The fastest-spreading contagion known to humankind swept through Britain this
week, causing raised blood pressure, spiralling stress-hormone levels and
rash economic actions galore. The contagion is an outbreak of mass panicked
anxiety. Bank failures, credit crises and rollercoaster stock prices have
piled on top of our worries about food and fuel costs, but heart-gripping,
mind-spinning fear - the sort that has sent record numbers seeking
psycho-therapy - is something we can catch from each other like a virus. For
centuries, such epidemics have caused panic and economic plunges. But
studies show that the fear can be forestalled.
Worry is only natural in the circum-stances, but our primitive fear-driven
flock instincts are to blame for spreading social anxiety and severe unease.
Philip Corr, a professor of psychology at the school of human sciences at
Swansea University, cautions that doubt and instability are among the worst
causes: “Uncertainty is more difficult to deal with than bad news. If you
lose your house, your job, it's tragic, but then you have a concrete problem
to address,” he says. “If you are faced with higher interest rates, large
fuel bills, rising food costs and the worry of what is going to happen in
the next few months - that can have a catastrophic effect on people.”
We swap doses of worry with each other
The sense of fear grows because we swap ever larger doses of worry with each
other. The human brain spots fearful expressions faster than any other
emotion, says a Vanderbilt University study, in which a dozen participants
studied photos of scared, neutral and happy faces. The volunteers
consciously recognised fearful expressions a half-second quicker than other
images. Unconsciously we react even faster: the amygdala - the brain's
anxiety centre - spots signs of fear in less than two-hundredths of a
second. Historically, we've had to stay alert to others' anxiety in case it
meant that something nasty was lurking in the grass, says Randolph Blake, a
co-author of the Vanderbilt study.
We can even smell each other's fear, reports a Rutgers University study in
Perceptual And Motor Skills, which asked men to wear absorbent pads while
watching clips from a funny and a scary movie. The pads were put in jars and
presented along with neutral control pads. More than three-quarters of the
women and more than half the men were able consciously to identify the smell
of fearful men.
Thus worry ripples through a crowd in a manner called “emotional contagion”.
At this point, things can rapidly spiral. As Daniel Goleman, the author of
Emotional Intelligence, explains, the presence of anxiety heightens the
intensity of people's emotional interactions so that those who feel
threatened and anxious are especially prone to catching other people's
anxiety and then passing on more of it. From here on, shrill words of
reassurance from rattled politicians may prove as self-defeating as Corporal
Jones's cries of, “Don't panic! Don't panic!”
We've seen such intense emotions driving the stock market this past week,
where one day the FTSE 100 plunges, the next it strongly recovers. Such
behaviour accords to “the law of patterned herding”, says Robert Prechter,
the director of the Socionomics Institute, in Georgia, and a pioneer in the
emerging field known as neuroeconomics.
He reports in The Journal of Behavioral Finance that when faced with volatile
markets, even the most adventurous investors head for safety in numbers,
thanks to their unconscious herding impulses. When a stock's price rises,
demand tends to increase, but when prices are low few people want to buy, he
says, but this is the opposite of what happens in the grocer's shop. It also
contradicts the economic theory of what is supposed to happen in stock
markets, where the best way to make money is to buy low and sell high.
Bernard Baruch, the legendary Wall Street stock trader of the early 1900s,
understood this phenomenon well. “All economic movements, by their very
nature, are motivated by crowd psychology,” he declared. In the Great
Depression, Baruch advised President Roosevelt to use the theory of mental
contagion to change the course of panicked public feeling. Roosevelt
conducted relaxed fireside radio talks to allay public anxiety, which
included his famous statement: “You have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
The human herd's habit of sparking collective investment frenzies was first
spotted more than 150 years ago by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in
his seminal work on crowd psychology, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He wrote it “to show how easily the
masses have been led astray”. Mackay's many examples of our sheep-flocking
side include the outbreak of tulipomania in 1624. The human herd mentality
even gets us marching in step. Shortly after the Millennium Bridge, the
futuristic City of London span, opened in 2000, it had to be shut because it
had begun wobbling violently. The designers had not expected pedestrian
bridge-users to synchronise their footsteps subconsciously.
More of us are seeking psychological help
The economic wobble has sent thousands heading for psychological help, with
organisations such as the Priory Hospitals group reporting rises in patient
numbers of up to 40 per cent. Phillip Hodson, a spokesman for the British
Association for Counselling and Psycho-therapy, says: “Our members who work
in corporate employee-assistance programmes report unprecedented numbers of
workers contacting them with worries about money,” he says. But it's not all
negative, he adds. “Some people are using the credit crunch as an
opportunity to review their lives; they're asking whether they want to
change direction and go for quality of life.”
How will today's thirtysomethings cope with unheralded anxiety after years of
good economic news? The sociologist Steven Stack cautions that charmed
youths often grow up lacking a crucial psychological resource - resilience.
In a report in the Journal of Social Psychology, he found that short men are
far less likely to commit suicide than tall guys. This, Stack says, is
because shorties develop psychological defence skills to handle bullies. By
contrast, he says, people who enjoyed adversity-free upbringings can get
derailed by setbacks later on because they have never learnt to deal with
them.
Hodson, however, is more optimistic about the younger generation. “The initial
shock of a new economic landscape might well be great for them, but they
tend to be a devious bunch. They have used their collective might and
knowledge of downloads to get free records out of the music industry and
they have proved creative in ensuring that their lives are comfortable,” he
says. “I think their skills will make them surprisingly resilient.” And, who
knows, perhaps you can't catch panic from surfing social networking sites.
How to stay calm
Studies show how constant anxiety causes constantly raised levels of the
stress hormone, cortisol, and that prolonged exposure to cortisol raises the
risk of developing depression. One key to fending off anxiety is to develop
resilience skills, such as the following:
Get physical If you feel yourself physically contracting a bad case of
social panic, mind-body methods can help you to cope. Techniques such as
meditation, deep breathing, yoga or exercise can be used to calm the body,
so the fight-or-flight response will switch off sooner.
Stay curious In times of stress, it can feel instinctively right to
hunker down and resist risky changes. But Al Siebert, the director of the
Resiliency Centre, in Oregon, says the opposite works best. “Highly
resilient people continually learn new ways of doing things and frequently
change how they interact with their circumstances. The least resilient
people drift into a calcified condition where they try to avoid change and
new experiences.”
Keep a gratitude journal It may sound sappy, but keeping a record of
the things in your day that bring joy and gratitude can prove an effective
way to break the worried brain's habit of fixating only on stress- inducing
things that have gone wrong or which might go awry. To see an expert
gratitude-spotter at work, visit www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com
Build your community A host of studies has found that people who are
involved with church or other religious communities have higher levels of
resilience against life's knocks. That could be evidence of a beneficent
deity at work, but researchers tend to agree that what often helps people to
cope is their strong sense of community, spiritual or otherwise.
John Naish has won the IVCA Clarion Award for ethical book of the year for
Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
