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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 14 days

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By: Julian Adorney, Mark Johnson and Geoff Laughton

Published: Mar 23, 2024

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard tells the story of a jet fighter pilot who was practicing high-speed maneuvers. As Willard puts it, “She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down.”

What if we were flying upside down? But let’s go further. What if an entire generation was flying upside down–flying through fog and danger, unable to see either ground or sky, and the well-intended adjustments pushed on them by “experts” were just bringing them closer to catastrophe?

That’s the lens through which we interpret Abigail Shrier’s New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy.

There’s no denying that the youngest generation is in crisis. As the Addiction Center notes, members of Generation Z “run a higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem than previous age groups.” A 2015 report found that 23.6 percent of 12th graders use illicit drugs. The American Psychological Association reports that just 45 percent of Gen Zers report that their mental health is “very good” or “excellent,” compared with 51 percent of Gen Xers and 70 percent of Boomers. A concerning 42 percent of Gen Zers have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, and an astounding 60 percent take medication to manage their mental health.

It gets worse. The rate of self-harm for girls age 10-14 increased over 300 percent from 2001 to 2019 (before the pandemic). According to a 2021 CDC survey, 1 in 3 teenage girls have seriously considered killing themselves.

Well-meaning therapists, teachers, and school counselors are trying to help the next generation to rise up. But what if everyone involved is upside down? What if, like the fighter pilot that Willard describes, what they think is rising up is actually bringing them into deeper danger? Shrier makes a strong case that that’s exactly what’s happening.

Lots of educators encourage kids to spend more time checking in with their feelings. In the 2021-2022 school year, 76 percent of principals said that their school had adopted a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum. Common SEL practices include: asking students how they’re feeling at the start of each day, teaching that students should be more aware of how they’re feeling in any given moment, and encouraging students to use activities like writing and art to express their feelings.

The problem is that all of this obsession with feelings can actually make students feel worse. As Yulia Chentsova Dutton, head of the the Culture and Emotions Lab at Georgetown University, says, “Emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them.” “Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions,” she explains, “can increase emotional distress. And I’m worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil into the fire.” Or to put it another way: when we ask kids over and over again how they’re feeling, we’re subtly and accidentally encouraging them to feel bad.

The reason is that, as psychiatry professor Michael Linden explains, most of us don’t feel happy all the time. Dealing with life involves ignoring a certain amount of moment-by-moment discomfort: I’m tired, my feet hurt, I’m sore from sitting down all day, I’m a little worried about my mom. When we encourage kids to check in many times per day on how they’re feeling, we’re tacitly encouraging them to bring to the surface–and then dwell on–all the things going on in their minds that are not “happiness.” That’s why, as Linden puts it, “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that.”

But it gets worse.

Obsessing over our emotions can actually prevent us from doing the things that might make us feel better. Anyone who’s spent too long wallowing after a bad break-up knows this; at a certain point, you have to shelve your unpleasant emotions so that you can get on with your life. Psychologists describe two mental states that we can occupy at any given time: “action orientation” and “state orientation.” “State orientation” is where you focus primarily on yourself (e.g., how you feel about doing the task at hand, whether your wrist hurts or you’re starting to get sick, etc.). “Action orientation” is where you primarily focus on the task at hand. As a study published by Cambridge University Press notes, only the latter is actually conducive to pursuing and accomplishing goals. “State orientation is a personality that has difficulty in taking action toward goal fulfillment,” the authors warn. By encouraging young people to focus so much on their feelings, we might be hurting their ability to adopt the mindset necessary to accomplish goals in life. If so, that would make them even more unhappy.

But the dangers posed by well-meaning “experts” telling students to fly in the wrong direction–towards the ground instead of towards the sky–go well beyond encouraging unhappiness and depression. Rates of suicide and self-harm for young people are skyrocketing. But in their attempts to cope with the spike, well-meaning administrators might be making the problem worse. Here are questions from the 2021 Florida High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered to students age 14 and up:

During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing your usual activities? During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide? During the past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide? During the past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide? If you attempted suicide during the past 12 months, did any attempt result in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse?

A survey authored by the CDC asked students “During the past year, did you do something to purposely hurt yourself without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning yourself on purpose?” Another survey offered this question to Delaware middle schoolers: “Sometimes people feel so depressed about the future that they may consider attempting suicide or killing themselves. Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?”

Administrators may be asking these questions with the best of intentions, but the end result is to normalize suicide in young peoples’ minds. If you were 12 years old and taking a survey like this along with all of your classmates, you might reasonably conclude that suicide, or at least suicidal ideation and/or self harm, were pretty common at your school. Otherwise, why would everyone your age have to take such an exhaustive assessment about it?

One reason this is so dangerous is that, as Shrier writes, “The virality of suicide and self-harm among adolescents is extremely well-established.” Following the release of Netflix’s TV show 13 Reasons Why, which some said valorized a fictional girl who killed herself, several studies found a spike in teen suicide rates. The CDC agrees. In a post warning about the dangers of “suicide contagion,” the CDC said that journalists should avoid things like:

“Engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide in the news.”

“Reporting ‘how-to’ descriptions of suicide.”

“Presenting suicide as a tool for accomplishing certain ends” (i.e., as a “means of coping with personal problems”).

But this is most of what the surveys described above are doing. They are deluging students with repetitive and excessive discussion of suicide. They are describing different methods for killing yourself (e.g., cutting or burning yourself). One survey, which asks students who have considered killing themselves why they did so (possible answers include “demands of schoolwork,” “problems with peers or friends,” and “being bullied”) is a textbook example of presenting suicide as a “means of coping with personal problems.”

The authors of these surveys seem to at least recognize the risk that students are flying upside down, and that these surveys might take them closer to the ground. One survey concludes by telling students, “If any survey questions or your responses have caused you to feel uncomfortable or concerned and you would like to talk to someone about your feelings, talk to your school’s counselor, to a teacher, or to another adult you trust.” The survey also includes links to different hotlines.

Communicating to kids that suicide is normal and a possible solution to their problems might be the worst way that some schools are failing kids, but it’s also far from the only way.

Schools are increasingly lax about standards, willing to let almost anyone get away with almost anything. Some accommodations do make sense: for example, it makes sense to give a kid with dyslexia more time to complete the verbal component of the SAT. But Shrier argues that standards are falling for perfectly healthy students too. “School counselors—students’ in-school ‘advocates,’” Shrier writes, now “lobby teachers to excuse lateness or absence, forgive missed classwork, allow a student to take walks around the school in the middle of class, ratchet grades upward, reduce or eliminate homework requirements, offer oral exams in place of written ones, and provide preferential seating to students who lack even an official diagnosis.”

Shrier documents stories of students who have been allowed to turn in work late because they were having a “tough Mental Health Day” or because “I was having a rough day and dealing with my gender identity.”

The problem with this is that one of the primary things that children and teenagers do is try to figure out the boundaries of the world. When a child throws a tantrum, it’s not malicious–they’re trying to understand this new world and figure out what they can get away with. As Jordan Peterson writes in Twelve Rules for Life, young children are “like blind people, searching for a wall.” “They have to push forward, and test,” he writes, “to see where the actual boundaries lie.” What’s true of young children is also true of older children and even (to a lesser extent) adults. All of us are trying to figure out the rules of life–that is, what we can get away with. If well-meaning teachers and counselors tell students that one of the rules is that you don’t have to do your homework on time if you say that you’re having a rough day, then we shouldn’t be surprised when more young people seem to manifest rough days.

But this is the opposite of what students need–especially the truly disadvantaged students who so many of these efforts seem to be aimed at helping. In his memoir Troubled, clinical psychologist Rob Henderson writes that, “People think that if a young guy comes from a disorderly or deprived environment, he should be held to low standards.” But, he warns, “this is misguided. He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.”

So kids are depressed, anxious, and poorly behaved. Educators are trying to help them by encouraging them to tap in more to their feelings, by asking them more questions about suicide, and by trying to accommodate their difficulties even more. But all of this is backwards. Educators are encouraging students to do what they think will take them higher–away from the ground and back to the safety of the sky. But both kids and educators are upside down. And every adjustment that the “experts” are telling kids to make just brings them closer to the ground–and a catastrophic collision.

Now’s a good time to emphasize that this isn’t all schools, all teachers, or all administrators–not by a long shot. There are heroic educators working every day to help students to rein in their problems, stop taking advantage of accommodations that they don’t need, and develop the emotional resilience to deal with the problems of adolescence. But the problems documented above do represent a trend. And while it’s not every school, the trend is too big to ignore.

What will happen if this trend continues–if an entire generation keeps going “up” until they crash into the ground? Most severe and most damaging is the harm to the generation itself. Shrier tells the story of Nora, a 16-year-old girl who helps put a human face on all of the brutal statistics described in the introduction to this piece. Nora describes her friends as going through a litany of serious mental health problems: “anxiety,” “depression”; “self-harm” (as Shrier notes, “lots of self-harm”) including “Scratching, cutting, anorexia,” “Trichotillomania” (pulling your hair out by the roots); and more. As Shrier writes, “Dissociative identity disorder, gender dysphoria, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette’s belong on her list of once-rare disorders that are, among this rising generation, suddenly not so rare at all.”

But the dangers can also ripple out beyond just one generation. The full danger may be nothing less than an imperiling of our democracy.

As Shrier notes, many kids in school are almost constantly monitored. Her own kids have “recess monitors” at their school–“teachers who involve themselves in every disagreement at playtime and warn kids whenever the monkey bars might be slick with rain.” On the bus home, they have “bus monitors.” Better that kids know they’re being observed by an adult at all times than that one kid push another to give him his lunch money.

One of the most pervasive forms of monitoring is what are called “shadows”—ed techs or paraeducators whose job is to cling closely to one particular student so that they don’t have any issues. The original intention certainly made sense. If a child had autism, a shadow could help the kid to integrate into the main classroom rather than being sent to Special Ed. But, as Shrier notes, scope creep has been substantial. “Today,” she writes, “public schools assign shadows to follow kids with problems ranging from mild learning disabilities to violent tendencies.” Nor is the problem restricted to public schools: “private schools advise affluent parents to hire shadows to trail neurotypical kids for almost any reason.” Shadows monitor and guide almost every interaction with their chosen student, from when to raise her hand to how long to hug a fellow student.

As Peter Gray, professor of psychology at Boston College and an expert on child development, puts it, “Kids today are always under the situation of an observer. At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy.”

But when kids spend their entire waking lives being monitored by an adult, they start to think that kind of monitoring is normal. Worse, they start to think that they need it. If a child gets constant guidance from an adult, what are the odds that she’s going to cultivate her own independence? If she expects authoritarian adults to monitor and run every aspect of her life already, what is she going to think of a liberal democracy that more-or-less leaves people free to handle their own affairs?

No wonder just 27 percent of Americans age 18-25 strongly agree with the statement that “Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government” (compared to 48 percent of Americans as a whole).

So what’s the solution? If our kids are upside down and getting lower to the ground, then the only thing that makes sense is to help them reverse course. Is there something that’s the opposite of always asking them about their feelings, telling them that life is too much for them or their peers to cope with, and constantly telling them that they’re too fragile to do their homework if they’re having a rough day? Yes. That something is called antifragility.

Antifragility is the idea that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Greg Lukianoff note in The Coddling of the American Mind, kids are naturally antifragile. That doesn’t just mean that they’re tough. It means that “they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.” Not letting a kid hand in homework late doesn’t just teach them to do their homework on time; it also teaches them that they can deal with a 0 in class and not die. They can pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and even earn an A in the class overall if they bust a sweat for the rest of the semester. Telling a kid who’s having a “tough mental health day” that you’re sorry to hear it but they still need to take today’s test doesn’t just teach the kid that low-level excuses don’t fly; it also teaches them that a hard day isn’t enough to stop them. It teaches them that they’re stronger than whatever negative emotions they’re currently experiencing.

It’s time to remind kids that they are strong–before it’s too late.

All quotes not otherwise attributed come from Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy.

About the Authors

Julian Adorney is a Contributing Writer to FAIR’s Substack and the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving and protecting Western civilization. You can find him on X at @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneer Performance Partners and a facilitator and coach at The Undaunted Man. He has more than 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies. He blogs at The Undaunted Man’s Substack.

Geoff Laughton is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the founder of The Undaunted Man. He has spent the last twenty-six years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential.

#Julian Adorney #Mark Johnson #Geoff Laughton #Abigail Shrier #Bad Therapy #human psychology #psychology #emotions #emotional distress #feelings #antifragility #coddling #emotional fragility #religion is a mental illness

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 26 days

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By: Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson

Published: Apr 3, 2024

Something is wrong in modern life. We're experiencing levels of safety and security that our ancestors would have found unfathomable. According to Statista, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell by almost half from 1990 to 2022. That's not an anomaly; as Harvard University professor of psychology Steven Pinker notes in Better Angels of Our Nature, crime of all kinds has been falling for centuries. We experience far less rape, murder, and robbery than did our ancestors. We're also much less likely to die in war. While the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragic, it's also a far cry from the continent-spanning conflicts of centuries past, like the Thirty Years War or the Napoleonic Wars.

Similarly, we're experiencing a level of material prosperity that our ancestors could only dream of. According to economic historians at the Maddison Project Database, from around 1 CE to 1800 CE, the annual real (or inflation-adjusted) income per person was under $2,000. By 2016, that number in the United States was a comparatively staggering $53,015. Life expectancy for most of human history was around 30 years; in the United States, life expectancy in 2022 was 76.1 years. We even work fewer hours than people even a century ago.

And yet, in spite of our historical levels of privilege, many of us are miserable. Over 40 million people in the United States suffer from an anxiety disorder. 47 million Americans suffer from depression. As Dr. Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, puts it when describing modern life, "Life just seems to be squeezing everyone dry."

What's going on? Why are we struggling so much to cope with the demands of modern life, even though those demands are lighter than anything our ancestors had to contend with? Our ancestors slew dragons on a daily basis; why are we struggling to beat back chihuahuas?

The truth is that humans evolved specific powerful ways to cope with the world. Our ancestors used these to great effect to thrive in conditions of intense danger and poverty. Over the past several decades, most of our society has accidentally turned away from these ways.

In order to cope with negative experiences, we need two things: time and mental space. We need idle time, in which our hands might be occupied but our minds are not, in order to let our minds simply process whatever has happened to us. Here's how Dr. Kanojia describes it: "[emotional] processing is actually…a subconscious or relatively automatic activity that…happens over long periods of time." This is a very powerful process and can help folks to work through brutal experiences.

In ages past, humans had lots of idle time. We fished, sharpened spears, tended fires, repaired nets, and performed other physical activities that kept our hands busy while leaving our minds free to process the events of the day. By contrast, in the modern world, we have little to no idle time. Every spare minute is filled with distractions: we listen to podcasts, read books, text friends, and check social media ten thousand times per day. As a result, we never actually process our emotions and work through them. Dr. Kanojia describes this phenomenon using an example of a bad date:

"Let's say I have a bad date. What I end up doing immediately after the bad date…is distract myself and then what happens is—as I distract myself—I don't process any of those emotions. They kind of just go dormant…as this goes on again and again and again what we tend to see is that our life is filled with negative impacts that we don't allow ourselves time to actually process."

As humans, we're designed to be very resilient; but a primary mechanism of that resilience is giving ourselves idle time in which to process our emotions. In the absence of that idle time, we start to feel very fragile. As Dr. Kanojia puts it, we experience "death by a thousand cuts." He says he works with a lot of people who "as they try to move through life, they're just getting more and more shriveled and kind of patched up and defunct." Or, as he sums it up, "We're not able to recover from things the way that we used to."

It's not just lack of idle time that's handicapping our ability to cope with life's challenges. Sebastian Junger is a war correspondent who spent time on the front lines of the Afghanistan conflict. In a piece for Vanity Fair titled "How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield," he points out that chronic PTSD was rare in pre-modern societies. "Ethnographic studies on hunter-gatherer societies rarely turn up evidence of chronic PTSD among their warriors," he writes, "and oral histories of Native American warfare consistently fail to mention psychological trauma." Even fifty years ago, reports of PTSD were relatively low among soldiers. But modern soldiers experience high rates of PTSD; as of 2015, he notes, fully half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans applied for disability. As Junger puts it: "They return from wars that are safer than those their fathers and grandfathers fought, and yet far greater numbers of them wind up alienated and depressed."

What's driving this increase in PTSD among modern soldiers? Junger chalks it up to changes in modern society. We evolved as hunter-gatherers; we lived in small communal tribes where we worked, hunted, and slept surrounded by our fellows. That communal experience is common for soldiers, who live in tight-knit platoons and have to rely on their brothers for their daily survival. By contrast, modern civilian society in the United States is isolationist and atomistic. Most of us are lonely; according to an Advisory by the Surgeon General, "In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness." Even those of us with spouses and close friend networks don't experience the deep web of social connection that hunter-gatherers—or many soldiers on active duty—experience.

Leaving a close-knit platoon to return to a society where a "strong support network" might mean a few friends that you see once per week can be jarring. According to anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz, "Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that."

The alienating effects of modern society can even prevent recovery after a traumatic event. Junger describes an experiment with lab rats in which a rat is traumatized by an attack by a larger rat. The smaller rat, who was frightened but not injured, generally recovered within 48 hours—unless it was kept in isolation. As Junger puts it, "The ones that are kept apart from other rats are the only ones that develop long-term traumatic symptoms." Our veterans spend years overseas in the kind of dense social web that we evolved to thrive in, and then return to a society that feels utterly isolating by contrast. No wonder so many of them experience long-term PTSD.

It's not just veterans who suffer from this alienation, of course. Many Americans experience trauma of some kind. We evolved to heal from that trauma; but when our mechanism for healing (social connection) is hijacked, we shouldn't be surprised when people start to seem more fragile.

We see the same story in conflict resolution. We have a lot of conflict in our society. According to a 2021 study by the American Enterprise Institute,15 percent of American adults have ended a relationship over politics. 40-50 percent of first marriages end in divorce (and the numbers are even higher for second marriages). And a quick glance at Twitter will reveal that, when it comes to conflict, we're bursting at the seams.

Partly, this is because we don't process our emotions, so they keep bubbling out of us in unpleasant ways. But part of it is that we rarely take advantage of how our bodies were designed to work through conflict.

In his book The Way Out, Columbia University professor of psychology Peter T. Coleman notes that when we have conflict with someone, we normally sit down to hash it out. But this is suboptimal; in fact, it's much more productive to physically move with the person. As Coleman reports, "physically moving in sync with others has been shown to enhance cooperation, prosocial behavior, and the ability to achieve joint goals, and it also increases our compassion and helping behavior." "One study," he said, even "showed that walking in sync with a group of people made them more willing to make personal sacrifices that benefited the group."

When you have conflict with someone, taking a walk or even going for a run with them can be a much more powerful way to get back to peace than simply sitting down with them. Our bodies evolved to move. When we ignore this and assume that our thoughts and our words are the only things that matter, we shouldn't be surprised when conflict starts to feel endemic and unfixable.

Another way to reduce conflict is to take some time away from the conflict to breathe. As psychologist Chris Ferguson explained to us in an interview, doing this can help us to calm down and not fly off the handle at small conflicts. Ferguson explains that "there are two related issues here…emotional responses usually peak immediately after a stressor, then lessen with time, and, second, emotional responses tend to impair problem-solving." "Thus," he argues, "you see people have a bad emotional response, impulsively do something stupid, only to later acknowledge how stupid it was." When we pause and take time to process, we can "evaluate if the situation is really as bad as we initially thought it was" and calibrate our response from there. Again, this is something that most of our ancestors did very easily; in a relatively slow-paced society, you have a lot of time to breathe when it comes to addressing (non-violent) conflict. But in our hyper-online age, we're far more used to experiencing a stimulus (for example, a tweet we don't like) and immediately reacting. That's a formula for conflict escalation that our ancestors rarely had to deal with.

This rejection of our biology and the rhythms for which we evolved is having damaging effects on our psyches. But even more concerning is its erosion of our civic society.

For most of American history, the United States has been characterized by the strong bonds of civic association. In his book Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the United States was unique in terms of our willingness to band together to form private organizations in order to address problems. In the 20th century, these organizations included religious groups, bowling leagues, charitable organizations, interest groups, trade unions, and more. They bound us together in a tight web of interpersonal associations that helped us feel connected to the world and to our neighbors.

The problem with human connection, though, is that it's inherently risky. If you go on a date, you might find true love…or you might get rejected. If you join a bowling league with your neighbors, you might find a much-needed sense of community…or you might feel humiliated by your low score or hurt by something that another league member said (whether or not their statement was intended to be hurtful). Our ancestors were able to shrug off this risk and deal with the rough-and-tumble of human interaction because they used the powerful strategies that our biology and evolution gave us. But because we've turned away from these strategies, human interaction has started to feel substantially more dangerous. When we stop processing our emotions, we stop recovering from interactions that might rub us the wrong way. We move away from seeing these annoyances as a minor irritant and the small price of human connection and start to experience death by a thousand cuts.

This trend is most pronounced among younger generations, who are more prone to living online and more cut off from in-person connection and physical movement. Is it any wonder that 73% of Gen Z’ers (age 18-22) report "sometimes or always feeling alone?" Or that 63% percent of men aged 18 to 29 are single, according to Pew Research? More and more young people are deciding that IRL social relationships are too risky for them because they've never been taught the coping mechanisms that our bodies and evolution gave us.

The rejection of these coping mechanisms also poses dangers for our republic. Our republic requires that people come together to debate and discuss ideas. As governmental systems go, this is pretty rough-and-tumble. It requires that we engage with people in good faith who might disagree with us or even believe that decisions we have made should be illegal. When we take time to process our emotions, this engagement is highly doable. But when we neglect to do so, these conversations start to feel riskier. We have trouble coping with opposing views and are more likely to stew and ruminate on the perceived awfulness of those views to our psychological detriment. This is made worse by the fact that more people are carrying around a lot of bottled-up anger and frustration, looking to vent it on someone else. We're all getting more angry at the same time that we're getting more sensitive, which is not a recipe for productive conversations. In the absence of these productive conversations, we may find that people lose their appetite for democracy.

This isn't hypothetical. Again, the problems that we've identified in this piece are most acute among younger Americans. And young Americans are indeed losing faith in democracy. Only 59 percent of Americans aged 18-25 agree that "Democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government" (compared to 74 percent of Americans as a whole).

So what can we do to ameliorate the malaise of modern society and get back to the emotional peace and well-being that our ancestors experienced? One key is to get back into the rhythms from which we evolved. Cultivate idle time. Develop a closer circle of friends, and spend more time in person with other human beings rather than trying to connect through a keyboard (as far as our evolved brains are concerned, the latter is mostly pseudo-connection anyway). If you're in conflict with someone else, get together in person and physically move through it. Once we start working with our biology instead of against it, we might be surprised at how much better we, and our society as a whole, start to feel.

Another key is to stop letting ourselves be artificially divided into in-groups and out-groups. Illiberal attitudes towards race and gender can certainly contribute to us not interacting as often or as deeply with people who have superficial differences (for example, college students are warned to avoid an ever-increasing list of microaggressions when interacting with someone of a different race or gender, some of which are just basic get-to-know-you questions). But we can choose to not fall into these divides to instead recognize another core component of our biology, which is that we are all one human species and that our differences are dwarfed by our similarities. If we do that, we might all feel a little bit less lonely.

#Julian Adorney #Mark Johnson #psychology #human psychology #conflict resolution #social media #coping mechanism #evolution #evolutionary psychology #mental health #human evolution #religion is a mental illness

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