Category Archives: anxiety

Is This The Age Of Anxiety? – part 3

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The holiday season overtook us… but I was about to deliver on a promise of what can you DO about anxiety. It seems quite a few people are eagerly awaiting the answer. I’m not surprised this piece struck a chord with so many: I believe it is indeed the Age Of Anxiety. It’s everywhere: economics, politics, religion, environment, gender issues, career… and now, of course, this year particularly: end of the world!! It would be pathological NOT to feel somewhat apprehensive.

As I showed with part 2 of this article series (Masserman’s Cats), anxiety is really uncertainty and contra-survival shocks that destabilize us and leads to tension. If you always know where you are going to live; that you will always have a home and food; that your job is secure; your God is not going to let you down; and your government is working to keep you safe; then you probably won’t feel insecure and will never know real anxiety.

However, there is still the physiological condition of anxiety: tension, adrenalin or (later) cortisol, leading to agitation and restlessness. You can get that from eating the wrong foods, as I found out in the 1980s. Nutritional deficiency, such as is rampant today in the Western world, with it’s manufactured junk, will lead to depletion of positive neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine. You will certainly FEEL anxious, till that is corrected.

Electronics also do a lot to over-agitate the nervous system and keep us in high beta (brainwaves of 25 Hertz or more).

What can we do? Continue reading →

Is This The Age Of Anxiety? – 2

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I was not too surprised that the article in the last issue about anxiety would strike some raw nerves. I think we are truly living in “The Age Of Anxiety”. See the previous article here: Alternative Doctor: The Age Of Anxiety

To increase your understanding, I have repoduced here a page from alternative-doctor.com It’s been up there for years. But I will also pull it out of the old site settings and actually blog it. So do go over there and comment… please!

You’ll see, I think, an amazing parallel between cats which are stressed and they learn to cope with alcohol, just like we do at cocktail time!

 

Very Human Cats

In 1950 Dr. Jules H. Masserman, MD Psych, Associate Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases at Northwestern University, published a highly significant article in Scientific American magazine (March issue, pp 38-43). Entitled “EXPERIMENTAL NEUROSES”, in which:

  1. cats learn complex patterns of behaviour
  2. are subjected to contradictory influences and
  3. develop neuroses which are relieved by psychotherapy.

Masserman’s paper sheds a great deal of light on the question of choices — and the disastrous results of misinformed, contradictory and conflicting beliefs which are buried within our psyche. It will help the reader understand neuroses better and also alcoholism (and other drug dependance). It could enable practitioners to devize intelligent and specific programmes which rapidly solve anxiety, compulsive behaviour, neurosis and alcoholism. In fact addictive behaviour of all kinds.

The Scientific American article supplemented an earlier film “Neurosis and Alcohol: the induction and cure of alcoholism in cats” made by Masserman as part of a doctorate thesis, at the University of Indiana in 1948. Bob Ross, developer of the Power of Choice programme, saw the film in the summer of 1953, as part of a seminar on Korzybski’s General Semantics at Bard College, New York. This could be said to be the beginning of the programme proper. Continue reading →