https://youtu.be/2exAQi18wZ4?si=yqwxBqVjyrXOH8nV

READ IF - You’re interested in a super in depth analysis of how psychologically f**ked our modern situation is (with a few chapters at the end on what to do about it).

Dr. Gabor Mate is an MD specializing in addiction and healing of trauma. He explains what we’ve grown accustomed to as “normal” RE: cultural, economic, political, technological, and physical conditions — are actually profoundly abnormal. The mind-body system is inseparable from the broader systems we inhabit. The proliferation of unhealthy mind-body responses is actually an appropriate response to toxic conditions.

Lessons…

• Our modern child birthing norms evolved out of the industrialization and profit maximization of the medical system. The standard care serves to traumatize women and infants more than benefit them. He cites data to show how this natural process has been overly medicalized — search “C section overuse”.
• Trauma is essentially scar tissue of the nervous system. A damaging event leads to inflexibility and numbness just as a physical injury would.
• ADHD is more of a cognitive pattern than a “disease”. When we feel an overwhelming emotion at a young age that we cannot fight against or run away from, we default to tuning out. This tuning out pattern becomes subconscious and later in life, when we are averse to a task we may “tune out” unintentionally.
• Our society generates chronic mental stress which is passed into the body through the HPA axis. This manifests in chronic physical disorders — all of which are on the rise. There is clear scientific data that our modern world is wreaking havoc on mental and physical health.
• Addiction is a solution (albeit a poor one) to feeling disengaged from yourself. When something in you is cut off from feeling whole, some chemical or behavior makes you feel right again. Addiction is usually a coping mechanism for repression or depression from unprocessed traumas.
• “The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” — Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

I publish resources and tools to optimize for happiness at studyhappiness.blog and at *@jacksonkerchis on Youtube.*

Happiness PhD with Jackson K. | Jackson Kerchis | Substack

Jackson Kerchis