My Love for Psychology

I'm a people person. Sort of. Apparently, I have good people skills and I work retail, and most customers like me. The ones that don't are the ones that have argued with me about getting something that they want that they don't necessarily deserve. I'm also a social work student, and that line of work generally means that I'm going to be spending the rest of my life working with people.

As such, one of my favourite school subjects is psychology. I'm planning on making a minor out of it, and I've taken as many psych courses that I am allowed in order to fill almost all of my elective slots. They just interest me a lot.

The entire study of psychology is about learning how the brain works, whether it is on a more medical level, such as the study of actual psychological disorders (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc.) or on a more abstract level, like thinking about the actual reasons behind why we do things. I've taken both of these classes, and loved them both. Learning about the way that people work and why they choose to do certain things really interests me.

Another thing that I love to do is people watch, and I do it all the time. I go to school downtown, so there's always a million people around doing a variety of things. A lot of the time, my friend and I will grab food in the food court at the mall near campus, and because she takes forever to eat, I usually end up watching all the people around me fight for tables and talk to their friends and just go about their business. I walk a busy underground path from campus to the train station, and there's always a thousand business people in there because it snakes underneath the financial district with access to all the office buildings above it. There's restaurants and shops down there, so people go get lunch or go shopping or run errands or are also trying to get somewhere. Most business people are the same - in the morning or the evening, they're rushing to the office or the train station, respectively, and in the middle of the day, they walk slow as turtles carrying their lunches because they really don't want to go back to work. They all stand around and chat with each other in the middle of the hall and actively avoid the eyes of the many homeless people that are panhandling and trying to make eye contact with them because the $300 suit/watch/shoes they're wearing indicates that they do have money, but never money to give. Granted, I don't give money to homeless people either, but being a teenage girl, I'd really rather they didn't remember me giving them money and harass me for the rest of my life.

That got a little offtopic, but the basic point of what I'm trying to say is that people fascinate me, and we all do so many different things for so many different reasons, and learning about those reasons really fascinates me. I was talking to one of my friends last night and she was telling me that the reason that she likes psychology is because she wants to know how her mental illnesses work. That's a large part of it for me as well, because learning how my anxiety works is really interesting to me. In case anybody is wondering, it's basically a combination of nature and nurture - having the chemical imbalance in your brain that makes it possible combined with specific environments that trigger it creates the anxiety/depression/etc that you feel.

One of my favourite psychological facts is that you are capable of having the chemical imbalance in your head to have something but may never be put in the kind of environment that activates it. For instance, you could have a chemical imbalance/genetic predisposition (because that might be closer to what it is - my memory is fuzzy) to be a psychopath, but never become one because you grow up in a loving family home. If you've noticed that most psychopaths grew up in homes that were incredibly crappy to the nth degree, there's a pattern there and it is not a coincidence.

So, yeah. I just think that psychology is really cool, and as much grief as it causes me trying to study it, I still love it and think that it's cool. That's it, really.