Shiloh
Editor, Senior Moderator
Source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article4920184.ece
October 11, 2008
How to survive the global panic
We're infected by mass anxiety: here's how to keep your head on straight when others around you are losing theirs
John Naish
The fastest-spreading contagion known to humankind swept through Britain this week, causing raised blood pressure, spiralling stress-hormone levels and rash economic actions galore. The contagion is an outbreak of mass panicked anxiety. Bank failures, credit crises and rollercoaster stock prices have piled on top of our worries about food and fuel costs, but heart-gripping, mind-spinning fear - the sort that has sent record numbers seeking psycho-therapy - is something we can catch from each other like a virus. For centuries, such epidemics have caused panic and economic plunges. But studies show that the fear can be forestalled.
Worry is only natural in the circum-stances, but our primitive fear-driven flock instincts are to blame for spreading social anxiety and severe unease. Philip Corr, a professor of psychology at the school of human sciences at Swansea University, cautions that doubt and instability are among the worst causes: ?Uncertainty is more difficult to deal with than bad news. If you lose your house, your job, it's tragic, but then you have a concrete problem to address,? he says. ?If you are faced with higher interest rates, large fuel bills, rising food costs and the worry of what is going to happen in the next few months - that can have a catastrophic effect on people.?
We swap doses of worry with each other
The sense of fear grows because we swap ever larger doses of worry with each other. The human brain spots fearful expressions faster than any other emotion, says a Vanderbilt University study, in which a dozen participants studied photos of scared, neutral and happy faces. The volunteers consciously recognised fearful expressions a half-second quicker than other images. Unconsciously we react even faster: the amygdala - the brain's anxiety centre - spots signs of fear in less than two-hundredths of a second. Historically, we've had to stay alert to others' anxiety in case it meant that something nasty was lurking in the grass, says Randolph Blake, a co-author of the Vanderbilt study.
We can even smell each other's fear, reports a Rutgers University study in Perceptual And Motor Skills, which asked men to wear absorbent pads while watching clips from a funny and a scary movie. The pads were put in jars and presented along with neutral control pads. More than three-quarters of the women and more than half the men were able consciously to identify the smell of fearful men.
Thus worry ripples through a crowd in a manner called ?emotional contagion?. At this point, things can rapidly spiral. As Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, explains, the presence of anxiety heightens the intensity of people's emotional interactions so that those who feel threatened and anxious are especially prone to catching other people's anxiety and then passing on more of it. From here on, shrill words of reassurance from rattled politicians may prove as self-defeating as Corporal Jones's cries of, ?Don't panic! Don't panic!?
We've seen such intense emotions driving the stock market this past week, where one day the FTSE 100 plunges, the next it strongly recovers. Such behaviour accords to ?the law of patterned herding?, says Robert Prechter, the director of the Socionomics Institute, in Georgia, and a pioneer in the emerging field known as neuroeconomics.
He reports in The Journal of Behavioral Finance that when faced with volatile markets, even the most adventurous investors head for safety in numbers, thanks to their unconscious herding impulses. When a stock's price rises, demand tends to increase, but when prices are low few people want to buy, he says, but this is the opposite of what happens in the grocer's shop. It also contradicts the economic theory of what is supposed to happen in stock markets, where the best way to make money is to buy low and sell high.
Bernard Baruch, the legendary Wall Street stock trader of the early 1900s, understood this phenomenon well. ?All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology,? he declared. In the Great Depression, Baruch advised President Roosevelt to use the theory of mental contagion to change the course of panicked public feeling. Roosevelt conducted relaxed fireside radio talks to allay public anxiety, which included his famous statement: ?You have nothing to fear but fear itself.?
The human herd's habit of sparking collective investment frenzies was first spotted more than 150 years ago by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in his seminal work on crowd psychology,Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He wrote it ?to show how easily the masses have been led astray?. Mackay's many examples of our sheep-flocking side include the outbreak of tulipomania in 1624. The human herd mentality even gets us marching in step. Shortly after the Millennium Bridge, the futuristic City of London span, opened in 2000, it had to be shut because it had begun wobbling violently. The designers had not expected pedestrian bridge-users to synchronise their footsteps subconsciously.
More of us are seeking psychological help
The economic wobble has sent thousands heading for psychological help, with organisations such as the Priory Hospitals group reporting rises in patient numbers of up to 40 per cent. Phillip Hodson, a spokesman for the British Association for Counselling and Psycho-therapy, says: ?Our members who work in corporate employee-assistance programmes report unprecedented numbers of workers contacting them with worries about money,? he says. But it's not all negative, he adds. ?Some people are using the credit crunch as an opportunity to review their lives; they're asking whether they want to change direction and go for quality of life.?
How will today's thirtysomethings cope with unheralded anxiety after years of good economic news? The sociologist Steven Stack cautions that charmed youths often grow up lacking a crucial psychological resource - resilience. In a report in the Journal of Social Psychology, he found that short men are far less likely to commit suicide than tall guys. This, Stack says, is because shorties develop psychological defence skills to handle bullies. By contrast, he says, people who enjoyed adversity-free upbringings can get derailed by setbacks later on because they have never learnt to deal with them.
Hodson, however, is more optimistic about the younger generation. ?The initial shock of a new economic landscape might well be great for them, but they tend to be a devious bunch. They have used their collective might and knowledge of downloads to get free records out of the music industry and they have proved creative in ensuring that their lives are comfortable,? he says. ?I think their skills will make them surprisingly resilient.? And, who knows, perhaps you can't catch panic from surfing social networking sites.
How to stay calm
Studies show how constant anxiety causes constantly raised levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, and that prolonged exposure to cortisol raises the risk of developing depression. One key to fending off anxiety is to develop resilience skills, such as the following:
Get physical If you feel yourself physically contracting a bad case of social panic, mind-body methods can help you to cope. Techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, yoga or exercise can be used to calm the body, so the fight-or-flight response will switch off sooner.
Stay curious In times of stress, it can feel instinctively right to hunker down and resist risky changes. But Al Siebert, the director of the Resiliency Centre, in Oregon, says the opposite works best. ?Highly resilient people continually learn new ways of doing things and frequently change how they interact with their circumstances. The least resilient people drift into a calcified condition where they try to avoid change and new experiences.?
Keep a gratitude journal It may sound sappy, but keeping a record of the things in your day that bring joy and gratitude can prove an effective way to break the worried brain's habit of fixating only on stress- inducing things that have gone wrong or which might go awry. To see an expert gratitude-spotter at work, visit www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com
Build your community A host of studies has found that people who are involved with church or other religious communities have higher levels of resilience against life's knocks. That could be evidence of a beneficent deity at work, but researchers tend to agree that what often helps people to cope is their strong sense of community, spiritual or otherwise.
John Naish has won the IVCA Clarion Award for ethical book of the year for Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton, ?16.99)
October 11, 2008
How to survive the global panic
We're infected by mass anxiety: here's how to keep your head on straight when others around you are losing theirs
John Naish
The fastest-spreading contagion known to humankind swept through Britain this week, causing raised blood pressure, spiralling stress-hormone levels and rash economic actions galore. The contagion is an outbreak of mass panicked anxiety. Bank failures, credit crises and rollercoaster stock prices have piled on top of our worries about food and fuel costs, but heart-gripping, mind-spinning fear - the sort that has sent record numbers seeking psycho-therapy - is something we can catch from each other like a virus. For centuries, such epidemics have caused panic and economic plunges. But studies show that the fear can be forestalled.
Worry is only natural in the circum-stances, but our primitive fear-driven flock instincts are to blame for spreading social anxiety and severe unease. Philip Corr, a professor of psychology at the school of human sciences at Swansea University, cautions that doubt and instability are among the worst causes: ?Uncertainty is more difficult to deal with than bad news. If you lose your house, your job, it's tragic, but then you have a concrete problem to address,? he says. ?If you are faced with higher interest rates, large fuel bills, rising food costs and the worry of what is going to happen in the next few months - that can have a catastrophic effect on people.?
We swap doses of worry with each other
The sense of fear grows because we swap ever larger doses of worry with each other. The human brain spots fearful expressions faster than any other emotion, says a Vanderbilt University study, in which a dozen participants studied photos of scared, neutral and happy faces. The volunteers consciously recognised fearful expressions a half-second quicker than other images. Unconsciously we react even faster: the amygdala - the brain's anxiety centre - spots signs of fear in less than two-hundredths of a second. Historically, we've had to stay alert to others' anxiety in case it meant that something nasty was lurking in the grass, says Randolph Blake, a co-author of the Vanderbilt study.
We can even smell each other's fear, reports a Rutgers University study in Perceptual And Motor Skills, which asked men to wear absorbent pads while watching clips from a funny and a scary movie. The pads were put in jars and presented along with neutral control pads. More than three-quarters of the women and more than half the men were able consciously to identify the smell of fearful men.
Thus worry ripples through a crowd in a manner called ?emotional contagion?. At this point, things can rapidly spiral. As Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, explains, the presence of anxiety heightens the intensity of people's emotional interactions so that those who feel threatened and anxious are especially prone to catching other people's anxiety and then passing on more of it. From here on, shrill words of reassurance from rattled politicians may prove as self-defeating as Corporal Jones's cries of, ?Don't panic! Don't panic!?
We've seen such intense emotions driving the stock market this past week, where one day the FTSE 100 plunges, the next it strongly recovers. Such behaviour accords to ?the law of patterned herding?, says Robert Prechter, the director of the Socionomics Institute, in Georgia, and a pioneer in the emerging field known as neuroeconomics.
He reports in The Journal of Behavioral Finance that when faced with volatile markets, even the most adventurous investors head for safety in numbers, thanks to their unconscious herding impulses. When a stock's price rises, demand tends to increase, but when prices are low few people want to buy, he says, but this is the opposite of what happens in the grocer's shop. It also contradicts the economic theory of what is supposed to happen in stock markets, where the best way to make money is to buy low and sell high.
Bernard Baruch, the legendary Wall Street stock trader of the early 1900s, understood this phenomenon well. ?All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology,? he declared. In the Great Depression, Baruch advised President Roosevelt to use the theory of mental contagion to change the course of panicked public feeling. Roosevelt conducted relaxed fireside radio talks to allay public anxiety, which included his famous statement: ?You have nothing to fear but fear itself.?
The human herd's habit of sparking collective investment frenzies was first spotted more than 150 years ago by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in his seminal work on crowd psychology,Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He wrote it ?to show how easily the masses have been led astray?. Mackay's many examples of our sheep-flocking side include the outbreak of tulipomania in 1624. The human herd mentality even gets us marching in step. Shortly after the Millennium Bridge, the futuristic City of London span, opened in 2000, it had to be shut because it had begun wobbling violently. The designers had not expected pedestrian bridge-users to synchronise their footsteps subconsciously.
More of us are seeking psychological help
The economic wobble has sent thousands heading for psychological help, with organisations such as the Priory Hospitals group reporting rises in patient numbers of up to 40 per cent. Phillip Hodson, a spokesman for the British Association for Counselling and Psycho-therapy, says: ?Our members who work in corporate employee-assistance programmes report unprecedented numbers of workers contacting them with worries about money,? he says. But it's not all negative, he adds. ?Some people are using the credit crunch as an opportunity to review their lives; they're asking whether they want to change direction and go for quality of life.?
How will today's thirtysomethings cope with unheralded anxiety after years of good economic news? The sociologist Steven Stack cautions that charmed youths often grow up lacking a crucial psychological resource - resilience. In a report in the Journal of Social Psychology, he found that short men are far less likely to commit suicide than tall guys. This, Stack says, is because shorties develop psychological defence skills to handle bullies. By contrast, he says, people who enjoyed adversity-free upbringings can get derailed by setbacks later on because they have never learnt to deal with them.
Hodson, however, is more optimistic about the younger generation. ?The initial shock of a new economic landscape might well be great for them, but they tend to be a devious bunch. They have used their collective might and knowledge of downloads to get free records out of the music industry and they have proved creative in ensuring that their lives are comfortable,? he says. ?I think their skills will make them surprisingly resilient.? And, who knows, perhaps you can't catch panic from surfing social networking sites.
How to stay calm
Studies show how constant anxiety causes constantly raised levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, and that prolonged exposure to cortisol raises the risk of developing depression. One key to fending off anxiety is to develop resilience skills, such as the following:
Get physical If you feel yourself physically contracting a bad case of social panic, mind-body methods can help you to cope. Techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, yoga or exercise can be used to calm the body, so the fight-or-flight response will switch off sooner.
Stay curious In times of stress, it can feel instinctively right to hunker down and resist risky changes. But Al Siebert, the director of the Resiliency Centre, in Oregon, says the opposite works best. ?Highly resilient people continually learn new ways of doing things and frequently change how they interact with their circumstances. The least resilient people drift into a calcified condition where they try to avoid change and new experiences.?
Keep a gratitude journal It may sound sappy, but keeping a record of the things in your day that bring joy and gratitude can prove an effective way to break the worried brain's habit of fixating only on stress- inducing things that have gone wrong or which might go awry. To see an expert gratitude-spotter at work, visit www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com
Build your community A host of studies has found that people who are involved with church or other religious communities have higher levels of resilience against life's knocks. That could be evidence of a beneficent deity at work, but researchers tend to agree that what often helps people to cope is their strong sense of community, spiritual or otherwise.
John Naish has won the IVCA Clarion Award for ethical book of the year for Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton, ?16.99)