Why am I always late?

Without being able to find their own place as a reader, viewer, or listener in those stories, people feel paralyzed and they don't feel like they can engage and have an entry point into doing something about the problem. These findings are worth paying attention to because the number one way most of us learn about the environment is through the media. Media shape the stories we hear, which, in turn, become the mindsets that we use to understand the world. Catastrophe narratives in pop culture Climate change fatalism is so ubiquitous it's made its way into pop culture. In the HBO series Euphoria, for example, a teen addict defends her drug use, saying: The world's coming to an end, and I haven't even graduated high school yet. It's just one of a seemingly endless stream of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films and television series that emerged over the past decade. The surge of catastrophe narratives led New York Times film critic Anthony Tony Scott to quip, Planetary destruction and human extinction happen a half-dozen times every summer in his 2014 review of the movie Snowpiercer. Here's what we will do. I will write out a letter of sorts that you could recite out loud or even give as a written/typed note to the person in question. This does not need to be an exact script, but it might get you started in the right direction. After I finish writing the letter, I will retrospectively break down some of the things that I wrote by instinct and try to understand what some of the magic ingredients are for communicating with people who do not understand your anxiety. To whom this may concern, You are an important person in this individual's life. That's why you are getting this letter. My name is Robert. I am a therapist and the author of a article about anxiety that this person has recently read. This means that they are trying to find resources to help pull themselves out of the crappy feelings that you have seen them struggling with. If participants only received the fear-arousing message (with no instructions on how to get the shot) or just the specific instructions without the fear-arousing description of tetanus, they were less likely to get the shot. These results indicate that eliciting fear can help persuade, but you also need to tell people how to avoid that which elicits the fear.

APPLICATION Is Death Good for Your Health? So far we've assumed that fear-arousing messages are effective because they motivate people to avoid threats to their physical health. But arousing fear may have opposite effects when it motivates people to care more about their self-images than their health. From the existential perspective of terror management theory described in article 2, recall that people strive to maintain self-esteem as a way of protecting themselves from concerns about death. This suggests that arousing fears about death may have opposite effects on people's health attitudes and behavior. On the one hand, people are motivated to avoid threats to their survival, so bringing thoughts of death to mind might motivate them to avoid unhealthy behavior. On the other hand, increasing people's death awareness might motivate them to enhance their self-esteem, which may mean engaging in unhealthy behaviors if those behaviors help to confer self-esteem. The question, then, is, what determines whether increasing people's awareness of their mortality increases or decreases risky but self-esteem-bolstering health behaviors? Popular culture provides a lens through which we can see how, as a broader society, we are thinking and feeling. It both influences and reflects societal concerns and desires. Fears about climate change, and the profound ecological uncertainty and change it engenders, are so resonant they've given rise to a whole new genre of ecological-disaster-themed entertainment, commonly referred to as eco-apocalypse, eco-catastrophe, or climate porn. In 2019, Shauna Doll and Tarah Wright of the Education for Sustainability Research Group at Dalhousie University29 did a thematic analysis of two hundred artworks related to climate change from across Europe and North America. Only four artworks were coded as expressing hope. This is a problem, particularly given the findings of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They studied the impact of the art displayed in Paris in association with the 2015 United Nations climate change summit. They too found that the vast majority of the pieces were dystopian and gloomy, and that those works left people feeling uninspired to take action. Only three of the thirty-seven works on display left people feeling hopeful that they could do something about climate change--all three of those works focused on solutions. Any narrative that is so deeply embedded should raise alarm bells. It can be immensely hard to explain what anxiety feels like. If you have never had significant issues with anxiety, you are exceptionally lucky because it really sucks.

I want you to know that the person who gave you this letter is not trying to be difficult. If they had a magic wand that could help them suddenly stop struggling with these issues, I 100% guarantee they would use it without a moment's hesitation. Have you ever felt the fight or flight response? Maybe you've stepped out into the street without looking both ways and nearly missed getting hit by a car or perhaps you've had to speak in front of 1000 people and felt like you were going to puke, cry, and hyperventilate all at the same time. That's what anxiety feels like, except it's not just a fleeting state of discomfort that happens once. It is something that can come on without much warning, and it makes it very difficult to function. Trust me when I say that this person feels sad, guilty, and exhausted due to difficulties that anxiety causes them and the people around them. You don't need to know how to make them feel better and that's okay because it's not your responsibility. Goldenberg and Arndt (2008; Arndt & Goldenberg, 2011) proposed that one key factor is whether people are consciously thinking about death. When people are explicitly concerned about death, they are more motivated to take practical steps to reduce or avoid threats to their physical health if they think they can do so effectively (Cooper et al. But when death thoughts are activated outside of conscious attention, people can be motivated to enhance their self-esteem, even if it means engaging in unhealthy behaviors. For example, if you are headed to the beach on a sunny day, you might be more likely to drive slowly, slather on the sunscreen, and pass when offered a cigarette if you are consciously thinking about your mortality and ways to prolong your life. But if death is primed only subtly below conscious attention, you might instead prioritize ways to feel and look good by putting the pedal to the floor, taking a drag on a cigarette, and getting that socially valued but nonetheless skin damaging sun tan (Hansen et al. Jessop & Wade, 2008; Routledge et al. SOCIAL PSYCH OUT WORLD This Is Like That: Metaphor's Significance in Persuasion There should never be just one dominant story. In a well-functioning, democratic world, there are multiple stories competing with one another for our attention.

The idea that something as complex and extraordinary as all life on Earth could ever be encapsulated by a single grand narrative just doesn't make sense. It's as if the Earth is dying has become a sort of apocalyptic platitude. We repeat these things because we've heard each other say them, but it's possible we say them without really thinking about what they actually mean. We have massive, terrifying, urgent environmental problems. But we also have powerful successes that we need to amplify above the din of hopelessness. Whenever we straitjacket an idea or an issue into a single, monolithic story, whether it's environment or Africa or gay or terrorist, we lose the nuance and specificity of context. We miss positive developments and shifts in perception. We are left with an oversimplification that is so generalized it becomes inherently inaccurate. If you want to be awesome, I have a few tips that can help you be the best support possible for this person when they are enduring a hard time. Firstly, don't take it personally. They might act very differently when they are having a peak in their anxiety. Take the things that they say and do in context. I'm sure you've been through a hard time before and acted in ways that aren't quite in line with your normal self. Asking them if there is anything that you can do to help is great, but don't always expect to get a clear response from them. Things can be confusing when the anxiety monster is hitting hard, so knowing what would help is not always clear. One question that most anxious people can give you an answer to is do you need some space? If they say yes, please give them a little room to breathe and let them know that you will be around if they need you. Try not to tell them it's all in their head, because they know that already. Many times, we come across persuasive messages that, strictly speaking, make no sense. Consider the statement made by opponents of a mandatory seatbelt law being contested in California some years ago: We don't want Governor Deukmejian sitting in our bathtub telling us to wash behind our ears.

This is an example of a metaphoric message, a communication that compares one type of thing with another type of thing. Beginning with Aristotle, scholars have noted metaphor's power to persuade. Returning to the bathtub metaphor above, even though people know that enacting a seatbelt law does not literally mean having the governor in the bathtub with them, hearing the bathtub metaphor guides them to think about the seatbelt law as the same type of thing--a disgusting violation of personal privacy. In fact, study volunteers randomly assigned to read the bathtub statement evaluated the seatbelt legislation more negatively than those who didn't (Read et al. Other common metaphoric messages try to change how people understand social problems and thus evaluate certain solutions. Many real-world problems are abstract, complex, and difficult to comprehend fully. A metaphor comparing an abstract problem with a more familiar problem suggests what solutions are more and less likely to work. For example, one television ad advocated cutting government spending on social programs by comparing the federal budget with a household budget. Because we are told that the planet is doomed, we do not register the growing array of scientific studies demonstrating the resilience of other species. For instance, climate-driven disturbances are affecting the world's coastal marine ecosystems more frequently and with greater intensity. This is a global problem that demands urgent action. Yet, as detailed in a 2017 paper in BioScience, there are also instances where marine ecosystems show remarkable resilience to acute climatic events. In a region in Western Australia, for instance, up to 90 percent of live coral was lost when ocean water temperatures rose, causing the corals to jettison the algae (zooxanthellae) living in their tissues--what scientists call coral bleaching. Yet in some sections of the reef surface, 44 percent of the corals recovered within twelve years. Similarly, kelp forests hammered by three years of intense El Nino water-temperature increases recovered within five years. By studying these bright spots, situations where ecosystems persist even in the face of major climatic impacts, we can learn what management strategies help to buffer destructive forces and nurture resilience. Beware fatalistic mindsets When the student I mentioned at the beginning of this article said, I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless, she believed that to be true, and I felt sad for her suffering. It doesn't make the pounding in their chest, the pain in their head, the hyperventilation, the sweating, or the racing thoughts any easier to deal with. There's no way that I can put you in their shoes, but I hope you believe me when I say that it's not as easy as just taking a breath and getting some fresh air.