Opinion SHOHAM GEVA EDITOR IN CHIEF CLAIRE BRYAN AND REGAN DETWILER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS LAURA SCHINAGLE MANAGING EDITOR 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4 — Friday, February 12, 2016 I nterrupting our scene, my act- ing teacher put her hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eyes. Soft, yet affirmatively, she told me to “park politeness at the door.” “Get out of your head,” she demanded. “Don’t think about your reac- tion and don’t manipulate your response; just express the feel- ing that comes naturally to you.” Feeling very uncomfortable and utterly lost, I stood on the stage rubbing the inside of my palms. It was hopeless; I didn’t know what to say, or the right way to say it. Our class was learning the Meis- ner approach to acting, where the name of the game is to express authentic emotion during an impro- visation by recalling your own feel- ings and experiences. Through a series of repetition exercises, we were supposed to learn how to react honestly to our partners’ expressed emotion rather than focusing on the lines that we were exchang- ing. For example, if my partner said something that made me anxious, I would say aloud to him, “You’re making me uncomfortable.” As I stood helpless in front of the class, I was saved by yet another interjection by my teacher. “Tell- ing someone what you’re actually feeling is hard, isn’t it?” The entire class nodded in agreement. “In our culture, we’re so focused on being polite that we’re afraid to express our feelings. We create so many miscommunications by being afraid to be emotionally connected with another person.” After she said this, I started to reflect on my relationships. Even though I had only known my act- ing partners in the class for a few weeks, I already felt more connect- ed to them than to friends that I had known for months. Initially, I was worried about how much I would actually enjoy this class. Being a person diagnosed with generalized anxiety disor- der, I have difficulty with public speaking. I could barely give class presentations, let alone channel my innermost feelings to share openly with a class of 16 strangers. But to my surprise, by the end of my scene, the unexpected happened. Instead of provoking stress, the activity lessened my stress tre- mendously. As weird as it sounds, it actually felt great to show com- plete vulnerability to a stranger. I hadn’t noticed it before, but after that scene, I realized that I had been suppressing my emotions in order to accommodate others, and that my suppression of emotion had been worsening my symptoms of anxiety. Sincerely exposing my feelings to my peers unexpect- edly eased the restlessness and worry that normally overtook me in social interactions. Western culture has taught us that it’s abnormal to express emo- tion. We live in a society where men have been conditioned to believe that suppressing their emotions makes them more masculine, and where the expression of emotional pain by women has been discour- aged. It’s unfair that our culture has diminished this sense of our humanity. Even though a lot of people experience a pressure to conceal their emotions, people with generalized anxiety disorder and other emotional disorders, such as clinical depression or other mood disorders, can be more devastating- ly affected by the pressure to create a façade. People with generalized anxiety disorder are more likely to suppress their emotions because they are more worried that their emotions are unacceptable or inappropriate. There have been times when I’ve been so worried to show my emo- tions that my concern has caused me physical pain in the form of chest discomfort and loss of breath. In general, this burden is attributed to the development of diseases and physical ailments in people with high levels of anxiety. Improper emotional regulation through lack of expression also makes it harder for individuals to communicate effectively. This leads to miscom- munications and can result in the inability to recognize the emotions of others. Interestingly enough, none of my health care providers warned me about these behaviors and their negative consequences to my health. I have been in and out of different health systems and I have met with multiple doctors from diverse areas of expertise, but none of them suggested regulating emotional expression to help alle- viate my anxiety. Instead, they all strongly recommended different types of medications. I finally gave in, and I tried one medication after another. When the medications were not effective, my health care professionals urged me to increase the dosage. Needless to say, that didn’t work, so instead they encour- aged me to try creatively concocted cocktails of antidepressants. Unfor- tunately, none of these methods proved to be helpful. After experiencing overwhelm- ing anxiety relief from emotional verbalization, I realized I had found my alternative to anti-anxi- ety drugs. I wish I had known that communicating effectively and taking the time to connect with others would boost my serotonin levels as much as the little white pill that I took every day. I’m not saying there is a better alternative to medication for everyone, but I think that having open and hon- est dialogue regularly is beneficial for the improvement of emotional well-being. The real kicker is that, in our society, it’s becoming more abnor- mal for a person to show they feel something than it is for them to feel nothing at all or to mask their feelings. It’s considered an insult to be described as an emotional individual. As a nation, we need to start doing a better job at acknowl- edging our humanity by dimin- ishing our capitalist culture and disregarding the idea that we don’t have time for feelings because we’re so busy with work. In addi- tion to this, we need to address the emotional detachment that often comes in the form of competitive nature. We need to reverse the dis- cernable loss of empathy for the betterment of mental and physical health of people with and without generalized anxiety disorder or other emotional disorders. —Hannah Maier can be reached at hannamai@umich.edu. Acting away anxiety E-mail yazmon at Eyazmon@umich.Edu YAZMON ECTOR Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Jeremy Kaplan, Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala, Kit Maher, Madeline Nowicki, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, Kevin Sweitzer, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, Stephanie Trierweiler, Hunter Zhao EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS O ne sleepy morning during my sopho- more year of high school, my teacher posed a question to the class that has lingered in the back of my mind ever since: “Which are more valuable to soci- ety: the sciences or the arts?” I remember most of the kids in my class answered science without hesita- tion. I had much more trouble producing an answer, but I settled on arts partially to be devil’s advocate and partially because I couldn’t imag- ine a world without art or music or books. Last week, I attended Dick Costolo’s talk about leadership and liberal arts, which reminded me of this age-old argument. Cos- tolo, former CEO of Twitter and a University of Michigan LSA computer science alum, pin- pointed exactly how I feel about the role of humanities in education. As a student who has a deep interest in both biology and English, I’ve found that I straddle a gray area few students choose to traverse. Even though I’m passionate about both the sciences and the arts, I’ve had trouble articu- lating to my peers exactly why I value taking humanities courses (except for the fact that writing well is an important skill, or that I personally like how the two disciplines exer- cise different parts of my brain, and that I’d be bored if I only took science and math classes). Many of my STEM-focused peers lament the humanities distribution requirements they have to fulfill for graduation. These courses seem to eat up valuable credits that could be used to take another science or math course, one that teaches skills more pertinent to their major or desired career. But when students studying the humanities lament the science distribution requirement, they’re met with incredulity that they would spurn such “essential” topics in education. While Costolo implored students to take computer science courses due to their appli- cability in the global economy, he also noted that nearly every discipline — sciences and humanities alike — teaches students critical thinking skills. He argued that what sets the critical thinking in humanities subjects apart from that in STEM subjects is that they teach us what to think about. That is, the critical thinking in the human- ities requires the consideration of multiple perspectives and factors that contextualize a problem before attempting to solve it. In the science and math classes I’ve taken throughout my schooling, I’ve found little room for varying perspectives or methods in course- work. Sure, there may be several approaches to a given problem, but thought processes are often restricted by the single correct answer that lies at the end of each question. Much of the context of science is stripped in practice — we’re usually forced to work within a set of con- trols or a finite set of mathematical theorems. Of course, science has room for concep- tual and abstract discussions, but it still lacks the interpersonal aspect integral to thought in the humanities. And these interpersonal skills often are more important in a career than technical skills. The humanities courses I’ve taken encour- age the accumulation of disparate viewpoints in conversation to strengthen a student’s inter- personal skills. More often than not, it’s per- fectly OK if a student takes away something different from a text than the next student, so long as they derive their reasoning from a rel- evant source. The humanities force students to sift through countless details to find what’s important, to become adept listeners, to con- sider experiences outside their own. We need the humanities to serve as a liaison between the world of science and the world of human interaction, to check the power of science and to force the scientific world to consider the ethical and interpersonal rami- fications of scientific advancements. Know- ing how to draw a curved-arrow mechanism for a bimolecular substitution reaction can- not teach a doctor to empathize with patients of different backgrounds than their own. Knowing how to take the line integral of a function cannot help engineers develop tech- nologies that consider a community’s needs. If we study science for science’s sake alone, we run the risk of endangering humanity itself. Life-prolonging medications, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are all significant marks of human achievement, but if used with the wrong intentions, they most certainly have the potential to destroy soci- eties and render life intolerable. The good science can do for us resides in our consider- ation of how these developments will shape human life and interpersonal interactions in the long term — and this is simply not some- thing taught in most STEM courses. Yet students don’t flock to STEM courses purely out of interest, but rather pragmatic concerns. College, after all, is a financial investment, and it certainly is reasonable to want a return on that investment. There is no dearth of jobs in STEM fields, and often these fields lead to lucrative careers — ones that can pay off college debt and allow students to earn comfortable livings post-graduation. But for students to boil down which class- es they take to the market value of the skills taught, they forgo classes that can teach them empathy or ethics or effective commu- nication — skills that possess value that has no price. Costolo — who made Twitter the booming social media company it is today — emphasized that his company would not have been as successful as it is without the skills he learned from the humanities courses he stud- ied here at the University. Society will perpetually juggle the influenc- es of the sciences and the arts in our everyday lives. Students can — and should — choose the field that makes them burn with passion, but they cannot dismiss the interconnectedness of the sciences and the arts and the value that each can contribute to their education, their career and their character. Life, after all, is so much more than a dis- crete set of scientific and mathematical truths. —Rebecca Tarnopol can be reached at tarnopol@umich.edu Keep humanity in education E veryone gives me more or less the same reaction when I tell them my celeb- rity crush is Seth Rogen. I’m always met with faces of pure shock and disbelief, followed by a chorus of questioning as to why. If I’m really lucky, I get hysterical laughter. Seth Rogen doesn’t have a six-pack, and he’s far from the typical definition of “tall, dark and handsome.” He’s short if you’re not into guys under six foot and a little pale, but I truly find him ador- able. His, for lack of a better term, “doughy” body doesn’t put me off. If anything, I find him more attrac- tive for it. He seems less unobtain- able. He seems more real. The reaction I get quite obvi- ously means I’m supposed to fall over myself for celebrities like the Hemsworth brothers or Channing Tatum. If I said I didn’t find them attractive I’d be lying. Their chis- eled bodies and sharp jawlines are nice to look at and all, but they’re entirely too intimidating. I’d never be able to talk to any of them in real life. But I think we’ve established I can’t talk to men in general so that’s not saying much. The thing about crushes that people tend to forget is that they are supposed to be based on more than looks. There’s a difference between finding someone attrac- tive and having a crush on them. I find many men attractive. I sure as hell wouldn’t date all of them. Sure, pretty men may be dreamy in their own right but that doesn’t mean other men aren’t. We’re constantly barraged with discussion surrounding unreal- istic beauty ideals women face every day. The same goes for men as well. We don’t think it’s fair of men to compare us to Victoria’s Secret models so why would we compare them to Calvin Klein mod- els? What kind of message are we sending when we fawn over the airbrushed men while completely disregarding others we deem not fitting as an ideal male? I’m not try- ing to downplay women’s struggles with body image, as there are sig- nificantly more women who suffer from body image issues; however, it should be recognized that while we grapple with how thin our bodies are, 18 percent of adolescent males struggle with wanting to be bigger or more muscular. Those kinds of men are few and far between anyway — with only 1 to 2 percent of men having the ide- alized body type, it’s as unrealistic to expect abs on a guy as it is to expect a woman to have a 20-inch waist. Most of us are going to end up marrying the Seth Rogens of the world. It shouldn’t be a bad thing to be attracted to “normal” men. I’m not saying every other man isn’t normal. It’s just that Hollywood is full of unusually beautiful people; that’s why they make a ridiculous amount of money by having their picture taken or starring in films. It shouldn’t be everyone’s auto- matic reaction to scoff at my choice of celebrity crush. But it is. “Why Seth Rogen when there are so many more hot men to choose from?” people have asked. You see, I’m crushing hard because not only is he hilari- ous, but also Seth cares deeply about social issues. He addressed Congress two years ago in an attempt to raise awareness about the lack of Alzheimer’s funding. His mother-in-law has suffered from Alzheimer’s for almost 11 years and he has made big bounds to help. Seth and his wife began Hilarity for Charity, a foundation to make Alzheimer’s advocates out of millennials. They hold the Los Angeles Variety Show to raise money and awareness for the dis- ease. It is the sweetest thing. He’s a man of substance with aspira- tions and a solid dedication to his wife and their relationship. As young girls we’re primed to want to find our “Prince Charm- ing” and he’s usually portrayed as the old Ken-doll-like man who has a perfectly symmetrical face and not an inch of fat anywhere on his body. Now there is a “curvy Ken” to match his new “curvy Barbie,” so we’re making moves toward body peace. Still, the “men of our dreams” have no substance. They don’t run charity events nor do they have ambition. We’re brainwashed into thinking these empty shells of humans are worthy of our time. For men, it’s more or less the same except they often get their ideas of ideal women from porn and half-naked models on the pages of magazines. Long cellulite-free legs, flowing lustrous hair and blemish- free faces bombard their psyches on a daily basis, leading to disappoint- ment for some when it’s usually not the case in real life. We should all aspire to be more cognizant of who we admire. It’s definitely OK to look at a celebrity and appreciate their beauty, but putting them on a pedestal is far from necessary. How about we all just agree that we don’t have to be exceptionally beautiful to be of any worth to one another? Olivia Puente can be reached at opuente@umich.edu Real men have curves, too OLIVIA PUENTE CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor and viewpoints. Letters should be fewer than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and University affiliation to tothedaily@michigandaily.com. REBECCA TARNOPOL HANNAH MAIER