Why can't I be more successful?

Individual differences in promotion focus and prevention focus can determine which types of persuasive messages are more influential. This has been found when persuading people to lead healthier lifestyles (Fuglestad et al. Updegraff et al. For example, in the study by Cesario and colleagues, participants read an argument in favor of a new afterschool program. For some participants, the program was billed as catering to a positive end state (facilitating children's progress and graduation). For other participants, it was billed as preventing a negative end state (ensuring that fewer children failed). For participants who were promotion focused, the promotion-oriented articulation of the program was a better fit to their current motivation and, as a result, these participants were more likely to support it. However, those who were prevention focused experienced a better fit with the avoidance message of reducing failures and thus were more likely to support the program when it was framed in prevention-oriented terms. Other researchers explain our failure to act, despite high levels of concern about environmental crises, through a phenomenon known as the finite pool of worry. According to researchers at Columbia University's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, there are limits to the number of concerns a person can deal with at one time. Overburdening people's capacity for worry with too much doom and gloom leads to emotional numbing. We tune out or feel immobilized. When we're scared, we can freeze, says Susan M. Koger, a psychology professor at Willamette University in Oregon, who teaches and writes about psychology for sustainability. The trouble is, emotionally numb can look a lot like not caring. My friend Carrie teaches high school. She recently told me that she's been showing her classes increasingly graphic images of climate change devastation to try to shock them into caring. They are so apathetic, she says. Many of you wanted to hear more about medication, though, so I am going to give you some of my thoughts about it. At the time of writing this, I am currently working at a large healthcare organization as a therapist.

At the end of every intake session with a new patient, I ask them how they would like to follow up. The main buffet of options includes psychotherapy, educational or support groups, and consultation with a psychiatrist to talk about medication. People fall on many different sides of the fence when it comes to medicine. There are a lot of misconceptions out there about medication. People think about movies that they have seen where it zombifies you and makes you unable to feel. There are certainly some medications that have a bit of a sedating effect, but in general this is not what happens. They also aren't a miracle drug. Many medications take a few weeks to alter your brain chemistry and begin working their magic. SOCIAL PSYCH AT THE MOVIES Argo: The Uses of Persuasion In 1979, Iranian militants stormed the U. They feared that it was only a matter of time before they were discovered by Iranian revolutionaries and likely killed, so they could not just arrive at Tehran's airport and reveal their American identities. Back in the United States, the CIA operative Tony Mendez came up with a plan to get the diplomats safely out of the country: Convince the Iranians that the diplomats were Canadian filmmakers who were in Iran scouting exotic locations for a sci-fi adventure movie along the lines of Star Wars. Although all of this sounds like a crazy premise cooked up by a screenwriter dreaming of a box office smash, the movie Argo (Heslov et al. Mendez first has to persuade the higher-ups in Washington to authorize and fund his rescue operation. He lays out the plan using strong arguments, describing the operation in detail and carefully explaining why it is the most promising idea considered so far. But they're not convinced because they are processing Mendez's message through the peripheral route to persuasion. Maybe they feel pressed for time, but they have difficulty getting past a simple heuristic: On the face of it, the idea of staging a fake movie sounds insane. Apathy can easily be mistaken for a lack of compassion, but many psychologists interpret it as quite the opposite. Apparent indifference or dissociation often serves to mask a person's feelings of helplessness.

Apathy is produced as a response to feeling powerless in the face of political realities we cannot control. Apathy stems from fear and a lack of capacity to tackle what seems like an insurmountable task. When we believe nothing will change for the better, then any positive action can feel useless or pointless. So if the students in Carrie's class already know about climate change (which, according to research, it's pretty well guaranteed they do), and if they keep being slammed with examples of how unjust it is or how little society is doing to correct it, her lessons may unintentionally create the apathy she is trying to cure. There is a worrisome connection between apathy and cynicism. People who fall prey to apathy then may end up transforming their original political frustrations into longer-lasting expressions of skepticism, cynicism, and mistrust. Indeed, you don't have to look far to see this happening writ large. A rise in cynicism and drop in trust Some medications are for emergencies only such as when you are actively panicking. As for which are right for you, that is definitely something that you should talk to a psychiatrist about. Psychiatrists are medical doctors that specialize in psychiatric medication. Your primary care can certainly write you a prescription for some anti-anxiety medication, but these particular types of medications can be a bit tricky to dial in. If you have access to a psychiatrist, I would definitely suggest talking to one. My opinion about medication is that it doesn't solve any problems for you. A pill will not make the issues that create anxiety for you disappear. That said, I think that medication can be invaluable in its ability to help you cope with the crushing pressure of anxiety that sometimes makes it so damn difficult to find solutions on your own. Basically, the long term medications (non-emergency) help to bring your baseline level of anxiety and reactivity down to a point that you can focus on learning good coping skills in therapy or through your own problem solving. On that note, I also want to say that I definitely suggest taking advantage of both therapy and psychopharmaceutical (drug) treatment if you decide to try out medication. Eventually Mendez gets the green light and works with the Hollywood makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and the producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) to set up a phony movie-production company with the pretense of developing a sci-fi flick called Argo. If they are going to convince the Iranians that they are making a Hollywood movie, they need all the trappings of a film crew on a scouting mission, including a glossy poster, a script and storyboards, press releases, and an office phone if and when the Iranians decide to check things out (which they do).

With all of these peripheral cues to back up their story, they create a convincing cover for the trip. The next group that needs to be persuaded is the people whose lives are on the line. Posing as Argo's producer, Mendez meets the diplomats who are in hiding and provides them with Canadian passports and fake identities. But he also gives them a crash course in the film industry and Canadian citizenship. After all, if they have any chance of making it past the authorities and getting on the plane, they need to play their roles convincingly. But they too are skeptical of Mendez's scheme and reluctant to go along with it. At first Mendez tries to persuade them by presenting himself as a trustworthy source, a powerful peripheral cue when audiences take the peripheral route. But the diplomats aren't processing information peripherally. Pessimism and cynicism are on the rise in many countries, according to Our World in Data, a research project based at the University of Oxford that analyzes big data trends. Meanwhile, feelings of trust are plummeting. The Edelman Trust Barometer measures levels of trust in business, media, government, and nongovernmental organizations. In 2017, the barometer revealed a global implosion of trust. In nearly two-thirds of the twenty-eight countries surveyed, the general population did not trust these four social institutions to do what is right. We're rapidly shifting from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Cynicism. People trust each other less in the US today than forty years ago. Indeed, the US ranked the lowest in the most recent barometer reading, positioning it as the country with the least-trusting informed public. Decline in trust between Americans is coupled with a reduction in trust in their government, which, according to the Pew Research Center, is at historically low levels. Not surprisingly, trust is actively undermined by fake news and gaslighting. With few exceptions, nobody wants you to be on medication for anxiety for the rest of your life. The point is to help raise you up while you build your own emotional scaffolding underneath.

That way, if at some point, you feel like you have made progress and want to try this shit out on your own, that scaffolding that you built in the form of skills, knowledge, and perspective will hold you up when that medication support is taken out from underneath you. This article doesn't have a particular therapeutic basis or massive research backing it up. This is the freestyle section where I get to geek out and tell you how freaking amped I am for you to get out there and do this damn thing. No, seriously. I wish you could see how fast my fingers are typing right now. You are all coming from different backgrounds with different attitudes and different levels of readiness for change. When you picked up this article, you might already have been amped like me. Maybe you were curious but skeptical. The outcome of what happens is incredibly relevant to them, and that elicits central-route processing. Shifting gears, Mendez takes the time to deliver a strong argument for why they should trust him. He reveals his true identity and describes his training and his record of successful rescue missions. He also reminds them that he is risking his own life, too. He knows that the source of a message can gain credibility by being perceived as having nothing to gain by deception or manipulation. His willingness to risk his own life is evidence that he firmly believes that the plan can work, and the diplomats begin getting into character. In the movie's suspenseful climax, we watch the film crew slowly making their way through security checkpoints in Tehran's airport. Gun-toting Iranian soldiers suspect them of being American and lock them in a room to interrogate them just as their flight is boarding. The soldiers have very strong initial attitudes of mistrust toward Americans, in large part because of being repeatedly exposed to this message by revolutionaries who give impassioned speeches on America as the enemy of Iran. As the tensions rise in the interrogation room, one of the diplomats steps in and tries a new persuasive strategy. Gaslighting is when someone manipulates the facts so often, it leaves you second-guessing your reality. It causes you to question your own judgment.