Mental strength through Snoopy? Neurology professor swears by the cult comic

Crisis follows crisis and at the same time more and more people are reporting sick due to psychological problems. Is the global situation too stressful for many people?

Volker Busch: An incredible number of things bombard us every day – both positive and negative. We have to process this with the help of our brain. And we usually do it very well. Humans are very resilient. But if a lot of things affect us, especially of a negative nature, then it can overwhelm and overload us.

The stress usually comes from two sources: personal stress, such as arguments in a relationship or stress at work, and worldly stress, including political, economic and social events. It obviously has an impact on us that food prices rise in line with inflation or that a terrible war is raging on the outskirts of Europe.

In summary: It is not just the personal backpacks that people carry, but also the world conditions that influence us. And all in all, that’s quite a lot for our psyche at the moment. But in addition to the external circumstances, the internal, i.e. how we deal with the stress, also plays a role.

They indicate the “mental immune system”. You write about this in your book, in the best case scenario you could imagine it as a “good friend who provides 360-degree all-round psychological protection”. What do you mean?

Volker Busch: The language image is not mine, and I can’t take credit for it either. But it simply describes very well how our psyche fights for us every day and defends us – just like a good friend. You can imagine it like this: we have a defense system in our brain against psychological stress.

Can you give us an example of this?

Volker Busch: Someone speaks stupidly to us from the side on the tram. We get annoyed for a moment, maybe talk about it again in the afternoon with a colleague or our partner, but then we forget about it. This has nothing to do with memory impairment, but rather with a coping process, an active process that takes place in our brain.

Another example would be that we hear that an acquaintance or neighbor has died. This affects us. We are sad, maybe a tear will fall. But after two weeks it’s okay again.

And this is what our mental immune system does. Similar to how our physical immune system fights off bacteria and viruses, the mental immune system ensures that we overcome psychological stress – and importantly: even grow.

That means?

Volker Busch: The mental immune system not only ensures that we are defended and recover, but also – just like the physical immune system – that, in the best case scenario, we mature and become stronger from the stress. That’s not always true, you can’t promise it, but overall we get stronger from crisis to crisis. We become more relaxed and immunological strength builds up.