Hey how are you keeping?
Letās get right to itāhereās the contents for todayās email. (Feel free to skip to anyone youāre interested in):
š¦ Iām minimising coronavirus news
š¢ Upcoming essay on conspiracies
š§Ŗ Breaking Bad and dealing with hardshipā¦
š§ A way of thinking about anxiety disorders
š¦ Iām minimising coronavirus news
You can hardly look anywhere these days without running into viral news (dreadful pun intended!)āitās COVID-19 everywhere you go! So I decided to limit how much of my attention is going to itāmore so because I already have to deal with it at work everyday!
Basically, about once a week, I try to bring myself up to speed on whatās new with the virus.
And thatās it.
The rest of the week I donāt bother with learning anything about it. I am on a bunch of groups where thatās all that gets discussed a lot (including the WhatsApp group for my medical school classāwe doctors love to talk about this stuff!) The implications for me? Iām way less active on WhatsApp! Once I see thatās the topic of discussion, I swipe to āMark as Read,ā and move along. In the meantime Iāve been engaging in the far more satisfying activity of watching TV shows (more on which in a minute) and a lot more writing. Speaking of whichā¦
š¢ Upcoming essay on conspiracies
Weāve always had conspiracies but never have we had so many so fast. All the ingredients are in place after all: a situation of great interest to everyone, that poses potential danger to anyone, with inadequate available info and reports of possible suspicious behaviour from several quarters. Itās practically begging to be theorised about, and theorised we have!
So Iāve been working on an essay about conspiracies which Iād hoped to publish today, but itās not ready yetāhopefully next week! But Iām really excited about it and canāt wait to share it with you! Iāll be looking at why even the best of us are so prone to both buying and sharing conspiracy theories, why thatās valuable, and how to manage the tension between being less prone while remaining open. Keep your eyes peeled.
š§Ŗ Breaking Bad and dealing with hardshipā¦
(I know. Iām a decade late. Donāt judge.)
Itās one of the most highly rated shows ever, and Iāve been wanting to get into it for a while, so I have over the past few weeks. And itās not been disappointing. Itās been particularly great because Iām deeply interested in how easily we overlook or downplay the dark side of human nature, and especially in our own lives. (Like how weāre quick to see others as bad people, but when we do bad things, it was with good reason or provocationāaka fundamental attribution error.) Anyway, Breaking Bad is five seasons of that.
And one of my best quotes comes in season 2, where protagonist Walter White is reflecting on the remission of his cancer (not really a spoilerāhe gets the diagnosis in episode 1 but of course, you couldnāt have 5 seasons without his having gone into remission, right?). At any rate, he says:
Well, itās kind of funny. When I got my diagnosis, cancer, I said to myself, you know: āWhy me?ā And then, the other day, when I got the good news, I said the same thing.
That really struck me. We question when bad things happen to us, but good things, not so much. As if we somehow assume good things should happen. But why should they? Thereās literally no system of thought, from science to religion to philosophy, to back up such an expectation. (I dare you to name one.) The idea that we deserve things really makes no sense outside of human-to-human interactions, and itās debatable even there.
As one philosopher put it:
āŖāIn the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the otherā¦āāEcclesiastes 7:14 ESV)
Iāve been thinking about it a lot, especially in these times, and reminding myself that with every āWhy me?ā I can also rightly ask, āWhy not me?āāfor good as well as bad, in gratitude as well as in lament.
š§ A way of thinking about anxiety disorders
Anxiety is increasing a lot in these times, and weāve been seeing lots of patients who are presenting with anxiety about having already contracted COVID-19. I was chatting with one recently who didnāt recognise their experience as actually being panic attacks, so I thought Iād share how I explained the problem.
Think of anxiety as sort of your bodyās alarm system. When it works right, it should alert you to danger, and help you prepare to deal with it. Anxiety disorders are those alarms going off, but for, like, birds and small animals, not actual intrudersāor for no reason at all.
Basically your bodyās ability to distinguish between information you actually need and filter out information thatās not useful is gone, and so youāre finding yourself taking every bit of data as hugely important (which is why itās so stressful, because life is constantly throwing mad data at you).
Once you see this a few things become clear.
You see why trying to solve the problem by obtaining more information doesnāt workāif you canāt filter the signal from the noise, then more information only makes it all worse. Itās like dealing with oversensitive alarms by testing them more often.
You also see why the therapy for it is so difficult: since the problem is your filters not working properly, the therapy is about learning to retrain them. Which begins with learning to distrust them.
Basically, overcoming anxiety disorders begins with learning to ignore the alarms, and to start again to figure out when they deserve your attention. So yeah, itās hard. But thereās no other way. The challenge is people often want the alarms to just kind of, I dunno, reset, but that doesnāt just happen.
Step one to dealing with anxiety disorders begins with distrusting your own ability to interpret signals.
And that is very, very hard for us humans. But itās possible.
Peace,
Doc Ayomide
2 |
Create your profile
Only paying subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to log in.