compulsion to worry correlates tightly with depressed mood
There are some very interesting notions about depression from an ev-psych perspective here, the gist of which being that depression is “effort to reconstruct models of the world so that future action can lead to payoffs, in part through stripping away previous valuations that led to unwelcome outcomes”. As a result depression results in “suspension of behavioral activity accompanied by very intense cognitive activity”.
In somewhat more detail,
Depression should be precipitated by (1) a heavy investment in a behavioral enterprise that was expected to lead to large payoffs that either failed to materialize or were not large enough to justify the investment; or (2) insufficient investment in maintaining a highly valued person or condition that was subsequently lost (possibly as a consequence); or (3) gradual recognition by situation-detectors that one’s long-term pattern of effort and time expenditure has not led to a sufficient level of evolutionarily meaningful reward, when implicitly compared to alternative life paths (the condition of Dickens’ Scrooge).
In other words, depression is the manifestation of the brain calling a “Halt, melt and catch fire” event.
What I’ve been wondering for some time now is whether the causation can go in reverse—i.e. whether intense thinking about your life’s overall strategy can be recognized by your brain as “that mood” and actually trigger the emotional ensemble associated with depression.
I can’t think of any sensible advice, though. What I tend to do about decisions (mostly minor) that are waiting on further information is to put them into my GTD system with an appropriate “decide by” date, and annotate them with information as it comes in. I find this a big help in offloading concerns from conscious thought. I have no idea how that system would cope with a life-changing decision.
What I’ve been wondering for some time now is whether the causation can go in reverse—i.e. whether intense thinking about your life’s overall strategy can be recognized by your brain as “that mood” and actually trigger the emotional ensemble associated with depression.
You know, this is something that we can test. Keep some measure of mood for a while—randomly sample “how are you feeling” on a 1-5 scale, say, (or better, on one of these). After a couple of weeks for calibration. spend a couple of weeks where you write out hopes, fears, and ramifications about your overall life strategy for 20 minutes or so, every morning or night. Try other, similar tests. See what results.
I’ve been using MercuryApp to track my mood on a daily basis for a few months now.
One problem: it’s very noisy data. I consciously recalibrated my happiness set point sometime in january following Alicorn’s strategy, and it’s really hard looking at the curve with its ups and downs to tell when that happened.
ETA: I’m not sure the experiment you propose is wise. As far as I’m concerned this is definitely “don’t do this at home” science. Depression sucks.
Actually, given some of the information linked from Alicorn’s post, I’ll just take increased worry as a solid trigger for depression, and act on that where possible. The added value of information is pretty high, but probably not that high. :P
how do you feel right now on a scale of 1 to 10? (I don’t think 1-5 has enough gradation but I think those circle things make the whole process too involved).
There are some very interesting notions about depression from an ev-psych perspective here, the gist of which being that depression is “effort to reconstruct models of the world so that future action can lead to payoffs, in part through stripping away previous valuations that led to unwelcome outcomes”. As a result depression results in “suspension of behavioral activity accompanied by very intense cognitive activity”.
In somewhat more detail,
In other words, depression is the manifestation of the brain calling a “Halt, melt and catch fire” event.
What I’ve been wondering for some time now is whether the causation can go in reverse—i.e. whether intense thinking about your life’s overall strategy can be recognized by your brain as “that mood” and actually trigger the emotional ensemble associated with depression.
I can’t think of any sensible advice, though. What I tend to do about decisions (mostly minor) that are waiting on further information is to put them into my GTD system with an appropriate “decide by” date, and annotate them with information as it comes in. I find this a big help in offloading concerns from conscious thought. I have no idea how that system would cope with a life-changing decision.
You know, this is something that we can test. Keep some measure of mood for a while—randomly sample “how are you feeling” on a 1-5 scale, say, (or better, on one of these). After a couple of weeks for calibration. spend a couple of weeks where you write out hopes, fears, and ramifications about your overall life strategy for 20 minutes or so, every morning or night. Try other, similar tests. See what results.
Hm. I should start doing this.
I’ve been using MercuryApp to track my mood on a daily basis for a few months now.
One problem: it’s very noisy data. I consciously recalibrated my happiness set point sometime in january following Alicorn’s strategy, and it’s really hard looking at the curve with its ups and downs to tell when that happened.
ETA: I’m not sure the experiment you propose is wise. As far as I’m concerned this is definitely “don’t do this at home” science. Depression sucks.
Actually, given some of the information linked from Alicorn’s post, I’ll just take increased worry as a solid trigger for depression, and act on that where possible. The added value of information is pretty high, but probably not that high. :P
how do you feel right now on a scale of 1 to 10? (I don’t think 1-5 has enough gradation but I think those circle things make the whole process too involved).