Anxiety: Two (a)
The World is a Fckd Place
And “Coming up after the break, learn about this dangerous thing you do every morning that could kill you!”
Many of us don’t go near cable news of any kind and we think that the hundreds of ads and news clips we see online and in social media spaces are all things that don’t register with us unless we choose to turn our attention to it. But unfortunately it all registers. Because fear and our “check again” loop of scanning environments for potential threats is such a robust system in the brain, our capitalist system leverages it all for profit for the elite.
I wrote this original piece over a decade ago and it’s now reworked to reflect the fact that there are not just one, but two distinct streams of persuasion acting on us that a) influence our consumption, and b) influence our production. In both cases, fear is leveraged to focus our attention, and it happens often very much against our will.
The persuasion that influences consumption is of course called marketing. The persuasion that influences our production is called propaganda. Over a decade ago I did not address propaganda in this piece, but it has become more relevant for us all in the past five years. This article now comes in two sections (a) and (b).
Consumption, Production and Being
It’s unfortunate we use the word “consume” for eating food. The etymology of “consume” has three distinct meanings in Latin: to eat food, to use up, and to waste. In fact, we transform food; we don’t just use it up, destroy it or waste it. Food is transformed into our very life force. It’s important to make this point upfront for those with eating disorders, as eating food is not the consumption being referenced in this article at all.
What became patently obvious to the titans of industry across the globe in the early months of the SARS2 pandemic unfolding, was that if the masses had too much time to be, rather than produce and consume, then that was a profound risk to the suck of money from the masses up to the obscenely wealthy 1%. What resulted was both a marketing and propaganda effort that likely has not been seen since WWII.
It has been so incredibly successful that most people have completely overwritten their own recollections of their experiences of the early days when the world drastically slowed the production/consumption treadmill. While the Urgency of Normal [1] was ostensibly positioned as a working class driving force, in fact many in that class fought hard against the removal of remote learning for their children (as just one example of projection of elite needs onto working class sensibilities). It was the preferentially well-off white communities that parroted the propaganda phrases of “learning loss” and “immunity debt” in the service of getting kids back into physical school buildings. Research evidence even pre-pandemic indicates that students with health issues, or who are members of a visible minority, fare much better for scholastic outcomes when learning fully remotely and online. It could be for this reason, that many black families in the US fought to maintain remote learning for their children. [2],[3],[4]
The more propaganda and marketing you absorb, the more both your production and consumption squeeze your ability to just be. I will explain what “just being” entails further on.
Obviously a baseline requirement for production and consumption is non-negotiable for the vast majority of us precisely because we are in a capitalist system (yes, even those ostensibly living in other political systems beyond democracy). In order to cover the basics for survival (shelter, clothing, food) we all have to sell our labour for money that we then exchange for those basics. If we are disabled in any way and cannot sell our labour, then we live in usually state-enforced poverty and cannot meet our basic survival needs more often than not.
Eugenics appears to find favour when populations/birthrates decline, most specifically when it occurs in the upper economic echelons of society. It was the case between the two world wars, and has resurfaced again in all our developed nations in the past forty years. [5] Eugenics is the belief that it is possible to improve the qualities of the human population with selective breeding, which usually includes the sterilization of those in the population deemed to have undesirable traits that should not be passed on to the next generation.
This second wave of eugenics starting at the end of the 20th century also includes, as was present in the inter-world-war period in Europe and the US too, the concept that an unproductive human, as defined within the capitalist framework of selling labour, should not just be prohibited from passing on their “flawed” genetics, but also should no longer be any drain on the society at large.
I know this is taking a decidedly dark turn and it’s hardly conducive to easing anxiety (!), but it’s important to recognize that a chronic illness, be it defined as physical or mental, places a person in peril during times when eugenics is trending. Like now.
I am speaking to those with chronic illnesses. An eating disorder is a chronic illness. Even in remission, it is never cured. It is important to protect your ability to sell your labour, or be engaged in productive efforts deemed acceptable in our current uncertain times.
There is an increasing importance we should all place on our need to produce and consume (but at bare minimum levels to support our basic survival needs); to blend in as much as we are able with heavy meta-cognitive curation of what we absorb; and to inherently maximize the time we devote to “being” so that we might not lose our ethical and moral responsibilities to ourselves and our community at large.
For those on the anxiety spectrum, and that’s what drives an eating disorder, it’s not feasible to become less anxious. Perhaps in this day and age it’s not even advisable to become less anxious. Sentinels (guards or lookouts) exist in animal populations to warn the group of actual danger. So what follows are some experiments and tasks you can run to build out meta-cognition and heavily curate the marketing and propaganda messages you are exposed to, so that you might short circuit sentinel responses to dangers that are outside your control. These efforts are designed to maximize the time you give to being, which is probably one of the most health protective things you could do as someone with a chronic condition that is incurable.
Two-Day, Two-Part Experiment
Here’s a way to identify when those around you are activating your refined anxiety system and how you can avoid getting pulled into an anxiety cascade for circumstances that are outside your control and therefore a wasteful expenditure of your anxiety system.
Spend the two days with a notebook handy. Go about a usual day that involves interactions with family, friends, classmates, colleagues, what have you. Whenever you get spare moments throughout the day, jot down the topics of conversation and the people involved, as best as you can recall everything.
You can also include conversations you overhear as well if you found yourself paying attention to the dialogue.
On day one, you are going to focus on identifying only the conversations that match the criteria below:
Firstly, list the number of times that each person utters an “I should” statement. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to say the words “I” and “should”, but rather that they are expressing their sense of having to follow through on something. They may use the words “must”, “ought to” or they may say “I plan to” but the nature of what is planned is an obligation of some sort.
Secondly, list the number of times that each person speaks of their weight, shape, fat, body parts, or is speaking of someone else’s weight, shape, fat or body parts. List whether the comment is negative, neutral or positive.
Thirdly, identify how many times a body statement (weight, shape, fat or body parts) is subsequently linked to an “I should” statement.
Fourthly, identify the number of conversations you may have had throughout your day (meaning not just exchanging a passing greeting) that had absolutely no examples of a body statement linked to an “I should” statement.
Fifthly, rate your anxiety level (1 being relaxed and calm, and 5 being so agitated you may have to run from the room and you want to crawl out of your own skin) for each one of these conversations in which you were involved (or overheard).
And finally, and most importantly, rate your perceived sense of the person’s anxiety level when he or she uttered both a body statement and the “I should” statement.
On day two, you are going to focus on taking notes on all the conversations that fit the following criteria:
List how many conversations involved a topic that relayed the distress, crisis or misery of individuals not known at all to the people present. Essentially you are looking most often for people relaying shocking news stories. Examples might include: a violent crime or accident where neither the victim(s) nor perpetrators are personally known to you or to those who are part of the conversation; natural disasters and wars; and fraud, cruelty, scams and abuses of power.
List how many times, in the course of these conversations whether anyone suggests any action that could be taken by those present to rectify the wrongs that have been highlighted in the news story that was relayed. That one is usually pretty easy to complete— it is almost always a “zero” times. An example might be: “I wonder if we could start an office donation to help those people who are now homeless because of that fire in the building across town?”
Then rate your anxiety level (1 being relaxed and calm and 5 being so agitated you may have to run from the room and wanting to crawl out of your own skin) for each one of these conversations in which you were involved. And also rate the overall mood of the group at the end of the conversation (where 1 is upbeat and relaxed, 3 is neutral, and 5 is down, stressed and somewhat pessimistic).
For most of us, the results of this two-day experiment will likely not be too surprising. Generally, you will notice that both body/should statements and news of distressing situations where there is no action that can be taken, are anxiety-provoking conversations not just for you, but for everyone around you as well.
It is not that we need happy and upbeat stories to alleviate anxiety— and in fact that those can heighten anxiety as much as distressing stories— but rather we have to identify locus of control in a conscious way.
Locus of Control
The photo immediately above is a great example of external locus of control. Although, interestingly, there are likely grounding wires on both towers and that means that humans have identified that they can sometimes mitigate things that are out of their control (lightning strikes) when they understand the physics (the strike will take the least resistant path to ground).
There are two primary loci of control in life: external and internal.
If your house is swept away by a mudslide, then that event was never going to be in your locus of control. For all external locus of control events in our lives, we can sometimes be a bit prepared (house insurance) but many times there is no way to do anything except deal with the aftermath.
The North American philosophies of life have generated a preponderance of assuming everything is actually an internal locus of control. Got cancer? It’s your fault because you should have exercised more, eaten better, slept more, been nicer to your kids. Fired from your job? It’s your fault because you had too many sick days, were rude to a colleague once, never went golfing with your boss.
Of course living your life assuming everything is someone or something else’s fault is equally futile. Most life events are a mixture of things we might have done differently to generate different outcomes, and things that simply would have occurred no matter what we would have done or not done. In fact, as Robert Sapolsky highlights in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, being able to accept when things are either inside or outside your locus of control mitigates your stress response enormously.
Certainly, some things are clearly run by an internal locus of control, and this is particularly the case if you are somewhere in a middle-class socioeconomic stratum in a developed nation in the world. Where you live, what food choices you make, where you go to school, where you work, the car you drive and the clothes you wear all tend to sit within your internal locus of control. Your thoughts and feelings are largely, although not exclusively, within your internal locus of control as well. Other people’s thoughts and feelings are not!
Here is what I said on the topic in an archived forum thread:
“This process is called identifying your locus of control. Many people of faith embody that process in the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
But it does not require faith to identify what is in your locus of control and what is outside your locus of control.
Unfortunately, we often assume that our body is in our locus of control— we should be able to say what weight it will be at; how long recovery will take (actually how short it will take!); how it reacts to stress; and what pains should or should not be there.
If we can move through accepting that our minds are living within an ecosphere that, while supportive of the mind, is not actually controlled by the mind, then we can begin to understand a bit more of the mystery of the locus of control for our bodies being largely outside our conscious control.”
But what happens, thanks to modern medicine, when we can in fact treat our bodies as completely under our mind’s control? You can get a nose job, have liposuction, mutilate your stomach so that it no longer physically accommodates the energy your body needs, you can diet and workout and you can take all manner of drugs to nudge all manner of biological functions in whatever direction it is deemed they must go.
No one should pass any overall ethical judgments on these decisions, but it is wise to recognize that messing with any ecosphere, including your own body, is almost never achieved without some risk and possibly unwanted outcomes in the end.
Anxiety Management and Direction
Now we’ll put the two-day, two-part exercise together with an understanding of loci of control and voilà! your anxiety managment and direction effort will be well underway.
Body/Should Statements From Others
First and foremost, you will want to alleviate the anxiety you experience when you hear others speak of their diets, their horrible thighs, their self-admonishments for not going to the gym, their refusal of a second piece of something tasty, because these things run straight to the heart of your already ED-anxiety-heightened state.
When the topics turn towards body/should issues, then you have three choices in social circumstances (family, friends, colleagues, classmates etc.):
1 Change the subject.
2 Wander away with some excuse of needing to go do something (if indeed an excuse is even needed).
3 Challenge it.
The situations I personally used to love to challenge in workplace settings was when someone invariably had brought goodies to work or there was the obligatory group lunch involving the hemming and hawing over dessert options: I was right in there short circuiting all the “I shouldn’t” with “Well, I am most certainly not turning this down!”
You have to be in a good space to feel the wash of anxiety from the other people back at you when you challenge the status quo in this way. And there will be the once up and down when they blatantly look at your body shape. And even worse there can be the retaliatory: “Oh, well you can afford to, but me I have to be careful!” or worse still there is the retaliatory “Really? You really think that’s wise given, well…” (as they look you up and down).
In any case, if and when you are ready to take on a challenge-it moment, then channel this quote from Mae West:
It's better to be looked over, than overlooked.
No matter what choice you take, the goal is to keep their anxiety firmly in their locus of control. A yawn can be pretty contagious with many animals, but if you don’t see it, you don’t ‘catch’ it. The same is true of all these body anxieties around you.
And, if you are consciously paying attention and someone yawns, you can actually suppress yawning in response. The trick is to be conscious of the fact that anxiety is easily transferred from one locus of control to the next. If someone is worried about their diet, or exercise regime, or shape, then by noting it is their worry you can suppress the transfer of that worry to your thoughts and feelings altogether.
Taking the Shock Out of Your Life
And while we’re at it, you’ll want to lower the multi-tasking, the “check-again” and the helplessness cycles from your life as well.
If you’ve never had a chance (and you have 21 minutes and 20 seconds to spare), check out Dan Gilbert’s TEDTalk on The surprising science of happiness.
As he mentions, our pre-frontal cortex is a phenomenal futures-simulator. We can anticipate many things and determine (and feel in real-time) our emotional response to those things without actually experiencing the events in real life.
There is also, although contentious within various scientific practices, the possibility that our distributed mirror neuron network actually simulates what we see in others, within ourselves. Vilayanur Ramachandran touches on some of his research in this area in this TEDTalk, The neurons that shaped civilization (7:44), and this one as well 3 clues to understanding your brain (23:38).
In fact our mirror neuron network is often interchangeably referred to as our empathy network. Do you feel an emotional surge watching an interview on television with the woman who was attacked the night before? Most likely yes you do. The question is whether you are aware of your emotional responses to it or not. And if you are aware, do you believe that the response is positive or negative?
Whenever I suggest to highly anxious individuals that they cease watching or reading the news altogether, they push back instantly with the concept that it is important to know what is going on.
And while I don’t know if the The 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferriss really holds the key to anyone’s success but Tim Ferriss’, I cannot help but really like the guy (another TEDTalk to assess him for yourself: Smash fear, learn anything). And while his recommendations are about efficiency, I would suggest they are equally (if not more) applicable for those needing to implement an anxiety management program:
“The world doesn’t even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord.”
Paying attention to current events in today’s world means you will experience horror, helplessness, fear, anxiety and stress on a global scale compressed into your brain’s mirror neuron system. I imagine that this must be the equivalent of the non-consensual Vulcan mind meld (referencing the TV and movie series: Star Trek):
“Mind melds can also be very violating and potentially harmful under certain circumstances. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock forcefully used the technique on Valeris in order to discover information she had that could be used to prevent a war; Valeris began screaming just before Spock broke the connection”
Cut the news feeds (both pop-culture and current affairs). It’s okay to recognize that your mirror neuron system is simply not optimized to take in the experiences of almost eight billion people strewn across our planet.
As I mentioned earlier, consider the option of speaking up when people talk of world events by offering up suggestions for action. A “do something or don’t dwell on it” attitude can be helpful for all concerned. If everyone is talking about some recent tragedy, then be the one to offer to organize a way to help the victims in some way. As with speaking up during body/should conversations, there is no need to take on the burden of action, there is merely the option if it feels right for you at that time and place.
In Part (b) we will look at smartphones, moral panic, collective living and more.
Morris RD. How denialist amplification spread COVID misinformation and undermined the credibility of public health science. Journal of Public Health Policy. 2024 Mar;45(1):114-25.
Corry M. Hispanic or Latino student success in online schools. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. 2016 Apr;17(3):251-62.
Black E, Ferdig R, Thompson LA. K-12 virtual schooling, COVID-19, and student success. JAMA pediatrics. 2021 Feb 1;175(2):119-20.
https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2022/05/online-learning-can-help-minimize-racism-and-ableism-and-out-classroom
Sear R. Demography and the rise, apparent fall, and resurgence of eugenics. Population studies. 2021 Dec 15;75(sup1):201-20.
T Ferriss, The 4-hour Workweek, Crown Publishers, 2009, p.90
