tal flanchraych

Most people I know have an unnaturally high amount of anxiety. But then again, most people I know are entrepreneurial or otherwise ambitious folks trying to make their mark and make their benjamins while working 60-hour weeks, being bombarded with information overload on steroids, and generally living an overwhelming, expensive, fast-paced life in New York City. Oh yeah, and they somehow still find the time to maintain alter egos in alternate dimensions such as the Twitterverse. No pressure. Naturally, these people befriend each other, date each other, and take out their ever-mounting stress on one another. 

If the human body ever had an instruction manual, it certainly did not anticipate the modern New Yorker. When natural selection was still relevant, our fight-or-flight response evolved so that in the rare case that you were faced with a threat to your life, such as a bear, your adrenaline would kick in and hopefully preclude you from doing something terribly dumb, like getting yourself killed. However, you did not spend the majority of your time fighting for your life; rather, you spent most of your waking hours picking berries, seeking out rodents for dinner, sitting around fires, and chillin’ in a cave with nothing to do. Rinse and repeat.

Now I don’t know about you, but I find that when work is extraordinarily stressful — which is most days — the prospect of being mauled by a grizzly seems rather comforting in comparison. When the subway is delayed, my panic is akin to that of a caveman running from hyenas. Every time I look at my unread email count, it’s like a dingo ate my baby.

Just like overdosing on Advil screws up your intestines, overdosing on adrenaline (which is released by stress and anxiety) screws up our nerves, but taking on this much stress is such an ingrained part of our lives, and frankly, many of us are addicted to it. Guilty as charged. Even though these lifestyles are increasingly becoming the norm — if they aren’t already — this doesn’t mean they are sustainable for most people. After all, as many as 18% of Americans suffer from some form of clinical anxiety disorder. Assuming that New Yorkers don’t skew higher than the average Joe when it comes to anxiety — which I highly doubt — that’s 1 out of 5 people that you know and I know. 

But I understand why people are embarrassed to talk about it. People who seek professional help for this kind of stuff are often just like me: ambitious, perfectionistic, proud, Type A. The kind of people who choose to take on more stress than their nervous system is biologically wired to handle. The type of people who would never talk about it, because we’re neurotic about everything including our pride, our egos, and our reputations, even though we’re more emotional than the norm underneath it all.

Anyway, the entire reason I started writing this post is to debunk a damaging myth about stress and anxiety that makes people ashamed to talk about it, or address it in their own lives: the perception that “it’s all in your head.” That you should be able to just snap out of it, that it won’t get worse over time if you feel that you have control over your thoughts. That anxiety is just a temporary inability to get your head straight or to keep your emotions in check.

Here’s the truth: unchecked anxiety causes damage to your parasympathetic nervous system, and a damaged parasympathetic nervous system only leads to increased anxiety (and in extreme cases, panic attacks and the like).

Even though clinical anxiety is classified as “mental illnesses,” the term is misleading, as the true culprit of anxiety is your parasympathetic nervous system. People with slight-to-moderate anxiety can cope or make small lifestyle changes — as your brain can certainly affect your nervous system’s behavior to an extent — but in moderate-to-severe anxiety, what we perceive as cowardice, mental weakness, etc. is actually malfunction on the part of your nervous system that your brain no longer has control over, because there’s been permanent damage. Oftentimes, this happens because your autonomic nervous system’s baseline level of anxiety gets higher and higher until your parasympathetic nervous system, which is supposed to calm you down, simply can’t handle the load anymore and goes haywire. (So I guess that makes anxiety meds the biological equivalent of load balancers). Sure, it might have been caused by years of anxious thinking, which is indeed “in your head” — but the same way anxiety can give someone an ulcer or aggravate heart disease, it can also just mess up your nervous system, which is unlike an appendix in that it happens to be one of the organs you need to survive.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to start talking about their stress levels with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. But for those of us that would benefit from the knowledge and support, it can be helpful to be more open with it around our friends and peers, and it can preclude a lifetime of future anxiety to realize that your stress levels can cause full-blown physiological disorders. 

And, um, apologies in advance for any increased anxiety that anxious people might experience after reading this blog post because they’ve become more anxious about their anxiety. 

I read a headline the other day about a drunk driver being convicted for murder and it got me thinking about the underlying factors prosecutors use in charging and sentencing criminals.

One thing that’s strange about the justice system in general is that you’re punished for results, not actions. You can beat someone on the head with a baseball bat and leave them for dead, but whether they happen to survive or not decides whether you serve a longer or shorter sentence (e.g. x years for murder vs. y years for attempted murder). If there is sufficient evidence of one’s intention, shouldn’t they be convicted based on the physical actions they took and what their goal was? It seems so arbitrary to say “Okay, Person A shot this guy in the head but they survived so s/he’ll serve 10 years, but Person B shot someone in the head and killed them so s/he’ll serve 30 years.” At that point, we’re tacking on years to a sentence just because Person B happened to have better aim. In such a case, I think that they both should serve time for murder because that’s what they intended.

That being said, sentencing based on intention is by no means the right way to do things universally. For example, say Person A and Person B both got into their respective vehicles when they were totally shitfaced and each of them hit another car driving equally fast. When Person A hit the car, which was a big SUV, it flipped over but only caused minor injuries. When Person B hit the car, which was a convertible, it flipped over and killed four people. Although both of them acted equally irresponsibly, there was no intention to kill by either party — Person B gets hit with a murder charge pretty much due to the make and model of the car they hit. From here you could form one of two opinions if you were working with the principle of equal actions leading to equal punishments: They should both receive a heavy punishment, since they placed themselves in situations that have a relatively high probability of resulting in someone’s death, or they should both receive light sentences since neither of them intended to kill. Neither of those two options sound quite right, do they?

Now, most people would immediately say that if they were a family member of one of the people who were killed, they would want “justice.” And understandably so! But is that a good enough reason to put someone away for 20 years because they made a dumb decision without bad intentions, or a good enough reason to not charge someone with murder because their aim was a little off? Maybe it is good enough reason. Maybe our justice system is in fact fair because even though it’s not always based off the actions involved in any particular crime, it is based proportionally on the estimated amount of suffering the crime inflicts on the victim’s loved ones? Although that seems to be only a single factor, it does make sense as a way to gauge severity of violent crimes, for example murder vs. attempted murder. I’m not saying I necessarily agree it’s the right way or the best way to sentence people, but it’s the only way for me to make sense of our justice system as it is currently.

Addendum: What about cases in which people who were killed broke the law too by behaving recklessly? For example, if no one was wearing seatbelts in the car Person B hit when s/he was drunk, and experts can prove they would
 have likely only had minor injuries otherwise, is it right to still sentence Person B the same way? I’m not sure myself.

I caved in. I created a blog just so talflanchraych.com would finally have something pretty to redirect to. However, when you blow $50 on a premium tumblr theme, you want to make sure that everything you write about is life changing, overly verbose, and — if you’re in my industry — includes some profound quote from Paul Graham or Guy Kawasaki. Until I can master that, I will post according to whimsy.

I went through a blog I wrote in college earlier today to remember what used to inspire me to write, only to find that my muses at the time were mainly craigslist, dirty wars, dirty hippies, and dirty laundry. Here is one excerpt:

Having no clean socks makes me think back to when I was living in New York with my parents before college. We had a sock-sharing system that generally went like this: I would always run out of socks because I was lazy about doing laundry. So I’d start wearing my mother’s socks, but since we both were wearing her socks they’d run out quickly. And then both my mother and I would start wearing my dad’s socks. And although the three of us were now all wearing socks from the same pile, they would never run out (My dad has unlimited socks — the only possible explanation is that they reproduce asexually whenever their population feels threatened). But eventually my mother would force me to do laundry and the cycle would start over again.

There are a few other gems from ye olde college blog that are appropriate enough to post — and a few others which will need to be censored beforehand. I’ll put them up another time.