Category Archives: existentialism

Time Management is a Crock

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Have you ever thought about how absurd the phrase “time management” is?

I was just thinking about it and, as I am wont to do, was struck by the underlying semantic silliness of the what is to my mind yet another example of the ongoing corporatization of our lives. So, allow me to spend some time talking about time management.

The word “management” carries a heavy load of hierarchical business-like connotations. When applied in an employment context, it makes sense. Businesses have employees, and it’s often in their best interests (that being those interests that facilitate profitability) to manage those employees to varying extents. Management in this sense implies hierarchy and a vertical distribution of power, with a disproportionately large amount of said power lying in the hands of those closest to the top.

As a verb, “manage” has a few meanings: to control; to succeed in accomplishing something; to dominate or influence. There is an implication of mastery, of optimizing returns. From a purely semantic standpoint, this is an adversarial way of looking at things – constructs are reduced into two fundamentally different and opposing groups: the managers and the managed. Management becomes something that the manager does to the managed.

In an employment scenario, this can either work really well, or incredibly poorly. So much depends on the few people doing the managing.

But does it make sense to go around thinking we can actually manage our time? That we can assert our own mastery onto it and expect to have any sense of control? Continue reading →

Curiosity, and why we need more of it in our lives

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Therapy, when you think about it, is a rather unique relationship. In a short period of time therapists often will transition from being complete strangers to having clients sharing some very personal stories and feelings. When I began my training as a therapist one of the first ideas that was focused on was the importance of nurturing and maintaining an open curiosity within our sessions. In being curious we acknowledged how much was unknown to us about our clients’ lives and invited our clients to help us understand their perspective.

Since then I’ve found that the idea of curiosity has often been on my mind. Curiosity wasn’t something that I thought about much prior to that point however. When thinking of the qualities that an aspiring therapist needed to cultivate, it was qualities such as patience, understanding, or compassion that were talked about but curiosity…not so much. Especially when looking outside of the therapeutic context, curiosity isn’t often listed as at the top of people’s virtue lists.

In our society we praise people for being kind, or brave, or wise but not often for being curious. Curious George may be a loveable character for many people, myself included, but you don’t often hear people aspiring to be like him. Curiosity is sometimes highlighted as being one of the characteristics of the young but as much as we idealize youth, we are less likely to praise youthful traits later in life. Continue reading →

University, or Masquerade Ball?

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I’m feeling a little philosophic today, so I’ll ask: Just what is authenticity all about?

We’ve been talking about it at work in regards to job interviews, but it’s clear that the construct applies to a lot more than just that.  But it’s a slippery thing to try to define.  When applied to people, the best we can really do is provide a list of near-synonyms: genuine, real, veritable.  None of which are all that helpful.

It’s one of those qualities that tends to be more noticeable by its absence.  We usually know when a person is being inauthentic.  Even if we can’t quite put our fingers on it, we get a sneaking sense that something’s not quite, well… authentic!  Accordingly, the easiest way to define the word is in a negative fashion: “not false or copied.”

We generally make a big deal out of inauthenticity or fakeness.  Just picture the stereotypical, cliquey high school girl exclaiming, “she’s so FAKE” to her confidantes (or the whole internet, whatever).  Or the whole narrative of “finding yourself” and embracing independence that permeates adolescence.  But it goes beyond overused generalizations about high school.  If we get a sense that someone painting an incomplete or ‘false’ picture of themselves, we tend to go back on our heels no matter the circumstance. Continue reading →

Embracing Fear Makes For Better Decisions

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Scared child

Big decisions create fear

How do you make important decisions?

I’ve been reminded in my visits with students recently of the difficulty that can be a part of making big decisions.  I’ve also been reminded that when working with people struggling with a choice between two or more alternatives, each with clear benefits and drawbacks, it can be challenging to reign in the impulse to push for one direction or the other.  I can feel their stress, the tension, the anxiety, as a palpable presence in the room, as if it were an odour, and my first instinct is to do something to ease their discomfort.

All it would take is a few words: “This is the choice you should make.  This is what I think you should do.”  I want to take the heavy responsibility of their choice away.  I can almost see it, a weight hanging from their neck.  Just let me pick it up.

But I don’t.  In a professional helping context, I never have, and never will. Continue reading →

Academia vs. Students: Disconnected

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Something is very wrong.

Maybe it’s just the “what does it all mean?” question that I find myself asking from time to time, without being able to come up with a satisfactory answer.  Maybe it’s the existentialist in me coming out since I started reading R.D. Laing‘s The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (a gem of a find from United Way‘s recent used book sale).

Whatever it is, something is wrong.

*     *     *

For a long time, all I’ve really wanted to do with my career has been to help people.  So far, this has culminated in the pursuit of a Masters in Counselling Psychology, and of course, my work with Career Services as a Career Advisor.  Perhaps it’s my experiences in the latter that have created this dissonance that I’m currently feeling.  At least, dissonance seems to be the right word – there is something of a disconnect.  Let me make a clear statement right off the bat, though: I’ve loved this job and all of my colleagues here from the start and I think that we do fantastic and useful work everyday, a view that is fortunately often echoed by the students that we serve.

But I’m a big picture person.  Right now, the big picture that I’m concerned about is the institution of higher education.  Not SFU or any other specific university or college, but academia in all its nebulous, impersonal constitution.

via wikiversity.org

It’s almost unreal how many students I’ve been seeing recently who, in the early years of their bachelor’s degree, are so concerned with their prospects after graduation that they are functionally paralyzed: unable to make a decision about what to study for fear of choosing “the wrong path.”  To me, it’s quite disconcerting, as I know that there are many students out there toiling in disciplines that they really have no interest in or passion for, all for the sake of perceived employability at the end of the day.

Don’t get me wrong – the future of a given field is of course an important consideration when deciding on a field of study.  But is it the most important?  My answer is a 100% no.  It’s far more important to have interest and passion for your field, to feel that you are doing something personally meaningful, whatever form that may take.

By no means is this paralyzing concern the fault of students.  No, students are victims of a combination of systemic forces that are changing the face of higher education as we know it.  It used to be that people would go to university simply to pursue knowledge in a particular field.  To be on the cutting edge of new developments in research and critical thought.  To learn, for the simple reason that they wanted to learn.

More recently, this has begun to be displaced by a collective belief that the purpose of universities is career preparation, not learning for learning’s sake.  The way I see it, a number of factors are contributing to this development, but one stands out above the others.  Education as an institution is putting more and more pressure on students at earlier and earlier ages to answer the question: What are you going to do with your life?  What is your direction?

But who in their right mind can answer that question with certainty, even in the first years of post secondary education?  We are asking students to answer these questions without acknowledging that normal career development is heavily influenced by chance events – things that you can’t predict with any kind of accuracy.  That so many students cannot come up with an answer shouldn’t be a surprise.

So, we have a perception that universities are there to prepare us for our careers, and a reality that is somewhat different: Higher education is still as much about learning for learning’s sake as anything else.  The result?  Students feel like they were owed something that they didn’t get.  After so much work just to finish a degree in the first place, they don’t know how to translate the skills they crafted over years of academic exertion into a paycheck.

In the end, this is what a lot of the conversations in my office end up being about.

There may not be much that we can do to make systemic change happen quickly.  But students can try to embrace attitudes that will hopefully lessen the stress of picking the right career.  Know that it’s normal to feel lost or uncertain.  Know that, despite all the pressure that you’re feeling from many different areas of your life to settle on something right now, the vast majority of people end up doing something different than they thought they would be doing, and there’s no changing that.  Know that one of the best ways to help you succeed in your courses and get the most from your education is to study something that you care about.

There’s a lot of work to be done in transforming academia – indeed, education as a whole – into something that effectively balances the need to pursue knowledge and build general skills with the need to effectively train generations of happy and productive workers.  I sure don’t know what needs to be done, or if there is even an ultimate solution, but there are sharper minds than mine out there to address that issue.

For now, I’ll stick with what I enjoy most: helping people, even if one by one, in their struggles.
*This post is cross-posted at the Career Services Informer.

On Nothingness

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photo by Caity

Sleep is just one of “those” things.

It’s tied in to so much of our well being, that to notice how important it is to our daily functioning, all one has to do is go for a brief period where it’s hard to come by.

Besides studying counselling psychology, one of the things I do on the side is work as a casual/on-call staff in community homes around Vancouver for people diagnosed with severe mental illness.  The homes are staffed 24 hours a day, and I seem to be among the small percentage of casuals who don’t mind working overnight, so I often work the graveyard shift.  This is all well and good, and I really don’t mind working nights here and there, but sometimes the ramifications on my sleeping patterns can reverberate all the way through the week (i.e. if I could right now, I would be sleeping such that my 7 hour class starting tomorrow morning would be more bearable, but it’s just not meant to be).

Anyway, I was on a night shift on the weekend and I found myself looking up into the sky at about 3:30, 4:00 am.  It was muggy outside and there was a distinct purplish pink hue to the normally gray overcast clouds.  And there was a moment of beautiful urban silence.  Like time slowed and the rest of the world had truly gone to sleep, leaving me alone standing in a backyard in the middle of a vast sprawling city.  I’m not sure how long it was before the sound of traffic shattered my reverie.  It was probably only moments.

The thing that I kept thinking about as I stood there looking up into the empty purple sky was nothingness.  How immensely vast the atmosphere is, the planet is, solar system, universe.  How there is no way to conceptualize this kind of space and emptiness!  How truly surprising, inspiring, and revolting the things that we’ve accomplished in spite of this crushing unknown.  The vanity of our attempts to reduce or explain it down to a level that is supposedly comforting and relatable… the mythologies, the religions…

But the irony of my experience that night is that the most salient feeling I had was one of comfort.  I’ve felt this before when looking up into the sky on clear nights, contemplating the stars and wondering, after their light has travelled for millions of light years, whether they even still exist.  Knowing that in this perspective, I am less than a speck in space and time.  I could understand how this might be an overwhelming feeling of being lost, without meaning, for some.  But for me it’s always been a comforting experience.  A spiritual experience.  To know that there really is nothingness all around.  To embrace it, without pushing it away or belittling it.  To be lost, and to not care.

It makes what we have in our meagre lives seem a lot more… human.

Now, if only I could get some sleep.

One thing I always say about anxiety

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For quite some time, and likely still, the “common cold” of mental health seemed to be depression.  Statistics are hovering around the 1 in 10 mark for experiencing a depressive episode in one’s lifetime, with men being the more likely gender to suffer it.  Keeping in mind, of course, that these are only reported cases in which a diagnosis was given.  If we acknowledge that in a lot of cases a depressive episode will go unreported and undiagnosed, that number goes up a significant amount.  I would guess that it doubles at least.

But this is not a post about depression.

I recently decided to go through the list of people that I’ve seen in the last 8 months and tally up the “presenting concerns.”  The issue at the top of the list, unsurprisingly, was our common cold – depression (incidentally, only a small fraction of these people had a diagnosed ‘disorder’ such major depressive disorder – though many met the criteria).  But coming up at a close second was another issue that has been, in my view, becoming more and more prevalent: anxiety.

It’s not always easy to separate the two.  In fact, in the DSM-V, they are flirting with creating a new diagnostic category called mixed anxiety depression because the two so often play together.

In any case, if I were to count the number of issues of my clients without limiting it to one issue per client, I’m confident that anxiety would be at the top of the list.  It’s just something that accompanies other problems.  And there’s good reason for that, which I’ll get into shortly.

Now, I’m not too big a fan of the manualization of therapy.  I like to think that each individual person that I sit with has a unique life situation and that there are many equally valid ways of resolving whatever distress they are going through, and that we have to work to find out which way is going to be the most productive.  I have a problem with pretending to know exactly what is required to do to ‘fix’ a person before I even know anything about them.

However, when it comes to anxiety (and perhaps more specifically, panic), there’s come to be one thing that I ALWAYS do, and it couldn’t be simpler.  It takes 5 minutes.  It’s so simple that I’m going to do it with you, right now, because I know that you’ve experienced anxiety before and that this might be new information for you.  But that’s all it is: information.  So, without further ado, I present to you…

A Brief Discussion on the Physiological/Evolutionary Nature of Anxiety
with illustration!

At some point in our evolutionary history, the fact that some folks had something that we now call the ‘autonomic nervous system’ became somewhat of a survival advantage.  You see, this nifty gifty had  two sub-systems: one called the sympathetic and one called the parasympathetic nervous system.  The former had this neat function where it got us really pumped up in response to some kind of threat in our environment.  Maybe a poisonous snake crossed your path, maybe some pre-historic douche-canoe was making moves on a certain female member of the species that you wouldn’t mind impregnating.  In any case, a threat is detected.  This is where the sympathetic nervous system decides to step in and do its thing.  Suddenly, more blood starts pumping out to your arm and leg muscles, your heart rate doubles, breathing becomes fast and shallow, and your pupils dilate, and all sorts of chemical changes start happening.  In a split second, you are literally stronger, faster, and more alert.  Now, you have much more capacity with which to either flee the threat or engage it physically.  This is what is more popularly known as the fight/flight response.

This is all well and good.  Obviously this all developed over generations and the process of evolution refined it to be what it is today.  But as with so many traits that allowed us to survive in an ancestral environment, it doesn’t always function with the same level of effectiveness in our lives today.  The simple fact of the matter is that, for the more fortunate of us, we don’t live life surrounded by the possibility of constant threats to our survival.

So, for those of us who don’t have problems with anxiety or panic, this system tends to be well-regulated most of the time.  Every now and then a legitimate threat is perceived and you’ll get that response happening, but most of the time, when faced with normal everyday stimuli, nothing happens.

When we start talking about anxiety, and particularly with panic attacks, what effectively has happened is that the sympathetic nervous system’s threshold has been lowered way down.  It’s been over-sensitized for some reason (which obviously varies depending on one’s history – in the case of trauma there is very good reason for this).  But the point is that there is a natural, physiological process that is happening – one that was well-developed back when our ancestors didn’t have the cognitive abilities that we now possess in order to make logical sense of the the world around us.

So, when someone with social anxiety begins to have a panic attack when forced to interact in a group, we (and they) can easily come to the conclusion that it just doesn’t make any sense for that to happen – nothing bad is going to come out of it and there is no logical reason to become anxious.  But on a deeper level, this system that’s basically been told to go into red alert status starts going off the rails.

So what about this other subsystem of the autonomic nervous system – the parasympathetic one?  This one is actually responsible for the exact opposite function of its sister – it calms us down when a threat is no longer present.  Our blood begins to flow back to our core, heart rate slows, pupils return to normal size, breathing slows, and all sorts of chemical changes happen.  It’s no longer adaptive to be hyper-vigilant and ready to spring at the drop of a pin.  And this is also the system that has to start kicking in when maladaptive anxiety is starting to cause panic.

It’s just not possible for both of these systems to be fired up at the same time.  You can’t be anxious and relaxed simultaneously.  And this is the bottom line of what I say to anxious people.  The beauty of it is that there is an incredibly simple way to kick-start the parasympathetic nervous system’s calming effects – it’s as simple as taking control of your breath.  Slow down your breathing, you slow down your heart rate, and just maybe, that gets some of the other processes going.

I find it to be a hopeful message.  It’s just a starting point, and it’s by no means the ideal, ultimate  solution to anxiety, but it is simple enough that it’s worth saying every time.