Tag: anxiety

Jacob Nordby

Rats in a Cage Experiment Breaks Our Ideas of What Causes Addictive Behavior

We created a society where significant numbers of us can’t bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping … We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for many of us, more like the first cage than the bonded, connected cages we need.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of it, is geared toward making us connect with things not people.

Jacob Nordby

The only sanity in a world gone mad

There’s a phrase you might have heard or thought quite a few times this year: “… in a world gone mad.”

If you’ve been awake at all, you’ve probably muttered something like this for at least several years.

But the world has always been mad. What’s going on right now just reveals a deep level of insanity that has always been there, seething beneath the surface of what we refer to as “normal.”

Jacob Nordby

Restoring Yourself: the life-giving cure for creative pneumonia

Using my metaphor of physical pneumonia as a comparison, many people are living their lives barely able to take a breath, creatively speaking.

Anxiety, pressures of socialization, fear of rejection, and reactions triggered by unresolved traumas fill the lungs of their creative body. This leaves them lethargic, full of self-doubt, lacking the sense of purpose or self-worth to move toward what they would love to create in life. Furthermore, many people believe that they lack the needed talent to produce something “rare, original, and valuable” with their lives.