Counterintuitive Spring 2023

The Mental Health Remedy – Causal 

It is alarming to see that 6.9 Americans struggle with chronic, daily anxiety. However, after considering the stressful lives we live in this society, it kind of makes sense. When you are faced with a problem, it is normal to experience feelings of stress or anxiety. For example, family or relationship problems, the loss of a loved one, or even work stress can cause someone to feel anxiety. However, people who have anxiety disorders have difficulty managing these feelings, getting rid of unwanted thoughts and emotions. A generalized anxiety disorder can cause significant issues in areas of life having to do with school, work, and even social interactions. Living in a constant state of anxiety can be extremely detrimental to a person’s mental health.  According to the National Institute of Mental Health, a person with a generalized anxiety disorder also experiences irritability, muscle tension, fatigue, restlessness, difficulty concentrating, and difficulty controlling feelings of worry. Leaving these symptoms untreated causes a person’s mental health and overall quality of life to decrease. 

For some, medication can be very helpful. However, it is also said that medication can cause unwanted side effects. Jayne Leonard states that some possible side effects of anxiety medication can be blurry vision, dry mouth, drowsiness, lightheadedness, low blood pressure, tremors, weight loss or gain, etc; the list goes on and on. Patients can work with their doctors to find the right dosage of medication for them, which can help alleviate these side effects. But, this can be a long process and can take a while for the patient and doctor to decide what will work best. Luckily, meditation has proven itself to be equally as beneficial, but without the negative side effects. A study was conducted at Johns Hopkins that analyzed the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to help alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression, and pain. Alice G. Walton states that  “Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good.” 

Many people think positively about the idea of meditation, but when it comes to actually sitting with your thoughts, it can be difficult. In our society, we have so many things to use as distractions from our thoughts. For example, many use social media as a way to take up time, or to avoid thinking about things that can be stressful. It is easy to mindlessly scroll through Instagram or Tik Tok to keep your mind off of what you don’t want to give attention to. This mindless scrolling is easier to keep scrolling than to actually confront your thoughts. 

However, it is problematic because pushing negative thoughts and emotions to the side does not make them go away. According to Ritu Ailani, it is said that the average person spends about three hours a day mindlessly scrolling through social media. Each time you scroll to another post, your brain receives a dopamine hit, and this cycle goes on and on until the decision is made to put down the phone. Psychologist Joshua Ehrlich explains “It really is an addiction and we’re wired for this. The same brain pathways get stimulated as they do in a chemical addiction.” Once you start this habit, like any addiction, it can be difficult to stop. According to Dr. Alber, “Too much time on any media or social media sites, whether the news is bad or not, has been linked with feelings of depression, burying your nose in a phone can exacerbate disconnection and loneliness. Being locked on a screen can zap your energy and leave you feeling drained.”  However, you can replace bad habits by creating new and healthier ones such as practicing mindfulness and meditation. 

For those who struggle with their mental health, the thought of sitting quietly with your thoughts is daunting. Some people will become frustrated at the fact that there is no immediate relief. But like all things, meditation requires time, patience, and most importantly practice. According to Sandra Casabianca, a 2020 review shows that people who practice meditation for a long time start showing changes in the areas of their brain that modulate the stress and anxiety response. “Specifically, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus show increased activity. Also, the amygdala, which is involved in the fight, flight, or freeze response, shows decreased activity. All of this indicates improved emotional regulation, according to the review.” says Sandra.

        References 

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323666

https://in.askmen.com/lifestyle/1126610/article/7-ways-to-cease-mindless-scrolling-on-social-media

Convenience Over Conditioning

Humans are completely consumed with the technological advances of today.  Whether it comes to communication, news outlets, agriculture, transportation, and so on; we are surrounded by it from the moment we wake up.  As humans we often take advantage of technological advances without any long term knowledge of the consequences. 

For example, when canned food products came out in the early 1900’s.  People marveled at the convenience and accessibility of canned foods and they skyrocketed across the board.  Everything imaginable was canned with tons of preservatives and other ingredients to make it nonperishable.  Here, we saw an immediate short term benefit, but no one even thought that there could be anything wrong with consuming these products in such a high volume.  Looking back on this we see that there are so many health problems associated with this change in diet such as diabetes, high cholesterol and heart health in general. 

Another example of this instant hit products that no one thought twice about were cigarettes.  People went from enjoying a smoke on airplanes and in hospitals, to now realizing the destruction that was caused by them. This is the scary part about very new ways of living and products we are exposed to.  Human nature has proved that if we like a product, we absolutely abuse it until we realize the hidden long term side effects.

The same can be said about human activity in today’s society.  To get a bit more specific, the comparison between physical exertion we once knew and physical exertion we now know is light years away from each other.  Picture a railroad being constructed  in order to successfully transport goods during the industrial revolution.  Let’s put ourselves in the position of a worker on this railroad assembling team.  You grab your shovel and start digging and evening the soil over endless yards of hard dirt and gravel.  When that is done you carry heavy pieces of steel and begin to line up and hammer in each piece one by one.  Driving heavy metal stakes into the ground with an even heavier sledge hammer.  You do this all day for your livelihood and it is the norm for your lifestyle. 

Now, let’s take a look at what we have to do to get this same physical exertion.  Now, our role is an everyday person in today’s world going to the gym.  You pick up two dumbbells and press them over your shoulders and your heart rate starts going.  You do this for four sets of ten repetitions each.  You finish up and put the dumbbells back on the rack where you got them. You then move to the bench press where you load up heavy plates on both sides of a metal bar.  You begin pressing the weight to your chest over and over again.  You stretch your muscles with each repetition to trigger growth in the pectorals.  You then carry the weights back and place them back on the rack as you did before.  You do this over and over with each exercise for 45 minutes to get some form of activity in your.  However, there’s a huge difference when comparing both scenarios. 

Digging into the ground with shovel and dumbbell pressing both work the muscles in your shoulders and upper back, but digging into the ground with a shovel was done out of productivity.  There is no byproduct of working out at a gym besides achieving physical fitness.  The point being made is that physical activity and laboring over a job or for survival used to go hand and hand.  We did not need to even think about finding ways to physically challenge ourselves because that was already included in the day’s work.  Industrialization, while convenient, has taken once necessary human labor out of the equation.  We now have cranes, jack hammers, and other industrial tools to assemble railroads.  The irony is that the man or woman working these machines could very possibly be an inactive and overall unhealthy person.  

We continue to try and find the quickest and most effortless way to complete tasks and it is killing our chances of living a healthy and extended life.  We’ve seen obesity explode in the U.S.  In the paper, “The Growth of Obesity and Technological Change,” there is a correlation between the price of physical activity in relation to the food we purchase.  “In a post-industrial and redistributive society, such as the United States, most work entails little exercise and not working may not cause a large reduction in weight, because food stamps and other welfare benefits are available to people who do not work.”  This quotation from the paper dives into the fact that after becoming so advanced we are not required to do much manual labor at all. 

The authors go on to say that this has in a sense made physical activity more expensive in an abstract sense.  We now need to set aside time and money to get our physical activity outside of our occupation/daily life.  When this has become too “expensive” we have seen our health as a society deteriorate and our body weight to increase dramatically across the board. 

Along with this lack of physical activity, the food that is being sold to us has been decreasing in quality year over year.  This is due to the ongoing growth of the population where agriculture is left to find the fastest ways to get food out.  Corners are cut in order to produce food at this volume and this inevitably hurts the quality of the products.  Also, cheaper foods are higher in calories, sugars and preservatives.  This economically looks appealing, but is often horrible for our bodies if consumed on a regular basis.  The higher the quality, the higher the price. 

This obviously makes sense, as something that is overall healthier or better for your body would be more costly, but it is a sad reality that the majority of the foods found in a grocery store have been mass produced and as filling as possible.  It’s no wonder that we see amazing deals on huge bottles of sodas and family sized bags of chips.  These companies have products that are loaded with horrible ingredients, but they have us hooked on the addictive taste.  They have perfected their manufacturing to have unbelievable margins, and the public eats it up, no pun intended.  We buy these items in bulk and households go right to them, eating and drinking morning to night.

As a society, we need to take a step back and slow down this mass produced influx of technology and unhealthy consumption.  Everything is so fast paced that we do not even realize we are jeopardizing our health in ways that haven’t even been discovered as of yet.We need to turn around our relationship with food and active lifestyles and find a way to “cheapen” the price of getting ourselves moving during the day.  Without it we are going to regress quickly and that should be motivation to spend our days with our bodies in mind.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2767437/Lakdawalla, Darius, and Tomas Philipson. “The Growth of Obesity and Technological Change.” Economics and Human Biology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2767437/. 

Anderson, Janna, and Lee Rainie. “Concerns about the Future of People’s Well-Being and Digital Life.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, Pew Research Center, 31 Dec. 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/04/17/concerns-about-the-future-of-peoples-well-being/. 

The Mahna Mahna Phenomena

Typically, puppets are believed to communicate light, fun topics, but more importantly, they hold this incredible ability to present heavy topics that allow us to gain access to scary parts of our emotional core. Consider this: you are safely sitting in the audience of a show about death, but you are not dying or watching anyone else die. You are still hoping to feel something frightful or heartbreaking, after all, theatre exists to evoke emotions. Throughout the performance, you get to know a puppet character; you dig into its psyche and experience its highs, lows, and everything in between; you form a bond with this being. Then, the puppet dies. The puppeteer steps away from the puppet and suddenly, all that exists is an inanimate object, no longer a character. Everything you thought you knew about this being has been ripped away from you. It is jarring, it is tragic, and it is magical.

A wonderful example of this kind of deep connection can be found in the article, “Power in Puppetry ” by Miranda Wright when she states, “In order to make good on his promise, the puppet offered to provide a demonstration of death itself. He offered to die in front of us. When the moment came, I couldn’t breathe. As the puppeteer behind the curtain lifted his hands from the puppet’s body, I realized there truly was no life left in my new friend. I watched a life end, and sat in the theater crying.” This kind of deep, emotional reaction makes it clear that a performance is successful once the artist has put their effort into it, but even more so, once the audience has allowed themselves to accept the performance as real. Wright had this experience because she saw the marionettes “breathe” and “come to life” and she accepted that as natural. She kept her mind and heart open to the possibilities of the performance and it touched her deeply. It explored new domains of empathy within her, allowing her to tap into her own feelings of loss and sorrow. This death landed so deeply also because not only did the puppet die on a theatrical level, but it lost its life literally; it was merely a heap of materials, no longer a friend with a soul. 

If this had been an actor portraying death, it would still have been compelling, but so much of our reaction is a critique of how well the actor mimicked death, so the performance aspect distracts us from our visceral reaction to the reality of death. In fact, the only way a human could portray death in the same powerful way would be for them to literally die onstage. Since that is not a viable option, puppets are as close to a real death as it can get on a stage. When a puppet portrays death, it is raw, it is clumsy, and it allows us to supply the reality by ourselves; the drama takes place in our hearts and that is what makes puppets such an incredible vehicle for storytelling. They step away from the idea of performance and they just exist as they are and allow the audience to feel the emotions as they arise. Puppeteer Mark Down illustrated this idea beautifully when he stated, “it is not puppeteers who make puppets come alive. The puppet lives in the audience’s imagination. We try to steer that, and perhaps persuade it to go somewhere exciting, but to be honest we don’t have a huge amount of control over it.” The world of the puppet exists in a space where there are no outside influences or distractions; it is 100% open to interpretation. 

Rest assured, not all empathy has to come from a heart-wrenching puppet show about death. A well-known, light-hearted example of this comes from the catchy video clip of the “Mahna Mahna” song from The Muppet Show. There are websites dedicated to puppetry fandom and, more specifically, Sesame Street and The Muppets; Ryan Roe facilitates one such website. In his commentary “Mahna Mahna, Yes… But Why,” Roe notes, “Clearly, when we watch ‘Mahna Mahna,’ we’re seeing a reflection of ourselves that causes a spark of recognition to flare up inside us,” Roe goes on to explain that members of the audience can either empathize more strongly with “the Snowths,” which are the pair of pink puppets who sing “doo doo doo doo,’ and “have clearly spent copious amounts of time carefully rehearsing for this performance” or with “Mahna Mahna,” (the interrupting, hippie-like puppet) who “is a true free spirit. He has an insatiable urge to express his individualism and he’s going to do it even if the results are too chaotic for the Snowths to handle. He’s the nonconformist, the iconoclast.” Viewers of this performance are drawn to either character (consciously or not). They are able to relate to the characters and find humor and a sense of ridiculousness within themselves, which is not only enjoyable but extremely comforting to the human psyche.

References

Between Human and Object: Performing Artists on the Possibilities of Puppets. (2013, June 3). Creative Capital. https://creative-capital.org/2013/06/03/between-human-and-object/ 

Cummings, S. T. (2019, December 30). Puppets: Still Very Much a Thing. AMERICAN THEATRE. https://www.americantheatre.org/2015/06/24/puppets-still-very-much-a-thing/ 

Roe, R. (2017, September 20). Mahna Mahna, yes… but why? Retrieved December 08, 2021, from https://toughpigs.com/mahna-mahna-yes-but-why/ Wright, M., & Wright, M. (2016, August 3). Power in Puppetry. Getty Iris. https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/power-in-puppetry/

Wright, M., & Wright, M. (2016, August 3). Power in Puppetry. Getty Iris. https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/power-in-puppetry/

Puppets view the real world through a unique lens which allows them to communicate to real-world audiences about relatable topics. Puppets exist in an incredibly unique reality onstage, one more distinctive than any other actor, audience member, or subject engaged in the performance. Of course, puppets do not hold life by themselves; they require a human agent’s energy to animate them. That is exactly what is so impressive about the art of puppetry; it disconnects from the “living” world in which the audience exists in, but still beautifully communicates to this realm. Typically, puppets are believed to communicate light, fun topics, but more importantly, they hold this incredible ability to present heavy topics that allow us to gain access to scary parts of our emotional core. Consider this: you are safely sitting in the audience of a show about death, but you are not dying or watching anyone else die. You are still hoping to feel something frightful or heartbreaking-after all theatre exists to evoke emotions. Throughout the performance, you get to know a puppet character-you dig into its psyche and experience its highs, lows, and everything in between-you form a bond with this being. Then, the puppet dies. The puppeteer steps away from the puppet and suddenly, all that exists is an inanimate object, no longer a character. Everything you thought you knew about this being has been ripped away from you. It’s jarring, it’s tragic, and it’s magical. Miranda Wright describes her encounter with this when she saw “Famous Puppet Death Scenes” by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop of Canada. She describes her experience in the quote, “In order to make good on his promise, the puppet offered to provide a demonstration of death itself. He offered to die in front of us. When the moment came, I couldn’t breathe. As the puppeteer behind the curtain lifted his hands from the puppet’s body, I realized there truly was no life left in my new friend. I watched a life end, and sat in the theater crying.” This death landed so deeply with Wright because not only did the puppet die on a theatrical level, but it lost its life literally; it was merely a heap of materials, no longer a friend with a soul. Now, if this had been an actor portraying death, it would have still been compelling, but so much of our reaction is a critique of how well the actor mimicked death, so the performance aspect distracts us from our visceral reaction to the reality of death. When a puppet portrays death, it is raw, it is clumsy, and it allows us to supply the reality by ourselves-we feel the drama in our hearts and that is what makes puppets such an incredible vehicle for storytelling. They step away from the idea of performance and they just exist as they are and allow the audience to feel the emotions as they arise. Puppeteer Mark Down illustrated this idea beautifully when he stated, “it is not puppeteers who make puppets come alive. The puppet lives in the audience’s imagination. We try to steer that, and perhaps persuade it to go somewhere exciting, but to be honest we don’t have a huge amount of control over it.” The world of the puppet exists in a space where there are no outside influences or distractions-it is 100% open to interpretation.