Marian Rojas: "90% of the things we worry about never happen and yet those thoughts have a direct impact on our health".

"90% of the things we worry about never happen. And yet, that set of thoughts that haunt our minds ("what if I don't meeting work , what if I don't pass, what if I get sick, what if my partner leaves me...) has a direct impact on our health". This was stated at the University of Navarra by Dr. Marian Rojas, during the Open Day organized to present the offer of postgraduate program of the academic center in Madrid.

At the meeting, which was attended by more than 600 people (and nearly 800 online), the psychiatrist explained that when we experience a state of alert, threat, uncertainty, fear, etc., cortisol, "the stress hormone", is activated. "Then our body starts up and changes: physically (our hair falls out, we get gray hair and wrinkles, we suffer tachycardia, it is difficult to breathe, the digestive system changes, we do not sleep well...) and also psychologically (irritation, sadness...). Also, the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for attention, concentration, problem solving and impulse control, is deactivated.

Marian Rojas delivered a session under the degree scroll "How do you make good things happen in your career path?". "You are in a time of uncertainty and the professional environment has become complicated," she told them. "Learn to manage your stress, because we live in a world where things are always happening (viruses, wars, work, money, partners...)."

Faced with this, he proposed, firstly, to get to know yourself and secondly, to carry out a personality outline , to know what your stress factors are and how you react to them: "If I understand how I am, I am the master of my life and I am able to manage what happens to me. Happiness in the end is nothing more than the ability to connect in a healthy way with my reality, to manage the bad and enjoy the good".

Emotional drug dependence and screens

Likewise, he pointed out that happiness consists in knowing how to give meaning to life, "in connecting with the present having overcome the wounds of the past and looking forward to the future". "If I get stuck in the past I am a depressive and if I am anxious about the future I am an anxious person; and depression and anxiety are the two great diseases of the 21st century," he stressed.

When the human being has no sense of life, he added, the mind replaces sense with sensations: "The organism looks for something to hold on to... social networks, video games, shopping, food, drugs...". "We have become a society of emotional drug addicts: 'I want this and I want it now, I need to feel and because I feel it I think I am right'." But, in his opinion, the problem of living with instant gratifications, based on tendencies, impulses, emotions, without a prefrontal cortex, is that "none of this is fulfilling".

One of the causes of this drug addiction, according to the expert, is the misuse of screens: "They give me what I want when I want it. In her opinion, "what moves the world today is the ability to retain our attention for as long as possible on a screen, and multinationals spend millions on this". 

"The more screen, the less prefrontal cortex, the less ability to pay attention, and the less ability to make decisions, to manage an impulse and to postpone reward."

However, people who can focus their attention are able to focus. "If we want good things to happen to us, we have to set goals, because when my brain is interested in something it shows it to me." "We have to go back to looking at real life with different eyes, it is enough to look at it with interest for it to become interesting." Similarly, he advocated recovering the physical contact : "Something is happening when we connect better through the screen than through real life. Let's not forget that real life is the only one capable of fulfilling us fully and that everything else is instant gratification".