A free market where nothing is free

 

It should come as no real surprise to know that 25% of American adults suffer from diagnosable psychological disorder each year. Here in Spain every day there are more sufferers of bigorexia, exercise addiction, orthorexia, an unhealthy obsession for healthy eating, people addicted to video games and those addicted to cosmetic surgery etc....

 We live in a society in which every day we become more emotionally exiled from one another. Christmas is perhaps the time of year that most highlights the difference between what the market requires and expects from us and the actual possibilities that are within our grasp.

 Capitalism is the new religion, you just have to talk to one of their neo liberal fans realize how fanatical they really are.  In similar ways in which the Aztecs sacrificed lives to quench the thirst of their gods, we sacrifice our freedoms and our physical and mental health to quench the thirst of capitalism. "Everything for the market!"

 To ensure that free market remains free, the exchange of labor, land, money, and consumer goods should not be contaminated by social and emotional elements, such as loyalty to the nation, social responsibilities, professional guilds or unions, charity, family obligations, social roles, or religious values. Cultural traditions distort the laws of supply and demand, and therefore must be eradicated.  In free market economies, it is expected that people migrate where the jobs are and adjust their lives and their cultural tastes to accommodate the supply of the global market.

  People who for one reason or another, fail to fully integrate, or simply do not want to integrate because of different values ​​can find themselves excluded and marginalized. Once outside of the social fabric it is not surprising that people seek refuge within substitute lifestyles and subcultures.  This implies alternate lifestyle and can include, but not be limited to drug use, obsessive behavior and can lead to the creation of social relationships that are not close or sincere, stable, or culturally acceptable to provide a minimal psychosocial integration. People who can not find better way to achieve psychosocial integration will cling to a substitute lifestyle with a tenacity that represents addiction itself.

 This can be considered as an adaptive behavior. All behavior has its function and that includes addiction, which is based on relieving discomfort and feelings of emptiness created by not being fully included, or perceive that one is not included within the social fabric.
  Could this explain the poor success of drug treatment programs? Given that addiction is a behavior that relieves anxiety created by a psychosocial dislocation; without real alternatives and a just society where we care about each other, trying to treat a person out of addiction will have more or less the same success as trying to law enforce a person out of addiction. That is, almost zero.

Emotion and Motivation

Motivation can be considered as the drive behind our existence. In its very basic form it is what drives us to find water when we are thirsty, shade when we are hot and shelter when we are cold. This process of maintaining our body at its optimum levels of temperature or energy is known as homeostasis and is carried out by the release of various hormones and neurochemicals in the brain. They inform the body that it needs food, water or is over heating and needs to take action to restore things to normal.

Pleasure plays a big part in our motivation and satisfying a need that we have can bring us a sense of great pleasure. I do a bit of running and after a 10km run, drinking a bottle of water can be a pleasurable experience as I replenish depleted water reserves. In this case I receive a positive reinforcement from drinking the water and increase the likelihood that I will repeat the behaviour next time I’m thirsty. But pleasure can also be derived by “moving away” from something unpleasant such as a hot fire, this is known as a negative reinforcement. 

In these cases we are referring to the almost automatic motivation involved in meeting our basic needs. Although fundamentally important in keeping us alive, due to modern city living we take them very much for granted. On the hedonic scale they provide us with very little positive reinforcement. Unless of course you’ve just ran a 10km race when a simple bottle of water taste divine. Although our basic needs are met on an unconscious level, it can be resumed as our mind occupying itself for something that is presently unavailable. It is indeed this craving that plays centre stage in how we understand motivation in a modern context.  

Research has shown that at a neuropsychological level there are different systems involved in being motivated. One is involved at an appetitive level, where we fancy or desire something and take action to get it. Whilst it is another more consummatory level that gives us the motivation to actually consume what we desire. Of course we are not the only animals who are motivated to collect things without necessarily being motivated to consume them immediately, squirrels collect nuts and many birds and animals will hide food for later. Without wanting to point out the obvious, there is usually a correlation between what we want and what we like, but not always.  

When we think of motivation we also tend to think of drive, striving and competing all of which in a modern western society are seen as desirable traits that will enable us to achieve to our best ability. In this sense we have a different type of motivation that is more linked to social status or standing, as we compare ourselves to those around us. What can give us a buzz when we perform better than others, can also get us worrying when we don’t quite come up to standard and this can even lead us to feeling shame and self criticism. Our drive to want more, which is what enabled us to convert from being hunters to farming communities with surplus of food all year round, has been a real asset, but it can lead us into some real messes. 

Due to our imaginative mind we have been able to invent new ways to satisfy our desires and our competitive drive. We no longer see who runs the fastest to be able to catch the prize, but now we have a better job, which pays more money to be able to buy a car that goes faster so we can get to the prize first. The only problem is that by the time we’ve done all that we’ve forgotten what the prize was in the first place. Sugar is a high in energy and it’s not surprising that we have an inbuilt taste for it; our ancestors had to take great risks to get honey from bees. But we can lie on the sofa with a big bag of sugary sweets and gorge ourselves Roman style whenever we want. Satisfying our desires, but at the same time creating all sorts of health problems.

The human brain, due to the way it has developed wants more and it wants it better. Unfortunately we can even turn this critical dissatisfaction with what we have upon ourselves. We want to be faster, taller, slimmer, cleverer and certainly more popular. When this highly competitive desire seeking brain meets western capitalism it can be a match made in heaven and of course the advertising agencies know very well how to play upon our insecurities and inadequacies. I myself have a problem with amazon.com as I compulsively buy books that I just “need”. Each one leaving me as unsatisfied as the last one that I consumed. This is one of the great absurdities of modern life. I’ll finish with the words of the Dalai Lama:

“Man sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die,
and then dies having never really lived”

~ Dalai Lama

Primitive self protection system

In my last thread I talked very briefly about how our Emotions serve three basic functions, one of them being a self protection warning system against possible threats.  Fear, anxiety, anger, rage and hatred are all naturally occurring emotions that due to the way they have evolved are very easily activated.

 Our minds are continually scanning for possible threats, even when we’re sleeping. We’ve all woken up with a start in the middle of the night because we heard a bump or a crash, and a mother is capable of hearing her child cry even though she is fast asleep. Our self protection system is always activated, humming away in the background and continually scanning for possible threats.

 When it does perceive a threatening situation, it automatically puts into motion our “fight or flight” process as our body prepares itself to either run from the threat or fight the threat, this creates changes in our body as our eyes dilate, blood flow is redirected from our digestive system to the big muscle groups like the biceps and quadriceps, not to mention the release of all number of hormones that throw our body out of balance, but will save our lives in a dangerous situation.

 All this takes place automatically without us being to able to do anything about it. Of course how you feel about emotions will affect how you react to having them, but more about that another day.

This process is automatic because it takes place deep inside our primitive mid brain where the Amygdala is in charge of emotional response. Information about a threatening external stimulus is transmitted through what is known as the ventral circuit, which is quick and automatic and completely bypasses the prefrontal cortex where reasoning is carried out.

 This has its benefits, as a slower more reflexive warning system would not have had much success in the evolution stakes. A warning system that needs to reflect and ponder would have been a disaster for survival. Imagine if you had to spend five minutes thinking about what to do when faced with a charging rhino, you or your genes wouldn’t have much of a future.

 Our self protection warning system has evolved to be quick and without thinking. It is designed to protect us and is not afraid to over exaggerate a threatening situation in order to “save us”. It will frequently make mistakes, preferring to make us run away from 9 unreal threats and go without dinner than make one fatal mistake and become the dinner of some predator.  

Of course all is not sabre tooth tigers and packs of hungry wolves. We humans are social creatures by nature and have to interact with each other on a daily basis. Our minds tendency to over estimate danger is also carried over to social situations, where we may see individuals or other groups as a threat. This is a natural tendency and happens automatically and our mind needs to be trained not to see everything and everyone as possible threats, as this can affect our quality of life.

 Sometimes we have to overcome fear. There is a great Buddhist saying that “to overcome a fear you have to face a fear”. This is a concept known to behavioural therapists as exposure and is a technique often used for overcoming fears and phobias. The idea being that you purposely expose yourself to your fears. In this case the level of anxiety will steadily rise, but after about 10 minutes will eventually start to drop.

Usually what we do when we feel threatened is to try to avoid the source of the threat, be it snakes, spiders or public speaking. The relief that we feel from avoiding the situation is known as a negative reforcer, that is, I take action to get rid of emotions I don’t like. The next time I feel the unpleasant emotion; there is a big possibility that I will repeat the avoiding behaviour that served me well in the past.

 The problem is that the relief I feel from avoiding the threat may prevent me from hanging around for a bit and realising that it wasn’t such a threat as my mind was telling me it was. Often, to change the way we feel about something, first we have to change our behaviour. As Chinese philosopher Laozi quoted “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”. It certainly doesn’t begin with navel gazing, lamenting the past or worrying about the future. We can do that on the journey.

Emotions

In this post I’d just like to start to look at emotions. I really didn’t know where to start as this is such a big subject. So I’m going to try to break it down into small manageable bite size pieces. First I will look at the functions of emotions and why we have them.

 Emotions seem to be what gives life that sparkle; they’re what make things important. My cat can’t understand the emotion involved in watching a game of football, so emotions tend to be a qualitatively human experience, without them a football game would be very tedious. My wife could probably confirm that for you.

There appear to be three functions to having emotions. 1: Taking care of threats and protecting ourselves 2: Increasing motivation and action and 3: Soothing ourselves.

As in with most things in life, when there is an imbalance of emotions then this can begin to cause us problems. One of the most common psychological problems in modern western society is the over activation of the taking care and protecting system, where we see or feel threatened, or the over activation of the motivation and action system, where we feel obliged to continually “rise to the challenge”, or over achieve.  

 Both these systems have an evolutionary basis and have served us well for thousands of years. Being a high achiever as a hunter, was probably an advantage in finding a mate so you could pass on our genes. Taking care of threats and protecting ourselves has served us well and emotions such as anxiety have protected us from potential threats. Of course we all have fears and these can be different, such as dogs, heights or public speaking, which shows that although our emotions have a genetic evolutionary basis they are also learnt through a process of classic conditioning of behavioural situations with emotional memory.

 When I was about 14 years old, I went to a party and drank a bottle of sweet martini. As you can imagine I was very ill and even to this day even if I just smell martini I have strong emotions of disgust and emotional memories of being very ill come flooding back. Because of the high emotional content involved there was a classical conditioning where martini has become emotionally associated with being ill. This of course serves the purpose of protecting me from martini in the future, but it could have easily been, red berries, rotten meat or the wrong mushroom. Disgust comes inbuilt, have you ever seen a child spit out bitter tasting food?

 Anger is also an emotion that enables us to get what we want when something is between us and our goal. Useful in certain situations, but it can also lead us to force situations and try “brute force” as we become increasingly frustrated. Anger and a feeling of unfairness can also help us to protect what we have, if someone tries to take something away from us. This sort of retaliatory anger is great for protecting the prize that we just hunted from thieving hyenas and getting people to do what we want, but may be unhelpful when we receive criticism from our boss and anger wells up inside as we feel threatened.

 We can see that emotions are of great importance, they motivate us, they protect us and they help us achieve goals, but due to modern city living lifestyles, our emotions can also be maladaptive and be the source of, at times great emotional distress. Understanding what our emotions are for empowers us and helps us to begin to realise that they serve an evolutionary function and nothing more. Our emotions are simply that, emotions. They do not reflect us as persons, at most they reflect what we have learnt or been shown. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine somebody who has been told from a very young age that expressing anger is bad. An overwhelming feeling of guilt every time that person feels angry could lead to trying to suppress anger, which of course will lead to all sorts of psychological and behavioural problems.