moodybreadcrumbs

• Women are more emotionally labile so we are both happier and sadder than men
  • The skills of becoming happy are different from the skills of not being sad/anxious/angry
  • So focus work on becoming happy not avoiding sadness
• 3 different forms of happiness you can pursue
  • Pleasant life: aim for as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion
  • Engaged life: build life around strengths and talents to use them in work, relationships, etc.
  • Meaningful life: use strengths and talents to belong to and serve something greater than yourself

Introduction

• Depression is a disorder of “I” – failing in our own eyes relative to our goals
  • Society makes individual selfish, emphasizing view of we are the center of the world making individual failure feel greater than it might be
  • Relationships to god, family, nation, community, large extended family used to be buffer to individual failure
  • Many focus on feeling good, building self-esteem and confidence vs doing well in the world, persisting and overcoming obstacles
  • Depression and violence may have increased because of valuing how young people feel about themselves more highly than how we value how well they are doing in the world

1: Two ways of looking at life

• Pessimist:
  • Imagines the worst, prone to depression
  • Believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do and are their own fault
• Optimist:
  • Sees bad events in their least threatening light, as temporary and surmountable challenges to overcome
  • Believe defeat is a temporary setback, confined to one case and not their fault
  • At the core of pessimism is helplessness: i.e. nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you
    • The antidote is personal control: i.e. the ability to change things by one’s voluntary actions
  • Pessimists can learn to be optimists
• Learned optimism: changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience setbacks
  • Your way of explaining things to yourself determines how helpless you become, or how energized

2: Learning to be helpless

• If helplessness can be learned, it can be unlearned
• Learned helplessness can be avoided if one learns how you respond matters
• Resilience is trait that can be acquired, it is not inborn

3: Explaining misfortune

• Your internal explanation about the external occurrences is important
• 3 dimensions to explanatory style
  1. Permanence (time)
     • Pessimist: always & never; bad events are permanent; good events explained by transient causes: mood, effort, sometimes (success was a fluke so won’t try harder)
     • Optimist: sometimes & lately; bad events are temporary; good events explained by permanent causes: traits, abilities, always (motivation to try harder)
  2. Pervasiveness (space)
     • Pessimist: universal explanations for failures (give up on everything else, too)
       • Good events caused by specific factors
     • Optimist: specific explanations for failures (accept failure in one part of their life but still motivated to succeed in others)
       • Good events enhance everything one does (universal)
  3. Personalization
     • When bad things happen people who blame themselves consequently have low self-esteem
     • People who blame external events do not lose self-esteem when bad things happen
• Hope
  • Existence of hope depends on permanence and pervasiveness
  • Art of hope: finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune
    • Permanent and universal causes of misfortune cause despair – these people collapse under pressure
• People who have a pessimistic explanatory style (regarding permanence, pervasiveness and personalization) get depressed more easily, achieve less than talents warrant, physical health suffers and life is not as pleasurable as it should be

4: Ultimate pessimism

• 3 kinds of depression
  1. Normal depression: loss or misfortune makes one feel sad and helpless, making one become passive and lethargic; believe prospects are bleak and that we lack talents to make them better
  2. Unipolar
  3. Bipolar depression
• Depression
  • 90+% of cases are episodic, lasting 3-12 months
  • Depressed people take much more responsibility for bad events than is necessary
  • People who have a pessimistic explanatory style (regarding permanence, pervasiveness and personalization) get depressed more easily
  • When you are depressed you have a dour picture of yourself, the world and the future

5: How you think, how you feel

• Letting all their emotions hang out results commonly in depressives increasing their depression and even suicide
• How you think about your problems, including depression itself, will either relieve depressions or aggravate it
  • Learned helplessness can result from failure or defeat but will only produce momentary depression, depending on explanatory style
    • If you have a pessimistic explanatory style, failure and defeat can throw you into full-blown depression
    • If optimistic, depression will be halted
• Women are 2x more likely to suffer from depression because men tend to act but women contemplate it, trying to analyze it and determine its source (rumination)
  • Rumination + pessimistic explanatory style = severe depression
  • Men’s tendency to distract themselves when depressed seems to be a better strategy versus women’s tendency to analyze
• Pessimism is fertile soil from which depression grows
• Changing either rumination or pessimism relieves depression (changing both helps most)
• Cognitive therapy: theory that what we consciously think about mainly determines how we feel
  • So aims to change how depressed consciously think about failure defeat, loss and helplessness
  • 5 tactics
    1. Recognize automatic thoughts flitting through consciousness at times you feel the worst
       • Automatic thoughts are quick phrases/sentences so well practiced that they almost go unnoticed or unchallenged
       • Automatic thoughts are explanations and becoming aware of them allows us to determine that they are permanent, pervasive and personal
    2. Dispute automatic thoughts by proposing contrary evidence
       • Argue with the automatic thought and think of things that contradict it or question its validity
    3. Learn to make different explanations (reattributions) and use them to dispute automatic thoughts
       • Aim for something more temporary, less personal, less pervasive
    4. Learn to distract yourself from depressive thoughts
       • Rumination makes situation worse
       • Sometimes it’s better to put off thinking so that you can do your best
       • You can learn to control both what you think and when you think it
    5. Learn to recognize and question depressive-sowing assumptions that govern actions
  • Cognitive therapy changes explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic and the change is permanent
    • It gives you skills for how to talk to yourself when you fail
    • Skills can be used to stop depression from taking hold when failure comes
    • It works because it gives the self a set of techniques for changing itself – the self chooses to do this out of self-interest to make it feel better

6: Success at work

• Success requires persistence – optimistic explanatory style is key to persistence
• Aptitude, motivation and optimism determine success
• Depressed people are:
  • Sadder but they are wiser
  • Depressed people (most are pessimists) accurately judge how much control they have
  • Recall more bad events and fewer good events
  • Explanatory style is roughly the same for good and bad events
• Non-depressed people (most are optimists) believe they have more control than they do, especially when they are helpless and have no control at all
  • Recall more good events and fewer bad events
  • Explanatory style is lopsided for good and bad events (if it’s bad, you did it to me, it’ll be over soon and it’s only this situation; if it’s good, I did it, it’s going to last forever and it’s going to help me in many situations

7: Children and parents: the origins of optimism

• Optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles are developed in childhood – all setbacks and victories are then filtered through it as it becomes an ingrained habit of thinking
• Up until puberty girls are noticeably more optimistic than boys
• Children are tuned to the way their parents (esp their mothers) talk about causes of emotionally loaded events
  • So you should pay attention to how you answer their “why” questions and if they align with pessimistic or optimistic explanatory styles
• Children also believe the criticisms they get and use them to form their explanatory style
  • They listen carefully to what and HOW adults speak to them
• There is evidence for 3 influences on children’s explanatory styles
  1. Form of every day casual analyses
  2. Form of criticism when he/she fails
  3. Reality of early losses and traumas

8: School

• When we fail at something we all become helpless and depressed at least momentarily
  • Optimists recover immediately
  • Pessimists wallow in defeat (see it as permanent and pervasive) becoming depressed and staying helpless for a long period of time
• Depression and pessimism form a vicious cycle
  • Either can come first and make the other worse
• Pessimism makes it harder to tolerate disappointment
• Children of divorce are much more likely to be depressed
  • Oddly, more negative events happen to children of divorce
• Children of fighting families look similarly bad
  • If you fight, children should see an ending to it with a clear resolution
• If fighting starts to become a pattern or leads to separation, put children in therapy to decrease likelihood of depression

9: Sports

• Teams also have a measurable explanatory style
• Explanatory style determines how successful a team will be above and beyond talent
• Success on playing field is predicted by optimism
• Failure predicted by pessimism
• Explanatory style works by means of how team does under pressure (after a loss or late in close games)

10: Health

• Madelon Visintainer became the first person to demonstrate that a psychological state – learned helplessness – can cause cancer
  • Your mind/thoughts influence your health

12: The optimistic life

• Even when things go well for a pessimist, he is plagued by forebodings of catastrophe
• Optimism is simply learning a set of skills about how to talk to yourself when you suffer a personal defeat
  • Learn to speak to yourself about your setbacks from a more encouraging viewpoint
• Focus not on blind optimism but on flexible optimism to increase control over the way you think about adversity
• Explanatory style-changing skills should be used if:
  • You are trying to achieve something
  • You are concerned about how you will feel (fight off depression, keep up morale)
  • Your situation is apt to be protracted and your physical health is an issue
  • You want to lead, be inspiring, want people to vote in your favor
• Explanatory style-changing skills should NOT be used if:
  • Your goal is to plan for a risky and uncertain future
  • Your goal is to counsel others whose future is dim (don’t use optimism initially)
  • You want to appear sympathetic to troubles of others (don’t use initially but can later once empathy and confidence are established)
• If cost of failure is high, don’t use optimism
• ABCs
  • Adversity: we react to it by thinking about it
  • Beliefs: thoughts become beliefs, which become habitual
  • Consequences: beliefs are direct causes of what we feel and what we do next
• Two ways to deal with pessimistic beliefs once aware of them:
  1. Distract
  2. Dispute: more effective in the long run since successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation repeats itself
• Habitual pessimistic thoughts grab our attention and circle unceasingly in our minds – they are primitive reminders of needs and dangers
  • Ruminations circle around your mind so you don’t forget them
  • 2 ways to handle them:
    1. Write troublesome thoughts down the moment they occur (ventilate and dispose)
    2. Agree upon a later time to think about the troublesome thoughts
  • If you do these things, they no longer have any purpose and purposelessness lessens their strength
  • Realize that beliefs are just that, they are not facts
    • It’s essential to stand back and suspend belief for a moment to distance yourself from the pessimistic explanations at least long enough to verify accuracy
• To dispute beliefs, scan for all possible contributing causes
  • Focus on the changeable, the specific, and the nonpersonal
  • Become skilled at generating alternatives to the pessimistic, most dire possible belief because there is just as much evidence to support the dire as there is the opposite
• If the negative belief you hold about yourself is correct, focus on decatastrophizing
  • Focus on implications of beliefs – what do they imply and argue for against the worst
• Use distraction if it is not functional for you to think your belief right now – assign a later worry time
• Usually your negative beliefs are distortions – challenge them – don’t let them run your emotions