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Don’t Forget to Take Your ‘Culture Vitamins’
This is an excerpt from The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging (Simon & Schuster) by Julia Hotz.
Jonas has always loved exploring other worlds — whether they’re the post-apocalyptic realms of his computer games, or the ancient civilizations of his history textbooks. “Imagine, you live a quiet life in the city with your parents, and then suddenly, you’re transported to a completely different place where you don’t know what anyone is saying,” he says of his favorite ancient world, the Roman Empire. “It’s gotta be traumatic as hell.”
On some level, Jonas could relate. Growing up, though he always loved learning, he was ruthlessly bullied in school. Seeking escape, he moved away for his graduate studies, but almost as soon as he arrived, that’s when his “really bad health problems began,” he says.
Suddenly, out of the blue, he’d feel his heart racing, he’d have trouble breathing, and feel consumed by crippling panic. Later, he was diagnosed with panic disorder and agoraphobia.
Designed for unemployed people dealing with psychological struggles like anxiety, Kulturvitaminer offers group-based “culture vitamins” like concert tickets, sing-a-longs and read-alouds. Courtesy of Kulturvitaminer
Especially when Jonas was trying to meet new people, nothing felt worse than knowing that he might suddenly erupt into a panic attack, and kind of like the Roman Empire commoner, he felt like nobody could understand.
Seeking an escape from his thoughts, he started to smoke weed. “I felt most comfortable while smoking, but then I began to get more panic attacks when I didn’t have any weed, which made me more and more isolated.”
When the panic attacks got so bad he couldn’t leave the apartment, Jonas knew he needed more help. After enrolling in group therapy and a drug treatment program, he gave up all substances and returned to his hometown in Aalborg, a tiny former Viking city in Denmark. But returning was a double-edged sword, he says. “I had a long period where I wasn’t really doing anything besides looking for a job, so it made me isolate and get really bad anxiety again.”
Jonas realized he needed to find a balance between comfort and exploration. “If I stayed too close to home and never went out, it would worsen my anxiety, so I needed to, like, push my boundaries a little, but not too much,” he says.
That’s when one of his mental health case workers recommended Kulturvitaminer — a 10-week program, designed for unemployed people dealing with psychological struggles like anxiety, by offering group-based “culture vitamins” like concert tickets, sing-a-longs and read-alouds. At first, Jonas says he wasn’t so sure. “When you’re sitting at home with anxiety, it’s obviously very scary to have to leave the house.” But when his kid-rooted explorer instincts overruled his anxious ones, he decided to give Kulturvitaminer a try.
Regine Galanti, a clinical psychologist, explains why exposing ourselves — literally or in our imagination — to the stressors that bring us anxiety is a positive first step. “Often what we do with anxiety is feel it coming on, and then we do everything we can to get away from that feeling and that fear, but we don’t actually get away from it because we don’t follow the anxiety through to its logical conclusion, and so it just takes it over and piles up in [our] head.”
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