Tylenol Fights Headaches…and Existential Angst?

"Existential angst", sometimes called dread, anxiety, or anguish, is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility." - Wikipedia

Tylenol Fights Headaches…and Existential Angst?

Everyone knows you can pop a Tylenol to ease a headache or reduce a fever. But that’s not all. A new study suggests that you can also take Tylenol to ease the psychological angst of watching weird, twisted David Lynch films, or to generally ward off existential dread of death and nothingness.

In what is perhaps one of the oddest studies in recent memory, researchers in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia hypothesized that overwhelming feelings of pointlessness and physical pain may be located in the same part of the brain, LiveScience explains. 

So they decided to test the effects of acetaminophen, Tylenol’s main ingredient, on easing the anxiety brought on by pondering the meaning of life. 

First, the researchers enrolled 120 students to take either 1,000 mg of Tylenol or a placebo. Then, they divided the students into two random groups and asked them to perform one of the following strange tasks:

One group of participants was instructed to write two paragraphs about what would happen to their body after they die and how they would feel about it. The others were asked to write about dental pain, which would be unpleasant, but likely wouldn’t invoke any existential anxieties. All of the students then had to read a hypothetical arrest report about a prostitute and set the amount for bail on a scale of $0 to $900.

In this type of setup, researchers typically expect people to set higher bonds after faced with existential thoughts, suddenly feeling a need to assert their values.

As anticipated, those who took the sugar pill and were forced to think about their own death tended to set bail over $500.

The placebo group who only wrote about dental pain, on the other hand, set the prostitute’s bond at $300 – the same amount that people who took Tylenol and then thought about their earthly body’s putrid decay settled upon.

 The researchers think the Tylenol’s acetaminophen may have numbed their existential pain and made them more lenient towards the imprisoned prostitute, LiveScience writes.

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