The New York Times, Sunday Review – “Cognitive Therapy for the Country” – Richard Friedman
In Richard Freidman’s NYT op-ed he calls for President Obama to be our Cognitive Therapist in Chief.
Premise (not part of the article, but is at it’s core):
- The limbic brain runs the show (part that regulates emotion.
- The frontal lobe (our cognitively evolved brain) goes fuzzy in the face of fear.
Freidman points out the responsibility of our President to help the American people bring their thinking brains back online.
Fact: when fear is spiked (i.e., when we imagine falling in an airplane out of the sky, or being gunned down in a stadium) no logic permeates our impulse to self-protect.
We’re born with a nervous system that supports us to do something. It’s not challenging to see why we evolved that way…otherwise we could have been lunch to a saber tooth tiger. Yet, now we’re stuck in bodies that are primed to flee or battle. As we slog off to our daily routines, where does that powered-up life-saving energy go? To ruminating anxiety.