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Internal Locus

Interesting article on what the likely causes of increased mental health issues in the workplace might be.

..Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, said that it’s not social media or young people’s fractured attention spans that are causing their anxiety; it is school itself.

He traces a progression from the mid-1950s in which society has gradually taken away children’s internal locus of control (someone with an internal locus of control is likely to believe that both successes and failures are due to their own efforts).

As a result, many young people today are lost. “Since the mid-1950s, when they began taking away children’s play, people haven’t learned to take control of their own lives.” Gray said that control is essential to ward off excessive anxiety.

Gray advocates overhauling our educational system to instill more of that focus

The connection between play and lessons in controlling your own life is something I had not thought about. Personally, I might be a good test subject. For the first eight years of my life, I had an abundance of free play with the kids in the neighborhood. We ran wild, got into scrapes and out of them, learned the rules of teamwork and more. After that, the play almost disappeared from my life. We had moved to a new town where I could no longer speak the native language, severely hampering my ability to make friends. 

This was also the time that I discovered the joys of reading. The combination gave me an escape hatch out of my troubles. In a few years, I had grown so distant and apart from my peers that it was hard to re-enter their world even-though by then I had acquired fluency in their language. My "internal locus of control" has been tenuous in times of stress. Only in later life when I let friends and strangers into my space was I able to regain some of it. 

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