Our Anxious Culture Triggers For Anxiety Summary

The article Our Anxious Culture: Triggers for Anxiety by Richard Restak, discusses how anxiety affects our culture in the sense of how we choose and perceive many things around us. I found many of the topics Restak brings up very interesting and although when reading this the topics seem obvious, such as a hindsight bias, I did not think about them before reading the article. One of the topics I found interesting and seemed to correlate with all other topics brought up was the media and what they choose to talk about and how they choose to talk about it. Restak discusses how anxiety impacts us greatly through the media. By doing this the media achieves much more ratings because we become tuned into our anxiety and fear than anything else. I learned from this, the media has a large
influence on many things around us by just simply stimulating our anxiety about things. Such as home safety, choices of travel, ways of traveling, heath risks, consumer goods, opinions of places and the people who inhabit them, and many more. The media does this by talking about certain things in certain ways and creating a certain opinion in the viewer/reader/audience. If the media talks about a major situation in a certain area and only talks about that certain area once just because of that situation, many of the audience will think a situation like that happens often in that area. This ties together with another topic Restak discuses, specifically risk perception and risk tolerance.
When Restak brings perception and tolerance up, he mentions people will think of something in the same way it is was talked about.
For example, when media talked about the situation that happened in Ferguson, many outside of Ferguson saw on the media, riots, violence, more death, etc. The media did not portray any good news about Ferguson during that time. This is a good example of risk perception because the audience of the media is only seeing the bad things about Ferguson, giving people who know little to nothing about Ferguson only one bit of information to go off of, that Ferguson is dangerous. However, in the other topic, risk tolerance, Restak discusses tolerance as the ability to look beyond the perception being given by the media and making a rational choice. When you watch the television and a commercial, a television show or even the news talks about a product, they will either state how you might legitimately need the product or your life will be much easier and better with the product. When Restak talks about risk tolerance, he defines it as the ability to not get lost or influenced to buy something simply because of the nice words presented in the
media.
When addressing the risk tolerance, I found it interesting the article talked about optimum level and how when trying to get their product sold, people will try to find the right amount of anxiety to influence the audience to not be too scared to go outside and also feel the necessity to have the product. It because noticeable to me when I would see an advertisement with music playing in the background. For example the ever so famous rescue animal shelter commercials. The music in it is pretty sad, making the viewer sad as well, this music along with the message being sent to viewers about a problem and a way to help fix it will encourage viewers to do something about it because they will think if the problem gets solved then their sadness goes away too. I found it interesting, when it comes to optimal levels, the media will try to affect a viewer’s emotions as well as their anxiety to encourage those with little to no anxiety.