Defective Yeti On Teenagers, Terrorism And Behaviour Detection Guidelines

A hat-tip to the always enjoyable Defective Yeti for his irreverent coverage of the role of behaviour detection officers at airports. I work with a lot of teenagers who refuse to come out from their hooded tops or baseball caps. They speak in monosyllables and spend a lot of time in shoe-gazey mode, particularly when accompanied by parents. Courtesy of the photographs, I now know that they spend a lot of time torn between disgust and anger.

Matthew astutely observes that the average teenager would never be allowed to fly anywhere if these rules were applied rigorously.

in addition to having to forgo your iPod and hair gel you will now be required to check in your teen prior to boarding

The photograph and quotation from Matthew's post is distributed under Creative Commons.

FEAR, And The Fear Of Terrorism

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.