This doesn’t really ring true to me (as a model of my personal subjective experience).
The model in this post says despair is “a sign that important evidence has been building up in your buffer, unacknowledged, and that it’s time now to integrate it into your plans.”
But most of the times that I’ve cycled intermittently into despair over some project (or relationship), it’s been because of facts I already knew, consciously, about the project. I’m just becoming re-focused on them. And I wouldn’t be surprised if things like low blood sugar or anxiety spilling over from other areas of my life are major causes of some Fact X seeming far more gloomy on one particular day than it did just the day before.
And similarly, most of the times I cycle back out of despair, it’s not because of some new information I learned or an update I made to my plans. It’s because, e.g., I went to sleep and woke up the next morning and things seemed okay again. Or because my best friend reminded me of optimistic Facts Y and Z which I already knew about, but hadn’t been thinking about.
I think this is a good point. Despair, which I see as perceived hopelessness, originates in an individual and so it depends on how that individual perceives the situation. Perception is not like receiving a reflection of the world in the mind. It is like meshing together the neural activity from percepts with the existing neural activity ongoing in the brain. The result is that it is context dependent. It is affected by priming and emotions, for example.
I think the advice in this post, essentially embrace despair, isn’t probably that helpful. What do you think about this advice: “Notice despair for it is a signal of hopelessness. It indicates that you may be stuck in a mental rut or that the way that you are viewing a situation may be inducing unnecessary anxiety. In summary, it tells you to rethink how you are trying to solve the problem that you are facing. The first thing you should do is check that it is real. Get advice and talk to others about it. Try to get out of your head. Also, try and find out if it is misattributed. It may be due to low blood sugar or anxiety spilling over from other parts of your life, for example. If you have done this and now know that the despair is real, i.e. resulting from a complex problem that matters to you and that you can’t solve, then try to understand the problem you are facing and your plan to solve it. Once you are happy with the plan then you can embrace the incoming depression. Do not view it as anathema, but instead as your body’s mechanism to move you into the necessary focused and analytical state that you need to be in to be able to solve the complex problem that you are facing”.
This doesn’t really ring true to me (as a model of my personal subjective experience).
The model in this post says despair is “a sign that important evidence has been building up in your buffer, unacknowledged, and that it’s time now to integrate it into your plans.”
But most of the times that I’ve cycled intermittently into despair over some project (or relationship), it’s been because of facts I already knew, consciously, about the project. I’m just becoming re-focused on them. And I wouldn’t be surprised if things like low blood sugar or anxiety spilling over from other areas of my life are major causes of some Fact X seeming far more gloomy on one particular day than it did just the day before.
And similarly, most of the times I cycle back out of despair, it’s not because of some new information I learned or an update I made to my plans. It’s because, e.g., I went to sleep and woke up the next morning and things seemed okay again. Or because my best friend reminded me of optimistic Facts Y and Z which I already knew about, but hadn’t been thinking about.
I think this is a good point. Despair, which I see as perceived hopelessness, originates in an individual and so it depends on how that individual perceives the situation. Perception is not like receiving a reflection of the world in the mind. It is like meshing together the neural activity from percepts with the existing neural activity ongoing in the brain. The result is that it is context dependent. It is affected by priming and emotions, for example.
I think the advice in this post, essentially embrace despair, isn’t probably that helpful. What do you think about this advice: “Notice despair for it is a signal of hopelessness. It indicates that you may be stuck in a mental rut or that the way that you are viewing a situation may be inducing unnecessary anxiety. In summary, it tells you to rethink how you are trying to solve the problem that you are facing. The first thing you should do is check that it is real. Get advice and talk to others about it. Try to get out of your head. Also, try and find out if it is misattributed. It may be due to low blood sugar or anxiety spilling over from other parts of your life, for example. If you have done this and now know that the despair is real, i.e. resulting from a complex problem that matters to you and that you can’t solve, then try to understand the problem you are facing and your plan to solve it. Once you are happy with the plan then you can embrace the incoming depression. Do not view it as anathema, but instead as your body’s mechanism to move you into the necessary focused and analytical state that you need to be in to be able to solve the complex problem that you are facing”.