The following, snitched from the excellent delanceyplace.com postings, is
of direct concern to FW people. The dysfunctional state educational system
in pretty well all advanced countries, the adult protectionism of the most
interesting/highest-paid jobs, the ineptitude of governments in trying to
control their economic systems, the growing number of the young unemployed
and, below, the growing fear in our culture is what this mailing list was
set up to try and discuss, not trivialities.
Keith
<<<<
In today's excerpt - fear and anxiety. The average high schooler today has
the same
level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s:
"When you think about it, it's one of the great ironies of our time: we now
inhabit
a modernized, industrialized, high-tech world that presents us with fewer
and fewer
legitimate threats to our survival, yet we appear to find more and more
things to
be anxious about with each passing year. Unlike our pelt-wearing
prehistoric ancestors,
our survival is almost never jeopardized in daily life. When was the last
time you
felt in danger of being attacked by a lion, for example, or of starving to
death?
Between our sustenance-- packed superstores, our state-of-the-art hospitals,
our quadruplecrash-tested cars, our historically low crime rates, and our
squadrons
of consumer-protection watchdogs, Americans are safer and more secure today
than
at any other point in human history.
"But just try telling that to our brains, because they seem to believe that
precisely
the opposite is true. At the turn of the millennium, as the nation stood
atop an
unprecedented summit of peace and prosperity, anxiety surged past
depression as
the most prominent mental health issue in the United States. America now
ranks
as the most anxious nation on the planet, with more than 18 percent of
adults suffering
from a full-blown anxiety disorder in any given year, according to the
National
Institute of Mental Health. (On the other hand, in Mexico -- a place where
one assumes
there's plenty to fret about -- only 6.6 percent of adults have ever met
the criteria
for significant anxiety issues.) Stress related ailments cost the United
States
an estimated $300 billion per year in medical bills and lost productivity,
and our
usage of sedative drugs has shot off the charts: between 1997 and 2004,
Americans
more than doubled their yearly spending on anti-anxiety medications like
Xanax and
Valium, from $900 million to $2.1 billion. And as the psychologist and
anxiety specialist
Robert Leahy has pointed out, the seeds of modern worry get planted early.
'The
average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average
psychiatric
patient in the early 1950s,' he writes. Security and modernity haven't
brought us
calm; they've somehow put us out of touch with how to handle our fears.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this. After all, fear is truly our most
essential
emotion, a finely tuned protective gift from Mother Nature. Think of fear
as the
body's onboard security system: when it detects a threat - say, a snarling,
hungry
tiger - it instantly sends the body into a state of high alert, and before
we even
comprehend what's going on, we've already leapt to the safety of a
fortified
Range Rover. In this context, fear is our best friend; it makes all of the
major
decisions for us, keeps the personage as freed from tiger claws as
possible, and
then dissipates once the threat has subsided. ...
"What makes a person capable of keeping cool and doing their duty in
terrifying
situations like [these]? ...
"Fortunately - and not a moment too soon - a flood of cutting-edge research
from
psychologists, neuroscientists, and scholars from all disciplines is now
coming
together to show us what fear and stress really are, how they work in our
brains,
and why so much of what we thought we knew about dealing with them was dead
wrong.
Picking a painstaking trail through the labyrinth of the brain, a
neuroscientist
from the bayou traces our mind's fear center to two tiny clusters of
neurons, uncovering
the subconscious roots of fear. Using a simple thought experiment, a
Harvard psychologist
discerns why our efforts to control our minds backfire, and why a directive
like
'just relax' can actually make you more anxious. Employing one minor
verbal suggestion,
a group of Stanford researchers find they can make young test takers'
scores plummet
in a spiral of worry - or hoist them right back up. Across the nation,
intrepid
scientists are discovering why athletes choke under pressure, how the human
mind
transforms in an emergency, why unflappable experts make good decisions
under stress,
and how fear can warp our ability to think."
Author: Taylor Clark
Title: Nerve
Publisher: Little, Brown
Date: Copyright 2011 by Taylor Clark
Pages: 10-12, 15
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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