Posted by Noa on November 27, 2001, at 15:58:44
In reply to Re: What is Anxiety?, posted by benzapp on November 26, 2001, at 18:59:44
> Whether I claim to be a doctor or not is irrelevant, because you have no way of determining the truth to my statement.
Yes, but people will take your statements as more credible if you can cite a source.
> Yes, what I am saying is that there is no such thing as an anxiety attack.
I am not sure why you conclude this.
>he issue here is anxiety is a normal and necessary aspect of our physiology.
Yes, but there is the issue of degree. Cell division is normal and necessary and yet cancer, which, as I understand it, is the unchecked rapid division of cells, is not normal, for example.
>All mammals experience it, and it has many evolutionary benefits.
Yes, but, as you mentioned earlier, we no longer live in the kind of extreme environments necessitating the acute stress response that mammals need to survive. And, our ability to reproduce does not depend directly on our ability to use the acute stress response to outrun a predator, for example. Perhaps an analogous phenomenon is wisdom teeth. Normal,yes. Evolutionary benefit, I'm sure. Adaptive to us? Not always. In fact, they cause distress to many and need medical intervention. Unless we can grow our jaws...At the moment, the orthodontic technology to increase the size of our palates is still new, as far as I know. So for many of us, there are pain releivers and extraction.
>Anxiety is a powerful motivator, focusing us on things that keep us alive.
True, when it is in adaptive proportion, but it can also be incredibly immobilizing when in more intense proportions.
>Go to a third world country, where people spend 12 hours a day tilling the soil for their family, spending their free time sleeping, and you will not find anyone suffering from anxiety.
How do you know this to be so?
I don't know how the person in the third world country feels, but it is quite plausible to me that an alternative hypothesis would be true. Although having acute survival stress is better matched to our innate stress response, I am not sure that the situation you describe is acute and short lived enough to fit the bill. Our evolved stress response (see Sapolski, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers") is for acute, intense, but short lived stress--cortisol mobilizes the energy to outrun your prey or preditor, for example. But that energy peters out quickly. The zebra or lion cannot sustain the intense survival response for more than a few minutes at a time, and then need to recover. So, the prolonged poverty of the person in the third world country may be very different. Sapolsky's thesis is basically that because we humans have prolonged, chronic stress, rather than the immediate, acute, intense, short lived spurts of stress (like the lion and zebra), the stress reaction built in to our systems is not well-suited and actually causes damage.
>It is simply illogical to think there is something unique to the physiology of white, middle class women that predisposes them to anxiety.
Again, I find this to be an extraordinary statement. What makes you think anxiety is unique to white middle class women?
poster:Noa
thread:84880
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20011123/msgs/85325.html