Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
The optimist believes that bad events have specific causes, while good events will enhance everything he does; the pessimist believes that bad events have universal causes and that good events are caused by specific factors. When.
It turns out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report and how well you judge your life to be going at that moment determines less than 30 percent.
Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good. This.
In the struggle to cure syphilis in the first decade of the century, Paul Ehrlich concocted a drug, 606, that worked by poisoning Treponema pallidum, the spirochete that causes syphilis. It was called 606 because before it Ehrlich concocted 605 other drugs, none of which worked. Ehrlich, presumably, experienced 605 defeats but persisted.
Being in touch with what we do well underpins the readiness to change,” David continued. “This is related to the Losada ratio. To enable us to hear criticism nondefensively and to act creatively on it, we need to feel secure.
Do you have a problem with alcohol? Is it “abuse,” or, worse, do you “depend” on drinking to get through the day? It will not surprise you to find out that the lines between handling liquor well, abusing alcohol, and being dependent on it are far from clear.
First, you learn to recognize the automatic thoughts flitting through your consciousness at the times you feel worst.
Second, you learn to dispute the automatic thoughts by marshaling contrary evidence.
Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts.
Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.
Fifth, you learn to recognize and question the depression-sowing assumptions governing so much of what you do:.
Bertrand Russell said that the mark of a civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep.
For example, if I promise you one thousand dollars to turn to this page, you will probably choose to do so, and you will succeed. If, however, I promise you one thousand dollars to contract the pupil of your eye, using only willpower, you may choose to do it, but that won’t matter. You are helpless to contract your pupil. Page turning is under your voluntary control; the muscles that change your pupillary size are not.
During Pavlovian conditioning they felt the shocks go on and off regardless of whether they struggled or jumped or barked or did nothing at all. They had concluded, or “learned,” that nothing they did mattered. So why try?
But clinical psychologists also began to find something disconcerting emerging from therapy: even on that rare occasion when therapy goes superbly and unusually well, and you help the client rid herself of depression, anxiety, and anger, happiness is not guaranteed. Emptiness is not an uncommon result.
People who made certain kinds of explanations, he believed, are prey to helplessness.
The theory clearly predicts that in the classroom and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the playing field, success will not necessarily go to the most talented. The prize will go to the adequately talented who are also optimists.
With patients, he pushed and pushed until he had persuaded them to give up the irrational beliefs that sustained their depression. “What do you mean you can’t live without love?” he would cry. “Utter nonsense. Love comes rarely in life, and if you waste your life mooning over its all too ordinary absence, you are bringing on your own depression. You are living under a tyranny of should’s. Stop ‘should-ing’ on yourself!
Here is the exercise: find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood.
Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both.