This month, an American Psychological Association (APA) task force released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don’t despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part. Sourced from psychological experiments, we review tricks that could be deployed by companies or organisations to encourage climate-friendly behaviour. Also, on page 40 of this issue, psychologist Mark van Vugt of the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands describes the elements of human nature that push us to act altruistically.

As advertisers of consumer products well know, different groups of people may have quite distinct interests and motivations, and messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to take these into account. “You have to target the marketing to the demographic,” says Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, another of the report’s authors.

Messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to the interests of individual groups
The affluent young, for instance, tend to be diet conscious, and this could be used to steer them away from foods like cheeseburgers – one of the most climate-unfriendly meals around because of the energy it takes to raise cattle. So when trying to convince them to forgo that carbon-intensive beef pattie, better to stress health benefits than harp on about the global climate.

Though conservative pundits have been known to attack such efforts, characterising them as psychological manipulation or “mind control”, experiments indicate that people are willing to be persuaded. “From participants in our experiments, we’ve never heard a negative backlash,” says Wesley Schultz of California State University in San Marcos. In fact, according to John Petersen of Oberlin College, Ohio, we are used to far worse. “Compared to the barrage of advertising, it seems milder than anything I experience in my daily life,” he says.

Good neighbours

DEEP down, most of us want to fit in with the crowd, and psychologists are exploiting this urge to conform to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour.

Researchers led by Wesley Schultz at California State University in San Marcos and Jessica Nolan, now at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, have found that people will cut their electricity usage if told that their neighbours use less than they do.

In one experiment, the researchers left information with households in San Marcos asking them to use fans rather than air conditioners at night, turn off lights and take shorter showers. Some messages simply stressed energy conservation, some talked about future generations, while others emphasised the financial savings. But it was the flyers that implored residents to join with their neighbours in saving energy that were most effective in cutting electricity consumption (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 913).

In another study, the researchers told households what others in their neighbourhood used on average. High users cut their consumption in response, but low users increased theirs. The problem disappeared if the messages were reinforced with sad or smiley faces. The smileys received by the residents who were already saving energy provided sufficient encouragement for them to keep doing so (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 429).

Information economy

MOST people seem to conserve energy if provided with real-time feedback on how much they are using. But feedback can be too immediate.

For instance, Janet Swim has a General Motors car that shows her mileage per gallon plummeting each time she accelerates. It’s just not very useful, she argues, because it’s hard to place that momentary piece of feedback in the context of her overall driving behaviour and fuel efficiency.

In contrast, the Toyota Prius display shows mileage per gallon over 5-minute intervals for the previous half-hour. With that contextual information, people can experiment with different driving styles to see how they affect mileage, and even compete with themselves to improve over time. The 2010 Honda Insight goes one better, flashing up an image of a trophy to reward thrifty driving.

The benefits of feedback are not restricted to car gadgets. Studies show that devices that display domestic energy usage produce savings of between 5 and 12 per cent.

Competitive instincts

EVERY spring, selected student dormitories at Oberlin College in Ohio compete to discover which one can cut energy use by the most. Computer screens give the students detailed feedback on electricity consumption, and in one study dorms cut their electricity use by 55 per cent (International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, vol 8, p 16).

The researchers running the study have not yet crunched their numbers to separate out the effects of competition from the feedback on electricity consumption, but the large savings compared to other studies that lack a competitive element suggest a strong effect. “The competition, at least in this environment, is critical,” says John Petersen, Oberlin’s head of environmental studies.

Petersen concedes that Oberlin may attract students with green sensibilities atypical of society at large. The project is about to extend into the real world. Equipment to provide detailed feedback on electricity use will be fitted into 53 apartments and six business units in a development now under construction in the city of Oberlin. “We hope to create volunteer groups that will compete with one another,” says psychologist Cindy Frantz.

Here and now

PEOPLE have to be persuaded to act on climate change even though the benefit won’t be felt for decades. Research by David Hardisty and Elke Weber of Columbia University in New York suggests ways to achieve this.

Hardisty and Weber have found that people respond in exactly the same way to decisions involving future environmental gains and losses as they do when making financial decisions (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol 138, p 329). This allows psychologists’ knowledge of how to manipulate financial decision-making to be brought into play.

For instance, schemes that give people an upfront cash payment for insulating their home will work better than those promising long-term savings, even if the people receiving cash end up paying a little more in the long run.

And because we are generally more worried about future losses than we are impressed by future gains, messages are more effective if framed to warn people that they will lose $500 over 10 years if they don’t follow a particular course of action to limit climate change than if they are told they’ll be $500 better off if they do take action.

Social networks

AS SOCIAL animals, we like to interact with others and take inspiration from their actions. Psychologists are working out how to exploit this to spread behaviours that will help limit climate change. “My sense is that social networks are going to be important,” says Swim.

Allowing people to document successes in saving energy on their Facebook pages could drive change among their friends, and the Oberlin team is considering integrating this into its urban residence experiment.

Tawanna Dillahunt and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, think such opportunities presented by Facebook can be combined with our liking for furry animals. Inspired by the attachment that people can develop towards Tamagotchi virtual pets, the team is testing the persuasive power of a “virtual polar bear” standing on an ice floe that grows bigger as people adopt environmentally friendly behaviours such as taking shorter showers. Initial results suggest the polar bear has pull.

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No matter what tasks I have before me, who I am with, or where I happen to be, joy is within my soul. It springs up from the very depths of my being, from the presence of the indwelling Christ. This joy is peaceful, loving, and fulfilling.

As an inner quality that is part of my nature, joy is waiting to be expressed by me at any time, in any situation. All that is required is my participation. So I activate my inner joy by loving and by living with anticipation, wonder, and appreciation. I am joyous, radiant, and fulfilled.

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“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (Woody Allen, 2008) is a fun and funny satire on America’s mainstream culture. Love, sex, female/male identity in search of the meaning of life, and the possibility of passion. It is definitely just a beginning of the journey. Young, we just scratching the surface of who we are. Men are dull and women are clueless.

In an authority based society man thinks that woman knows something and waits for instructions on what to do or for an approval. Woman believes that man is in control and fight the phantom. Just like in politics we think that the government knows something or that banks are in control and pass the responsibilities to someone else. And then we suffer, and we feel sorry for ourselves and wait for something else to come alone.

In today’s financial crisis, it may look like America is suffering from greed but if you get a closer look, you may see that it is more likely that we are suffering from boredom and a identity crisis.

Think about it, what would even the best of the best American men do if he did not have a “money game” or a “war game” to play? Nothing right?

So far “The Star Wars” is the only common ground for Americulture. What do we believe in besides war? What do we stand for besides money? So, maybe by the good fortune, solving the Global Environmental crisis is the next adventure that will redefine US culture, and will give it unity.

Crisis is always a good thing.

In literature the word crisis has another name – “climax.” Climax is when the hero changes his value system through new action.

Action has been a measure of truth across all ages.

“Vicky-Cristina” is drifting, man is bored in the board room. Strangely American man will do anything to get the money but would not lift a finger to get a woman, or understand the woman, or to hold on to the woman. Who was it that said that the family is the basic unit of society and that the easiest way to change society is to change the family dynamics.

Change creates change.

To change a personal or cultural identity will take tons of self-awareness and internal power. The good news is that being a young culture, America also has all the benefits of the youth – abundant energy, flexibility, and puppy enthusiasm for the new. This time, the new is a new game, and the one who makes the new rules is the one who will lead the game.

Where is no passion there is no compassion.

We understand what we love, we love to understand. Like a soldier is never ready for peace the businessman is never ready for love.

Strangely only sex makes American man more human, and connects him to a woman. No wonder we confuse sex with connection and glue ourselves to every passer by or a computer screen.

We stroke our troubles with the feather of small talk, we afraid to cut through to the heart of the problems to split it open. We search for proof of life in money, and objects, and forget that only connected world is real.

There is a slight sense of irony in the movie: life is passing by just like a cloud on the blue sky. What would it take to bring these people to life? Maybe it will be a world economic crisis, or it could be green revolution. WiserEarth needs wiser people, just a bit more curiosity, passion and trust in its own power. Freedom simply means flexible rules and flexible actions to get what you want and know what you need. Time to raise the bar.

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, sex, love, power, passion, money, barcelona, comedy films, female, green revolution, love, male identity, passion, scarlett johansson, woman, wiserearth, woody allen, penelope cruz

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Jim and Jon on Mad Money. You do not even have to hide in America. Everyone knows what the truth is but does nothing about it.

What do you think creates this level of openness and this level of inaction in US?

Why do you think social freedom does not translate in to personal freedom?

Do you wonder why Jon Stewart understands US financial market game better than FCC?

Would you ask this question your financial advisor?
Would you ask this question your senator?

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When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second. True, you hear it applied to everything from cars to agriculture to economics. But that’s because the concept of sustainability is at its heart so simple that it legitimately applies to all these areas and more.
Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability. And after this introduction, it’s clear which myth has to come first….

Myth 1: Nobody knows what sustainability really means.
That’s not even close to being true. By all accounts, the modern sense of the word entered the lexicon in 1987 with the publication of Our Common Future, by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland commission after its chair, Norwegian diplomat Gro Harlem Brundtland). That report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Or, in the words of countless kindergarten teachers, “Don’t take more than your share.”
Note that the definition says nothing about protecting the environment, even though the words “sustainable” and “sustainability” issue mostly from the mouths of environmentalists. That point leads to the second myth….

Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment.
The sustainability movement itself—not just the word—also dates to the Brundtland commission report. Originally, its focus was on finding ways to let poor nations catch up to richer ones in terms of standard of living. That goal meant giving disadvantaged countries better access to natural resources, including water, energy and food—all of which come, one way or another, from the environment. “The economy,” says Anthony Cortese, founder and president of the sustainability education organization Second Nature, “is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere. The biosphere provides everything that makes life possible, assimilates our waste or converts it back into something we can use.”

If too many of us use resources inefficiently or generate waste too quickly for the environment to absorb and process, future generations obviously won’t be able to meet their needs. Says Paul Hawken, the author (his latest book is Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, and Why No One Saw it Coming) and entrepreneur (he’s a co-founder of the Smith & Hawken garden tools company) who helped to found the sustainability movement: “We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP [gross domestic product].” If people continue to pour carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air, for example, we won’t necessarily exhaust resources (there’s plenty of coal still in the ground), but we will change the climate in ways that could very likely impose huge burdens on future generations. The same, of course, goes for the poisonous by-products other than CO2 from all kinds of human activity, from manufacturing to mining to energy generation to agriculture, that get dumped onto the land and into streams, oceans and the atmosphere. The nonenvironmental rationales for sustainability get a little squishier when we talk about intangibles, such as the beauty of nature or the value of wilderness. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry David Thoreau; the national parks movement that began in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century and has since spread internationally springs from that idea. In modern terms, because humans evolved in a nontechnological world, we seem to need some connection to nature to be content. That concept is tough to prove scientifically. Nevertheless, says Nancy Gabriel, program director at the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vt., “If you look at Western society, you have huge rates of depression, isolation, [and] people who are disenfranchised. I think that reconnecting to the land is an important way of reestablishing a basic level of happiness.” That kind of intangible connection has led towns, cities and states all over the U.S., but especially in built-up areas, to preserve land for open space. A related but separate myth is….

Myth 3: “Sustainable” is a synonym for “green.”
Although there’s a fair amount of overlap between the terms, “green” usually suggests a preference for the natural over the artificial. With some six billion people on the planet today, and another three billion expected by the middle of the century, society cannot hope to give them a comfortable standard of living without a heavy dependence on technology. Electric cars, wind turbines and solar cells are the antithesis of natural—but they allow people to get around, warm their houses and cook their food with renewable resources (or at least, a much smaller input of nonrenewables) while emitting fewer noxious chemicals. It’s probably more difficult to see nuclear power as sustainable. Unlike the other alternative energy sources, it has long been anathema to environmentalists, largely because of the problem of storing radioactive waste. But nuclear reactors are also a highly efficient source of power, emit no pollutant gases and—with some types, anyway—can be designed to generate minimal waste and to be essentially meltdown-proof. That’s why Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, has become a nuclear booster and why many other environmentalists are beginning—sometimes grudgingly—to entertain the idea of embracing nuclear. Calling it green would be a stretch. Calling it sustainable is much less of one.

Myth 4: It’s all about recycling.
“I get that a lot,” says Shana Weber, the manager of sustainability at Princeton University. “For some reason, recycling was the enduring message that came out of the environmental movement in the early 1970s.” And of course, recycling is important: reusing metals, paper, wood and plastics rather than tossing them reduces the need to extract raw materials from the ground, forests and fossil-fuel deposits. More efficient use of pretty much anything is a step in the direction of sustainability. But it is just a piece of the puzzle. “I deal with the people who run the recycling program here,” Weber notes, “but also with purchasing, dining services, the people who clean the buildings. The most important areas by far in terms of sustainability are energy and transportation.” If you think you are living sustainably because you recycle, she says, you need to think again.

Myth 5: Sustainability is too expensive.
If there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room of sustainability, this myth is it. That’s because, as Gabriel observes, “there’s a grain of truth to it.” But only a grain. “It’s only true in the short term in certain circumstances,” Cortese says, “but certainly not in the long term.” The truth lies in the fact that if you already have an unsustainable system in place—a factory or a transportation system, for example, or a furnace in your house, an incandescent lightbulb in your lamp or a Hummer in your driveway—you have to spend some money up front to switch to a more sustainable technology.
In general, governments and companies can take that step more easily than individuals can. “Over the past seven years,” Cortese explains, “DuPont has made investments that have reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 72 percent over 1990 levels. They’ve saved $2 billion.” The Pentagon is determined to cut its energy use by a third, both to save money and to reduce its dependence on risky foreign oil supplies.

Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living.
Not at all true. It does mean that we have to do more with less, but as Hawken argues, “Once we start to organize ourselves and innovate within that mind-set, the breakthroughs are extraordinary. They will allow us to achieve greatly superior rates of resource productivity, which in turn allow us to be prosperous, fed, clad, secure.” Moreover, he and others maintain that the innovation at the heart of sustainable living will be a powerful economic engine. “Addressing climate change,” he says, “is the biggest job creation program there is.”

Myth 7: Consumer choices and grassroots activism, not government intervention, offer the fastest, most efficient routes to sustainability.
Popular grassroots actions are helpful and ultimately necessary. But progress on some reforms, such as curbing CO2 emissions, can only happen quickly if central authorities commit to making it happen. That is why tax credits, mandatory fuel-efficiency standards and the like are pretty much inevitable. That conclusion drives free-market evangelists crazy, but they operate on the assumption that wasteful use of resources and the destruction of the environment is without cost, which is demonstrably untrue.

To cite just one example, economic devastation is very likely under even the mildest plausible climate change scenarios, in the form of disruptions to agriculture from shifts in rainfall patterns and growing zones; densely populated coastal areas will be rendered unlivable as sea level rises, and so on. Yet the price currently being charged to people who add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is zero. Putting a per-ton tax on carbon emissions would be wildly unpopular, but it would for the first time account for the real costs of unsustainable energy use. Free-market purists also argue that with respect to the depletion of natural resources, rising prices will automatically push people into more efficient behavior. True enough—but the transition can be painful and disruptive. The primary reason U.S. automakers are in such trouble is that they have been depending for years on high-profit, gas-guzzling SUVs. When the price of oil shot up last year, the market for big cars plummeted (gas prices have only come down since then in the face of a worldwide recession, which hasn’t helped the auto industry). So car buyers may have changed their behavior, but only at the cost of potential disaster for some of America’s biggest companies and their employees.

Still, rising energy prices have had the effect of again galvanizing research into wind, solar and other alternatives—and if you leave economic disruption aside, we can at least count on car companies to make more efficient vehicles and on utilities to find more sustainable sources of energy. But that outcome may reflect another myth….

Myth 8: New technology is always the answer.
Not necessarily. During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama made the tactical mistake of pointing out that proper tire inflation could save Americans millions of gallons of gasoline through better fuel economy. The Republicans ridiculed him, just as they did President Jimmy Carter for appearing on TV in a sweater during the energy crisis of the late 1970s. Both Carter and Obama were right, however (California’s Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for proper tire inflation as well).

In other words, sometimes existing technology can make a huge difference. Sometimes it takes a creative business model. Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi, for example, wants to electrify the world’s car fleet—widely acknowledged as a big step toward cutting down carbon emissions—not by inventing a battery that gets 200 miles on a charge but by inventing a better system for letting drivers go as far as they want without recharging. His proposal, which has been adopted on a pilot basis by Israel and Denmark, would create battery exchange stations along highways, analogous to the gas canister exchanges that people now use for barbecue grills. What do you do if you are out on the road and your battery is running low? You pull into a station, your dead battery is swapped for a fully charged one and you’re on the road again in a few minutes. “He’s delivering distance, not better batteries,” says Mark Lee, CEO of the London consulting firm SustainAbility. “There’s an Italian utility that’s selling its customers hot water, not energy to heat water. It’s a different way of measuring, and it gives the company an incentive to be more efficient so it can be more profitable.”

Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem.
This is not a myth, but it represents a false solution. Every environmental problem is ultimately a population problem. If the world’s population were only 100 million people, we would be hard-pressed to generate enough waste to overwhelm nature’s cleanup systems. We could dump all our trash in a landfill in some remote area, and nobody would notice. Population experts agree that the best way to limit population is to educate women and raise the standard of living generally in developing countries. But that strategy cannot possibly happen quickly enough to put a dent in the population on any useful timescale. The U.N. projects that the planet will have to sustain another 2.6 billion people by 2050. But even at the current population level of 6.5 billion, we’re using up resources at an unsustainable rate. There is no way to reduce the population significantly without trampling egregiously on individual rights (as China has done with its one-child policy), encouraging mass suicide or worse. None of those proposals seems preferable to focusing directly on less wasteful use of resources.

Myth 10: Once you understand the concept, living sustainably is a breeze to figure out.
All too often, a choice that seems sustainable turns out on closer examination to be problematic. Probably the best current example is the rush to produce ethanol for fuel from corn. Corn is a renewable resource—you can harvest it and grow more, roughly indefinitely. So replacing gasoline with corn ethanol seems like a great idea. Until you do a thorough analysis, that is, and see how energy-intensive the cultivation and harvesting of corn and its conversion into ethanol really are.

One might get a bit more energy out of the ethanol than was sunk into making it, which could still make ethanol more sustainable than gasoline in principle, but that’s not the end of the problem. Diverting corn to make ethanol means less corn is left to feed livestock and people, which drives up the cost of food. That consequence leads to turning formerly fallow land—including, in some cases, rain forest in places such as Brazil—into farmland, which in turn releases lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eventually, over many decades, the energy benefit from burning ethanol would make up for that forest loss. But by then, climate change would have progressed so far that it might not help.

You cannot really declare any practice “sustainable” until you have done a complete life-cycle analysis of its environmental costs. Even then, technology and public policy keep evolving, and that evolution can lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences. The admirable goal of living sustainably requires plenty of thought on an ongoing basis.

Copyright 2009, Scientific American

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I’m not sure if it’s because we’re strung out on “Lost” episodes, or if it’s because we’re still suffering from a post-9/11 stress disorder that makes us crave “breaking news” alerts, or if it’s because the economy has turned us into distraction junkies. But one thing is painfully obvious after Michael Phelps’ marijuana “scandal” erupted last week: Our society is addicted to fake outrage — and to break our dependence, we’re going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking.

If you haven’t heard (and I’m guessing you have), the Olympic gold medalist was recently photographed taking a toke of weed. The moment the picture hit the Internet, the media blew the story up, pumping out at least 1,200 dispatches about the “controversy,” according to my LexisNexis search. Phelps’ sponsors subsequently threatened to pull their endorsement deals, and USA Swimming suspended him for “disappointing so many people.”

America is a place where you can destroy millions of lives as a Wall Street executive and still get invited for photo ops at the White House; a land where the Everyman icon — Joe Six-pack — is named for his love of shotgunning two quarts of beer at holiday gatherings; a “shining city on a hill” where presidential candidates’ previous abuse of alcohol and cocaine is portrayed as positive proof of grittiness and character. And yet, somehow, Phelps is the evildoer of the hour because he went to a party and took a hit off someone’s bong.

As with most explosions of fake outrage, the Phelps affair asks us to feign anger at something we know is commonplace. A nation of tabloid readers is apoplectic that Brad and Jen divorced, even though one out of every two American marriages ends the same way. A country fetishizing “family values” goes ballistic over the immorality of Paris Hilton’s sex tape … and then keeps spending billions on pornography. And now we’re expected to be indignant about a 23-year-old kid smoking weed, even though studies show that roughly half of us have done the same thing; most of us think pot should be legal in some form; and many of us regularly devour far more toxic substances than marijuana (nicotine, alcohol, reality TV, etc.).
So, in the interest of a little taboo candor, I’m just going to throw editorial caution to the wind and write what lots of us thought — but were afraid to say — when we heard about Phelps. Ready? Here goes:

America’s drug policy is idiotic.

Doctors can hand out morphine to anyone for anything beyond a headache, but they can’t prescribe marijuana to terminal cancer patients. Madison Avenue encourages a population plagued by heart disease to choke down as many artery-clogging Big Macs and Dunkin’ Donuts as it can, but it’s illegal to consume cannabis, “a weed that has been known to kill approximately no one,” as even the archconservative Colorado Springs Gazette admitted in its editorial slamming Phelps. Indeed, it would be perfectly acceptable — even artistically admirable in some quarters — if I told you that I drank myself into a blind stupor while writing this column, but it would be considered “outrageous” if I told you I was instead smoking a joint (FYI — I wasn’t doing either).

That said, what’s even more inane than our irrational reefer madness is our addiction to the same high that every pothead craves: the high of escapism. Nerves fried from orange terror warnings, Drudge Report sirens and disaster capitalism’s roller-coaster economics, our narcotic of choice is fake outrage — and it packs a punch. It gets us to turn on the television, tune in to the latest manufactured drama, and drop out of the real battle for the republic’s future.

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–- Paulo Coelho

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– Paulo Coelho

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More than 90 % of workers recently polled by ComPsych, a global provider of employee assistance programs, said they were losing sleep over the sad state of the economy.

The loss of a job and the economic downturn are combining with holiday stress to plunge more people into anxiety and depression.

More than 6,000 Tucsonans lost their jobs this year, and the economy is not expected to right itself for six months to a year.

Local mental health professionals are seeing an increase in calls for help as well as a shift in the reason for which people are seeking that help.

“It all comes down to money,” said Laura Waterman, clinical director of Southern Arizona Mental Health Corporation. “Job loss. House foreclosure. Things snowball.”

Clarke Romans, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona, said his agency, too, is being bombarded.

“The number of calls are definitely up,” he said. “We are definitely hearing more distress over things because of money pressures.”

While more people are turning to counselors, many still do not because of the expense or the stigma associated with lingering sadness or depression, experts say.

It’s important, they say, to get help or recognize where your feelings are coming from and take steps to improve your situation and your state of mind.

“When three months go by with only two job interviews, it’s hard not to feel a certain amount of self-doubt and hopelessness,” said one Tucson woman who was willing to talk about her recent job loss but spoke about her mental state only on the condition that she not be identified.
“You can’t really indulge it, can’t let it debilitate you, because that just makes things worse. Try to do something rather than sit around being miserable, even if that something is trivial rather than productive.”

The Tucson Citizen’s policy is not to use unnamed sources whenever possible. However, to fully tell this story, editors decided to use a credible but unnamed source.

Even people who still have jobs are struggling in the face of economic uncertainty.
More than 90 percent of workers recently polled by ComPsych, a global provider of employee assistance programs, said they were losing sleep over the sad state of the economy.

“They struggle with how to use this check and pay that bill,” Waterman said. “Sleep deprivation can lead to other behaviors.”

The woman who lost her job is well aware of depression’s classic symptoms because she is the daughter of a psychologist.

“Unhappiness? Check,” she said. “Self-doubt. Sure. Hopelessness? Check, sort of. Lethargy? Yup. Unable to get things done? Pretty much. Disturbed sleep? Absolutely.”

Tucson therapist Ky Resh said he is seeing an increase in the number of men who have been laid off whose wives are urging them to deal with their depression.

“Men in general will not ask for help,” Resh said. “They feel asking for help is failing.”
He said they see themselves as failures, too, for not living up to the traditional male role.
“Their job is to bring home the bacon,” he added, “and they’re not bringing it home.”

Resh said the holidays can act as a giant magnifying glass, intensifying feelings of inadequacy or failure.

“This is a tough season,” Resh said. “This is when loneliness is emphasized. People start saying: ‘I should have this, I should have that, I should have money to buy things for my kids.’”

Linda Moreno, a mental health advocate and president of the local NAMI chapter, said some people tend to isolate during the holiday season. “This becomes even more dramatic and made more real when they see all the wonderful ads for family gatherings,” she said.

Those who have families to visit may find it tough getting to them.
“This year people don’t have extra income to spend on travel, can’t afford to take time off or have no job to take time off from,” Moreno said.

Moreno, 53, lost her son, Daniel Moreno, to suicide in December 2005 and has lived with her own depression most of her adult life.

“The most important thing in recovery is stability,” Moreno said. “Obviously with this economic crisis we’re going through, stability has become upset.”

Whatever your economic setbacks, you have some control over how you respond to them, experts say.

“If you don’t have the money to buy your kids gifts, give them something they really want, which is your time and attention,” Resh said.

Other solutions, shared at a recent meeting of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, include socializing with friends, family and loved ones, listening to music, playing with a pet and exercise.

“Above all, don’t beat yourself up. Fight back against hopeless thoughts,” said the woman who is still struggling through her unemployment.

“The key is to move forward in some way rather than feel helpless and hopeless.”

De-Stress At Work Program

TIME FOR A GOOD HEALTH. LUNCH, PLAY, RELAX, FEEL GOOD.

Sign up for 3 De-Stress At Work sessions and you will know:

• 3 different techniques to guide yourself into a state of tranquility
• Freedom from anxiety and fear
• 3 different techniques to guide yourself into a state of tranquility
• Emergency distress-self-care kit to help you to balance your life
• New habit
• New skill
• Something to teach others
• A wonderful experience

What it means to you:

• Better life, better health, better environment
• Feeling of control and stability, piece of mind
• New professional skill – emotional resilience and flexibility
• Increased professional performance

To register visit www.Luminific.com