Psychology
fromPsychology Today
17 hours ago3 Hidden Causes of Stress
Anxiety often stems from a deep aversion to uncertainty and ingrained mental frameworks that fuel psychological distress.
"They didn't know how to express themselves. If you ask them how they felt, they will tell you what they did versus the actual feeling," Cooper said. "That's what made me take a deep dive in cognitive behavioral therapy, utilizing that as a tool to teach them how to emotionally regulate, and then to be able to articulate those emotions to the people that they care about."
Many mistakes move us forward more than backward. Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.
Sitting in the audience, listening to these professionals in perfect harmony, brought me back to my days in the band. I wasn't good, it was mandatory, and I played the trombone. I desperately wanted to quit. We couldn't have backpacks in school, so I walked through the halls lugging my trombone in my right hand and books under my left armpit. This made me a perfect target for a bully or two to come up behind me and smack the books out from under me.
Even when our own lives are relatively stable, constant exposure to war, political unrest, climate crises, and humanitarian suffering activates the brain's threat system. The nervous system is not designed to distinguish between danger that is physically nearby and danger that is emotionally vivid or repeatedly witnessed. Over time, this creates chronic vigilance. When people observe patterns of harm, exclusion, or dehumanization playing out publicly, the body registers risk.
Human psychology is characterized by a paradoxical structure: The same species that wages war, destabilizes ecosystems, and creates collective threats also develops moral systems, empathic abilities, cultural innovations, and an increasing desire for internal harmony. In my previous post, I explored the possibility to transcend our paradoxical nature through learning. This contribution focuses on learning to see through the nature of our vulnerability.