Anxiety, choice and information hygiene

a brief look at what to think about

This was twenty-four years before Prozac. I was in fourth grade and I had anxiety. Trouble falling asleep. My parents made an appointment for me to see Dr Flaherty. I remember only a few details from the visit. In retrospect, I remember him as a rounder Irish version of Carl Jung. I took a Rorschach Test. He prescribed a green liquid (or was it red?) to take before bed. And I remember this one thought experiment he talked me through. Something like this: You are walking through the woods on a path. You notice ahead of you is a long smooth shape across the path. It looks like a snake. What do you do? (I stop.) Why? (Because it might be dangerous.) How do you feel? (Scared, I guess.) But you look closer and see it’s not a snake. It’s a smooth, curved stick.

The point of the exercise was this: How you feel is a function of how you think. The practice of thinking about thinking had just been introduced to my little nine-year-old mind.

I would encounter this truth twenty-eight years later in Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism (1990) where he illustrates how thoughts affect feelings. If you believe crossing a street is dangerous, you will feel anxious at the cross-walk. On the other hand, if you believe crossing a street can be dangerous, and that being alert and looking left and right is enormously helpful, then you will feel more confident, less anxious. 

more confident, less anxious

David Foster Wallace gave one of the finest college commencement addresses ever at Kenyon College in 2005. He challenged the platitude that the purpose of a college education is to teach people how to think:

“The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.”

He talks about the “default setting” of human consciousness—we all tend to center the world around ourselves and our experiences—and contrasts this to the choice we have about what to pay attention to. One example is food-shopping at the end of a long workday. You are hungry and tired and just want to get home, and everyone else around you is just in your way, making you impatient and maybe angry. This is a default self-orientation: “certainty that situations like this are really all about me.”

“As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.”

Personal intentional choice. In the recording of this address he pauses after this phrase, just long enough to let the whole idea sink in. And every time I read the transcript or watch the YouTube video, it sinks in again and the question rises before me: If how I feel is a function of thinking, then how and what I think about takes on a vital significance for emotional health.

In a recent conversation with my daughter Molly about truth-seeking, she alluded to the term “information hygiene” and shared with me a link to a lecture on the topic by Damon P-Sasi, a family therapist active in the rationalist community. He compares the spread of infectious disease to the spread of untruths. Memes, he explains, are ideas that propagate in the mediasphere, sometimes in spite of truth and logic. Such memes are “sticky”– likely to be remembered and held onto, and likely to be shared (spread) to others because of their attachment to strong emotions, such as fear and anger. 

So, as we each think about our role in containing the spread of unverified information, it is worth asking as Damon P-Sasi does: 

“What are the weak points in our idea immune systems?”

Taken together, all these people — Dr. Flaherty, Martin Seligman, David Foster Wallace, Damon P-Sasi — shine a light on the discipline and sometimes hard work required to be alive to the struggle for truth. Maybe the forces at work in the media trying to wrest our attention and trigger our stronger emotions are just very persistent, strong, and getting stronger. But I guess I have always held from an early age that the first and the most persistent struggle — and maybe the most potent and sacred — is to know what I believe, to strive for a bigger picture, and to watch for the times I see a snake when there isn’t one.

Or fail to see one that is, for that matter.

No snake and no stick