I feel to understand and help prevent these acts of violence, we need to see more correctly how our environment affects all of our lives and hopefully begin to see how we can help persons in general have better mental/emotional health through better social care of persons along with providing better tools for hope and cognitive growth to all persons in our society. This I feel is the only way to help prevent the possibility of mass violence the future.
I have provided a Figure, page 4, to show how our average stress is really made up of layers of mental work our minds are dealing with in general. I feel all of us are acclimated or not even aware of our average stress. All of us are working with different amounts or layers of mental work. For persons in more stable, caring environments, there are relatively lower layers of mental work or lower layers of average stress. Please look at the Figure, page 4, I have provided. The “whole upright rectangle or box” represents our full mental energy given to our minds to use. Then look at the little horizontal lines drawn in from the bottom going up. I see this as our layers of mental work that take up real mental energy. For most of us, our layers of mental work (work our minds are dealing with both consciously and subconsciously) are somewhat healthy or rational. However, something to be aware of is that all of us can, if not kept healthy by society and our care, can have our layers of mental work accumulate toward the top of that upright rectangle.
This area at the top of the upright rectangle, page 4, represents a very unhealthy area for two reasons. Please look at the line with the double arrow on the left side of the upright rectangle. This represents our reflection time or time taken to think long-term, consider the long-term consequences rewards for a course action or to think deeply. As our layers of mental work or average stress accumulates toward the top of the upright rectangle this shortens our reflection time. This can become very unhealthy for those persons and others. The second reason those high layers can be very unhealthy is that with higher layers of average stress you also have less mental energy to deal rationally with life. This also can create more mental anguish and psychological suffering for “any individual who may be undergoing such very high average stress.
While these conditions usually lead to a vast number of escapes such as overeating, overshopping, and drug/alcohol abuse, it can also lead persons to escape through suicide and violence. In cases of mass violence, investigators are puzzled as to both the unexpected behavior of such persons and the sometimes meticulous planning by those persons committing the violence.

Since all of us are in society and all of us can be affected our environments in ways that may create very high average stress and psychological suffering, we need to redefine our average stress as layers of mental work that take up real mental energy in our lives. We need to begin using ourselves and teaching our students how to begin approaching our lives more delicately each day to begin more permanently reducing layers of mental work that take up real mental energy and hurt thinking, learning, motivation to learn, and reflection time or long-term thought processes.
We “cannot use relaxation or meditation” to more permanently lower our average stress. When we relax or use meditation, we are only temporarily turning off the valve to the multi-prong faucet, our mind that is feeding our layers of average stress. We may feel good, but when we attempt to approach any new mental work or problem, we are simply turning the faucet to the multi-prong faucet on again so nothing is accomplished. Running or doing physical work will not work either. Here we are simply transferring our mental energy to physical areas. When our bodies recover, that energy is then fed back onto our average stress, so nothing is accomplished.
Note that many layers of mental work “can be more permanently lowered by all of us”. We can all slowly learn how the elements of our individual environments along with weights and values we place on elements in our lives can create many layers of mental frictions or mental work in our lives. We can all slowly begin to understand, resolve, and make changes in our former weights or values so those things, persons, organizations, etc. no longer have the weight or influence in our lives and so we are able to begin more permanently reduce layers of mental work over time that take up real mental energy. By changing a faulty value of something and removing that mental friction, the principle we learned will help prevent other like mental frictions in the future. I believe all of us over time have the potential to change and improve our lives each day by approaching our lives more delicately to continually, more permanently reduce layers of mental frictions our life.
This theory has many social and academic applications.