As promised, today we are going to discuss the Hiddushim from the annual Torah U’ Mesorah Conference I attended this past May.
One of the presenters was Dr. David Rosmarin, a religious Jew as well as a prestigious and highly respected professor at Harvard’s McLean Center for Spiritual and Religious Healing. He has proven to the secular world that religion is the best way to cope with anxiety. This is a big Hiddush in the academic non-religious world of Harvard. He published a book about this topic and has conducted many studies that have been embraced by the academia. For example, he has data that shows that if a person goes to a house of worship twice a week, his anxiety decreases by a certain percentage.
His biggest Hiddush at that conference, though, came in his opening remarks:
He explained, firstly, that we are currently in the era of anxiety. In the US, we spend 1.3 billion dollars on medications to alleviate pain (Tylenol, Aspirin, Advil etc) and about 3 billion dollars for anxiety medications.
So there is a lot of money being spent on avoiding anxiety and pain.
Secondly, he pointed out that the United States should be the least anxious nation in the world. There is no one amongst us that lacks running water. Most of us have been on an airplane and have probably recently spoken to someone in another time zone. We have more luxuries and abilities than previous generations, yet we have more anxiety than ever before. Why the paradox?
He explains that the Yesod/ foundation of anxiety is that people don’t like uncertainty. The less we can tolerate it, the more anxious we get. And conversely, those who can tolerate more uncertainty end up less anxious.
Exposure therapy works on this principle.
The most effective way to overcome fear is to face it. If you have a fear of dogs and avoid them at all costs, you can’t ever overcome the fear. But once you’re exposed to dogs, you see that they’re safe. You let one crawl on you, you hug the dog and you start to lose that fear. After exposure to an item that is feared, anxiety decreases. This process, called exposure therapy, is what therapists do with people to eliminate their fears. If someone is afraid of spiders, they slowly expose the person to spiders, until eventually spiders are crawling all over the person and the fear is gone.
But thanks to technology, we have trained ourselves to avoid uncertainty. Which drives up our anxiety.
A few examples:
-When we get up in the morning, it’s chilly. In years past, we’d wear a sweater and hope for the best, not knowing what would happen later. And we’d manage. Nowadays we have weather apps- we try to know the weather for the entire day. And we try to avoid the uncertainty in that. Then if the weather changes suddenly, we are caught off guard.
-Traveling: we used to get in the car, ask people for directions, and figure it out. Now we have waze and other apps that tell when to go, where to go, and avoid the uncertainty of travel.
-Predictions in the stock market, in the political arena etc. also help us avoid the unknown.. We are constantly making predictions and thus avoiding uncertainty. So when it comes, we can’t handle it. The more you avoid something, the worse the fear gets. We have avoided uncertainty so much that we can’t handle it any more. When the weather changes we get nervous, when we travel and have unexpected delays we get nervous...
We are constantly avoiding uncertainty.
-And in the new era, our children, from the age of six, must have cell phones. We have gotten used to knowing exactly where they are at all times of the day. And the more we rely on the phones to tell us where the kids are, the crazier we get when they don’t answer us.
The antidote, he says, is to give up control and realize Hashem is in charge of your life. When we realize that we have no control and we never will- that’s the answer to anxiety.
We have to embrace the uncertainty- which is actually the certainty that we aren’t in control- Hashem is. We don’t know where we are going or what’s going to happen and that’s okay! Hashem is in control.
The more we live life like this, the less anxious we’ll be.