4 ms·

I honestly think (for me, at least) the implied causation is the wrong way round here. When I'm feeling sad, I tend to be unmotivated and liable to spend more t

by nippoo 6y ago

I honestly think (for me, at least) the implied causation is the wrong way round here. When I'm feeling sad, I tend to be unmotivated and liable to spend more time / all day on my phone. When I'm feeling great, I'm generally motivated to go outside / do DIY / read / have a lot less screen time. I initially spent lots of effort trying to reduce my screen time (parental controls, etc) before realising that it was probably an indicator, not a cause!

Florin_Andrei 6y ago
You're highlighting the feedback mechanism that this disease uses to maintain itself. The spiral of doom. Any attempt to break it is beneficial, though it may feel like the opposite is happening.
- bgroat 6y ago
  I remember once explaining to a friend that depression wasn't really "feeling sad all the time" It was more like "Emotional AIDS" - it's not that the depression made me sad, it just took away all my emotional immunity/resilience
  - colecut 6y ago
    No idea why this would be downvoted. I lost my only sibling to an overdose last year. I lost the mother of my child to cancer in February. Three days later, my current gf was diagnosed with cancer. Even when I'm not sad, I'm definitely highly irritable, easily overwhelmed, lack patience...
rjkennedy98 6y ago
> When I'm feeling sad, I tend to be unmotivated and liable to spend more time / all day on my phone. Switch "on my phone" with "drinking alcohol" and that's literally how all alcoholics think.
- kylecazar 6y ago
  Ehh -- I'd just reconsider the 'literally all' part. There are alcoholics who just chase the feeling for itself -- a quick fix for sad thoughts, but not for all. It's a complicated disease, but some with issues crave booze regardless of how they're doing mentally. At least in my somewhat limited experience.
  - xncl 6y ago
    I am an alcoholic and for me it's more you replace any activities outside of work with drinking as a substitute for doing stuff. Later you realise you didn't just replace activities alcohol replaced people too. So in the end all I had to do was drink.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Uh, that doesn't mean it isn't true. Alcoholics don't drink for no reason. (Source: had to quit drinking because of the problems it was causing for my life.)
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Of course not. Nobody does things for "no reason." It's more that sometimes we don't understand the motivation. With alcoholics (and drug addicts in general), my guess as to the reason is that it feels good, or otherwise does something for them. I've been told one's first time doing heroin or smoking crack is pure heaven. People who quit generally do so because it causes secondary problems for them. And, that makes sense to me, because why quit something that feels good, but doesn't cause any other problems? Most of this is pure speculation and extrapolation from my own experience. I had a short period of time when I was drinking excessively to deal with work stress. Once I noticed, I was able to stop, because I knew it would cause me problems later on. Luckily, I never suffered any health effects or legal issues from it, mostly because it was only about a 2-3 week period when I would drink every day after work.
- 8note 6y ago
  Stopping drinking doesn't make your other problems go away though
ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
This is my exact problem with all these studies. I thought "people who don't care about themselves eat unhealthily" was a bit of a no-brainer. I started a clinical psychology course on EdX recently and the first exercise was Common Advice. They went on the say the only useful common advice to give to a depressed person is to tell them to go for a run, as that was the only correlation supported by evidence. A RUN! That's so unhelpful that it's actually a common joke between the depressed people that I've met. If you can't get out of bed, you aren't going to be able to go for a run. Similarly, if you ruminate on horrible things every time you stop and think, you're going to want to go on your phone late into the night until you're so tired you can go straight to sleep. If you don't even know if life is worth living, it's quite hard to avoid eating that bag of chips. I thought these were obvious, but perhaps it's not to people who've never experienced depression. Perhaps the reductionist view, as unhelpful as it is, plays into it too.
- bityard 6y ago
  Well it's not totally crazy. I suffer from mild chronic depression and I have noticed that doing my morning exercise routine makes it much more likely that my mood will be decent throughout the day than if I wake up and decide I just don't feel like exercising that day. I have also experimented on myself to see whether 30 minutes of exercise improved my mood in the middle of the day. Not totally surprisingly, it _usually_ did. Not always, but usually. It never once had a negative impact. The main problem is one of motivation/willpower. Telling a depressed person that they should exercise to feel better seems like solid advice on the surface of it, because it stands a high chance of both being true and actually working, BUT they are not in a place to usefully implement the advice. The brain gets in the way and overrides what we see as "common sense." The same way you can't tell an alcoholic to have a nice big steak instead of a beer for dinner. The person usually even knows the "right" thing to do, they are just literally unable to take the right action in the moment.
  - danenania 6y ago
    For running/jogging, a good trick for when you really don't feel like it is to put running clothes on, go outside, and then just start walking. If you still don't feel like running, you can just go for a walk instead, but many people will actually want to run after a bit--the bottleneck is getting out the door. It's the same for other kinds of exercise. If you're dreading lifting weights, start by just doing some sets of really light reps. If you still feel bad, you can just stop after that, but you'll probably often find at that point that you actually feel like doing more. Weirdly, I seem to often have my best runs/workouts with this approach, when I started out feeling like crap. Motivation is a strange thing.
john_moscow 6y ago
Anecdotal, but a few observations that work for myself: * Lack of sleep lowers my energy and creative function. I no longer have energy to try new things, or to think out-of-the-box. The brain enters "survival mode" of just following the routine to make it to the end of day. If I let this accumulate over multiple days, the overall motivation and happiness starts dropping exponentially. This makes sense, since a lot of my happiness comes from envisioning goals and achieving them, which I cannot do if I don't sleep enough. * If I get more than 1 night of bad sleep, I usually try to squeeze in a strenuous hike or just go cycling around the neighborhood. At least 1-2 hours, ideally 4-5. It increases the physical tiredness and makes it easier to fall asleep. It also fills in the short-term memory buffer with random stuff, that seems to have a positive correlation with subsequent sleep quality. * Screen time generally depends on what you are doing. Routine work or clickbait browsing is bad because it doesn't make you tired and doesn't give enough short-term impressions. Playing games can give impressions, but they also raise excitement, that makes it harder to fall asleep. What works for me is to read for 30-60 minutes just before bedtime. Classic books, sci-fi, anything that is not exciting, but involves imagining what I just read about. After I'm done reading, I make a conscious effort to NOT think about work/plans/stressful topics. Thinking about what I just read usually works pretty well. * You need to be very careful with alcohol. Moderate amount (say, 1-2 beers) makes it easier to fall asleep, but there's a high chance of waking up after 2-3 hours once it wears off. It also seems to recalibrate the nervous system, making it harder to fall asleep without drinking. So if you are having sleep problems, completely cutting of any booze for about a week shows wonderful results, despite the initial setback.
- rconti 6y ago
  With alcohol, your REM sleep is suppressed, and resting heart rate is quite a bit higher. I watch my sleep cycles on my Garmin (and also track their 'body battery' thing, which I think is based on stress which is based on heart rate variability). If I have "some" drinks (eg, more than just 1 or 2 small ones), I can easily see how RHR is high and my recovery doesn't even BEGIN until say 3am. When you start tracking and watching those stats every day, you can see how different you feel when you get a good night's sleep. Vs an alcohol-aided-but-not-drunk-not-hungover sleep.
acituan 6y ago
> I honestly think (for me, at least) the implied causation is the wrong way round here Your framing assumes that there has to be a clear, unidirectional arrow of causation. In reality, behaviors and moods are in tight reciprocity, affecting each other simultaneously. For likes of depression (or addiction) that reciprocity can narrow and narrow to the point of only moping around and doing whatever maintains the depression. Which means avoiding depression maintaining behaviors is one of the multiple things to do in order to prevent it, or prevent a relapse, conversely it will indeed be incredibly hard to treat it with only reducing screen time.
Fnoord 6y ago
I suppose its a negative feedback loop. Either way, cause and effect in psychology isn't always obvious. When society regards drug abuse as problem, whereas it stems from say troubled youth, then you get that kind of shifting the blame reasoning.

by nippoo 6y ago

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

You're highlighting the feedback mechanism that this disease uses to maintain itself. The spiral of doom. Any attempt to break it is beneficial, though it may feel like the opposite is happening.

bgroat 6y ago
I remember once explaining to a friend that depression wasn't really "feeling sad all the time" It was more like "Emotional AIDS" - it's not that the depression made me sad, it just took away all my emotional immunity/resilience
- colecut 6y ago
  No idea why this would be downvoted. I lost my only sibling to an overdose last year. I lost the mother of my child to cancer in February. Three days later, my current gf was diagnosed with cancer. Even when I'm not sad, I'm definitely highly irritable, easily overwhelmed, lack patience...

rjkennedy98 6y ago

> When I'm feeling sad, I tend to be unmotivated and liable to spend more time / all day on my phone. Switch "on my phone" with "drinking alcohol" and that's literally how all alcoholics think.

kylecazar 6y ago
Ehh -- I'd just reconsider the 'literally all' part. There are alcoholics who just chase the feeling for itself -- a quick fix for sad thoughts, but not for all. It's a complicated disease, but some with issues crave booze regardless of how they're doing mentally. At least in my somewhat limited experience.
- xncl 6y ago
  I am an alcoholic and for me it's more you replace any activities outside of work with drinking as a substitute for doing stuff. Later you realise you didn't just replace activities alcohol replaced people too. So in the end all I had to do was drink.
exolymph 6y ago
Uh, that doesn't mean it isn't true. Alcoholics don't drink for no reason. (Source: had to quit drinking because of the problems it was causing for my life.)
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Of course not. Nobody does things for "no reason." It's more that sometimes we don't understand the motivation. With alcoholics (and drug addicts in general), my guess as to the reason is that it feels good, or otherwise does something for them. I've been told one's first time doing heroin or smoking crack is pure heaven. People who quit generally do so because it causes secondary problems for them. And, that makes sense to me, because why quit something that feels good, but doesn't cause any other problems? Most of this is pure speculation and extrapolation from my own experience. I had a short period of time when I was drinking excessively to deal with work stress. Once I noticed, I was able to stop, because I knew it would cause me problems later on. Luckily, I never suffered any health effects or legal issues from it, mostly because it was only about a 2-3 week period when I would drink every day after work.
8note 6y ago
Stopping drinking doesn't make your other problems go away though

ytwySXpMbS 6y ago

This is my exact problem with all these studies. I thought "people who don't care about themselves eat unhealthily" was a bit of a no-brainer. I started a clinical psychology course on EdX recently and the first exercise was Common Advice. They went on the say the only useful common advice to give to a depressed person is to tell them to go for a run, as that was the only correlation supported by evidence. A RUN! That's so unhelpful that it's actually a common joke between the depressed people that I've met. If you can't get out of bed, you aren't going to be able to go for a run. Similarly, if you ruminate on horrible things every time you stop and think, you're going to want to go on your phone late into the night until you're so tired you can go straight to sleep. If you don't even know if life is worth living, it's quite hard to avoid eating that bag of chips. I thought these were obvious, but perhaps it's not to people who've never experienced depression. Perhaps the reductionist view, as unhelpful as it is, plays into it too.

bityard 6y ago
Well it's not totally crazy. I suffer from mild chronic depression and I have noticed that doing my morning exercise routine makes it much more likely that my mood will be decent throughout the day than if I wake up and decide I just don't feel like exercising that day. I have also experimented on myself to see whether 30 minutes of exercise improved my mood in the middle of the day. Not totally surprisingly, it _usually_ did. Not always, but usually. It never once had a negative impact. The main problem is one of motivation/willpower. Telling a depressed person that they should exercise to feel better seems like solid advice on the surface of it, because it stands a high chance of both being true and actually working, BUT they are not in a place to usefully implement the advice. The brain gets in the way and overrides what we see as "common sense." The same way you can't tell an alcoholic to have a nice big steak instead of a beer for dinner. The person usually even knows the "right" thing to do, they are just literally unable to take the right action in the moment.
- danenania 6y ago
  For running/jogging, a good trick for when you really don't feel like it is to put running clothes on, go outside, and then just start walking. If you still don't feel like running, you can just go for a walk instead, but many people will actually want to run after a bit--the bottleneck is getting out the door. It's the same for other kinds of exercise. If you're dreading lifting weights, start by just doing some sets of really light reps. If you still feel bad, you can just stop after that, but you'll probably often find at that point that you actually feel like doing more. Weirdly, I seem to often have my best runs/workouts with this approach, when I started out feeling like crap. Motivation is a strange thing.

john_moscow 6y ago

Anecdotal, but a few observations that work for myself: * Lack of sleep lowers my energy and creative function. I no longer have energy to try new things, or to think out-of-the-box. The brain enters "survival mode" of just following the routine to make it to the end of day. If I let this accumulate over multiple days, the overall motivation and happiness starts dropping exponentially. This makes sense, since a lot of my happiness comes from envisioning goals and achieving them, which I cannot do if I don't sleep enough. * If I get more than 1 night of bad sleep, I usually try to squeeze in a strenuous hike or just go cycling around the neighborhood. At least 1-2 hours, ideally 4-5. It increases the physical tiredness and makes it easier to fall asleep. It also fills in the short-term memory buffer with random stuff, that seems to have a positive correlation with subsequent sleep quality. * Screen time generally depends on what you are doing. Routine work or clickbait browsing is bad because it doesn't make you tired and doesn't give enough short-term impressions. Playing games can give impressions, but they also raise excitement, that makes it harder to fall asleep. What works for me is to read for 30-60 minutes just before bedtime. Classic books, sci-fi, anything that is not exciting, but involves imagining what I just read about. After I'm done reading, I make a conscious effort to NOT think about work/plans/stressful topics. Thinking about what I just read usually works pretty well. * You need to be very careful with alcohol. Moderate amount (say, 1-2 beers) makes it easier to fall asleep, but there's a high chance of waking up after 2-3 hours once it wears off. It also seems to recalibrate the nervous system, making it harder to fall asleep without drinking. So if you are having sleep problems, completely cutting of any booze for about a week shows wonderful results, despite the initial setback.

rconti 6y ago
With alcohol, your REM sleep is suppressed, and resting heart rate is quite a bit higher. I watch my sleep cycles on my Garmin (and also track their 'body battery' thing, which I think is based on stress which is based on heart rate variability). If I have "some" drinks (eg, more than just 1 or 2 small ones), I can easily see how RHR is high and my recovery doesn't even BEGIN until say 3am. When you start tracking and watching those stats every day, you can see how different you feel when you get a good night's sleep. Vs an alcohol-aided-but-not-drunk-not-hungover sleep.

acituan 6y ago

> I honestly think (for me, at least) the implied causation is the wrong way round here Your framing assumes that there has to be a clear, unidirectional arrow of causation. In reality, behaviors and moods are in tight reciprocity, affecting each other simultaneously. For likes of depression (or addiction) that reciprocity can narrow and narrow to the point of only moping around and doing whatever maintains the depression. Which means avoiding depression maintaining behaviors is one of the multiple things to do in order to prevent it, or prevent a relapse, conversely it will indeed be incredibly hard to treat it with only reducing screen time.

Fnoord 6y ago

I suppose its a negative feedback loop. Either way, cause and effect in psychology isn't always obvious. When society regards drug abuse as problem, whereas it stems from say troubled youth, then you get that kind of shifting the blame reasoning.