scholarly journals Releasing Anxiety

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Benjamin Snooks

<p>Being the most common mental disorder, anxiety is especially co-related with busy urban environments. The rise of urbanisation and modern technology has created a world that has significantly heightened our levels of stress and anxiety. In this context, our social responsibility and accountability as architects is increasing. How can we design with peoples’ health and wellbeing in mind? Through iterative design processes, I will create an emotional experience that connects the body with architecture, heightens the occupant’s self-awareness, and engages with site, creating a place of calm and belonging. Sensory design will be used to model the four levels of anxiety (mild, moderate, severe, panic level). The final design will create a narrative journey that stimulates a transition from anxiousness to calming.  The research proposition will be tested on a site located in a highly developed area on the corner of Elliott, Albert and Victoria Streets in Auckland’s business hub. This site was chosen not only for its central location but because it is the site of a new metro station (predicted to be the busiest station in the Auckland rail network) as well as a linear park connecting Victoria and Albert Parks. Together these infrastructural additions will increase pressure on an already over-stimulated environment. The station (Aotea station) will be incorporated into the design, creating an urban park that provides access from the concourse level to street level, drawing people up into a protected landscape area intended to relieve anxiety and provide a place of respite.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Benjamin Snooks

<p>Being the most common mental disorder, anxiety is especially co-related with busy urban environments. The rise of urbanisation and modern technology has created a world that has significantly heightened our levels of stress and anxiety. In this context, our social responsibility and accountability as architects is increasing. How can we design with peoples’ health and wellbeing in mind? Through iterative design processes, I will create an emotional experience that connects the body with architecture, heightens the occupant’s self-awareness, and engages with site, creating a place of calm and belonging. Sensory design will be used to model the four levels of anxiety (mild, moderate, severe, panic level). The final design will create a narrative journey that stimulates a transition from anxiousness to calming.  The research proposition will be tested on a site located in a highly developed area on the corner of Elliott, Albert and Victoria Streets in Auckland’s business hub. This site was chosen not only for its central location but because it is the site of a new metro station (predicted to be the busiest station in the Auckland rail network) as well as a linear park connecting Victoria and Albert Parks. Together these infrastructural additions will increase pressure on an already over-stimulated environment. The station (Aotea station) will be incorporated into the design, creating an urban park that provides access from the concourse level to street level, drawing people up into a protected landscape area intended to relieve anxiety and provide a place of respite.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-95
Author(s):  
Jenilee Sneed ◽  
Tonya Hammer

Abstract There is growing recognition within psychology and other disciplines that body experience may be as important as cognitive and emotional experience. However, psychology has few psychotherapeutic interventions to support the integration of mind and body within therapy. Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy (PRYT) is a form of mind-body therapy that uses yoga posture, touch, and psychotherapeutic dialogue to facilitate growth and healing. The current study explored the phenomenological experience of four women who each received five PRYT sessions. Research questions posed were: (1) What are the clients' experiences of the phenomena of PRYT? and (2) How does receiving PRYT sessions impact the clients' lives? The following themes emerged from the data as the essence of PRYT sessions: mindfulness, self-awareness, mind-body connection, in vivo experience of new behaviors, client-directed, empowerment, and life changes. These themes show significance in the mind-body connection and that it is important to consider alternative modalities such as PRYT for clients. Each participant noted greater insight into mind-body connection. They noticed the effect of cognition and emotion on the body, observed how the body can be used to improve coping through movement and breathing, and experienced different thoughts and emotions associated with different areas of their bodies. Although these results are not necessarily generalizable, they offer interesting theoretical implications for embodied interventions.


Author(s):  
Evi Zohar

Continuing the workshop I've given in the WPC Paris (2017), this article elaborates my discussion of the way I interlace Focusing with Differentiation Based Couples Therapy (Megged, 2017) under the systemic view, in order to facilitate processes of change and healing in working with intimate couples. This article presents the theory and rationale of integrating Differentiation (Bowen, 1978; Schnarch, 2009; Megged, 2017) and Focusing (Gendlin, 1981) approaches, and its therapeutic potential in couple's therapy. It is written from the point of view of a practicing professional in order to illustrate the experiential nature and dynamics of the suggested therapeutic path. Differentiation is a key to mutuality. It offers a solution to the central struggle of any long term intimate relationship: balancing two basic life forces - the drive for individuality and the drive for togetherness (Schnarch, 2009). Focusing is a body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing, in which one learns to pay attention to the body and the ‘Felt Sense’, in order to unfold the implicit, keep it in motion at the precise pace it needs for carrying the next step forward (Gendlin, 1996). Combining Focusing and Differentiation perspectives can cultivate the kind of relationship where a conflict can be constructively and successfully held in the inner world of each partner, while taking into consideration the others' well-being. This creates the possibility for two people to build a mutual emotional field, open to changes, permeable and resilient.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Philip Smith ◽  
Florian Stoll

This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth “Wagner” Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semi-structured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more ‘everyday’, can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.


CNS Spectrums ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 467-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan J. Stein ◽  
Daphne Simeon

ABSTRACTDepersonalization disorder (DPD) is characterized by a subjective sense of detachment from one's own being and a sense of unreality. An examination of the psychobiology of depersonalization symptoms may be useful in understanding the cognitive-affective neuroscience of embodiment. DPD may be mediated by neurocircuitry and neurotransmitters involved in the integration of sensory processing and of the body schema, and in the mediation of emotional experience and the identification of feelings. For example, DPD has been found to involve autonomic blunting, deactivation of sub-cortical structures, and disturbances in molecular systems in such circuitry. An evolutionary perspective suggests that attenuation of emotional responses, mediated by deactivation of limbic structures, may sometimes be advantageous in response to inescapable stress.


2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brytek-Matera ◽  
Anna Kozieł

Abstract The purposes of the present study were to explore the relationship between body awareness and negative body attitude, interoceptive body awareness and physical self in women practicing fitness as well as to analyze the determinants of body awareness. The Body Awareness Questionnaire, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, the Physical Self-Description Questionnaire and the Body Attitude Test were applied to 43 women practicing fitness and 32 non-fitness practitioners. Bodily self-awareness was connected with greater fitness practitioners’ interoceptive body awareness and greater physical self. Noticing and global esteem predicted body awareness in women practicing fitness.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Max Davis

<p>In recent years, affective science has seen a shift in the understanding of emotion and its relationship to cognition. No longer is cognition viewed as the only significant factor in determining emotional experience, and as fundamentally distinct from bodily feeling. Rather than a linear causal relationship between one and the other, the philosophy and cognitive science of Enactivism suggests that the cognitive and emotional elements of experience, along with the body and surrounding environment, are constitutive of each other, and continuously influence each other in a dynamic, multidirectional manner to produce the experience of emotional patterns (Colombetti & Thompson, 2008). However, despite these advances in emotion theory, current rehabilitation programs such as the Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R, Ross et al., 2016) program continue to understand cognition and emotion as functionally distinct components of experience, with deficits conceptualised in mainly cognitive terms, and targeted through Cognitive Skills, which largely neglect the emotional elements of experience. This thesis explores how an enactivist understanding of emotion can be applied to offender rehabilitation programs, with specific reference to the R&R program. It is concluded that R&R and similar programs would benefit significantly from revisions to conceptualisations of cognitive deficits, and in treatment components, which should integrate emotional and cognitive techniques.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Africa Makasi ◽  
Krishna Govender

This article provides a new perspective on sustainable marketing strategies in the context of a globalized clothing and textile (C&amp;amp;T) sector in Zimbabwe by linking two diverse streams of literature, namely, globalization and marketing strategy. A quantitative approach was adopted to obtain data from 127 respondents using a two-stage cluster sample. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) confirmed three of four hypothesized relationships, namely that integrated co-alliances, modern technology and national policy impact the sustainability of clothing and textile sector in Zimbabwe. The adoption of a standardized marketing strategy characterized by uniform application of the marketing mix elements with minor modifications will have a significant impact on the capacity of the C&amp;amp;T sector to withstand the adverse effects of globalization. The research extends the body of existing knowledge on marketing strategy in the context of globalization of Zimbabwe’s C&amp;amp;T sector, and argues empirically for a new approach to developing and implementing competitive marketing strategies. The research findings will enable companies in the C&amp;amp;T sector of a developing economy to craft competitive marketing strategies, which incorporate internal company capabilities and technology, and also recognize the role of national policy in the globalization discourse.


1998 ◽  
Vol 353 (1377) ◽  
pp. 1903-1909 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
K. M. Heilman ◽  
A. M. Barrett ◽  
J. C. Adair

Anosognosia of hemiplegia is of interest for both pragmatic and theoretical reasons. We discuss several neuropsychological theories that have been proposed to explain this deficit. Although for psychological reasons people might deny deficits, the denial hypothesis cannot account for the hemispheric asymmetries associated with this disorder and cannot explain why some patients might deny one deficit and recognize another equally disabling deficit. There is some evidence that faulty feedback from sensory deficits, spatial neglect and asomatognosia might be responsible for anosognosia in some patients. However, these feedback hypotheses cannot account for anosognosia in all patients. Although the hemispheric disconnection hypothesis is appealing, disconnection is probably only a rare cause of this disorder. The feedforward intentional theory of anosognosia suggests that the discovery of weakness is dependent on attempted action and some patients might have anosognosia because they do not attempt to move. We present evidence that supports this theory. The presence of one mechanism of anosognosia, however, does not preclude the possibility that other mechanisms might also be working to produce this disorder. Although a large population study needs to be performed, we suspect that anosognosia might be caused by several of the mechanisms that we have discussed. On the basis of the studies of impaired corporeal self–awareness that we have reviewed, we can infer that normal self–awareness is dependent on several parallel processes. One must have sensory feedback and the ability to attend to both one's body and the space where parts of the body may be positioned or acting. One must develop a representation of the body, and this representation must be continuously modified by expectations (feedforward) and knowledge of results (feedback).


2021 ◽  
pp. 229-243
Author(s):  
Jonathan Cole

In neurological illnesses, the body may present itself to perception in ways which allows insights into the concepts of body image and body schema. Three such conditions are explored. From those who live with spinal cord injury, paralysed and insentient from the neck down, aspects of the importance of the body in one’s sense of self are revealed. Some also describe a coming to terms with their altered bodies. When considering the body image, its adaptability and this reconciliation to a new normal should be considered. Studies on acquired severe sensory loss explore how conscious control, at the body image level, may partially replace the deafferented body schema. There is little evidence, however, for these subjects extending access to previously non-conscious motor schema. Lastly, some narratives from those with congenital absence of movement of facial muscles describe reduced emotional experience and felt embodiment as children. These can be developed as young adults, through shared social interactions. The importance of the social in elaboration of the body image is further implicit in a consideration of the stigma associated with facial disfigurement. Others’ responses to one’s body are crucial in developing our body image and sense of self.


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