Happiness 101
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article really seems to treat depressive, angry, and other emotions as "negative", when in fact these emotions are really just neutral.
It is completely positive and OK to be depressed when someone dies or angry when you've been hurt, and treating them as 100% "negative" emotions is one of the reasons people can get stuck in the cyclical downward thinking:
1. "I'm experiencing depressive emotions"
2. "Oh no! These are negative and bad emotions. Therefore I'm not happy!"
(Brain releases more depressive feelings based on these thoughts)
3. Start at step 1.
Instead of fearing oneself, it's much easier to understand that all feelings are simply feelings, in the same way that all thoughts are simply thoughts. This ties in very closely to mindfulness and not just reacting to your mind, but engaging it and choosing what to do with thoughts and feelings.
Edit: Just to clarify, this is not to say depressive thoughts are always positive, but to encourage others to be aware and engage their feelings from a neutral perspective, then decide what to do with them. That is the point of mindfulness.
If my wife left me because I didn't pay enough attention to her then I'd get depressed, but the next time I'm married I'd be unlikely to make the same mistake because of the profound effect of depression. However, anti-depressants can hinder this learning process, so quite literally if I took anti-depressants after my wife (hypothetically) left me, it would be quite probable that I'd make the exact same mistake again.
Clinical depression, of course, is different as it's like the emotional equivalent of palpitations.
Personally I quite like depression, it's helped me a lot with my writing. It's odd as I seem to get a new perspective afterwards, I'd be interested to know if my depression is sometimes caused by my writing so I do learn a new perspective because I've been depressed at some pretty weird times before, but this is the kind of question that'll never be answered.
Fifty percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second and 74 percent of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=363986
I tend to see a stronger distinction between pain and depression.
I'll give a simple numerical example. I assume some people marry badly, and have an intrinsically higher probability of divorce. I assume the probability of divorce does not change after the first marriage.
Let MB = Marries Badly, and D = Divorce. Assume P(MB)=0.5, P(D|MB)=0.9 and P(D|!MB)=0.1. Then:
P(MB | D) = P(D | MB) P(MB) / P(D) = 0.9 x 0.5 / 0.5 = 0.9.
So 90% of divorcees marry badly. Therefore, a person who has gotten one divorce has a probability of getting divorced on their second marriage of:
P(D | MB) x 0.9 + P(D | !MB) x 0.1 = 0.82
Therefore, in this model, 50% of first marriages and 82% of second marriages will end in divorce.
My point is simply that the numbers provided prove nothing.
I don't think that is nothing.
In a sample of only divorced people, they've obviously learnt something because their 2nd marriage should be destined for 100% chance of failure because they've already illustrated they failed at marriage. Surely someone who has been divorced twice is guaranteed to fail? I mean they obviously picked poorly twice, so why does 26% of third marriages survive? Because obviously they've learnt from their mistakes, they're not choosing cheaters or losers the 3rd time?!
Obviously the numbers are going to be biased to lower percentages because there's more than just divorce's entering the 2nd and 3rd marriages, there's also widow/er's and such who already succeeded once as they made it to the whole 'until death do we part'. However, second marriages should be a lot more complex than first due to the addition of age, careers and children.
Edit: The thing never made clear in divorce statistics is something that seems to avoid common sense. You can only get married a second time if you've been divorced once, so the second marriage category is nearly 100% composed of divorce's as 50% of first marriages survive!
The real statistics are: 24.79% of total marriages fail. Out of 100 people 50 succeed the first time. Out of 50 people ~16.5 succeed the second time. Out of 33.5 people 8.71 people succeed the third time, meaning 24.79 people fail past a third marriage, that's less than 75% of the population; so really the gross marriage rate heads towards 100% success not 100% failure.
Interestingly 93% of fourth marriages end in divorce, which would show that roughly 23% of people are incapable of marriage. With this 23% removed, then the total success rate for marriage is 100%, that eventually people will end up in a successful marriage even after a failure or two.
I also wonder if the old "Children should be seen and not heard" helps with autistic children. I mean I know when I grew up it simply wasn't tolerated if I behaved badly, yet (I especially noticed this when I was still in school) I've noticed that people just a few years younger than me don't seem to have been taught to behave. I see people 15 years old (I'm 20) talking back to their parents in public, that's something that rarely happened when I was 15 and the people who did do that generally came from crappy families to begin with.
I feel sorry for any child growing up today because I seriously feel they're not going to be disciplined correctly, and I don't mean like beatings as I never got hit once. I never got grounded once as a teenager, because by the time I even hit 10 I had a healthy respect of what my parents said. Come to think of it, I rarely even got punished between 11-17 years old (I say 17 because thats when I started work with my father, there was probably more work-related arguments between 17-20 than there was in my entire childhood) because I always did what I was told, it was sort of ingrained in me. Plus I think between 14-16 guilt worked 10x better than discipline.
Guilt was a common disciplinary tool used and still sort of used by my mother. Guilt and getting yelled at and told you're useless and not good enough.
I think whatever method is going to encourage self-discipline is the best. A strong willpower is a very useful tool, not only to control yourself but to know when other people are trying to control you; my brother has an amazingly strong one so I guess my parents didn't mess up, I can't quite say the same for myself but I think I'm pretty stubborn and stoic.
Clinical depression is defined as being depressed for 6 months or more. Most doctors wouldn't prescribe anti-depressants to someone who has been depressed less than that.
If your wife leaving you resulted in a 6-month depression, you should go on anti-depressants. You would be clinically depressed, regardless of the cause.
This is a highly error-prone process, though. It is very easy for a person to develop a maladaptive pattern (clinical depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, etc.) because the true causes of and rational responses to the situations to which we're reacting are frequently unclear. Your brain will just take whatever explanation you give it, which is at least as likely to be a spurious and emotionally-charged one as it is well-reasoned one based on observable evidence.
What you call depression here is like the pain a little boy feels if he burns his hand on the stove--like that situation the cause (you didn't pay enough attention) and the response (pay more attention to your wife) are unambiguous--and like that situation one would have be deficient in reasoning ability (not deficient in emotion) to not learn a useful adaptation from such abundantly clear evidence.
This is important, as the chance of a maladaptive response to something increases with the ambiguity of the situation.
And so, your example is a bit simplistic and misleading. Depression is an effect: it doesn't make you learn from your mistakes, it only lets you know that one has been made. To learn a new adaptation (to some stimulus, the cause of the depression) is a process of reasoning. Common anti-depressants are not known to diminish one's ability to reason, so your claim that they would prevent one from learning from their mistakes seems unfounded. It is in fact central to psychotherapy that the patient be able to make use of their reasoning abilities to correct emotion-driven adaptations.
One would hope and expect that most patients seeking treatment for depression are people who have learned some kind of maladaptive pattern (whether they know what it is or not) that is causing them real harm in life. At that point, the idea of inhibiting that maladaptive process (breaking the self-reinforcing cycle of depression) with anti-depressants and therapy is pretty attractive and useful. Moreso than assuming that it should be tolerated simply because it's natural.
Granted, but it is detrimental to be feeling "negative" emotions frequently for no significant reason. Seligman's research in particular suggests that a person's outlook can be changed through specific mental exercises and that these changes have real-world effects, including improvements in health, career success, and how the person is perceived.
Depression is not the same as sadness. Depression is a vicious circle, often fueled by inner chemicals. Sadness can be OK, depression is never.
Another interesting thing I've learnt on happiness is that you can make yourself happy (especially when you're sad) by simply smiling. I've heard numerous explanations as to why (the best is that performing the physical action causes the nerves to activate that cause you to smile when you are happy and in turn actually begin to make you happy) but I just know that it works.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?"
from "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran
Was not aware that hypnosis uses it though, sounds rather strange to me that hypnosis uses conditional learning.
...... I made myself sad =(