A nation under stress



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On Monday night, the documentary "One Nation Under Stress" by HBO was broadcast. We can only hope that he will receive the same attention as Elizabeth Holmes 'incongruous baritone when Theranos' documentary "The Inventor" was released a week ago.

The film was presented as a mystery that the doctor Sanjay Gupta, a playful detective who takes us around the dystopian hysterical landscape, decaying factories and snow-swept gray forests, is getting ready: why hope? America's life declined in consecutive years, the largest decline since 1915-1918, a period of war and pandemic? The most obvious answer was the premature death due to alcoholism, opioid addiction and suicide, the triad being known as the "death of despair", but why do so many people despair?

The answer, the villain who is so desperate is given in the title of the documentary – imagine Hitchbad calling his masterpiece Norman the psychopath-is stress, the relentless stress that the brain can not handle. With repeated exposure to stress, the most advanced part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, begins to fade, leading to poor decisions, while the reptilian brain, the amygdala, becomes stronger. Rage rooms thrive on the reptilian brain, but expressing anger by crushing Grandfather's mug with a baseball bat does more to feed the reptile than to calm the urge to destroy.

The community can act as a buffer against stress, but social bonds dissolve when we need them most, the gap of connections filled by social media, a mediocre substitute for real human contact that adds to despair with descriptions of lifestyles inaccessible to many.

What do we have to do?

The documentary offers promising remedies such as exercise, meditation and baboons who would prefer to groom other baboons than to fight. But Angela Glbad, a nurse in Victoria, Texas, who became addicted to opioids who turned her into a hollow, fragile shell and urged her to consider suicide, is the hero of the transformation of documentary that kills the dragon of stress. We see Angela going into rehab, sobbing and unsure of recovery, and emerge a year later, a new woman, rounded face, shiny hair, sparkling smile. It is a remarkable metamorphosis.

"I found it ridiculous that the instructor came in and told me to sit in your chair and relax and take ten deep breaths." In the middle, it was as if I was waiting, it works … "~ Angela Glbad

In an interview in support of the film, Dr. Gupta was asked to point out something that everyone can do to reduce stress. His response, based on the idea that much of the stress lies in our feeling that we lack control over what is happening in our lives, is that each of us can say, "This is my time today It's my time, five years, ten, fifteen minutes to do something right for me and my brain, to reinforce what stress has weakened.

Maybe a stress-stricken nation can become a nation taking ten deep breaths.

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