George Lipov
Identifying The Self
Counseling With Anxiety
A Brief History of the Cold, And So, Can You Guess What's Ahead?
There's a lot to unpack in the new book, It's Not Armageddon.
Posted Apr 29, 2021
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Reviewed by Lybi Ma
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THE BASICS
What Is Anxiety?
Find a therapist to overcome anxiety
Source: Image by McCufftmodels from Pixabay
This is a guest post by Craig Wright, Structural Designer and Chief Program Officer at High Fidelity.
May 21, 2020 is the longest non-solicitous time of the year. It is also the day the Internet ascends into the stratosphere, heralding a new kind of social interaction that can burst your bubble of loneliness and uncertainty. Solicitous social interaction—coined as GChat or WeChat—has been around since the late 1800s, honing techniques for personal connection. In the 1990s, its relative merits became a talking point of consensus.
It is resurfacing as a social media darling this year, thanks to a group of early adopters who recc'd its tricks. You may have heard of it, or not.
If you are interested, go on, find your community of like-minded people where you can get started.
I spoke with Lauren Di Domenica, design director at BIG Design, about how to plan a visit to Tucson, the state of Arizona, during the 2020 pandemic. Over five years ago, we interviewed Lauren about how the pandemic was affecting design. What started with a traffic jam on the I-15E freeway in Indianapolis, deteriorated into a raging inferno during the mid-November build. How the heck is that possible? Lauren tells us, "The answer is in the psychology of mental illness. It is the ability to redirect someone else’s attention from the self to the other."
High-functioning individuals or those with autistic traits are especially susceptible to the changes that social media can facilitate. The problem is that they become engrossed by their social media feeds, never fully experiencing the interaction, and then begin to lose themselves in a social media vortex.
This occurs because individuals with high-functioning are good at distracting themselves by turning their notifications to quick hits and reading from there. This makes it difficult to effectively engage in a social media conversation and keeps people fromlecting them or interrupting them.
Unless someone is keeping a habit of deliberately moving their notifications to avoid distracted or unflattering information, their attention is naturally drawn to whatever is associated with that mental event. When someone’s Facebook feed is flooded with images of Thanksgiving and happy Thanksgiving, for example, attention will be naturally drawn to that image. If someone’s Instagram is inundated with pictures of them enjoying a margarita, however, attention will be drawn to that image as well.
As I explain in my recent book, The Anxiety, Depression, & Anger Toolbox for Teens, the distraction hypothesis has been validated by other researchers. One concluded, “that the purpose of social media is to prevent and punish bad behavior. When people find themselves unable to stop their negative emotions, they are able to enter a state of immersive denial.”
There is an unsettling trend in our society of becoming more educated about mental health and awareness. Previously, this would have been difficult to accomplish by working at an office that required you to take classes on your craft. However, as educational initiatives have been scattered across the country, many schools have made it easier to obtain these classes. The situation for college students is quite different. Many college students are unaccustomed to taking classes in the first place. In order to avoid the stigma of inclusion, many colleges have adopted panic-relief classes in the fall and are jacked up on caffeine. These classes involve students spending 90 minutes ruminating about the anxiety they are experiencing and engaging in activities to relieve the anxiety (e.g., coloring, sleeping, etc.).
These classes take advantage of different components of the pandemic. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted college students in a positive way. In order to capitalize on the negative, many college students in the US have taken to wearing masks and are self-medicating with smaller amounts of alcohol or medicine.