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My own experiences with depression have made me think you’re both partially correct. I feel like happiness is about learning how to deceive yourself. It’s abou

by J-dawg 8y ago

My own experiences with depression have made me think you’re both partially correct. I feel like happiness is about learning how to deceive yourself. It’s about learning how to put a positive spin on everything, and internalise it. I struggle with this because I don’t want to deceive myself. But then I’m probably deceiving myself in the opposite direction with all sorts of negative thoughts.

jm__87 8y ago
Personally, I have found it helps to just always try to take a pragmatic perspective: how is what I'm doing right now helping me achieve what I want in life? If you spend an hour thinking about how you suck at various aspects of your life, how is it making you feel? When you feel that way, are you in the best state of mind to achieve your goals? Absolutely not. So you need strategies to deal with those useless thoughts. Distract yourself with something else or reframe your thinking somehow. In the long run, the ideal would be to not have those unhelpful automatic thoughts at all (this is what therapy is for) but in the short run, they are there and you gotta find a way to deal with and manage them if you want to move your life forward. Meditation/mindfulness can be extremely helpful in this regard. I'd highly recommend "The Mindful Way Through Depression" to learn some techniques to help. The goal here should be to catch yourself sooner when you're thinking unhelpful thoughts instead of marinating in them for a long period of time (and creating a more negative effect on your mood) and learning a strategy to get out of that mode of thinking.
- Aaargh20318 8y ago
  > If you spend an hour thinking about how you suck at various aspects of your life, how is it making you feel? It doesn't matter how you feel about it. You need to focus on the bad things in life if you want to have a chance of improving things. Burying your head in the sand doesn't solve anything. Don't waste your time focussing on the good stuff, it doesn't need fixing. If all you want to do is feel good despite everything around you being shit, why not just do heroin ? You'll feel great and it's a lot less effort than convincing yourself that black is white.
  - jm__87 8y ago
    How is it that how you feel about yourself does not matter? It matters quite a bit. I also never said to bury your head in the sand and not improve anything? What I am saying is actually the exact opposite of that. Let me give an example: suppose you wanted to get in shape by going to the gym. You can sit around and think "I'm so out of shape", "I'm going to embarrass myself at the gym", "I won't be able to keep it up", etc. None of this is helping you with your original goal, which is going to the gym and getting in shape. Not only that, these thoughts are driving your mood down and making it less likely you will follow through on your plans, not more likely. These are the exact type of thoughts which depressed people deal with every single day. You can't just force them to stop occurring whenever you want, this is just what depression is. The ideal would be to change whatever core beliefs and assumptions are leading to these thoughts, but making that change with therapy can take a very long time. What you can do is take a more proactive approach early on to recognize these thoughts when they occur and deal with them every single time they come up (which will depend on how depressed you are). This may not stop the thoughts from occurring but you will have a strategy to keep yourself from self-defeating behavior.
    - Aaargh20318 8y ago
      > You can sit around and think "I'm so out of shape", "I'm going to embarrass myself at the gym", "I won't be able to keep it up", etc. None of this is helping you with your original goal But they are true though. If it’s a choice between being miserable and acknowledging the truth, or being happy in a delusion of your own making, I’ll choose the truth every time. I think people are being labelled as depressed way too often. In many cases it’s just a natural reaction to having a shit life. Anyone would feel like crap, it’s perfectly normal. The solution is to fix your life, not to convince youself nothing is wrong. If you don’t manage to delude yourself, if you see the world as it actually is, you get labelled as ‘depressed’. It’s not because you have to work 2 minimum wage jobs to make ends meet that you feel like crap, no something is wrong with YOU. CBT is basically a form of victim blaming.
      - jm__87 8y ago
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
No, you don't have to deceive yourself. The "positive spin" is about the emotional aspects of thought, not bending the truth.

by J-dawg 8y ago

jm__87 8y ago

Personally, I have found it helps to just always try to take a pragmatic perspective: how is what I'm doing right now helping me achieve what I want in life? If you spend an hour thinking about how you suck at various aspects of your life, how is it making you feel? When you feel that way, are you in the best state of mind to achieve your goals? Absolutely not. So you need strategies to deal with those useless thoughts. Distract yourself with something else or reframe your thinking somehow. In the long run, the ideal would be to not have those unhelpful automatic thoughts at all (this is what therapy is for) but in the short run, they are there and you gotta find a way to deal with and manage them if you want to move your life forward. Meditation/mindfulness can be extremely helpful in this regard. I'd highly recommend "The Mindful Way Through Depression" to learn some techniques to help. The goal here should be to catch yourself sooner when you're thinking unhelpful thoughts instead of marinating in them for a long period of time (and creating a more negative effect on your mood) and learning a strategy to get out of that mode of thinking.

Aaargh20318 8y ago
> If you spend an hour thinking about how you suck at various aspects of your life, how is it making you feel? It doesn't matter how you feel about it. You need to focus on the bad things in life if you want to have a chance of improving things. Burying your head in the sand doesn't solve anything. Don't waste your time focussing on the good stuff, it doesn't need fixing. If all you want to do is feel good despite everything around you being shit, why not just do heroin ? You'll feel great and it's a lot less effort than convincing yourself that black is white.
- jm__87 8y ago
  How is it that how you feel about yourself does not matter? It matters quite a bit. I also never said to bury your head in the sand and not improve anything? What I am saying is actually the exact opposite of that. Let me give an example: suppose you wanted to get in shape by going to the gym. You can sit around and think "I'm so out of shape", "I'm going to embarrass myself at the gym", "I won't be able to keep it up", etc. None of this is helping you with your original goal, which is going to the gym and getting in shape. Not only that, these thoughts are driving your mood down and making it less likely you will follow through on your plans, not more likely. These are the exact type of thoughts which depressed people deal with every single day. You can't just force them to stop occurring whenever you want, this is just what depression is. The ideal would be to change whatever core beliefs and assumptions are leading to these thoughts, but making that change with therapy can take a very long time. What you can do is take a more proactive approach early on to recognize these thoughts when they occur and deal with them every single time they come up (which will depend on how depressed you are). This may not stop the thoughts from occurring but you will have a strategy to keep yourself from self-defeating behavior.
  - Aaargh20318 8y ago
    > You can sit around and think "I'm so out of shape", "I'm going to embarrass myself at the gym", "I won't be able to keep it up", etc. None of this is helping you with your original goal But they are true though. If it’s a choice between being miserable and acknowledging the truth, or being happy in a delusion of your own making, I’ll choose the truth every time. I think people are being labelled as depressed way too often. In many cases it’s just a natural reaction to having a shit life. Anyone would feel like crap, it’s perfectly normal. The solution is to fix your life, not to convince youself nothing is wrong. If you don’t manage to delude yourself, if you see the world as it actually is, you get labelled as ‘depressed’. It’s not because you have to work 2 minimum wage jobs to make ends meet that you feel like crap, no something is wrong with YOU. CBT is basically a form of victim blaming.
    - jm__87 8y ago

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

No, you don't have to deceive yourself. The "positive spin" is about the emotional aspects of thought, not bending the truth.