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
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