When there’s little to do on a hot day, a quick trip to the store seems like enough physical exercise. The 10-minute walk went well, I grabbed the few basics I needed, and was about to head home when disaster struck. I realized I’d left the water bottle on the table. There I was, dying of dehydration a few minutes away from home. Besides being a bit crazy, I’m also a psychosomatic type. The whinny dwarf residing in my brain immediately went into panic mode. He does that often and I can keep him under control, so for the rest of the way I focused on the post I would write today.
On the other hand, it’s not all my doing. For the past few days, we’ve been bombarded with scary weather alerts and doctor’s warnings about the danger of going outside during this heat apocalypse. As, over the years, I’ve written several posts on climate change propaganda, you’d expect I would be unaffected. My conscious mind knows it’s propaganda, but the brain that keeps this body going doesn’t. My brain and the grumpy old dwarf are likely to say - ‘You with your smart ideas will kill us all’.
One of the things that’s been on my mind lately is the power of suggestion and how easily our perceptions can be skewed. A few evenings ago I was waiting for my daughter to drop off her brother and entertained myself with a football game in the meantime. When I heard the buzzer, I wondered whether she’d stop by as well. “Why would she stop by when it’s pouring outside?”, I asked myself. Only the rain was on TV. I’d been staring at the drenched players for an hour to the point I became convinced the rain was happening here, not thousands of miles away. That’s just a funny story, but it shows how easily we can be tricked.
I don’t believe global warming will kill us, but the stress associated with climate change propaganda might. The survival instinct is encoded in our genes and the brain constantly assesses threats. It won’t dismiss scare-mongering headlines and, moreover, it will influence how we perceive weather conditions (or other perils). It’s the nocebo effect. If the brain is convinced something bad will happen to you, the body will react accordingly.
Maybe it's not much of a photo, yet it's the view from the top of the lighthouse in Genoa and I was quite pleased with myself for making it to the top on a hot day, despite reading it's a difficult climb.
Even if you do make it home safely, like I did, the stress is still there. We often worry that the powers-that-be are trying to kill us with poisonous food, viruses, 5G, vaccines or wars. Maybe they are, but what we’re missing is that they don’t have to sweat it. The constant stress is slowly killing us. According to Gabor Mate, there’s a medical term for it “headline stress disorder”. The constant worry that something or other will kill you is enough to kill you, in a roundabout way.
The weather is a seasonal thing, but war, inflation, economic problems that might threaten your job are ever present. No matter what you think, that part of the brain in charge of survival will register every potential threat and stress about it.
“We know that chronic stress, whatever its source, puts the nervous system on edge, distorts the hormonal apparatus, impairs immunity, promotes inflammation and undermines physical and mental well-being”, says Gabor Mate in his influential book “The Myth of Normal”, in a chapter aptly called “The Toxicity of Our Culture”.
“Psychological factors such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, and lack of information are considered the most stressful stimuli and strongly activate the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis”.
Stress equals inflammation. Inflammation equals most of the pathologies affecting the modern world - from depression to autoimmune conditions, circulatory problems and heart disease, and, of course, cancer. Also leads to premature aging, a topic I remember seeing lately.
They don’t need to kill us outright. The constant stress is enough to lead us to an early grave, not before paying a fortune in medical bills.
As completely avoiding the news is unrealistic, Gabor Mate recommends a five-minute breathing exercise after going through your feed. You could also try that after reading another of my depressing posts.