5 ms·

> “It’s almost as if you’d already decided how you were going to feel, and then everything you were sensing was filtered through that,” he said. “The mood has b

> “It’s almost as if you’d already decided how you were going to feel, and then everything you were sensing was filtered through that,” he said. “The mood has become primary.” This is 1000% what depression feels like, once you've properly come to terms with it. Your brain seems absolutely compelled to apply the most horrific, negative interpretation to everything that happens to you. Even when you understand it's wrong, or at least heavily negatively biased, fighting those interpretations feels like trying to swim upstream in a terrific current.

comrh 3y ago
Which makes sense why CBT style therapy has shown effectiveness because its main focus is challenging those interpretations. No doubt even with those tools it is still a major challenge.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  One interesting thing to point out is CBT is so effective because it's somewhat easier to stick to than other approaches. Meditation, for instance, is equally effective if you keep with it, but most people realistically won't.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is one of the few times I've heard an accurate and concise description of what it feels like. I like the metaphor of the spiral wishingwell. The coin/ball represents the level of depression you sink into. The gravitational draw of the void makes the spiral go faster unless you figure out a way to pull out of it and the longer you wait the harder it is to pull out cause it's moving too quickly. So the trick becomes keeping the coin/ball off of the spiral
- hanselot 3y ago
  The only way out is through. One way or another, once you reach the shore on the other side, the time spent in the water doesn't seem so bad anymore. Just another perspective to lean on when understanding others. Once you confront it in the most absolute sense, something akin to ego-death occurs, and you make a decision about whether it is worthwhile to continue. Everything comes from and swings back to chaos. Embrace it and you will be free.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    This definitely resonates with me as I've graduated into the state you describe and yes "the only way out is through" is exactly the way to describe the path. Not sure I agree fully with the "time spent in the water" not seeming bad - I think I simply recognize it for what it was, while acknowledging the trauma and cascading effects that I'm unwinding 30+ years after the fact. Perhaps you mean that you are no longer attached to the trauma and can view it "objectively" More important to me now is unwinding the physical manifestations of trauma/anxiety that I never recognized as well as eliminating the behaviors (people pleasing, self deprecation etc...) that attract toxic attachment.
  - junon 3y ago
    Can relate. I don't know how, or why, or what I did to get to the other end, but one day I woke up, and it was gone. Years of nearly crippling depression, ruined friendships, hardships at work, nights of 'considering', all finished in an instant. It was absolutely bizarre and wonderful and concerning at the same time. Woke up and thought "alright this is stupid, I need to get stuff done" and as though it were magically manifesting out of thin air I had a normal train of thought, my emotions were mostly in check, and I had motivation that I hadn't felt in years. Almost like cracking a knuckle, but in my own brain. GP's comment resonates very hard.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
This is why the related concept of "catastrophizing" comes up so much in the context of therapy: > Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis. Anecdotally, many of the people I know with a tendency to "catastrophize" later suffer from clinical depression. The depression only exacerbates the problem. Even more anecdotally, catastrophizing seems heavily correlated to the usage of certain social media platforms in the young people I've worked with. I don't know which direction the causality flows, but I do know that people who consume a lot of Reddit and Twitter seem to think the world is ending and everything is terrible. They can tell me about every political scandal, every shooting, every tragedy, and every natural disaster that happened in the past week. Eventually they come to believe their news sources are representative of the entire world, forgetting that none of these things are happening to them personally. It's a weird doom loop spiral. Even weirder is that many of the people caught in it feel convinced that they "don't do social media" because they're not on Instagram or TikTok, yet they consume hours and hours of doom and gloom social media like Reddit all day.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  This is why the news has always been bad, since way before social media. Disasters, war, scandal, and death have always been more engaging. Also why gossip is almost always negative. Our brains evolved to deal with what was happening in our immediate vicinity. This was usually fairly neutral to pleasant, with maybe some moments of sadness, loss, alarm and danger. We just aren't mentally equipped to process an unending stream of bad news and really keep the perspective that these things are not happening to me. It's best to just avoid sources of that. I stopped watching and reading the news a few years ago, and generally feel much less stressed about day to day living.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    I think there also is a factor where good things move slowly. I always liked the thought experiment of imagining newspapers that are published at increasingly long intervals. What would the content be in a newspaper that's published every 50 or 100 years? Sure you'd cover major wars, but so much more space than we dedicate right now would go to phenomenal improvements that took a long time. Incredible advances of medical improvements, including eradication of entire diseases, much higher life expectancy and so many fewer famines, massively increased literacy rates. One could go on and on. Yet, few of these things, unless they are discreet events which is rare, ever go into a daily newspaper and certainly don't make headlines.
proper_elb 3y ago
Spot on. > Even when you understand it's wrong, or at least heavily negatively biased, fighting those interpretations feels like trying to swim upstream in a terrific current. Achieving it still feels like the end of "A beautiful mind", where there are people hanging out in the room that are not there. They sound like they are they, they feel like they are, they smell familiar. But they are not real and will disappear some wonderful day, as they always do. So you just nod to them and go on with your live.
OptCohTomo 3y ago
That is what depression felt like to me as well. I’ve written a book about it, Can’t Be Trusted. It is a memoir about engineering, mental health, and aviation. Here is more information about me and my book: https://cantbetrusted.org/?page_id=262 https://cantbetrusted.org/?page_id=262 As a laser engineer with an interest in computing, I think this book would be of interest to the tech community.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Simply by posting it you'll get someone's attention (like myself!) However you may get downvoted because you asked how to get upvoted, which can be counterintuitive if you're Neurodivergent (like many of us). It's ok, that's not how you intended it, but that is most likely not a helpful part of the message here.
  - sdwr 3y ago
    I don't want to get baited, really don't want to get baited here, but here goes. I've had my own struggles with mental health, maybe I can phrase it in a helpful way. This reply is for the book writer: All your points may very well be true, but taken together, they paint a picture of you as sick and untrustworthy. Society puts requirements on people, stuff like - wearing clothes in public - <more examples> One of those requirements is emotional resilience. Being able to absorb a setback or percieved slight, and keep moving forward in your day. It can also be seen as a game of emotional poker - sometimes you win a bit, sometimes you lose a bit, but if your bank goes down to 0, you're out! You are holding on to these slights and injustices, and it doesn't matter whether you are right or wrong. It's a catch-22, the fact that you keep complaining instead of moving on with your day proves that you are unwell. Trepanning is an analogy for schizophrenia. That's where part of a person's skull is removed, and the brain is directly exposed to the air. You are exposing your feelings to the world, where a normal person would have an emotional lid.
- tbalsam 3y ago
  (and to add to the other comment too you can edit your comment so you don't get dinged for asking about upvotes! ;P It seems very interesting. You can generally share how important it is to you within reason and that's pretty chill too.)
kayodelycaon 3y ago
For me psychotic paranoia was very much like this. No amount of reason could overcome the irrational thinking.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  I imagine it's frustrating to describe to people who don't understand the degree to which your own brain works against you. Too many assume it's a lack of willpower, but willpower can only do so much to fight the tide (depending on the severity of the illness).
munificent 3y ago
Anxiety feels similarly. The most valuable thing I've gotten from the past several years of therapy is a better model for how humans actually process information. The simple model a lot of people have is: 1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience. 2. Process and understand it. 3. Respond to that emotionally. What we actually do is more like: 1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience. 2. This data is way too ambiguous to make sense of on its own. So to turn it into coherent information, interpret it through the lens of a narrative about who we are and how we expect the world to work. This happens automatically and unconsciously. 3. React to that interpretation emotionally. 4. Watch logical rational brain then scramble around trying to come up with a coherent story that explains why we started feeling a certain way. The answer it comes up with may or may not agree with the unsconscious process that happened in step 2. So much of therapy is "Why does X make me feel Y?" How do I fix X? The answer is almost always that X doesn't make you feel Y. X in the context of belief Z you have about yourself leads do you feeling Y. You fix Z by questioning the often toxic beliefs you hold about yourself. But it can take a lot of work and therapy to even be able to see Z, much less root it out and install a better narrative.
- reaperman 3y ago
  Thank you for detailing / summarizing your exploration on this topic. You've phrased it very well / precisely.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This applies to many things, including lots of things we think we “got to rationally” - much more than we want to admit is rationalization.
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    It thinks therefore I am.
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      Oooh nice!
amelius 3y ago
I sometimes get this when I'm tired. The solution is not to think about it more, but instead to just have some sleep.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Right. A good approach to depression is to learn to simply "turn the TV off" and quiet your brain, but it takes practice to learn how to do that. More broadly speaking though, depression is partially like being stuck in your foulest possible mood for years, with the full knowledge that it's not going away, at least in the near term.
detourdog 3y ago
wild, this explains a particular relationship. I deliver what I perceive as good news and the response is consistently the worst interpretation of every detail.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  That actually sounds more like anxiety about the relationship, and now that I think of it what I'm describing is more like a (very common) combination of depression and anxiety.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Probably true. Thank you. Could it be anxiety driven by their own commitment?
    - asdfman123 3y ago
      It could, but I wouldn’t be able to tell for sure from my end.
agumonkey 3y ago
And none of the actions you used to do are linked to a joyful anticipation, it's like all weights have been reversed. That's how you end up stuck in bed, there's no idea in your brain that can trigger the motivation center, eating, walking to a room, standing.. nothing. The few that remained (in my personal case, can't speak about others) was a strange sense of gamification of everything. Lift that spoon with only one finger. That allows some influx of positive will but it can get drained real fast (to the point of physiological collapse .. a bit like narcolepsia) And yeah, long term management basically teach your brain to desensitize to its own bugs so you can at least not drown in negative emotions. But it's a double edged sword cause you're tapering down your own self in the process.

comrh 3y ago

Which makes sense why CBT style therapy has shown effectiveness because its main focus is challenging those interpretations. No doubt even with those tools it is still a major challenge.

asdfman123 3y ago
One interesting thing to point out is CBT is so effective because it's somewhat easier to stick to than other approaches. Meditation, for instance, is equally effective if you keep with it, but most people realistically won't.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

This is one of the few times I've heard an accurate and concise description of what it feels like. I like the metaphor of the spiral wishingwell. The coin/ball represents the level of depression you sink into. The gravitational draw of the void makes the spiral go faster unless you figure out a way to pull out of it and the longer you wait the harder it is to pull out cause it's moving too quickly. So the trick becomes keeping the coin/ball off of the spiral

hanselot 3y ago
The only way out is through. One way or another, once you reach the shore on the other side, the time spent in the water doesn't seem so bad anymore. Just another perspective to lean on when understanding others. Once you confront it in the most absolute sense, something akin to ego-death occurs, and you make a decision about whether it is worthwhile to continue. Everything comes from and swings back to chaos. Embrace it and you will be free.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  This definitely resonates with me as I've graduated into the state you describe and yes "the only way out is through" is exactly the way to describe the path. Not sure I agree fully with the "time spent in the water" not seeming bad - I think I simply recognize it for what it was, while acknowledging the trauma and cascading effects that I'm unwinding 30+ years after the fact. Perhaps you mean that you are no longer attached to the trauma and can view it "objectively" More important to me now is unwinding the physical manifestations of trauma/anxiety that I never recognized as well as eliminating the behaviors (people pleasing, self deprecation etc...) that attract toxic attachment.
- junon 3y ago
  Can relate. I don't know how, or why, or what I did to get to the other end, but one day I woke up, and it was gone. Years of nearly crippling depression, ruined friendships, hardships at work, nights of 'considering', all finished in an instant. It was absolutely bizarre and wonderful and concerning at the same time. Woke up and thought "alright this is stupid, I need to get stuff done" and as though it were magically manifesting out of thin air I had a normal train of thought, my emotions were mostly in check, and I had motivation that I hadn't felt in years. Almost like cracking a knuckle, but in my own brain. GP's comment resonates very hard.

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

This is why the related concept of "catastrophizing" comes up so much in the context of therapy: > Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis. Anecdotally, many of the people I know with a tendency to "catastrophize" later suffer from clinical depression. The depression only exacerbates the problem. Even more anecdotally, catastrophizing seems heavily correlated to the usage of certain social media platforms in the young people I've worked with. I don't know which direction the causality flows, but I do know that people who consume a lot of Reddit and Twitter seem to think the world is ending and everything is terrible. They can tell me about every political scandal, every shooting, every tragedy, and every natural disaster that happened in the past week. Eventually they come to believe their news sources are representative of the entire world, forgetting that none of these things are happening to them personally. It's a weird doom loop spiral. Even weirder is that many of the people caught in it feel convinced that they "don't do social media" because they're not on Instagram or TikTok, yet they consume hours and hours of doom and gloom social media like Reddit all day.

SoftTalker 3y ago
This is why the news has always been bad, since way before social media. Disasters, war, scandal, and death have always been more engaging. Also why gossip is almost always negative. Our brains evolved to deal with what was happening in our immediate vicinity. This was usually fairly neutral to pleasant, with maybe some moments of sadness, loss, alarm and danger. We just aren't mentally equipped to process an unending stream of bad news and really keep the perspective that these things are not happening to me. It's best to just avoid sources of that. I stopped watching and reading the news a few years ago, and generally feel much less stressed about day to day living.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I think there also is a factor where good things move slowly. I always liked the thought experiment of imagining newspapers that are published at increasingly long intervals. What would the content be in a newspaper that's published every 50 or 100 years? Sure you'd cover major wars, but so much more space than we dedicate right now would go to phenomenal improvements that took a long time. Incredible advances of medical improvements, including eradication of entire diseases, much higher life expectancy and so many fewer famines, massively increased literacy rates. One could go on and on. Yet, few of these things, unless they are discreet events which is rare, ever go into a daily newspaper and certainly don't make headlines.

proper_elb 3y ago

Spot on. > Even when you understand it's wrong, or at least heavily negatively biased, fighting those interpretations feels like trying to swim upstream in a terrific current. Achieving it still feels like the end of "A beautiful mind", where there are people hanging out in the room that are not there. They sound like they are they, they feel like they are, they smell familiar. But they are not real and will disappear some wonderful day, as they always do. So you just nod to them and go on with your live.

OptCohTomo 3y ago

That is what depression felt like to me as well. I’ve written a book about it, Can’t Be Trusted. It is a memoir about engineering, mental health, and aviation. Here is more information about me and my book: https://cantbetrusted.org/?page_id=262 https://cantbetrusted.org/?page_id=262 As a laser engineer with an interest in computing, I think this book would be of interest to the tech community.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Simply by posting it you'll get someone's attention (like myself!) However you may get downvoted because you asked how to get upvoted, which can be counterintuitive if you're Neurodivergent (like many of us). It's ok, that's not how you intended it, but that is most likely not a helpful part of the message here.
- sdwr 3y ago
  I don't want to get baited, really don't want to get baited here, but here goes. I've had my own struggles with mental health, maybe I can phrase it in a helpful way. This reply is for the book writer: All your points may very well be true, but taken together, they paint a picture of you as sick and untrustworthy. Society puts requirements on people, stuff like - wearing clothes in public - <more examples> One of those requirements is emotional resilience. Being able to absorb a setback or percieved slight, and keep moving forward in your day. It can also be seen as a game of emotional poker - sometimes you win a bit, sometimes you lose a bit, but if your bank goes down to 0, you're out! You are holding on to these slights and injustices, and it doesn't matter whether you are right or wrong. It's a catch-22, the fact that you keep complaining instead of moving on with your day proves that you are unwell. Trepanning is an analogy for schizophrenia. That's where part of a person's skull is removed, and the brain is directly exposed to the air. You are exposing your feelings to the world, where a normal person would have an emotional lid.
tbalsam 3y ago
(and to add to the other comment too you can edit your comment so you don't get dinged for asking about upvotes! ;P It seems very interesting. You can generally share how important it is to you within reason and that's pretty chill too.)

kayodelycaon 3y ago

For me psychotic paranoia was very much like this. No amount of reason could overcome the irrational thinking.

asdfman123 3y ago
I imagine it's frustrating to describe to people who don't understand the degree to which your own brain works against you. Too many assume it's a lack of willpower, but willpower can only do so much to fight the tide (depending on the severity of the illness).

munificent 3y ago

Anxiety feels similarly. The most valuable thing I've gotten from the past several years of therapy is a better model for how humans actually process information. The simple model a lot of people have is: 1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience. 2. Process and understand it. 3. Respond to that emotionally. What we actually do is more like: 1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience. 2. This data is way too ambiguous to make sense of on its own. So to turn it into coherent information, interpret it through the lens of a narrative about who we are and how we expect the world to work. This happens automatically and unconsciously. 3. React to that interpretation emotionally. 4. Watch logical rational brain then scramble around trying to come up with a coherent story that explains why we started feeling a certain way. The answer it comes up with may or may not agree with the unsconscious process that happened in step 2. So much of therapy is "Why does X make me feel Y?" How do I fix X? The answer is almost always that X doesn't make you feel Y. X in the context of belief Z you have about yourself leads do you feeling Y. You fix Z by questioning the often toxic beliefs you hold about yourself. But it can take a lot of work and therapy to even be able to see Z, much less root it out and install a better narrative.

reaperman 3y ago
Thank you for detailing / summarizing your exploration on this topic. You've phrased it very well / precisely.
bombcar 3y ago
This applies to many things, including lots of things we think we “got to rationally” - much more than we want to admit is rationalization.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  It thinks therefore I am.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Oooh nice!

amelius 3y ago

I sometimes get this when I'm tired. The solution is not to think about it more, but instead to just have some sleep.

asdfman123 3y ago
Right. A good approach to depression is to learn to simply "turn the TV off" and quiet your brain, but it takes practice to learn how to do that. More broadly speaking though, depression is partially like being stuck in your foulest possible mood for years, with the full knowledge that it's not going away, at least in the near term.

detourdog 3y ago

wild, this explains a particular relationship. I deliver what I perceive as good news and the response is consistently the worst interpretation of every detail.

asdfman123 3y ago
That actually sounds more like anxiety about the relationship, and now that I think of it what I'm describing is more like a (very common) combination of depression and anxiety.
- detourdog 3y ago
  Probably true. Thank you. Could it be anxiety driven by their own commitment?
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    It could, but I wouldn’t be able to tell for sure from my end.

agumonkey 3y ago

And none of the actions you used to do are linked to a joyful anticipation, it's like all weights have been reversed. That's how you end up stuck in bed, there's no idea in your brain that can trigger the motivation center, eating, walking to a room, standing.. nothing. The few that remained (in my personal case, can't speak about others) was a strange sense of gamification of everything. Lift that spoon with only one finger. That allows some influx of positive will but it can get drained real fast (to the point of physiological collapse .. a bit like narcolepsia) And yeah, long term management basically teach your brain to desensitize to its own bugs so you can at least not drown in negative emotions. But it's a double edged sword cause you're tapering down your own self in the process.