Okay, it’s true I did not poll a community of rats to find out what they think, however, some really smart people did research with them that is relevant to a question I run across a lot as a reader–“Is it better to know, or not know, that something bad is going to occur.”

I was listening to a Radio Lab podcast on stress, which you can find here. They get to interviewing (@45:33min) a man by the name of Dr. Robert Sapolsky who was doing tests with rats to look at their stress and to see what helped them with it. The set up goes that two rats get zapped and one of them is given a coping mechanism. The coping mechanism that caught my attention was that being given a warning helped reduce the stress of the experience. In other words, if you know something stressful is coming you will handle it better. Now as people we don’t usually get a light that flashes to warn us that something unpleasant is going to happen, but we can get a Tarot reading. In this reading we can be given a warning that can help us handle the stress better – even if we can’t change the outcome. In fact, because we are not rats in a cage, a reading can even help us alleviate or avoid a negative situation all together.

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