I began to make community outside of work and and build relationships there.
And when I finally decided to leave the job, I went to a website called meetup calm and meetup.com is a website for people who are interested in similar activities. So it could be mountain biking, or outdoor activities, or even meditation. So I was really kind of desperate for community because I had just broken up with my ex girlfriend, I had just left a job that I'd been at for six years. So I just instinctively really knew that I needed to be with people who I had something in common with something healthy just just so that I could heal. And I discovered a surfing group. And through that surfing group, I made some really great friends who have been friends who are still friends up until this day, and I've experienced some just wonderful experiences with and we've traveled to different places in the world together and had some really amazing experiences together.
So I just wanted to emphasize community as being a really important aspect of overall wellness community. There are studies that have shown community to be the single most important factor in preventing addiction to drugs and alcohol. While other studies have shown community to be the most important factor in living long, happy lives. Finding community can be a bit difficult as a working professional if your job is not particularly conducive to it. In my last job I worked with people primarily 20 to 30 years older than I was, so it was quite difficult to build community with individuals I could relate to. I eventually found community outside of work first in a salsa dancing group.
And then in a surfing group, the experiences I had with my community have been some of the most fun and rewarding I've ever experienced in my entire life.