When I’m feeling particularly depressed, I often don’t want to feel better. But, I have some amount of control over how I feel, even when depressed I think. More precisely, I think if there were fairly easy actions I could take that’d make me feel substantially less depressed, it’s pretty plausible that planning in advance to take those actions would cause me to in fact take those actions, even if my present person moment didn’t feel too motivated to take the action.
Thus I think it’s interesting to understand:
- What is the space of (ideally fairly easy) actions I can take that’d affect how I feel (when depressed).
- Which of these actions does normal Alek endorse?
Some reasons I might feel bad
Often when I feel bad, it’s related to things happening in my life. Here are some events that are often correlated (I’m reticent to admit a causal relationship here; I don’t think it’s necessary that I feel bad in all these cases, and this blog post is explicitly exploring questioning to what extent I should feel bad about these things) with my feeling bad:
- I was hoping for something, and it didn’t happen.
- I have failed in some capacity (or at least conceive myself to have).
- For instance, perhaps I’ve hurt someone I care about a lot.
- I’ve received feedback / criticism from someone whose opinion I care about.
- Someone betrayed my expectations / trust.
- Someone treats me in a not nice way.
Interventions and analysis
Adjust my expectations ex post facto
I could decide, or tell myself as a lie, or maybe as hyperstitioning, that I don’t care about whatever is causing me to be sad (or that things aren’t so bad really). For instance, maybe I could choose to not care about the thing which I was hoping for, to decide that my personal failing wasn’t a failing after all it was just a reasonable way for me to act. If someone has criticized me, or treated me in a nice way, I could perhaps decide that I don’t care about their opinion, or don’t care about them as much. Maybe I can’t fully decide to not care, but I could at least decrease how much I care.
I mostly don’t endorse this, with one exception: If someone has treated you quite poorly, it’s sometimes reasonable to update towards being more distant to this person, especially if it’s a repeated pattern and it’s not clear they care about the fact that they’re hurting you in this way. It’s good to have some amount (or maybe a lot!) of tolerance and charity about this with people you’re close to: the people you’re close to are the people you give the most power and opportunity to hurt you, so it’s not particularly surprising if they hurt you.
(Another note, which isn’t really an exception, is that sometimes you should not process something immediately. Maybe you should sleep first. If you’re overwhelmed, maybe you should temporarily ignore some of the issues, and handle things one at a time.)
This exception aside, I view post-hoc expectation adjustment as highly undesirable. Expectation adjustment both has immediate bad consequences, and (perhaps more concerningly) often ~necessarily generalizes in undesirable ways. Let me explain.
- Suppose I decide that I don’t care about a way that I’ve failed.
- Immediate bad consequence: maybe I should’ve taken actions to reduce harm from my failure. E.g., make reparations if I’ve hurt someone.
- Bad generalization: If I decide that I don’t care that I’ve failed in some way that used to be important to me, then I’m losing a part of my idealism / hope for a better Alek. These traits are quite important to me, so this’d be quite a shame.
- I decide to disregard criticism:
- There were likely useful things to learn form the criticism, lessons you’d be missing out on by trying to adopt apathy.
- Maybe the person who’s criticism I’m ignoring often has quite good advice, and you’re really shooting yourself in the foot by listening to it less in the future.
- Someone I care for has hurt me:
- If handled right, times when you’ve hurt or been hurt can bring you closer to someone: these are a chance to show that you can handle a stressful situation together. Supporting someone when they’ve been hurt, especially at your hand, is a quite meaningful experience. I’d be quite remiss to miss out on such experiences.
- Deciding to not feel the pain if someone I care for has hurt me would cause me to be more distant to them, which can be quite bad.
When things are going poorly, I can decide to give up / be apathetic, or to admit my failure, and yet proceed unwavering with strongly caring about things.
When I’m feeling depressed, I’ll often feel irredeemable. I see my failings, and feel that everything I’ve ever done has been a waste, no, worse than a waste a blight those around me. The obvious fact, that the future will similarly be full of such failings, oppresses me.
I wished that there was some simple proof: Alek was X, Alek is Y, Alek may become Z, hence Alek should love himself. But it doesn’t exist. I am not forced to feel any particular way about Alek.
Instead, I can choose. And, I choose to care.
When I’ve failed, I’ll sometimes cry with grief, sometimes laugh at the absurdity at my failure. I’ll try to understand the person I disagree with. I’ll try to figure out how I can do better. I’ll recall the good and worthwhile aspects of my journey. I’ll remember why I cared in the first place.
Concretely, I’m suggesting that when I feel sad I should consciously remember that failing is a necessary consequence of caring. And I will try to feel happy with myself for making this choice. Because it was the right choice to make.
Numb
I could dull the pain / sadness via “doomscrolling”, reading a bunch of blogs, binge reading a story, or binge watching TV.
This is undesirable. It has some pretty similar effects to “adjusting expectations”. Many of these numbing actions are also additionally perverse, in that they tend to put me in a worse physical state (e.g., very tired due to staying up too late).
Wallow
I could ruminate on my thoughts, especially without writing them down. For instance, here’s a rough trajectory of how my thoughts travelled the last time I was pretty depressed.
- Several distressing events happened in confluence.
- I started by ruminating alone on the events alone.
- My scope expanded backwards: I recalled many events, and saw them in a dark light, eg as evidence that people don’t really care about me.
- I recounted all my sharpest shames, failings I deeply regret, and took them as evidence of an irredeemable character.
- I thought forwards, and saw a miserable future for myself.
- I saw to the end of the human race, and felt empty. I wondered if that wasn’t for the best; and if not for the best, agonized that it might be averted, perhaps in part by my wretched hands. Wallowing is bad. However, it’s also a bit sneaky bc it’s superficially kind of similar to “take responsibility for things, try to realize your part in the problem”. On a naive read, it looks like it’s just the opposite of adjusting expectations, which I claimed was bad.
But wallowing isn’t about recognizing a mistake and resolving to do better. It’s more about convincing yourself that there’s no point trying to make things better. That the problem is too overwhelming and too fundamental to be worth trying to fix.
I’m somewhat into being comprehensive at times. (You might’ve guessed that from this insane list). Sometimes it’s necessary to get the right answer.
I think the real issue with wallowing is that it’s just kind of lazy, and that’s lame.
Ignore it for now
There are a variety of ways you could go about ignoring that they feel bad:
- You could do a distracting activity, such as math, work, or writing a blog post.
- You could go to sleep.
- You could just deliberately refuse to focus on whatever stimuli have caused me sadness. For instance, by focussing on something else. These are often pretty reasonable, especially if there aren’t immediate actions that should be taken. I’m pretty into doing these things, and think that they’re pretty reasonable defaults (if viable) for when I’m feeling bad. In some ways, they’re just delaying tactics. But, delaying can be fine if the current you is not set up to handle the situation well, and, e.g., a well rested or slightly more temporally distant version of yourself would be better at handling things.
Be wary of delaying things for too long though, e.g., for reasons discussed in “adjusting expectations”. A few reasons not emphasized earlier:
- Feeling sad can burn a memory into your brain: “don’t do this thing again!“.
- Feeling sad can be a meaningful experience, e.g., a way of treasuring something lost.
Physical interventions
Here are some things you might try:
- Breathing exercises
- Exercise. e.g., run around.
- Take a shower.
- Listen to some music.
- Sing.
- Eat something good
These can often be pretty good to do.
Process it
You could talk to a friend. If doing this, you should make it clear that you’re feeling pretty crummy, and would like someone to help you process it. This seems great: it’s often quite helpful for me to talk to someone to think something through, and this is also a meaningful type of social interaction.
You could also carefully and write down your thoughts about the situation, possibly analyze them, possibly look for distortions in them. This can work, if you’re careful to avoid wallowing.
Do something weird
Doing something weird: going and running around in the water and doing zumba and karaoke, go run through some sprinklers, sleep in the mountains. N says this is pretty good, and can lead to some weird experiences. I deffer.
Forced joy
You could try to feel better by smiling, laughing, telling a joke, or force of will.
There are some simple cases for wanting to be happy:
- Happiness seems good!
- I’d like the people I care about to feel happy, and endorse caring about myself. However, there are also some arguments against feeling happy:
- If a friend told me “I feel really sad because XYZ” it is generally insensitive to just say “aw, cheer up, here’s a dumb joke!” Maybe the main issue with this is that I wanted to be heard and validated. For someone else to share in my misery. (TBC I think dumb jokes might be the play sometimes).
- I don’t feel like it, and it might be a lot of work.
- These aren’t super compelling.
- Maybe if I feel sad people will be nice to me / give me attention.
- It’s pretty good to talk to people if you’re sad.
- But I think it’s pretty bad to exaggerate your sadness in hopes of obtaining more pity.
Overall, we’re left with the question of: should you try to manufacture happiness artificially in these ways?
My take is: only do it if it’s pretty clear that you’ve already heard and validated your feelings, and if it doesn’t feel insensitive. I think tricks like this can be useful to defuse the situation if it’s a bit too intense, but overall aren’t my favorite tricks.
PS: Sorry, this blog post is a mess. Ideally I’d have edited it, made the ontology better. But, I have to get it out tonight, because I told people I would. Hopefully it’s at least somewhat helpful for you in thinking through what to do when sad. I’ll try to be way more specific and targeted in my next blog post. -Alek