FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on August 9, 2006 - 12:47.
It’s a cliche in positive psychology that FEAR is an acronym: depending on your preference it is either False Experience Appearing Real or False Experience Accepted as Real.
Happiness teacher and writer Robert Holden says that a lot of his work consists of showing people that they are already happy. When working with people it is not unusual to discover that if people look through their present circumstances, there is much for which they are grateful, and much that contributes to a sense of happiness.
Participants in my Happystance workshops can be initially reluctant to join in some of the group exercises: they frequently say that they can not visualise and have no power of imagination. Yet, in my experience, most of those people are experts at being frightened by something that hasn’t happened yet. They are afraid of something that may happen in the future: they can imagine this event of set of circumstances in full technicolour gore, and may even be capable of experiencing some of the accompanying emotions in advance.
“They need to do better than what is going on to make a dent in the fear that is affecting a million people.”- ANDY APAID, a businessman in Port-au-Prince, on the United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.
I read the above quotation some time ago in the New York Times. And I had it in mind when I met a few people this morning who all reported themselves as unhappy. After we had worked together for a while it became apparent that none of them was unhappy because of their current circumstances. The unhappiness lay in their expectation of future unhappiness, and they brought that emotion into their present, although it doesn’t belong there, and there is no guarantee that a future event will occur that will justify their present emotional state. It is well established that negative emotions have an adverse impact on people’s immune systems and can undermine their health and wellbeing. Fear of an adverse event in the future can undermine an individual’s ability to cope with it.
1 attachment | read more | add new comment | terrorism | robert holden | positive psychology | happystance | happiness | furedi | FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on July 20, 2006 - 10:22.
I've previously offered a bone-achingly long post that shares my confusion about the topic Is Unhappiness A Symptom Or A Passing Phase. A handwave summary would be that unhappiness is part of the rhythm of our lives: however, when it persists it can be part of the symptom spectrum of depression. There is professional conflict that suggests that depression is over-diagnosed, and under-diagnosed according to demographic groups (e.g., under-diagnosed in men) and that it is over-medicated or under-medicated. There is little conflict over the life-distorting impact of depresson and its implications both for personal quality of life and well-being (a personal economy) and the general economy (depression can impact people's ability to be economically active). I hope that is clear (yes, your suspicion that I'm at the state of ignorance where all I can say is "One the one hand this. On the other hand..." is absolutely true). I am choosing to bodyswerve any attempt to summarise whether depression statistics should be included in any discussion of happiness economics.
Anyhow. I've introduced more confusion into my thinking by reading the transcript of a thought-provoking debate between psychiatrist Raj Persaud and happiness economist, Lord Layard. As part of the background to the debate, we are told that although research indicates that money doesn't necessarily make us happier, "the greatest predictor of unhappiness...is still real poverty and hardship, with mental illness a close second". It is from this position that Layard argues:
...that public policy, and even how we spend our time, should be more devoted to trying to help people who are very unhappy. There’s another reason there actually, which is in the research and has not been pointed out very much. We know a lot more about what makes the difference, what causes the difference between the misery and average happiness. Knowing what causes the difference between average happiness and great happiness, we have it more in our power (as well as it being a duty) to do more about the least happy.
…Unfortunately this is not the way the government has been thinking up till now. Psychiatry and psychology have been Cinderella sections of the NHS. If you have blood pressure (I have) or a skin problem, or asthma, or diabetes, or whatever, you will almost automatically, at some point, see a specialist. But not if you have a crippling depression which is stopping you from working for a year; you’re extremely unlikely to see a specialist. Not more than 10% of people in that condition will see a specialist, and this reflects I think our obsession at the moment with ‘objective indicators’ rather than the feelings of people, which are what I believe matter most of all. So it’s encouraging that by pointing out some of these facts, there is now a move going on in the government to provide more psychological therapy, which is of course what these patients want, they just don’t want to be put on a few pills by the GP and sent off home.
Unlike the usual discussion as to whether unhappiness is a prodrome for depression in the way that high blood pressure is for heart disease, Layard is proposing a call to action that discusses misery, unhappiness and depression as if they are synonyms. Persaud commends Layard's work for promoting positive psychology as a necessary part of public policy. He disputes Layard's definition of happiness and how it is measured: he argues that we need to take personal responsibility for our own happiness.
Internality and externality are two key dimensions the psychologists feel you can divide the population over. Internals are people who take responsibility for their lives, they believe that they can have an impact on the future of their life, on their destiny. And they believe their destiny is in their hands. Externals, on the other hand, believe that their life is down to external forces beyond their control and they have very limited ability to control their future.
...externals are more prone to various problems.
Persaud speculates that a blame culture is pushing more of the population in an external direction.
And the squeezing out of personal responsibility means that people are much more external in orientation. And it has dramatic implications for happiness, because externals feel happier in the short run, because when bad things happen to them, they can always blame someone else for why it happened to them. But in the long run, because they don’t take personal responsibility for their lives, they’re not going to be successful.
Persaud suggests that the pernicious effect ascribed to television and other entertainment media (similar to the earlier discussion of television) could be mitigated by
educating people as to the dangers of the entertainment industry and then leaving it to people to make decisions for themselves.
Persaud also outlines the research that shows that we are notoriously poor at predicting what will make us happy. Accepting this, he says:
I would be worried about governments saying, well, you know, you guys are really bad at this decision-making stuff; we’re going to take over and help you with your decisions. I think people should be educated about the fact that they’re error-prone when it comes to these decisions, but hopefully with that education they’ll be moved to a place where they can make better decisions over happiness.
Entertainment and public policy are both sources of mis-information and FEAR (False Experience Appearing Real). Both Layard and Persaud discuss the corrosive impact that these can have.
Now you’ve got this extraordinary view, which is obviously completely wrong, that there are many people according to the surveys, people in their late teens or early 20s, who think they’re not going to be as rich as their parents. Now this is completely fatuous. It’s inconceivable that that should come about. And yet this is the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that’s been created.
Persaud summarises the influence of politics on our sense of well-being. Both agree that it would be better if politicans and public policy:
encouraged more that we thought about positive emotions, like happiness and wellbeing. And encouraged ourselves to orientate ourselves towards positive emotions like wellbeing, and that we voted on that rather than voting on fear.
It's an intriguing discussion. I am not convinced that we can only shed unhappiness with the aid of a psychologist or psychiatrist. Intervention-based studies by positive psychologists such as Seligman and Reivich argue that we can change how we experience our lives and the quality of our lives by learning to be happy/more resilient. However, although happiness is a legitimate individual pursuit that can be self-cultivated, it seems as if there is a role for our local and national governments. Researchers like Ed Diener say that it is easier to be happy when there is a sense of trust, safety, stability and security. He says that governments can create conditions such as recreational facilities, working hours legislation, a health infrastructure and transport infrastructure that have a profound influence on people's happiness. One thing is certain, happiness can have a profound effect on our personal and national economies and deserves more attention (e.g., the cost of providing mental health treatment for the estimated 1 in 10 british children who are in need of it).
read more | add new comment | resilience | persaud | Layard | happiness economics | happiness | FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on July 8, 2006 - 15:03.
AADT has published a funny overview of the recent findings about the level of paranoia in the UK. They quote the BBC account of the statistics that paranoia is nearly as common as anxiety and depression and comment:
Their statistics paint a picture of a nation not quite teetering on the brink of tin foil hat sales and mass hysteria, but still facing an unexpectedly large problem.
I haven't read the original paper but AADT quotes:
- Over 40% of people regularly worry that negative comments are being made about them
- 27% think that people deliberately try to irritate them
- 20% worry about being observed or followed
- 10% think that someone has it in for them
- 5% worry that there is a conspiracy to harm them
I've no idea what the comparable figures are for other countries but it would be a fascinating comparison!
A while ago, Dr. Sanity’s offered a tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations. I rather blithely suggested that we need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis. As a consumer of media reporting, I sometimes feel that a lot of it implies that I am been governed by idiots who are incapable of concealing their disdain for me by covering up their attempts to deceive me on matters great and small. Possibly not a fair characterisation, but I'm not sure that media reporting is always a fair characterisation of the issues, people and stories.
read more | add new comment | psychiatry | paranoia | mental health | FEAR | crichton
Submitted by tonyplant on July 5, 2006 - 09:14.
A video from CCHR (co-founded by the Church of Scientology) is doing the rounds: Psychiatrists Admit No Science and No Cures. The video is 5 minutes long (an automatic defence against being nuanced), one-sided, it features Thomas Szasz, it semi-ambushes a number of American Psychiatric Association conference delegates/psychiatrists on the street who can have had little idea that the material would be used in this way.
I'm taken aback by the video. No, there is no blood test for it, but if a troubled teen self-harms many times a day, I think there is a mental-health problem. However, the video seems to be anti-psychiatry (perhaps this is not surprising, given its origins). I don't understand what is being offered as a solution. It's all well and good to advise us to say, "Gee, Doc. Where's the test for that?" upon hearing a psychiatric diagnosis for a loved one, but what is that supposed to do? Leave us refusing interventions (pharmacological or not) that might help the putative loved one? Depression does have a well-established mortality rate, doesn't it? Or is there some serious and well-researched disagreement on this point?
As for the sneering cui bono question which Szasz answers with, "The people who make the diagnosis", what? Seriously, it's the psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers etc. who benefit? Nice to see that Big Pharma is implicitly left out of the rogue's gallery for once, although I am sure that they would be in the list of secondary beneficiaries or rogues. I know very little about what the Church of Scientology recommends for diagnoses in which they don't believe, but media reports tend to contain the words vitamins and saunas. I have no idea whether they charge for these interventions, I equally have no idea whether or not they are effective although I have my doubts.
1 attachment | read more | add new comment | psychiatry | mental health | FEAR | crichton
Submitted by tonyplant on June 20, 2006 - 15:10.
Following on from yesterday's exploration of Putting Your Life Out To Tender I'm wondering about what bids we might attract for different areas of our life. If you were auctioning off areas of your life like happiness, family relationships, career, health etc. how would you describe them, and what value of bid would they be likely to attract? Do you eat a healthy diet? If you had valuable traits like high resilience, how much would that be worth? Of course, having read Shinga's piece on genetic determinism, how much is your gene profile worth? And is your environment adding to your nett worth or causing a major economic deficit?
Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project
add new comment | resilience | happiness economics | happiness | food | FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on June 3, 2006 - 08:19.
I've just learned a new word from Charles Morris: freakoutonomics. In the New York Times (normally behind a paywall but (Economist's View has helpfully reproduced Freakoutonomics), Morris describes the sort of uneasiness and lack of confidence that Ben Friedman wrote about in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.
Friedman argues that economic growth is essential to moral, social, political and cultural progress. He writes that the financial and social anxieties created by living in a stagnant economy lead people to look for explanations and answers in intolerance and fear. Furedi expands a form of this argument to argue for its role in the widespread internalisation of conspiracy theories: "[t]oday, acts of misfortune are frequently associated with intentional malevolent behavior".
Friedman outlines the comparisons that underlie the influence of income on well-being. For the first, we contrast our present and past circumstances: if we are better off financially that we used to be, and we can buy more with that money, then we feel better off. For the second, we use our present circumstances as a yardstick to compare ourselves to our notional peer group: if we are more prosperous then we feel better; if we are worse off, then we feel worse.
1 attachment | read more | add new comment | Morris | happiness economics | happiness | friedman | FEAR | economic growth
Submitted by tonyplant on April 12, 2006 - 13:38.
I've previously offered a bone-achingly long post that shares my confusion about the topic Is Unhappiness A Symptom Or A Passing Phase. A handwave summary would be that unhappiness is part of the rhythm of our lives: however, when it persists it can be part of the symptom spectrum of depression. There is professional conflict that suggests that depression is over-diagnosed, and under-diagnosed according to demographic groups (e.g., under-diagnosed in men) and that it is over-medicated or under-medicated. There is little conflict over the life-distorting impact of depresson and its implications both for personal quality of life and well-being (a personal economy) and the general economy (depression can impact people's ability to be economically active). I hope that is clear (yes, your suspicion that I'm at the state of ignorance where all I can say is "One the one hand this. On the other hand..." is absolutely true). I am choosing to bodyswerve any attempt to summarise whether depression statistics should be included in any discussion of happiness economics.
Anyhow. I've introduced more confusion into my thinking by reading the transcript of a thought-provoking debate between psychiatrist Raj Persaud and happiness economist, Lord Layard. As part of the background to the debate, we are told that although research indicates that money doesn't necessarily make us happier, "the greatest predictor of unhappiness...is still real poverty and hardship, with mental illness a close second". It is from this position that Layard argues:
...that public policy, and even how we spend our time, should be more devoted to trying to help people who are very unhappy. There’s another reason there actually, which is in the research and has not been pointed out very much. We know a lot more about what makes the difference, what causes the difference between the misery and average happiness. Knowing what causes the difference between average happiness and great happiness, we have it more in our power (as well as it being a duty) to do more about the least happy.
…Unfortunately this is not the way the government has been thinking up till now. Psychiatry and psychology have been Cinderella sections of the NHS. If you have blood pressure (I have) or a skin problem, or asthma, or diabetes, or whatever, you will almost automatically, at some point, see a specialist. But not if you have a crippling depression which is stopping you from working for a year; you’re extremely unlikely to see a specialist. Not more than 10% of people in that condition will see a specialist, and this reflects I think our obsession at the moment with ‘objective indicators’ rather than the feelings of people, which are what I believe matter most of all. So it’s encouraging that by pointing out some of these facts, there is now a move going on in the government to provide more psychological therapy, which is of course what these patients want, they just don’t want to be put on a few pills by the GP and sent off home.
Unlike the usual discussion as to whether unhappiness is a prodrome for depression in the way that high blood pressure is for heart disease, Layard is proposing a call to action that discusses misery, unhappiness and depression as if they are synonyms. Persaud commends Layard's work for promoting positive psychology as a necessary part of public policy. He disputes Layard's definition of happiness and how it is measured: he argues that we need to take personal responsibility for our own happiness.
Internality and externality are two key dimensions the psychologists feel you can divide the population over. Internals are people who take responsibility for their lives, they believe that they can have an impact on the future of their life, on their destiny. And they believe their destiny is in their hands. Externals, on the other hand, believe that their life is down to external forces beyond their control and they have very limited ability to control their future.
...externals are more prone to various problems.
Persaud speculates that a blame culture is pushing more of the population in an external direction.
And the squeezing out of personal responsibility means that people are much more external in orientation. And it has dramatic implications for happiness, because externals feel happier in the short run, because when bad things happen to them, they can always blame someone else for why it happened to them. But in the long run, because they don’t take personal responsibility for their lives, they’re not going to be successful.
Persaud suggests that the pernicious effect ascribed to television and other entertainment media (similar to the earlier discussion of television) could be mitigated by
educating people as to the dangers of the entertainment industry and then leaving it to people to make decisions for themselves.
Persaud also outlines the research that shows that we are notoriously poor at predicting what will make us happy. Accepting this, he says:
I would be worried about governments saying, well, you know, you guys are really bad at this decision-making stuff; we’re going to take over and help you with your decisions. I think people should be educated about the fact that they’re error-prone when it comes to these decisions, but hopefully with that education they’ll be moved to a place where they can make better decisions over happiness.
Entertainment and public policy are both sources of mis-information and FEAR (False Experience Appearing Real). Both Layard and Persaud discuss the corrosive impact that these can have.
Now you’ve got this extraordinary view, which is obviously completely wrong, that there are many people according to the surveys, people in their late teens or early 20s, who think they’re not going to be as rich as their parents. Now this is completely fatuous. It’s inconceivable that that should come about. And yet this is the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that’s been created.
Persaud summarises the influence of politics on our sense of well-being. Both agree that it would be better if politicans and public policy:
encouraged more that we thought about positive emotions, like happiness and wellbeing. And encouraged ourselves to orientate ourselves towards positive emotions like wellbeing, and that we voted on that rather than voting on fear.
It's an intriguing discussion. I am not convinced that we can only shed unhappiness with the aid of a psychologist or psychiatrist. We can change how we experience our lives and the quality of our lives by learning to be happy. However, although happiness is a legitimate individual pursuit that can be self-cultivated, it seems as if there is a role for our local and national governments. Researchers like Ed Diener say that it is easier to be happy when there is a sense of trust, safety, stability and security. He says that governments can create conditions such as recreational facilities, working hours legislation, a health infrastructure and transport infrastructure that have a profound influence on people's happiness.
read more | add new comment | resilience | persaud | Layard | happiness economics | happiness | FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on February 20, 2006 - 12:58.
I’ve been advised to look at Paul Stiles Is the American Dream Killing You?. It’s a passionately written exploration of the author’s belief that the market/corporate interests are shredding our quality of life and human values.
Although there looks as if there is a lot with which I would disagree, Stiles does make some arguments that match my own recent thoughts about the role of FEAR in undermining people’s sense of well-being. Stiles discusses stress in terms that sound very like FEAR:
the word stress, as applied to people, comes form the word stress as applied to metals. The result is physical, mental and spiritual breakdown. Stress is thus the critical missing link between the market economy and human health.
According to psychologists, stress is caused by ‘any circumstances that threaten or are perceived to threaten one’s well-being and thereby tax one’s coping abilities. The threat may be to one’s immediate physical safety, long-range security, self-esteem, reputation, or peace of mind.’ Such stress stems directly from all the market pressures we have just described. In effect, it is our response to the Market’s efforts to make the economy more productive. And to some extent, that response is natural and healthy. It is only the hypermarket that pushes us over the edge.(pg 35)
The book is an impassioned outcry against the shredding affect of market manipulation on life and society. Stiles claims that road rage, urban sprawl, latch-key children, obesity, depression and even waning sex drives are the collateral damage of being enslaved to the demands of the market/corporate interests. It doesn’t seem as if Stiles is arguing for conspiracy theories that are aimed at destroying quality of life: he comments that the impacts he deplores are collateral damage. However, the absence of malice probably doesn’t do much to improve the quality of life experienced by those who sustain most of the collateral damage.
read more | 1 comment | stress | learned helplessness | happystance | FEAR
Submitted by tonyplant on February 3, 2006 - 13:40.
Back in July, 2003 the British Medical Journal published Sars and Decompression Sickness: the butterfly effect?. The account was written by Dr. Colin Wilson of Oban and is one of the most interesting accounts of the chaos theory or butterfly effect that I've ever come across.
Very succinctly and elegantly, Dr. Wilson argued that SARS had led to an increase in decompression sickness in scallop divers around the West Coast of Scotland.
A man sneezes in a crowd in China. SARS becomes a health problem. The people of Japan stop going out socially. Japanese restaurants have a downturn in their trade with a reduction in the demand for the delicacy razor-shell fish. Razor-shell fish divers in the West Coast of Scotland no longer have a market so start diving for scallops. Scallop diving is much deeper. Divers get decompression sickness (DCS).
With the end result being that Dr. Wilson and his colleagues were dealing with more cases of DCS than usual.
I was reminded of this when working with the children and carers in a recent workshop. The children spoke across a wide range of topics, from their best friends and what they might have for dinner through to alarming snippets of information that they had picked up from news programmes, and the concerns of some of them that they were too fat or not good-looking. These were children between 2-4 years old, some of whom had obviously seen trailers for the radical make-over programmes that are on television: some of which seem to be on during the day. Some of the adults and children were talking about both Bird Flu gloal warming and what the impact of that might be. Adults were also talking about their own concerns and apprehensions about the future.
read more | add new comment | happiness | FEAR | chaos theory
Submitted by tonyplant on January 24, 2006 - 12:42.
It’s a cliche in positive psychology that FEAR is an acronym: depending on your preference it is either False Experience Appearing Real or False Experience Accepted as Real.
Happiness teacher and writer Robert Holden says that a lot of his work consists of showing people that they are already happy. When working with people it is not unusual to discover that if people look through their present circumstances, there is much for which they are grateful, and much that contributes to a sense of happiness.
Participants in my Happystance workshops can be initially reluctant to join in some of the group exercises: they frequently say that they can not visualise and have no power of imagination. Yet, in my experience, most of those people are experts at being frightened by something that hasn’t happened yet. They are afraid of something that may happen in the future: they can imagine this event of set of circumstances in full technicolour gore, and may even be capable of experiencing some of the accompanying emotions in advance.
“They need to do better than what is going on to make a dent in the fear that is affecting a million people.”- ANDY APAID, a businessman in Port-au-Prince, on the United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.
I read the above quotation in today’s New York Times. And I had it in mind when I met a few people this morning who all reported themselves as unhappy. After we had worked together for a while it became apparent that none of them was unhappy because of their current circumstances. The unhappiness lay in their expectation of future unhappiness, and they brought that emotion into their present, although it doesn’t belong there, and there is no guarantee that a future event will occur that will justify their present emotional state. It is well established that negative emotions have an adverse impact on people’s immune systems and can undermine their health and wellbeing. Fear of an adverse event in the future can undermine an individual’s ability to cope with it.
read more | 1 comment | robert holden | positive psychology | happystance | happiness | FEAR
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