> Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment.
The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.
If you're interested in this approach, I'd recommend the works of David Burns, for example his book "Feeling Great" or the Feeling Good Podcast.
This can surely be corrected with the happiness laser.
Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
> and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.
I came here to say: read this book, it's really great.
I think if your depression is very deeply buried, it surely isn't enough to read it, but still it can open up quit some insights regarding the connection of what you think and how you feel. It makes it visible.
There can also be other causes for depression is course.
While studying and testing the exercises described in the book I discovered one other thing I'd like to share: to me it seems, to come out of a reappearing mental dip, you need to be very consistent in your efforts (mental / physical exercises and other habits you try to establish or change, to feel better). Anyone else?
> In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.
Wouldn‘t it be both? While the repeated negative thoughts are the cause, they‘re also the symptom how it show up and the reason why people seek out a diagnosis
I've had little success with multiple CBT therapists as it's basically "have you tried not feeling bad" with extra steps.
"Things are only as bad as we perceive them to be" leading up to "have you tried reframing that and finding something positive in it", and "have you tried not thinking about that".
If I need dissociation and self-delusion, there are substances that are a far more impactful option.
I saw this with a family member. In their 60s, they started getting stuck on small worries and always assumed the worst. At first it just seemed like anxiety, but over time their memory and focus started slipping too. It was like their mind got stuck in a loop.
What helped the most wasn’t medicine. It was little things, like going for walks together or having simple conversations. Just giving the brain something new to pay attention to seemed to make a real difference.
Another little thing you can try: music from their childhood / youth.
Just yesterday I randomly came across a song we often heard in our shared apartment during University, and immediately I had 10 different memories from that time swirling around in my head.
This is in my family too. One person always had a tendency of being overly worried and after children moved out and social life thinned or a bit, this became more prevalent.
After years of trying to push that person towards trying out new things and enriching their life, I kind of gave up. You simply cannot convince someone about a medicine if they don't feel there is a problem. Still it's hard to see believing the person could be enjoying life more, especially during their retirement.
I'm not seeing where they are coming up with RNT as a cause, other than a lot of theory. Wouldn't it be a symptom of cognitive decline instead? Dementia patients, particularly those with Alzheimers, tend to become depressed because of confusion and memory loss. Wouldn't it be more likely that these depression symptoms are being caused by deteriotating brain function rather than the other way around?
The first thing that jumps out at me is the concept of perseveration (repeated fixed obsessions) that happens in dementia syndromes. It would be interesting to consider whether this is a chicken-or-egg scenario, whether individuals tended to ruminate in earlier life.
I believe there have been other studies showing people with a history of depression develop dementia at higher rates. There are some that have shown the structural/signal changes that happen after longterm depression as well. These are things that occur years or decades before the dementia.
Of course. It would be bizarre if there weren't a relationship between Lewy Body dementia, Alzheimer's, or vascular dementia (which in old people, means you've gone into heart failure) and repetitive negative thoughts. For one, you know you've got an incurable disease that will inevitably destroy your mind, and you've become one of the rare class of people for which assisted suicide has almost no controversy, it's something you're putting down payments on. For two, you can't finish thoughts.
My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.
Personally I think that reporting of correlations should be dropped altogether - they're very prevalent (reports on correlations) in every day news, and I think that they're damaging because they imply, or outright claim, that the discovery is that some causative effect has been observed.
> Personally I think that reporting of correlations should be dropped altogether…
It really should be a shared responsibility to report and understand the meaning of statistically significant correlation. Unfortunately, few journalists seem to have much interest in understanding it. And given that their readership likely has about average (i.e poor) numeracy and iffy understanding of probability, it’s a bad combination. The widespread misunderstanding about the iterative way that science converges on truth also contributes to this problem.
That said, I would rather know about interesting findings such as this if for no other reason than to start digging for the original paper.
A lot of modern medicine is based on just correlations and an more or less educated guess. I do not think ignoring them makes sense, it is just that the reporting needs to be more clear and less sensationalist.
I already knew my best friend from childhood was a terminal cynical bastard.
But now this! He has less time than I thought. I will have to forward it to him, and cross my fingers that he doesn't spiral. Thoughts and prayers, man. Before you suggest it, I can't tell him to just "think positive". He would physically explode. Implode? Something. Matter, antimatter.
To be honest, I don't think that line ever helped someone who sees himself in the middle of deep shit. There is nothing positive about being in shit.
The only thing that can help people stuck in such a mindset is somehow change their perspective. And yes, maybe that study will help in a way.
Beta is dimensionless, in terms of standard deviations. In their results tables, you can find their unit versions under the column "B". These lie in the centers of the CIs, as expected.
Anecdotally: Happy people seem to like to talk about anything and everything. Unhappy people don't like to talk or only talk about one thing.
I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far:
https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw
After my PD diagnosis, I started out taking only Azilect, then Mirapex and sinemet as the disease progressed but didn’t help much. In July last year, I started on PD-5 TREATMENT PROTOCOL from www. Uinehealthcentre. com. Few months into the treatment, I made a significant recovery. After I completed the recommended treatment plan, almost all my symptoms were gone, had wonderful improvement with my movement and tremors . Its been 6 months since I completed the treatment, I live a better life..
I have a personal theory (I'm sure it's not a novel one and it probably has a name) that human brains are naturally predisposed to negative thought than positive thought because our brains are essentially evolved prediction engines. And because it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it (e.g. it is usually less urgent to act on the signs of deer you might want to hunt and eat, than the sign of a tiger who might want to hunt and eat you), our prediction engines have a bias toward negative prediction. Conscious awareness of this fact (or rather, theory) has helped me curb negative thoughts at least to some extent.
I know that traumatized human brains tend toward negativity. I don't believe it is a natural human condition, though. With trauma, the instincts you mentioned start applying to the wrong situations - trauma rewires the brain. "Minor" trauma, sustained trauma, traumatic events, can all contribute to this.
I don‘t think negativity necessarily has something to do with trauma. Negativity bias is very widespread, regardless of previous trauma. Basically everybody flies at negativity.
Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.
I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers
This is likely a byproduct of us being too comfortable now. Not in the "you've got nothing real to worry about!" boomer rethoric kind of way, but in the sense that our baseline for reward has shifted a bit higher. So trauma can still present a very strong negative RL signal, while positive RL signals of similar magnitude become rarer.
Or a byproduct of sustained trauma being more prevalent in modern society. There was a large shift in the way children are raised in the past 100 years, from community to individuality. Entire generations of people whose childhoods prepared them for a world that did not exist by the time they were adults. There is no template for raising children in the new world, and no community to fall back on. Many react with anger and resentment, and raise their children accordingly. Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.
I have a personal bias but suspect this is more prevalent than it's made out to be since I've both lived through it and have not had much opportunity throughout my life to recognize how the two issues were connected until many years later.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
I've talked about how intergenerational trauma has affected my family before, although I didn't mention it started in 1918 when my great great grandfather killed my great great grandmother in a murder suicide, leaving my great grandmother an orphan who would one day abuse my grandma. [1]
I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.
Or byproduct of the fact that we live 2 to 4 times longer depending at which scale/how you want to count it. Ie not so long ago in ancient rome reaching 5yo was slightly above 50% chance gamble.
> Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.
Frankly, abuse and childhood trauma has always been a staple of human history. Even in the Bible, so at least a few thousand years ago, physical punishment against children is described. Sexual abuse was rampant as well, the Quran documents marriages at age 9. Wars and all the horrors that came with them were all too common - Europe only got actually peaceful after WW2.
Just ask in your own family if you still got really really old people left alive... they will all report from some uncle, aunt or godknowswhat that just went loony. Or tell horror stories about rape, beatings, bullying...
Nothing is new, the only thing that is new is that abuse gets called out and, at least in some cases, perps get punished.
Many people fall into a trap of thinking "we catch the bad guys now, not like in the old days."
I'm sure people were saying it in the 90s, 80s, 70s...every era of advancement involves experiencing technology before it is widely understood, which can feel very futuristic or magical. The underlying systems we depend on, like the court system, are still stuck in "the old days".
This is probably also evolutionary. Most species, once safe and sated, tend to calm down and relax, or even nap. But we humans suffer from boredom, which tend to agitate us into action even when there is no hunger or threat. Probably the evolutionary adaptation that allowed our particular lineage to overtake (and parhaps wipe out) other competing lines of homonids and develop civilization.
What? We're more comfortable? What planet do you people live on? People have never been more stressed and uncomfortable. People are literally fighting psychological warfare and vanishing opportunities. Psychologically, we have never been so uncomfortable.
Negative statements also garner more attention from the tribe. This is why a lot of special interest groups are constantly carping about what they're against rather than what they're for.
I agree with this to a large extent. All prediction comes with uncertainty and a good survival strategy is to align towards the upper bound on risk and lower bound on reward.
It seems to be an established fact that humans are loss averse, and feel the pain of a loss more than the pleasure of a gain. This seems to make sense from an evolutionary point of view - taking a risk to gain something, at the expense of losing something already in hand, seems generally maladaptive (perhaps moreso when you are old and frail, and less resilient to loss).
Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?
OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.
Evolutionary psychology just-so stories can justify anything as long as the premise that the organism will survive better in some defined local optimum is preserved.
People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it
In this case for example, it doesn’t really give a shit about your psychological well being or shaving years off your life because of some negative thought pattern
If being on your toes, anxious, paranoid, and always looking over your shoulder keeps you alive and making babies - then as far as the developer that nature is, it’s a feature not a bug
> People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it
Common misunderstanding.
Evolution optimizes for system success. Not individual gene propagation. Genomes are not agents with individual goals.
Many species, but especially social animals, have numerous behaviors and traits designed to prompt communal success rather than individual survival and reproduction
That's why it's best to sow plants as close to each other as possible, as they will help each other thrive. Or maybe that leads to famine and disaster, as it usually does when people try to apply their personal political beliefs to nature.
First of all if negative thinking is associated with cognitive decline and if what you say is also generally true then humans will also be pretty much, in general, be in cognitive decline.
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.
There’s not much evidence of rigorous differences in intelligence across racial groups that could not be explained by environmental and cultural differences. Statistical analysis generally suggests that if there is one, the effect size is small.
The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
I know this is such a controversial livewire of a topic and borderline taboo, but the evidence is pretty substantial. That being said, the intra-group variation is also extremely substantial (IE the variation between genius/median in any particular group is simultaneously a) far more than median in one group and median in another group and b) far less than genius in one group vs genius in another group). All that being said, I think this contributes to rather than detracts from GP's comment. These "studies" (as with much of modern psychological "research") are so poorly designed so as to be meaningless, hence the replication crisis. I think they're actually worse than meaningless because they're misleading and create infohazards.
I disagree. It strongly detracts from the GP’s claim.
If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
>If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.
>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.
Cite them. Let's see which ones you're talking about. We know there are studies that say what you say! But it's hard to engage when the studies themselves are abstractions.
> Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
Common sense says nothing about the weight of these factors nor does it say anything about “genetics” being archetypally delineated by race. Genetics for sure plays a role in intelligence.
You are appealing to non cognizance as a premise to support your biases. But that’s… dumb.
You are welcome to point to specific studies if you wish but the general consensus is that there is no statistical evidence of what you’re claiming to be obvious.
Most studies that attempt to normalize against socio cultural features recognize that it’s basically impossible to do. That’s why the best available premise is that since we broadly observe huge gains in population intelligence based on economic development within racial groups; it is most likely that economic and cultural differences occupy the lions share of any observable difference between racial groups currently as they’re all in different places.
not true. Evidence of rigorous differences exist. The "explanations" are not supported by rigorous evidence. They are just "explanations" for a correlation. One explanation is environment, another is genetics.
Realistically Both are factors.
>The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
Additionally the logic is inescapable. If genetics is what causes something like down syndrome then of course it can cause the opposite of down syndrome.
>So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
Either way can you stick to the main topic. Tired of this off tangent bs. The intelligence thing was just an example.
> Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
You cannot. And the smoking gun is, again, that we have seen massive rises in intelligence scores within racial subgroups over time correlating with environmental changes that are much larger than current spreads and still unevenly distributed.
Right and again, when you maximize environmental factors there ARE STILL differences in intelligence. While Environment plays a massive role, genetics does as well. It's not as if environment is a smoking gun that makes the other factor disappear even when environment accounts for a much greater rise.
Obviously a starving, stressed out person is going to have a much lower IQ score then someone who is happy and well fed. You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
This is what I'm talking about. The mass delusion. The positive cognitive bias. You grasp for evidence that supports the conclusion you want.
> You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
The claim is not that genetics has nothing to do with intelligence. The claim is that race is a material, important driver of intelligence. There is no rigorous evidence of this.
There are studies on separated Black twins that ended up in different socioeconomic situations. They limit the genetic difference in variation of IQ between races to just a few points.
And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
So yes you can very much find black people who are smarter than Asians and vice versa but the generality (aka the mean, aka the center of the bell curve) will be different for races.
>But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
This is not proven to be true. The most likely explanation is that variation in a population can be explained by both environment and genetics.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) are effective at reducing negative thinking, although they don't come in pill form.
Have children. Hard not to endlessly smile when you see their smiles for you doing nothing more than being there for them. Then, uhh I guess the plan is to have more children once they enter their teen years?
Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
> Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
This isn‘t really limited to weight lifting as to any kind of working out in general. Moving your body instead of only sitting at a desk constantly turns out to be healthy
having a kid had triggered an constant existential crisis for me. the moments are nice, but overall life is more confusing then ever, and not in a good way.
I had largely the opposite experience, perhaps because I started having children relatively later in life but was fortunately able to do so nonetheless.
In particular I'm not especially religious, but also think that the contemporary efforts of people to deny their mortality (singularity, consciousness transfer, medical immortality, etc) are irrational coping mechanisms, religion for atheists, that I refuse to adopt. So that leaves one in a rather uncomfortable existential place.
But since having children, it feels like every day I can see more of myself in them, and it provides an immense amount of comfort, like I've never had before in my life. This is about as close as I think we'll ever get to realistically transferring our consciousnesses, and I'm more than okay with that, and now hope to have many many grandchildren before my final day.
There's always going to be people who things don't work out well for, even if they're a good idea for the overwhelming majority of people. If you want studies on this parents have substantially lower rates of 'psychological distress' [1], it's associated with lower rates of psychiatric morbidity, and partnered parents have substantially lower rates of all common mental disorders, with an especially pronounced effect for men. [2] The same affect was not observed for non-parent couples.
The first study makes no conclusion that parenthood is the causative effect. It actually speculates if this is because people with higher rates of psychological distress are less likely to become parents.
I couldn't read the full text of the second, but likewise the conclusion does not imply causation.
I'm a parent, and have experienced significant 'psychological distress' as a result of having children. Every time I read a comment from someone advising people to have children for happiness reasons, it triggers me.
You're right. Not only did the first paper not imply causation, they literally did not even consider it. They didn't consider that fulfilling our most critical and primal instinct, in an activity that [generally] creates psycho-emotional bonds like no other, might have positional psychological benefits. Does not not strike you as odd?
There's a practical issue with social science. Very near to 100% of researchers (from the US at least) share a common ideology, frequently to a fairly radical degree, and it regularly leaks into their research. You can even see this in the abstract of the paper. They show data indicating that parents have dramatically lower rates of mental illness than the general population and their conclusion? "Serious psychological distress is fairly prevalent among parenting adults." So for these sort of papers, I generally find their discussion and conclusions quite irrelevant, but the data is generally sound, so long as it's not overtly cherry picked.
I'd also add that the fact that positive psychological effects (in the second study) were not observed in childless couples seems to largely falsify the hypothesis that the psychological benefits of parenting were simply an observation of people with psychological issues being unable to have children in the first place.
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And yeah, having a child can be terrifying at times. My youngest recently went through roseola and we spent days in the hospital with him after his fever briefly spiked just under 107F/41.6C. That is sheer terror - holding your child who's running so hot that he's literally uncomfortable to hold against your body. Yet they have also changed my life, worldview, and overall psychological state in an unbelievably positive way on the whole, and I would (and do) wholeheartedly recommend them to any and every person who can provide a reasonably stable household with two loving parents.
Take a look at stoicism. Not the pop modern version but the ancient roman and greek traditions of Seneca, Epictitus, and Marcus Aurelius.
Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.
It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.
Yes, there is medicine for negative thinking that helps to various degrees (SSRIs do work), but they have issues and unfortunately we don't have any magic bullets.
Repetitive negative thinking was a symptom of my undiagnosed ADHD. Getting diagnosed and medicated took away the repetitive negative thinking, or as I called it ruminating negative thought patterns.
I really wish I could get diagnosed too. My psychiatrist refuses to even consider it because she says with my psych history as a kid they'd have identified it. But that's nonsense because thinking some adhd has changed hugely since the 80s. You needed to be rain man to be seen as autistic. And adhd was only diagnosed for loud obnoxious kids. My psychiatrist is also very old and kinda clings to those definitions.
But because of this I'm locked out of medication :'(
Realizing there are many variables in life, I'll chime in. I'm in my late sixties and catch myself everyday complaining to myself. Things are harder to do, my memory isn't shot, but is not quite as sharp and the old body is, well, not as responsive.
Having said all this, I don't let it get to me because I knew all this was coming as I became more "senior". All things being even, we do have the power to control our thoughts and should. Hope is a much overlooked word these days. People we know, family and not looking for trouble can help us stay hopeful. Unfortunately not everyone has family or their living condition may not be ideal, this is when community is very helpful. If I may say, if you know an older person who you wonder about, ask them what's going on.
We can’t control our thoughts though, right? They just pop up, appearing randomly. We can control our attention and train ourselves not to get onboard trains of thought though. But I think it’s important to acknowledge thoughts randomly crop up and it’s not our fault.
My personal belief is that we can’t control every thought, but we can make sure we’re in a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one. For example, when I am getting negative, I’ve learned to take a step back and try to figure out why. If I can’t get myself in a better mood, I go to bed early and generally wake up happier. I also try to structure my days to make time for the things that make me happier (exercise, eating well, friends, family, hobbies) and cut out things that make me feel more negative (social media, news, sugar, etc). Not perfect, but it helps.
cognitive decline is also associated with stress. So if you have a lot of stress in your life you will probably suffer cognitive decline. Also if you have a lot of stress in your life you will probably be a pretty negative person.
This is why ignorance is bliss! If you can afford it. Mix in some stoicism and meditation, do some 'reality checks' every once in a while to not totally 'lose it', and life is good. If you can afford it. Otherwise? Bad luck. Still try that stoicism and meditation thing. Cats or other pets can help. Good sex too. Drugs? Just maybe.
At least in business, this isn't really true. It makes more sense to form long term partnerships by being trustworthy than to have a reputation of hostility and lawsuits.
Is it possible that we're just better at reporting our negative thoughts, not that we have more of them? Or is overthinking the price we pay for analyzing everything?
> RNT was assessed using the perseverative thinking questionnaire (PTQ). The scale consists of 15 items covering three domains: core characteristics of RNT, unproductiveness, and psychological capacity captured. Each item is rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 0 “never” to 4 “almost always”, with a total score ranging from 0 to 60.
Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?
The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?
I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?
“The prevalence of cognitive disorders is increasing year by year, placing a heavy burden on patients, families, and society. It is estimated that the total annual cost of dementia disease in China will reach $1.89 trillion in 2050 [4]. However, there is no drug that can stop or reverse the progression of dementia.”
That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.
It's common for old fogies to claim that the future is bad and the past was best. But I don't remember a time in my life that was this stressful. I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff. Everybody wants to escape the real world and live through their screens. Nothing is real and everything is a meme. And the fact that we allowed DJT to even approach the White House is such a damning indictment of America and it's vaunted democracy. The bad guys won, and there's no clear way to change that.
I think most people aren't leaving their house each day with the same worries people in the 20th century had. It is certainly much nicer to be alive now than then, especially in places like Europe.
What personally has me worried is the derivative and 2nd derivative. How much is my current comfort sustained purely because of the momentum of systems made possible less than a lifetime ago (post WW2 reconstruction). So ironically your comment induces more stress in me. The idea that just as recently as the 20th century, times that my grandparents were conscious for, that many people lived through that much suffering. To me it seems incredibly easy to end up right back there.
I don't know, in the 80s we had a really nice welfare system in the Netherlands that alleviated worry because there was always a safety net. Rent prices were government-set. Healthcare was good and very cheap.
In this century everything was cut and privatised due to globalization, neoliberalism and the financial crises. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, social security is less, national healthcare keeps being cut. I don't care about getting rich but I do want to live my life without worry.
IMO… You need to detach yourself from the big data straw you’re gagging on.
Go outside and interact with people.
There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.
If this solution is as effective as you claim, then wherefore comes this sense of societal malaise? I'm not disagreeing you that life is worth living IRL, but still, if you just need to "touch grass", then why _aren't_ we doing precisely that?
I think our brains are wired for hyper-compacted headline news (removes all nuance), emotional bits of info (high reactionary impact), especially if it's negative (survival instinct kicks in, makes a person feels alive).
It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).
That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.
I sort of agree, but what I'm worried about is that our own desire for social connection and validation has been hijacked as a commodity. As I see it, "McDonalds" capitalized on our lizard-brain's desire for easy calories, as "Porn Hub" has done for sex, "Apple" for shiny things and "Facebook" for socialization. All these successful products take advantage of some base instinct which served us well 100,000 years ago but when given the opportunity, just run wild.
I don't think its getting especially dumber and crazier now, but more like we let dumb and crazy fester and let the problems keep building for decades while we used technological progress as a distraction from it all and an excuse to do as little as possible. People started believing technological progress will fix everything and that 30 years down the live they will be living like the Jetsons with personal butler robots so that the problems of today don't matter, except it didn't happen, and will continue to not happen, and problems continue to mount.
Older generations died. Some generations died so often that we use words like ‘population decline,’ so the survivors don’t feel so badly about surviving.
As for finding ways through, I don’t believe that for even a moment. Why? Because we’re still struggling with those same issues.
There is no out. There is no through. Keep that can kicking down the road. That’s what we do.
> I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff.
At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.
Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.
I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.
The bad guys might seem to have won but the story isn't over yet!
The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.
Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.
Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.
The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.
The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.
It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.
There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.
However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.
Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.
Or for individuals. I;ve never realized how US-like my country was becoming until DJT and his second administration. I'm probably one of the most US-pilled person my age in my country (I follow US football more than soccer, i hang out on US forums and discords, i used to follow US news every day, i've spent a month between Ohio and WV, and another between California, Nevada and Colorado, it's the foreign country i've spent the most time in overall) and even I realized how subserviant and culturally acclimated to the US we became. Von der Layen and her "negociation" did not help the sentiment, i guarantee, but i think it's how much even national news talked about the US that made me realized we have to cut ties.
I've moved, in 6 month, from a pretty pro-OTAN, "liberal" point of view toward an anti-OTAN, anti-Atlantist position, and i think i'm right. I now would even vote for an anti-atlantist right wing party rather than for the left of center, pro-US party i've voted for before (well, since an anti-Atlantist left wing party exist, and despite its radicality, i will probably vote for them, but i'm now a single-issue voter, and my issue is how omnipresent the US is in our culture).
DJT made me realized i'm part of the problem, and now i can take steps to fix it.
I'm an American living _in_ Europe for over a decade and I've been going crazy watching the EU willfully remain a weak and insignificant vassal to the US when it _could_ be much, much stronger. It's insane watching them go back to their abuser over and over and over and acting surprised when the abuser behaves exactly like they said they would.
One, figure out why you're "anti-Atlantist", and anti-defense pact. Two, think about how radicality created the US problems, and why you think radicalism is the answer in your case.
Yes, Europe needs to change its stance, but electing a "burn-it-to-the-ground" faction is not actually going to do this in a productive way.
As for the "omnipresence" of the US, that is and has always been a lot of individual choices more than a political choice. By all means, fixate less on the US yourself, but I promise you that trying to force that on others by electing a more authoritarian party will backfire spectacularly.
Soft power isn't countered by hard power. The two working counters are increased soft power on your own (i.e. a culture that's more attractive than US culture), or said soft-power self-reducing. You can trust DJT to achieve the latter.
You don't have to "cut ties". You have to learn to think on your own.
I'm similar in that I had hugely admired the USA for as long as I've been politically aware (so a bit over 15 years) and dreamt of living there one day. That's all changed now of course, I think we need to keep the USA on side for as long as possible but we need to cut ties with them as soon as we can. Not only do they not give a shit about us, they seem to actively hate us. I don't recognise their right wing any more, they just worship that fucktard in the WH. Basically everything I believed about Western civilisation and America's role in leading it, turned out to be a lie. I mean, I wouldn't even call the USA a western country any more.
So who will lead then? A world without great power competition isn’t an actual thing. I’d be ok with the UK, maybe Italy. It won’t be France which is in turmoil. So who do you prefer over the USA, that has some chance of taking over?
It's not about who I want to lead. The USA has already stated to the world that it has no desire to lead and wants to retreat from the global stage. It's more about survival at this stage. Of course the UK cannot lead, it is too small, and I say that as a Brit.
> DJT has been the best thing that has ever happened…
I am curious about whether your model of how the current Administration in the U.S. has benefited various countries so strikingly includes the United States itself.
I personally think the US benefited from recent events in a similar way body benefits from a fever. So yes, even though it might not feel like it at times.
Bodies do not "benefit" from fever. A fever is a signal that pathogens have recently entered the body, and the body is desperately at work trying to kick them out again. If it fails, you die. The fever is a direct mirror of the inflammation caused by that fight.
So, yes, the current administration certainly caused a fever. And the only thing the US benefits from are the antibodies fighting that pathogen.
The jury is very much out on that. Market’s up, unemployment rising but relatively low. Our place in the world stage not as good as 30 years ago, but arguably a tad bit better than the days between our Afghan withdrawal and Putin’s blitz on Ukraine, or the dark days of pandemic lockdowns. Sometimes the darkest hour is before dawn. To be sure I ask myself your question nearly everyday and the concerns are obvious: a declining superpower (ensured by demographics) leaves a lot of room for the devil to take hold. Nuclear war has never felt more close or inevitable to me. Hatred reigns in many places, forgiveness, unity and love quite scarce compared to 30 years ago when soft power meant something. The Cold War years seem comfy in hindsight.
This is unironically the best time to be alive. The problem is that most people are ignorant of real history and don't realize how much life used to suck. Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.
But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.
edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse
There is no meaningful 'best time to be alive' distinct from psychological reality. If people are not adapted to their environment and either don't value it or aren't valued by it, it doesn't matter how much material comfort is available.
There is a reason the suicide rate jumps during industrial revolutions.
The industrial revolution was not a single event. There is enough data since then to say that economic uncertainty is correlated with suicide and that technological upheaval is correlated with economic uncertainty.
The period we are living through is a time of rapid technological change, whatever you want to call it, and suicide rates have been increasing for the past 25 years. Although I would take any studies and statistics on this with a large grain of salt I think it is not unreasonable to consider these things are related.
If you have a lot of money, sure. But coming back to reality, prices for everything has risen and lots of people are living harder lives than a few years ago.
Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive. But do you really think that Americans are simply that spoiled and stupid? When an entire nation sinks into a despair, surely there must be a better answer than "ignorance"? So I am positing that there must be some underlying problem, something that is difficult to quantify, dare I say it, some kind of mass psychological-spiritual disfunction at play.
> Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive.
Considering the United States only for a moment; the distribution of national income has not been so unequal since the robber baron days. At the same time the visibility of wealth to make upward comparisons has never been greater due to complete permeation of media, both traditional and social. If my share of income in real dollars was slipping as is the case for many, while watching the .1% pocket it, I’d be pretty doggone dysphoric.
Well, there aren't any signs of a worldwide multi-year pandemic starting that will shut down every economy, force governments into extreme monetary devaluation via supply expansion to pretend everything is okay, and an extreme loss of trust in many medical and scientific institutions.
So, yeah, I'd rather carry on as we are than go back and live through it all over again.
Hard not to be negative when you're 22 and have firsthand knowledge of how emotionally and intellectually stunted the coming generation is, and how much you've lost out on.
Consider how emotionally and intellectually stunted many generations were hundreds of years ago when information wasn't available, we knew very little about human psychology, and the state of medicine and technology meant that almost everyone suffered incredible trauma in their lives.
And yet those where the generations that by care and force of will eventually birthed ours.
Yes, it is a very scary time in the world right now. But it's not as scary as the Great Death, the Great Depression, or WWII and we were able to get from those to the prosperity that we have today.
> "Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment." (emphasis added)
This strongly implies that changing negative thinking behavior might reduce cognitive impairment. But the study has no way to establish a cause-effect relationship -- that would require an entirely different kind of study, one that studies the brain, not the mind. In other words, a neuroscience study, one probably not possible at present.
Like many psychology papers, this one implies a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence, but one that suggests a role for talk therapy.
It would be interesting to see a review of all modern psychological work, a hundred years from now, from the perspective of a neuroscience that doesn't yet exist, to see how often these articles turned out to be just-so stories with no connection to reality.
A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence. Maybe kids predisposed to mental health issues are more likely to use marijuana -- that possibility can't be excluded because all the studies are retrospective.
Most people know I can be relied on to make this point, but until neuroscience matures, studies like this will suffer from a theory vacuum. One can only accomplish so much by studying symptoms, with no clue about root biological causes.
> A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence.
This is one of those topics where people will set an impossibly high standard for evidence and then use that to reject everything.
We do actually know that heavy marijuana use is associated with increases of mental health conditions. We know that discontinuing heavy use can result in improvements in depression scores over time (following the withdrawal periods which, yes, exists despite decades of people claiming it doesn’t). We know that the increased availability of high concentration THC products has made it worse.
Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.
This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist. I knew a guy who started believing that there isn’t any strong evidence that flossing or even twice-daily brushing were important because he didn’t think the science proved causation that flossing and brushing improved dental health. He believed it was just correlation and people who were healthier in general were also flossing and brushing, coincidentally. His breath was terrible and he later abandoned those ideas when the dental problems undeniably arrived.
> Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.
Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on to justify a conclusion that would have required the impossible study. Saying that a study isn't practical can't be used to justify making a policy decision based on circumstantial evidence.
My use of marijuana studies is meant only to show how bad science steers public policy, not to advocate for its use. There are other, better reasons to avoid that drug.
> This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist.
This is why science exists. But if the science cannot be carried out, then we have no right to draw conclusions that would require actual science to be legitimate.
This is moving away from the original topic, which is the kind of sloppy science common in modern psychology, where people wave their hands instead of their scientific results.
> Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on…
Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
>> Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on…
> Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
The "therefore" section of your comment is your own interpretation, not the reality of a society steered by science. It's why uneducated people believe in Bigfoot. We can't disprove Bigfoot, therefore he exists. It makes a certain kind of pre-modern sense, but it fails to take scientific discipline into account.
I'm tempted to call it the Avi Loeb version of cosmology -- we can't disprove the alien provenance of a small distant glowing object, therefore it's an alien craft. And Loeb has a Harvard position on his side -- for those who believe in scientific authority.
When confronted by this kind of thinking, I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remark: "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."
And finally, it's why psychology has the reputation it does -- many psychologists have no hesitation about leaping ahead of the evidence.
No, it's correlation not causation. When you get older, you see everyone making the same damn mistakes you made, but refusing to listen to you. Various reasons are given as to "No, this is different", but it isn't.
Then, worse, you remember yourself saying "No, this is different", and how wrong you were, and it kinda bums you out a bit. You're watching a replay of yourself being a dumbass, which makes you angry at the situation.
That doesn't mean every old person is negatively inclined, because some will think "Well, this is the way of it", and take solace in that fact that it's been happening since at least the start of recorded history. You, and your ancestors are one. And you finally get your grandparents.
So even the optimists, feeling better, think "might as well play my part" then yell "get off my lawn!"
I have a go to list of positive things to think about.
I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.
It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).
The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.
My experience quite often is that if I get in a bad state, the things that usually bring me joy just no longer do. In some cases they even produce more sadness.
It depends on my negative thought loop. If it's more existential anxiety the things that bring me joy sometimes can help. Other sources of negative thoughts they definitely don't work on.
I think this question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how depression works for a lot of people. You're asking "why don't they replace negative signals with positive signals" when the problem often is that the positive signaling mechanism itself is broken. It's like trying to balance a bike that only goes left.
It's like how you can't really help but automatically read text you look at in a language you know well.
It's very hard to control, over the years I've worked on reigning in my negative thinking, but every once in a while I still end up in a spiral of increasingly negative thoughts that don't just go away by focusing on positive things.
No, but you can think less by reducing your cognitive ability through say drugs and alcohol. Notice how the happiest boomers guzzle the wine and don’t have as many (negative) thoughts.
It's not quite as simple as that, but what you describe has some relation to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Part of CBT involves recognizing when you're ruminating/spiraling in thought patterns that you want to avoid, and strategies to redirect and break that loop.
The only thing I'd add to this (as someone with stupidly depressive and negative thought patterns), is that there are techniques that can help.
The parent comment comes off as flippant, but I am going to assume it's not intended that way.
Learning to think more positively takes an incredible amount of effort. An effort which seemingly never goes away. It just never gets easier. It's like my brain is simply wired to assume the worst, worry and of course just constantly make suicide seem like some kind of great way out. So much so, that when I was younger, I had assumed everyone just walked around constantly wondering whether it'd be easier to just die.
To this day, that's where my brain goes first. Decades of nearly daily thoughts of ending it. BUT and this is the crucial part, to me that was just always part of the noise. It's there, but it's not forcing my hand. I can both live and also constantly think that I don't particularly enjoy just existing for existence's sake and therefore death sort of seems like a viable alternative. I don't act upon it, because I'm too curious to see what's next, for the time being.
Anyway, the techniques that people are often taught in therapy sound simple and obvious, but they are harder to do than one might assume. Especially for people deep in depression.
Gratitude journaling is one of those things. It is quite boring and tedious to write down what one is grateful for in life. To write down every single good thing that happened in a day, no matter how small.
BUT, it sort of forces you onto a track of positive thought. It literally blocks / occupies thought, because it takes effort to do and focuses the mind on the positive, even if for a short period of time.
Similarly, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile. There is some feedback loop between pretending to be happy and then sort of feeling a bit happier all of a sudden. Doesn't always work, won't work for everyone and deep clinical depressions are a whole different ballgame.
Exercise is a pretty big one for me as well. As much as I hate it, I always feel better afterwards.
Again, the sum of various small techniques can eventually make a bit of a difference.
I've come to terms with the fact that depression is hard-wired into my brain structure and it's not going anywhere. But, I have also made a ton of new pathways that allow me to more quickly switch into more positive and grateful modes of thinking. And this, in some ways, is like a list of positive things to think, like the parent comment alluded to.
Though without all of the above, I'd also take offense at the implication that depressed people can somehow choose to be depressed and need to just stop being depressed. That notion is ridiculous and has prevailed for (what feels like) centuries of ignorance of mental conditions.
I have a really hard time doing gratitude. Most days are pretty much like any other day, especially with work. If I journal the same thing over and over ("lunch was fine" "the podcast I listened to was slightly interesting") it feels grim.
I feel like I'm already aware of the good things in my life. I'm actually quite fortunate. But even that forms a baseline: "I was healthy today in a world where not everyone is" grows repetitive. Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Do you have any thoughts on how I might reframe that more beneficially?
I'll try to offer my perspective, but there is no guarantee it'll be of any use to you.
You are touching on a few things that sound familiar. I _struggle_ with repetition. Tasks like emptying a dishwasher or taking out the trash, to me, are like pure torture. No idea why. Now you can probably imagine what gratitude journaling feels like for me as well ;)
Another commenter mentioned the mantra as a technique (even espoused by various religions, though I'm not religious at all). The mantra is a way to simply take up space / time / focus. As I also mentioned, gratitude journaling simply doesn't allow you to think anything else for a moment and that, in and of itself, can be a relief.
I tend to play around with how I write these things down. Prose takes more effort. Changing the wording, and writing it from different perspectives can be a way to dedicate more mind-resources to it and also make it less boring.
Crucially, however, my ability to do this is supported by the other things I do. I have found that another concept comes in handy here, something I've come to call "avoiding zero-days". A zero-day is a day where I have not done a single thing that contributes to my health. E.g. I have not eaten healthy, I have not learned anything, I have done no exercise, I have done no work and I have ALSO not relaxed (see, the thing with my depression is that I won't really do anything. The tell-tale sign for me is when I stop enjoying video games. That's when I know I'm in deep. So literally getting myself to even play a video game is a win which contributes to a non-zero-day).
The reason I try to avoid zero-days is because ANY of the aforementioned things can give me that tiny positive push to accomplish another thing. Eventually, that can lead to a cascade of me achieving 2-3 positive things I'd like to achieve. And that can be the beginning of crawling out of depression for a while.
Another tendency of mine is to retreat into repetition (ironically, despite hating it) for comfort / safety / convenience / efficiency. So my mind kind of goes "I can score non-zero days by just doing one thing over and over". Take gratitude journaling. I'll be really tempted to not put effort in. To the point where I'll just write single words "exercise, training, sunshine" and be done with it. I start to try to cheat my own system.
So, I then have to remind myself to mix up the activities and see if I can pivot away from the obsessive component locking me in.
It's a never-ending cat and mouse game. That's all I can add from my perspective, not sure if that's of any use to you.
I'm not the person you replied to but their list of strategies (gratitude practice, evoking joy, exercise) pretty much mirrors what I've been trying to employ.
> Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Perhaps an obvious statement but our experience with any type of practice varies in infinite ways from moment to moment. At times things just click or maybe we've built up enough momentum that it could feel effortless, but on just as many occasions it can feel like wading through sludge. When it's the latter I have to ask myself just how am I showing up for the activity. How mindful am I? What's my intention? Perhaps most importantly, is the sense of gratitude actually being felt in my body?
If you don't mind self-help type books, 'Hardwiring Happiness' by Rick Hanson is a fairly accessible resource that stresses the importance of the somatic side of this type of work. The tl;dr is that if more parts of the mind pay _sustained_ attention to the embodied experience of gratitude, compassion, joy etc. then we're increasing the chances of training our minds. So if I find myself enumerating things in a journal that I believe I'm grateful for but the exercise feels contrived or flat then that's a sign I should either tune even more into large parts of the body (can be anywhere but for me it's usually my face, chest, and arms) or just attempt to evoke warm feelings in those areas. That last part can feel fake at times but there's probably value in learning how to encourage more mind processes to sign up for the practice. The OP alluded to this bit with "sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile". If the body remembers what gratitude feels like then chances are that's going to influence the mind for the next few moments.
'Awakening Joy' by James Baraz is another book in this vein. In it the author makes the case that learning how to shift our baseline towards one coloured with joy and gratitude usually requires someone repeatedly and genuinely appreciating seemingly trivial things over the course of each day (food, shelter, mobility, pet, access to nature, etc.). Whereas shifts occurring solely due to significant positive life events are potentially less common.
Why is this getting so many upvotes? Are anxious techies reading the headline and thinking they're in the beginnings of cognitive decline because they have thoughts they feel are more negative than they should have? Relax folks...
The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.
If you're interested in this approach, I'd recommend the works of David Burns, for example his book "Feeling Great" or the Feeling Good Podcast.
Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-good/202503/... explicitly discusses the arrow of causality here
> and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.
I think if your depression is very deeply buried, it surely isn't enough to read it, but still it can open up quit some insights regarding the connection of what you think and how you feel. It makes it visible.
There can also be other causes for depression is course.
While studying and testing the exercises described in the book I discovered one other thing I'd like to share: to me it seems, to come out of a reappearing mental dip, you need to be very consistent in your efforts (mental / physical exercises and other habits you try to establish or change, to feel better). Anyone else?
Wouldn‘t it be both? While the repeated negative thoughts are the cause, they‘re also the symptom how it show up and the reason why people seek out a diagnosis
"Things are only as bad as we perceive them to be" leading up to "have you tried reframing that and finding something positive in it", and "have you tried not thinking about that".
If I need dissociation and self-delusion, there are substances that are a far more impactful option.
What helped the most wasn’t medicine. It was little things, like going for walks together or having simple conversations. Just giving the brain something new to pay attention to seemed to make a real difference.
Just yesterday I randomly came across a song we often heard in our shared apartment during University, and immediately I had 10 different memories from that time swirling around in my head.
After years of trying to push that person towards trying out new things and enriching their life, I kind of gave up. You simply cannot convince someone about a medicine if they don't feel there is a problem. Still it's hard to see believing the person could be enjoying life more, especially during their retirement.
This can be very sad. The person you love just fades away.
My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.
It just seems like a silly study.
When really it's "We've found an interesting association, and we are going to explore it more to see if there's an causation that we can influence"
It's really clickbait territory sometimes (IMO)
It really should be a shared responsibility to report and understand the meaning of statistically significant correlation. Unfortunately, few journalists seem to have much interest in understanding it. And given that their readership likely has about average (i.e poor) numeracy and iffy understanding of probability, it’s a bad combination. The widespread misunderstanding about the iterative way that science converges on truth also contributes to this problem.
That said, I would rather know about interesting findings such as this if for no other reason than to start digging for the original paper.
We used to think stress caused ulcers, based on a correlation. We now know the actual cause is a bacterium.
But now this! He has less time than I thought. I will have to forward it to him, and cross my fingers that he doesn't spiral. Thoughts and prayers, man. Before you suggest it, I can't tell him to just "think positive". He would physically explode. Implode? Something. Matter, antimatter.
To be honest, I don't think that line ever helped someone who sees himself in the middle of deep shit. There is nothing positive about being in shit. The only thing that can help people stuck in such a mindset is somehow change their perspective. And yes, maybe that study will help in a way.
This seems wrong. If "β" is the estimate here (not sure), it should be inside the confidence interval, but is way outside...
I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far: https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw
Thank you for the set up.
Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.
I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers
Technological comfort just disguises it all.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40485608
That's an interesting formulation. I have someone in my family who could be described by these words.
Is this your own description or does this come from somewhere?
Frankly, abuse and childhood trauma has always been a staple of human history. Even in the Bible, so at least a few thousand years ago, physical punishment against children is described. Sexual abuse was rampant as well, the Quran documents marriages at age 9. Wars and all the horrors that came with them were all too common - Europe only got actually peaceful after WW2.
Just ask in your own family if you still got really really old people left alive... they will all report from some uncle, aunt or godknowswhat that just went loony. Or tell horror stories about rape, beatings, bullying...
Nothing is new, the only thing that is new is that abuse gets called out and, at least in some cases, perps get punished.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
And things that add to entropy are favored by nature, undoing human labor & endeavor. Related?
Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?
OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.
People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it
In this case for example, it doesn’t really give a shit about your psychological well being or shaving years off your life because of some negative thought pattern
If being on your toes, anxious, paranoid, and always looking over your shoulder keeps you alive and making babies - then as far as the developer that nature is, it’s a feature not a bug
Common misunderstanding.
Evolution optimizes for system success. Not individual gene propagation. Genomes are not agents with individual goals.
Many species, but especially social animals, have numerous behaviors and traits designed to prompt communal success rather than individual survival and reproduction
Even saying it optimizes for system success is an oversimplification it just depends how far down the rabbit hole you want to go
My only intention was to communicate and stress that we aren’t “designed” in the way a lot of people think
But thanks for the clarification
Just another fundamental asymmetry in existence.
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.
The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.
>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.
Common sense says nothing about the weight of these factors nor does it say anything about “genetics” being archetypally delineated by race. Genetics for sure plays a role in intelligence.
You are appealing to non cognizance as a premise to support your biases. But that’s… dumb.
You are welcome to point to specific studies if you wish but the general consensus is that there is no statistical evidence of what you’re claiming to be obvious.
Most studies that attempt to normalize against socio cultural features recognize that it’s basically impossible to do. That’s why the best available premise is that since we broadly observe huge gains in population intelligence based on economic development within racial groups; it is most likely that economic and cultural differences occupy the lions share of any observable difference between racial groups currently as they’re all in different places.
Realistically Both are factors.
>The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
Additionally the logic is inescapable. If genetics is what causes something like down syndrome then of course it can cause the opposite of down syndrome.
>So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
Either way can you stick to the main topic. Tired of this off tangent bs. The intelligence thing was just an example.
You cannot. And the smoking gun is, again, that we have seen massive rises in intelligence scores within racial subgroups over time correlating with environmental changes that are much larger than current spreads and still unevenly distributed.
Obviously a starving, stressed out person is going to have a much lower IQ score then someone who is happy and well fed. You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
This is what I'm talking about. The mass delusion. The positive cognitive bias. You grasp for evidence that supports the conclusion you want.
The claim is not that genetics has nothing to do with intelligence. The claim is that race is a material, important driver of intelligence. There is no rigorous evidence of this.
And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
https://www.scribbr.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Normal-dis...
So yes you can very much find black people who are smarter than Asians and vice versa but the generality (aka the mean, aka the center of the bell curve) will be different for races.
>But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
This is not proven to be true. The most likely explanation is that variation in a population can be explained by both environment and genetics.
https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2025.00461
Whoa. Far out.
Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
This isn‘t really limited to weight lifting as to any kind of working out in general. Moving your body instead of only sitting at a desk constantly turns out to be healthy
In particular I'm not especially religious, but also think that the contemporary efforts of people to deny their mortality (singularity, consciousness transfer, medical immortality, etc) are irrational coping mechanisms, religion for atheists, that I refuse to adopt. So that leaves one in a rather uncomfortable existential place.
But since having children, it feels like every day I can see more of myself in them, and it provides an immense amount of comfort, like I've never had before in my life. This is about as close as I think we'll ever get to realistically transferring our consciousnesses, and I'm more than okay with that, and now hope to have many many grandchildren before my final day.
[1] - https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2005...
[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16951919/
I couldn't read the full text of the second, but likewise the conclusion does not imply causation.
I'm a parent, and have experienced significant 'psychological distress' as a result of having children. Every time I read a comment from someone advising people to have children for happiness reasons, it triggers me.
There's a practical issue with social science. Very near to 100% of researchers (from the US at least) share a common ideology, frequently to a fairly radical degree, and it regularly leaks into their research. You can even see this in the abstract of the paper. They show data indicating that parents have dramatically lower rates of mental illness than the general population and their conclusion? "Serious psychological distress is fairly prevalent among parenting adults." So for these sort of papers, I generally find their discussion and conclusions quite irrelevant, but the data is generally sound, so long as it's not overtly cherry picked.
I'd also add that the fact that positive psychological effects (in the second study) were not observed in childless couples seems to largely falsify the hypothesis that the psychological benefits of parenting were simply an observation of people with psychological issues being unable to have children in the first place.
---
And yeah, having a child can be terrifying at times. My youngest recently went through roseola and we spent days in the hospital with him after his fever briefly spiked just under 107F/41.6C. That is sheer terror - holding your child who's running so hot that he's literally uncomfortable to hold against your body. Yet they have also changed my life, worldview, and overall psychological state in an unbelievably positive way on the whole, and I would (and do) wholeheartedly recommend them to any and every person who can provide a reasonably stable household with two loving parents.
Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.
It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.
But because of this I'm locked out of medication :'(
I'm very typical of both though. AuDHD.
"I've noticed a very strong correlation between being very bad at predicting the future, and worrying a lot about the future"
Having said all this, I don't let it get to me because I knew all this was coming as I became more "senior". All things being even, we do have the power to control our thoughts and should. Hope is a much overlooked word these days. People we know, family and not looking for trouble can help us stay hopeful. Unfortunately not everyone has family or their living condition may not be ideal, this is when community is very helpful. If I may say, if you know an older person who you wonder about, ask them what's going on.
There are constant attacks, backstabbing, sues, etc.
Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?
The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?
I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?
That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.
Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.
What personally has me worried is the derivative and 2nd derivative. How much is my current comfort sustained purely because of the momentum of systems made possible less than a lifetime ago (post WW2 reconstruction). So ironically your comment induces more stress in me. The idea that just as recently as the 20th century, times that my grandparents were conscious for, that many people lived through that much suffering. To me it seems incredibly easy to end up right back there.
In this century everything was cut and privatised due to globalization, neoliberalism and the financial crises. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, social security is less, national healthcare keeps being cut. I don't care about getting rich but I do want to live my life without worry.
Go outside and interact with people.
There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.
Teach yourself how to choose
It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).
That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.
There is no profit in it. We've let corporations have far too much influence in our lives.
All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.
As for finding ways through, I don’t believe that for even a moment. Why? Because we’re still struggling with those same issues.
There is no out. There is no through. Keep that can kicking down the road. That’s what we do.
At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.
Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.
I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.
The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.
Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.
Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.
The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.
The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.
It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.
There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.
However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.
Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.
I've moved, in 6 month, from a pretty pro-OTAN, "liberal" point of view toward an anti-OTAN, anti-Atlantist position, and i think i'm right. I now would even vote for an anti-atlantist right wing party rather than for the left of center, pro-US party i've voted for before (well, since an anti-Atlantist left wing party exist, and despite its radicality, i will probably vote for them, but i'm now a single-issue voter, and my issue is how omnipresent the US is in our culture).
DJT made me realized i'm part of the problem, and now i can take steps to fix it.
Do a mental experiment. Suppose that the US disappeared. What would Europe do differently?
One, figure out why you're "anti-Atlantist", and anti-defense pact. Two, think about how radicality created the US problems, and why you think radicalism is the answer in your case.
Yes, Europe needs to change its stance, but electing a "burn-it-to-the-ground" faction is not actually going to do this in a productive way.
As for the "omnipresence" of the US, that is and has always been a lot of individual choices more than a political choice. By all means, fixate less on the US yourself, but I promise you that trying to force that on others by electing a more authoritarian party will backfire spectacularly.
Soft power isn't countered by hard power. The two working counters are increased soft power on your own (i.e. a culture that's more attractive than US culture), or said soft-power self-reducing. You can trust DJT to achieve the latter.
You don't have to "cut ties". You have to learn to think on your own.
I am curious about whether your model of how the current Administration in the U.S. has benefited various countries so strikingly includes the United States itself.
Bodies do not "benefit" from fever. A fever is a signal that pathogens have recently entered the body, and the body is desperately at work trying to kick them out again. If it fails, you die. The fever is a direct mirror of the inflammation caused by that fight.
So, yes, the current administration certainly caused a fever. And the only thing the US benefits from are the antibodies fighting that pathogen.
But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.
edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse
From the site guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
The period we are living through is a time of rapid technological change, whatever you want to call it, and suicide rates have been increasing for the past 25 years. Although I would take any studies and statistics on this with a large grain of salt I think it is not unreasonable to consider these things are related.
Considering the United States only for a moment; the distribution of national income has not been so unequal since the robber baron days. At the same time the visibility of wealth to make upward comparisons has never been greater due to complete permeation of media, both traditional and social. If my share of income in real dollars was slipping as is the case for many, while watching the .1% pocket it, I’d be pretty doggone dysphoric.
It would be nice if our wellbeing increased monotonically but events (covid, the financial crisis, the war in Ukraine) get in the way.
So, yeah, I'd rather carry on as we are than go back and live through it all over again.
Noticing your own cognitive decline is bound to be depressing.
And yet those where the generations that by care and force of will eventually birthed ours.
Yes, it is a very scary time in the world right now. But it's not as scary as the Great Death, the Great Depression, or WWII and we were able to get from those to the prosperity that we have today.
This strongly implies that changing negative thinking behavior might reduce cognitive impairment. But the study has no way to establish a cause-effect relationship -- that would require an entirely different kind of study, one that studies the brain, not the mind. In other words, a neuroscience study, one probably not possible at present.
Like many psychology papers, this one implies a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence, but one that suggests a role for talk therapy.
It would be interesting to see a review of all modern psychological work, a hundred years from now, from the perspective of a neuroscience that doesn't yet exist, to see how often these articles turned out to be just-so stories with no connection to reality.
A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence. Maybe kids predisposed to mental health issues are more likely to use marijuana -- that possibility can't be excluded because all the studies are retrospective.
Most people know I can be relied on to make this point, but until neuroscience matures, studies like this will suffer from a theory vacuum. One can only accomplish so much by studying symptoms, with no clue about root biological causes.
This is one of those topics where people will set an impossibly high standard for evidence and then use that to reject everything.
We do actually know that heavy marijuana use is associated with increases of mental health conditions. We know that discontinuing heavy use can result in improvements in depression scores over time (following the withdrawal periods which, yes, exists despite decades of people claiming it doesn’t). We know that the increased availability of high concentration THC products has made it worse.
Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.
This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist. I knew a guy who started believing that there isn’t any strong evidence that flossing or even twice-daily brushing were important because he didn’t think the science proved causation that flossing and brushing improved dental health. He believed it was just correlation and people who were healthier in general were also flossing and brushing, coincidentally. His breath was terrible and he later abandoned those ideas when the dental problems undeniably arrived.
Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on to justify a conclusion that would have required the impossible study. Saying that a study isn't practical can't be used to justify making a policy decision based on circumstantial evidence.
My use of marijuana studies is meant only to show how bad science steers public policy, not to advocate for its use. There are other, better reasons to avoid that drug.
> This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist.
This is why science exists. But if the science cannot be carried out, then we have no right to draw conclusions that would require actual science to be legitimate.
This is moving away from the original topic, which is the kind of sloppy science common in modern psychology, where people wave their hands instead of their scientific results.
> I knew a guy who ...
A red herring, but I think you knew that.
Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
> Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
The "therefore" section of your comment is your own interpretation, not the reality of a society steered by science. It's why uneducated people believe in Bigfoot. We can't disprove Bigfoot, therefore he exists. It makes a certain kind of pre-modern sense, but it fails to take scientific discipline into account.
I'm tempted to call it the Avi Loeb version of cosmology -- we can't disprove the alien provenance of a small distant glowing object, therefore it's an alien craft. And Loeb has a Harvard position on his side -- for those who believe in scientific authority.
When confronted by this kind of thinking, I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remark: "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."
And finally, it's why psychology has the reputation it does -- many psychologists have no hesitation about leaping ahead of the evidence.
Then, worse, you remember yourself saying "No, this is different", and how wrong you were, and it kinda bums you out a bit. You're watching a replay of yourself being a dumbass, which makes you angry at the situation.
That doesn't mean every old person is negatively inclined, because some will think "Well, this is the way of it", and take solace in that fact that it's been happening since at least the start of recorded history. You, and your ancestors are one. And you finally get your grandparents.
So even the optimists, feeling better, think "might as well play my part" then yell "get off my lawn!"
Can't they have a go-to list of positive things to think about when they notice they are thinking negative thoughts?
I have a go to list of positive things to think about.
I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.
It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).
The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.
It's very hard to control, over the years I've worked on reigning in my negative thinking, but every once in a while I still end up in a spiral of increasingly negative thoughts that don't just go away by focusing on positive things.
Also: Correlation is not causation; we don't know that avoiding these RNTs changes anything in the brain chemistry.
The parent comment comes off as flippant, but I am going to assume it's not intended that way.
Learning to think more positively takes an incredible amount of effort. An effort which seemingly never goes away. It just never gets easier. It's like my brain is simply wired to assume the worst, worry and of course just constantly make suicide seem like some kind of great way out. So much so, that when I was younger, I had assumed everyone just walked around constantly wondering whether it'd be easier to just die.
To this day, that's where my brain goes first. Decades of nearly daily thoughts of ending it. BUT and this is the crucial part, to me that was just always part of the noise. It's there, but it's not forcing my hand. I can both live and also constantly think that I don't particularly enjoy just existing for existence's sake and therefore death sort of seems like a viable alternative. I don't act upon it, because I'm too curious to see what's next, for the time being.
Anyway, the techniques that people are often taught in therapy sound simple and obvious, but they are harder to do than one might assume. Especially for people deep in depression.
Gratitude journaling is one of those things. It is quite boring and tedious to write down what one is grateful for in life. To write down every single good thing that happened in a day, no matter how small.
BUT, it sort of forces you onto a track of positive thought. It literally blocks / occupies thought, because it takes effort to do and focuses the mind on the positive, even if for a short period of time.
Similarly, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile. There is some feedback loop between pretending to be happy and then sort of feeling a bit happier all of a sudden. Doesn't always work, won't work for everyone and deep clinical depressions are a whole different ballgame.
Exercise is a pretty big one for me as well. As much as I hate it, I always feel better afterwards.
Again, the sum of various small techniques can eventually make a bit of a difference.
I've come to terms with the fact that depression is hard-wired into my brain structure and it's not going anywhere. But, I have also made a ton of new pathways that allow me to more quickly switch into more positive and grateful modes of thinking. And this, in some ways, is like a list of positive things to think, like the parent comment alluded to.
Though without all of the above, I'd also take offense at the implication that depressed people can somehow choose to be depressed and need to just stop being depressed. That notion is ridiculous and has prevailed for (what feels like) centuries of ignorance of mental conditions.
I feel like I'm already aware of the good things in my life. I'm actually quite fortunate. But even that forms a baseline: "I was healthy today in a world where not everyone is" grows repetitive. Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Do you have any thoughts on how I might reframe that more beneficially?
You are touching on a few things that sound familiar. I _struggle_ with repetition. Tasks like emptying a dishwasher or taking out the trash, to me, are like pure torture. No idea why. Now you can probably imagine what gratitude journaling feels like for me as well ;)
Another commenter mentioned the mantra as a technique (even espoused by various religions, though I'm not religious at all). The mantra is a way to simply take up space / time / focus. As I also mentioned, gratitude journaling simply doesn't allow you to think anything else for a moment and that, in and of itself, can be a relief.
I tend to play around with how I write these things down. Prose takes more effort. Changing the wording, and writing it from different perspectives can be a way to dedicate more mind-resources to it and also make it less boring.
Crucially, however, my ability to do this is supported by the other things I do. I have found that another concept comes in handy here, something I've come to call "avoiding zero-days". A zero-day is a day where I have not done a single thing that contributes to my health. E.g. I have not eaten healthy, I have not learned anything, I have done no exercise, I have done no work and I have ALSO not relaxed (see, the thing with my depression is that I won't really do anything. The tell-tale sign for me is when I stop enjoying video games. That's when I know I'm in deep. So literally getting myself to even play a video game is a win which contributes to a non-zero-day).
The reason I try to avoid zero-days is because ANY of the aforementioned things can give me that tiny positive push to accomplish another thing. Eventually, that can lead to a cascade of me achieving 2-3 positive things I'd like to achieve. And that can be the beginning of crawling out of depression for a while.
Another tendency of mine is to retreat into repetition (ironically, despite hating it) for comfort / safety / convenience / efficiency. So my mind kind of goes "I can score non-zero days by just doing one thing over and over". Take gratitude journaling. I'll be really tempted to not put effort in. To the point where I'll just write single words "exercise, training, sunshine" and be done with it. I start to try to cheat my own system.
So, I then have to remind myself to mix up the activities and see if I can pivot away from the obsessive component locking me in.
It's a never-ending cat and mouse game. That's all I can add from my perspective, not sure if that's of any use to you.
> Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Perhaps an obvious statement but our experience with any type of practice varies in infinite ways from moment to moment. At times things just click or maybe we've built up enough momentum that it could feel effortless, but on just as many occasions it can feel like wading through sludge. When it's the latter I have to ask myself just how am I showing up for the activity. How mindful am I? What's my intention? Perhaps most importantly, is the sense of gratitude actually being felt in my body?
If you don't mind self-help type books, 'Hardwiring Happiness' by Rick Hanson is a fairly accessible resource that stresses the importance of the somatic side of this type of work. The tl;dr is that if more parts of the mind pay _sustained_ attention to the embodied experience of gratitude, compassion, joy etc. then we're increasing the chances of training our minds. So if I find myself enumerating things in a journal that I believe I'm grateful for but the exercise feels contrived or flat then that's a sign I should either tune even more into large parts of the body (can be anywhere but for me it's usually my face, chest, and arms) or just attempt to evoke warm feelings in those areas. That last part can feel fake at times but there's probably value in learning how to encourage more mind processes to sign up for the practice. The OP alluded to this bit with "sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile". If the body remembers what gratitude feels like then chances are that's going to influence the mind for the next few moments.
'Awakening Joy' by James Baraz is another book in this vein. In it the author makes the case that learning how to shift our baseline towards one coloured with joy and gratitude usually requires someone repeatedly and genuinely appreciating seemingly trivial things over the course of each day (food, shelter, mobility, pet, access to nature, etc.). Whereas shifts occurring solely due to significant positive life events are potentially less common.