Conspiracies, Breaking Bad and anxiety disorders
Hey how are you keeping?
Letâs get right to itâhereâs the contents for todayâs email. (Feel free to skip to anyone youâre interested in):
đŠ Iâm minimising coronavirus news
đą Upcoming essay on conspiracies
đ§Ș Breaking Bad and dealing with hardshipâŠ
đ§ A way of thinking about anxiety disorders
đŠ Iâm minimising coronavirus news
You can hardly look anywhere these days without running into viral news (dreadful pun intended!)âitâs COVID-19 everywhere you go! So I decided to limit how much of my attention is going to itâmore 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 whatâs new with the virus.
And thatâs it.
The rest of the week I donât bother with learning anything about it. I am on a bunch of groups where thatâs all that gets discussed a lot (including the WhatsApp group for my medical school classâwe doctors love to talk about this stuff!) The implications for me? Iâm way less active on WhatsApp! Once I see thatâs the topic of discussion, I swipe to âMark as Read,â and move along. In the meantime Iâve 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 whichâŠ
đą Upcoming essay on conspiracies
Weâve 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. Itâs practically begging to be theorised about, and theorised we have!
So Iâve been working on an essay about conspiracies which Iâd hoped to publish today, but itâs not ready yetâhopefully next week! But Iâm really excited about it and canât wait to share it with you! Iâll be looking at why even the best of us are so prone to both buying and sharing conspiracy theories, why thatâs valuable, and how to manage the tension between being less prone while remaining open. Keep your eyes peeled.
đ§Ș Breaking Bad and dealing with hardshipâŠ
(I know. Iâm a decade late. Donât judge.)
Itâs one of the most highly rated shows ever, and Iâve been wanting to get into it for a while, so I have over the past few weeks. And itâs not been disappointing. Itâs been particularly great because Iâm deeply interested in how easily we overlook or downplay the dark side of human nature, and especially in our own lives. (Like how weâre quick to see others as bad people, but when we do bad things, it was with good reason or provocationâaka 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 spoilerâhe gets the diagnosis in episode 1 but of course, you couldnât have 5 seasons without his having gone into remission, right?). At any rate, he says:
Well, itâs kind of funny. When I got my diagnosis, cancer, I said to myself, you know: âWhy me?â 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? Thereâs 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 itâs debatable even there.
As one philosopher put it:
âȘâIn the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the otherâŠââEcclesiastes 7:14 ESV)
Iâve been thinking about it a lot, especially in these times, and reminding myself that with every âWhy me?â I can also rightly ask, âWhy not me?ââfor good as well as bad, in gratitude as well as in lament.
đ§ A way of thinking about anxiety disorders
Anxiety is increasing a lot in these times, and weâve been seeing lots of patients who are presenting with anxiety about having already contracted COVID-19. I was chatting with one recently who didnât recognise their experience as actually being panic attacks, so I thought Iâd share how I explained the problem.
Think of anxiety as sort of your bodyâs 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 intrudersâor for no reason at all.
Basically your bodyâs ability to distinguish between information you actually need and filter out information thatâs not useful is gone, and so youâre finding yourself taking every bit of data as hugely important (which is why itâs 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 doesnât workâif you canât filter the signal from the noise, then more information only makes it all worse. Itâs 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, itâs hard. But thereâs no other way. The challenge is people often want the alarms to just kind of, I dunno, reset, but that doesnât 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 itâs possible.
Peace,
Doc Ayomide