Stressed Out

 Hello again to a random rant of which the only redeeming factor is in my opinion the fact that it is as unfiltered as I can get. So apart from the fact that the title of the post is the name of a twenty one pilots song which I really like, I also want to talk about some ideas which have been zooming around in my head. I don't really expect anyone to read this however I just want to document these ideas because they seem interesting to me in their own right. So I've recently been reading to and listening to many talks by Gabor Mate. What initially started as a want to closely understand ADHD (after my lowkey insane rant last time about neurodivergence which I almost considered deleting) led me to his book scattered minds (which ironically I didn't finish) but I have also been listening to a lot of his talks. Many of his ideas seem strikingly relevant to me. 

One of these for example is how genetics only increase our predisposition towards certain diseases and are not determining factors about whether we will get them in themselves. He talked about how extremely influential early childhood experiences, are in relation to epigenetics etc. One aside here which I want to talk about is how a lot of people treat themselves as victims of mental illness and start identifying with them in a weird way. e.g. at the risk of overgeneralizing, many people who have been convinced by the 'structural and chemical imbalance caused primarily due to genetic factors' theories of mental illness use their diagnosis as a license to be endlessly bitter towards the world while they wallow in their self-pity and nihilism. I have been such a person for some amount of time and hence I am way too aware of the rationalizations our brains make for this kind of behavior and how easy it is to fall down this path. 

Talking about his other ideas, another one which I found strikingly relevant was how he talked about the fact that people getting chronic lifetime illnesses was not random as it would seem. His argument is basically that there are tradeoffs between authenticity and attachment that we need to make as a part of the human condition. As a small child, attachment is infinitely more valuable to us. Because of this, we get caught in patterns that are often compensatory to the personalities of our primary caregivers in a bid to get their attention and be more attached to them. When these actions continue into adulthood, such as people pleasing and being too nice, they become a cause of chronic stress. Prolonged exposure to chronic stress causes a general deterioration in our immune systems. This again corresponds nicely to the Bohmian(ish) theories of mental illnesses often being maladaptive survival strategies that continue past the point of relevance because they are so deeply ingrained in our system of the self that being intentionally unaware of them seems more important to us than leaving behind the ill effects caused due to them. This, of course, does not make sense as the increase in importance is inside a system that has been in part formed by the maladaptive behavioral strategy itself, however without intense awareness, it is difficult to realize and stop these systems from being set in motion any time our body perceives a threat. Perceiving a threat in this case might just be realising that you have to spend a day alone by yourself and your intrusive self-sabotaging or self-loathing thoughts come in or your spontaneously start stimulating yourself just to escape from them. This aspect of humanity though thought to be intensely complex and enriching to the romanticism of many of our disciplines can be kind of boiled down to the principle that the greatest desire always wins. However, your greatest desires aren't often what you think you desire, but rather some internalized things it is extremely hard to even become aware of. 

Another one of his ideas was analysing society through this chronic stress perspective. He talked about how due to continuing psychological, sociological, economical, ecological etc. phenomena (everything is connected anyway, which is another point he makes), contemporary society is passing on stress to the individuals in it. From an epigenetic perspective, all these different stressors or the behaviours of your environment can literally alter the makeup of your body. This reminded me of many things, for example, the Bohmian neuropsychology of thought as a system (again), or a poem I read by stephen spender in 12th grade (about some elementary school classroom), the concept of karma and vaguely if you stretch it also dialectics. These ideas barely seem connected from a superficial perspective, and even I am stretching it if I think about it, but then again it's fun to connect random things and see what interpretation unfolds out of it. The picture of stressors being implicitly transferred reminded me a lot of the definition of thought as representative, metacognitive and using memory to transmit information. The poem I read by Stephen Spender had a line about how the disease acquired by a child was his father's curse or something like that. This to me captures this idea very well. Because bad economic conditions or coming from socially disparaged groups in a certain society are correlated with many problems e.g. addiction, domestic violence, intergenerational trauma etc., or even in a household that does not explicitly fall prey to these problems, there is a kind of desperation and stress whenever money is talked about. Coming back to one of Gabor Mate's examples about how young children are 'sponges' which soak up the stress of the household, it is quite obvious on connecting this with ideas such as Bessel Van Dork's Body keeps the score about how due to the extreme stress in our environment the people from a lower income or a sociologically disadvantaged background are more likely to be 'screwed over' in lack of a better word. All these many environmental factors which we want to separate and study disparaged groups for, cumulatively contribute through a mechanism of shaping the individual's environment and early childhood experiences to have (through an epigenetic perspective) an actual explicit effect on their very worldview and how they go about life in general. This is of course just intersectionality but considered from a more unfolded and not merely sociological perspective. All of this also intrinsically seems connected to a deeper implementation of the word Karma, not a pseudoscientific buzzword as it has become today but in its true mystical sense. If an organism was stressed and did not have the adequate method to deal with it at some point in time, then it will retain memory of that through certain patterns, be it implicit traumatic behaviour patterns, sociological or economical disparagment of a group for generations etc. Again even dialectics can be expressed somewhat through this perspective, as it could be seen as economic and material stresses being placed on a group of people and the response after that, however I do not know the specifics of these to actually flesh out these details. 

Everywhere around me this stress perspective seems to explain many things. Being in college which is a high stress environment, many people numb their anxiety for the future by overworking or direct hedonic numbing. We think that these stressors won't directly affect us or get to us, but they always do. If the stress is not adequately handled and also doesn't seem to affect us directly, we should never forget that the body does keep the score. Most people around me (and including me almost all the time) have terrible sleep schedules. People these days do not get full nights of restful sleep in general, and as a society we have almost forgotten the joy it provides to us. We have gotten used to whole days spent not at our maximum awareness and exuberance, just sliding by. The average value of an hour in which we are awake also reduces if we sleep less as we think we have more time to get our work done, probably edging us closer to being mindless drones. Everyday I sleep late I live in fear of oversleeping for class. My body has become used to waking up for it but at what cost? Sometimes even on weekends I find myself waking up early without much rest or waking up groggy having slept into the afternoon. The stress will show differently for different people. It can show up on your skin, your face, your movement, your bones, chronic illnessses or anyway. How each human reacts to things is of course unique and beautiful in a bittersweet way. There is nothing good or redeeming about an addict for example and I am not glorifying them. However when we look at it from the perspective of "what was it in your life that you saw so unbearable that you had to numb it continuously", and actually look at their lives with concern, or the people themselves as people, we often see the continuous struggle of life itself and it kind of portrays the essence of tragedy. How many times do you notice a flower or a beautiful tree on your daily commute. How many times do we practice self care for our body? How many times do we dance or sing without concern, constriction and inebriation? How many times do we play to complete exhaustion and joy? Coming back to one of Gabor Mate's Ideas again, society will eat into you if you do not adequately identify and develop healthy mechanisms to deal with the stressors being placed on you. We are organized in a way, for example, to incentivize this sacrificial sleep schedule for grinding everyday. The more you work, the more money you will make for your boss, and the more you will be promoted in this fake facade of 'respectability' in society, going further and further away from authenticity. However if there is any aspect of your life which you consistently ignore, it is bound to deteriorate. If the gym has taught me anything, it is that you should not take anything for granted. Even if you handle this whirl of emotions everyday, like balancing 3 plates at once teetering on the edge trying desperately to make nothing fall, it will cause friction and deterioration. So yes, again I urge you to take care of yourself and examine your assumptions about life and daily survival mechanisms very seriously.

All of this also seems connected to Krishnamurti's ideas of urgency of change, ambition, competitiveness and Kapil gupta's ideas of prescriptions as well (Though I should not call them merely ideas as that degrades them to intellectual stimulation).However I might talk about that sometime later as this post is already decently long. Thank you for reading.