Catastrophized Seaweed!

Catastrophize: To regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic.

I'm doing a lot of reading about anxiety and by "anxiety" I mean "my anxiety" and by "my anxiety" I mean "anything and everything that has to do about me."  Normally someone would follow this sentence up with a "But seriously . . . " lead-in but my comment is really pretty serious.  Factually true.  The point is that I like to be informed about my topics.  It's the Germanesque scientist in me.  Show me the facts, please.

One of the words I ran across was "catastrophizing" which is an excellent word even though it sounds made up to me.  It sounds like something that dicey mole on your calf suddenly starts to do: "Whoa.  That dude is catastrophizing - you better get it checked out."   Or maybe as a footnote in a drug overdose blurb: "After a long night of catastrophizing the teen was found unresponsive in a dumpster behind a Pollo Loco restaurant."

I've narrowed everything down to this: I spend a lot of time thinking.  About myself.  There is nothing I have that couldn't be cured by a head-ectomy.  Lop it off; toss it in the dumpster next to the unresponsive teen who is no doubt lying in a mess of chicken bones; allow the headless Seaweed to stagger around.  Definitely a better outcome.

I am curious about the intensity of my preoccupation with my health especially since I would characterize it as excellent.  My health, that is - not my preoccupation with my health which I would characterize as malevolent.  Maybe I'm afraid of dying.  But I don't think I'm afraid of dying.  I'm afraid of pain, that's for sure.  No doubt about that.  I don't have a ton of regrets about my life and I have some sense of comfort about What Comes Next.

I think anxiety is a construct of modern man.  Our forebears were frequently afraid and with good reason - 30 to 40 million people died of the flu, for chrissake, and only 100 years ago.  But most of us are never going to be put in a situation where we're existentially afraid for our lives so we come up with implausible shit to worry about.  The problem is that all of the automatic physiological responses that have evolved in our bodies to help prepare us to fight or run like hell still come out in the same way.  So if I think I ate a bug in my ice cream cone my body produces a reaction that would be more appropriate if I were being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or Attila The Hun.

Fear is a reaction to something real - anxiety is a reaction to something that may be real.  Or not.  Probably not.

I did some research on the history of psychotherapy as far as anxiety is concerned.  For the longest time it was something that was approached as a mental, emotional problem with the solution being analyzing and talking and listening.  Today the big drivers are the psychopharmacologists and the neurobiologists and I am not making either of those jobs up.  These are the scientists who try to break down anxiety into a series of chemical reactions and who believe the solution lies in chemicals to obstruct, change, or augment these reactions.

Guess who sponsors most of the conferences on anxiety treatment today?  The drug companies.  You betcha.