I have a personal theory (I'm sure it's not a novel one and it probably has a name) that human brains are naturally predisposed to negative thought than positive thought because our brains are essentially evolved prediction engines. And because it is often easier and faster to lose something than gain it (e.g. it is usually less urgent to act on the signs of deer you might want to hunt and eat, than the sign of a tiger who might want to hunt and eat you), our prediction engines have a bias toward negative prediction. Conscious awareness of this fact (or rather, theory) has helped me curb negative thoughts at least to some extent.
I know that traumatized human brains tend toward negativity. I don't believe it is a natural human condition, though. With trauma, the instincts you mentioned start applying to the wrong situations - trauma rewires the brain. "Minor" trauma, sustained trauma, traumatic events, can all contribute to this.
This is likely a byproduct of us being too comfortable now. Not in the "you've got nothing real to worry about!" boomer rethoric kind of way, but in the sense that our baseline for reward has shifted a bit higher. So trauma can still present a very strong negative RL signal, while positive RL signals of similar magnitude become rarer.
Or a byproduct of sustained trauma being more prevalent in modern society. There was a large shift in the way children are raised in the past 100 years, from community to individuality. Entire generations of people whose childhoods prepared them for a world that did not exist by the time they were adults. There is no template for raising children in the new world, and no community to fall back on. Many react with anger and resentment, and raise their children accordingly. Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.
This is probably also evolutionary. Most species, once safe and sated, tend to calm down and relax, or even nap. But we humans suffer from boredom, which tend to agitate us into action even when there is no hunger or threat. Probably the evolutionary adaptation that allowed our particular lineage to overtake (and parhaps wipe out) other competing lines of homonids and develop civilization.
I agree with this to a large extent. All prediction comes with uncertainty and a good survival strategy is to align towards the upper bound on risk and lower bound on reward.
First of all if negative thinking is associated with cognitive decline and if what you say is also generally true then humans will also be pretty much, in general, be in cognitive decline.
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.
I'm not seeing where they are coming up with RNT as a cause, other than a lot of theory. Wouldn't it be a symptom of cognitive decline instead? Dementia patients, particularly those with Alzheimers, tend to become depressed because of confusion and memory loss. Wouldn't it be more likely that these depression symptoms are being caused by deteriotating brain function rather than the other way around?
I believe there have been other studies showing people with a history of depression develop dementia at higher rates. There are some that have shown the structural/signal changes that happen after longterm depression as well. These are things that occur years or decades before the dementia.
Of course. It would be bizarre if there weren't a relationship between Lewy Body dementia, Alzheimer's, or vascular dementia (which in old people, means you've gone into heart failure) and repetitive negative thoughts. For one, you know you've got an incurable disease that will inevitably destroy your mind, and you've become one of the rare class of people for which assisted suicide has almost no controversy, it's something you're putting down payments on. For two, you can't finish thoughts.
My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.
Is it possible that we're just better at reporting our negative thoughts, not that we have more of them? Or is overthinking the price we pay for analyzing everything?
“The prevalence of cognitive disorders is increasing year by year, placing a heavy burden on patients, families, and society. It is estimated that the total annual cost of dementia disease in China will reach $1.89 trillion in 2050 [4]. However, there is no drug that can stop or reverse the progression of dementia.”
That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.
It's common for old fogies to claim that the future is bad and the past was best. But I don't remember a time in my life that was this stressful. I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff. Everybody wants to escape the real world and live through their screens. Nothing is real and everything is a meme. And the fact that we allowed DJT to even approach the White House is such a damning indictment of America and it's vaunted democracy. The bad guys won, and there's no clear way to change that.
I think most people aren't leaving their house each day with the same worries people in the 20th century had. It is certainly much nicer to be alive now than then, especially in places like Europe.
What personally has me worried is the derivative and 2nd derivative. How much is my current comfort sustained purely because of the momentum of systems made possible less than a lifetime ago (post WW2 reconstruction). So ironically your comment induces more stress in me. The idea that just as recently as the 20th century, times that my grandparents were conscious for, that many people lived through that much suffering. To me it seems incredibly easy to end up right back there.
IMO… You need to detach yourself from the big data straw you’re gagging on.
Go outside and interact with people.
There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.
If this solution is as effective as you claim, then wherefore comes this sense of societal malaise? I'm not disagreeing you that life is worth living IRL, but still, if you just need to "touch grass", then why _aren't_ we doing precisely that?
I think our brains are wired for hyper-compacted headline news (removes all nuance), emotional bits of info (high reactionary impact), especially if it's negative (survival instinct kicks in, makes a person feels alive).
It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).
That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.
> DJT has been the best thing that has ever happened…
I am curious about whether your model of how the current Administration in the U.S. has benefited various countries so strikingly includes the United States itself.
I personally think the US benefited from recent events in a similar way body benefits from a fever. So yes, even though it might not feel like it at times.
Bodies do not "benefit" from fever. A fever is a signal that pathogens have recently entered the body, and the body is desperately at work trying to kick them out again. If it fails, you die. The fever is a direct mirror of the inflammation caused by that fight.
So, yes, the current administration certainly caused a fever. And the only thing the US benefits from are the antibodies fighting that pathogen.
Or for individuals. I;ve never realized how US-like my country was becoming until DJT and his second administration. I'm probably one of the most US-pilled person my age in my country (I follow US football more than soccer, i hang out on US forums and discords, i used to follow US news every day, i've spent a month between Ohio and WV, and another between California, Nevada and Colorado, it's the foreign country i've spent the most time in overall) and even I realized how subserviant and culturally acclimated to the US we became. Von der Layen and her "negociation" did not help the sentiment, i guarantee, but i think it's how much even national news talked about the US that made me realized we have to cut ties.
I've moved, in 6 month, from a pretty pro-OTAN, "liberal" point of view toward an anti-OTAN, anti-Atlantist position, and i think i'm right. I now would even vote for an anti-atlantist right wing party rather than for the left of center, pro-US party i've voted for before (well, since an anti-Atlantist left wing party exist, and despite its radicality, i will probably vote for them, but i'm now a single-issue voter, and my issue is how omnipresent the US is in our culture).
DJT made me realized i'm part of the problem, and now i can take steps to fix it.
One, figure out why you're "anti-Atlantist", and anti-defense pact. Two, think about how radicality created the US problems, and why you think radicalism is the answer in your case.
Yes, Europe needs to change its stance, but electing a "burn-it-to-the-ground" faction is not actually going to do this in a productive way.
As for the "omnipresence" of the US, that is and has always been a lot of individual choices more than a political choice. By all means, fixate less on the US yourself, but I promise you that trying to force that on others by electing a more authoritarian party will backfire spectacularly.
Soft power isn't countered by hard power. The two working counters are increased soft power on your own (i.e. a culture that's more attractive than US culture), or said soft-power self-reducing. You can trust DJT to achieve the latter.
You don't have to "cut ties". You have to learn to think on your own.
This is unironically the best time to be alive. The problem is that most people are ignorant of real history and don't realize how much life used to suck. Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.
But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.
edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse
If you have a lot of money, sure. But coming back to reality, prices for everything has risen and lots of people are living harder lives than a few years ago.
Well, there aren't any signs of a worldwide multi-year pandemic starting that will shut down every economy, force governments into extreme monetary devaluation via supply expansion to pretend everything is okay, and an extreme loss of trust in many medical and scientific institutions.
So, yeah, I'd rather carry on as we are than go back and live through it all over again.
Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive. But do you really think that Americans are simply that spoiled and stupid? When an entire nation sinks into a despair, surely there must be a better answer than "ignorance"? So I am positing that there must be some underlying problem, something that is difficult to quantify, dare I say it, some kind of mass psychological-spiritual disfunction at play.
> Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive.
Considering the United States only for a moment; the distribution of national income has not been so unequal since the robber baron days. At the same time the visibility of wealth to make upward comparisons has never been greater due to complete permeation of media, both traditional and social. If my share of income in real dollars was slipping as is the case for many, while watching the .1% pocket it, I’d be pretty doggone dysphoric.
> RNT was assessed using the perseverative thinking questionnaire (PTQ). The scale consists of 15 items covering three domains: core characteristics of RNT, unproductiveness, and psychological capacity captured. Each item is rated on a 5-point Likert scale from 0 “never” to 4 “almost always”, with a total score ranging from 0 to 60.
Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?
The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?
I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?
I have a go to list of positive things to think about.
I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.
It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).
The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.
My experience quite often is that if I get in a bad state, the things that usually bring me joy just no longer do. In some cases they even produce more sadness.
It depends on my negative thought loop. If it's more existential anxiety the things that bring me joy sometimes can help. Other sources of negative thoughts they definitely don't work on.
It's like how you can't really help but automatically read text you look at in a language you know well.
It's very hard to control, over the years I've worked on reigning in my negative thinking, but every once in a while I still end up in a spiral of increasingly negative thoughts that don't just go away by focusing on positive things.
I think this question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how depression works for a lot of people. You're asking "why don't they replace negative signals with positive signals" when the problem often is that the positive signaling mechanism itself is broken. It's like trying to balance a bike that only goes left.
No, but you can think less by reducing your cognitive ability through say drugs and alcohol. Notice how the happiest boomers guzzle the wine and don’t have as many (negative) thoughts.
It's not quite as simple as that, but what you describe has some relation to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Part of CBT involves recognizing when you're ruminating/spiraling in thought patterns that you want to avoid, and strategies to redirect and break that loop.
The only thing I'd add to this (as someone with stupidly depressive and negative thought patterns), is that there are techniques that can help.
The parent comment comes off as flippant, but I am going to assume it's not intended that way.
Learning to think more positively takes an incredible amount of effort. An effort which seemingly never goes away. It just never gets easier. It's like my brain is simply wired to assume the worst, worry and of course just constantly make suicide seem like some kind of great way out. So much so, that when I was younger, I had assumed everyone just walked around constantly wondering whether it'd be easier to just die.
To this day, that's where my brain goes first. Decades of nearly daily thoughts of ending it. BUT and this is the crucial part, to me that was just always part of the noise. It's there, but it's not forcing my hand. I can both live and also constantly think that I don't particularly enjoy just existing for existence's sake and therefore death sort of seems like a viable alternative. I don't act upon it, because I'm too curious to see what's next, for the time being.
Anyway, the techniques that people are often taught in therapy sound simple and obvious, but they are harder to do than one might assume. Especially for people deep in depression.
Gratitude journaling is one of those things. It is quite boring and tedious to write down what one is grateful for in life. To write down every single good thing that happened in a day, no matter how small.
BUT, it sort of forces you onto a track of positive thought. It literally blocks / occupies thought, because it takes effort to do and focuses the mind on the positive, even if for a short period of time.
Similarly, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile. There is some feedback loop between pretending to be happy and then sort of feeling a bit happier all of a sudden. Doesn't always work, won't work for everyone and deep clinical depressions are a whole different ballgame.
Exercise is a pretty big one for me as well. As much as I hate it, I always feel better afterwards.
Again, the sum of various small techniques can eventually make a bit of a difference.
I've come to terms with the fact that depression is hard-wired into my brain structure and it's not going anywhere. But, I have also made a ton of new pathways that allow me to more quickly switch into more positive and grateful modes of thinking. And this, in some ways, is like a list of positive things to think, like the parent comment alluded to.
Though without all of the above, I'd also take offense at the implication that depressed people can somehow choose to be depressed and need to just stop being depressed. That notion is ridiculous and has prevailed for (what feels like) centuries of ignorance of mental conditions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
Technological comfort just disguises it all.
And things that add to entropy are favored by nature, undoing human labor & endeavor. Related?
Humans all being generally in a state of cognitive decline doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective because natural selection will weed out degraded cognitive performance. So most people won’t be in this state. Anecdotally, you likely don’t see all your friends in cognitive decline so likely most of them don’t have a negative bias.
So your conclusion is likely to not be true. In fact I’m being generous here. Your conclusion is startling and obviously wrong both from a scientific perspective and an anecdotal one.
In fact the logic from this experiment and additionally many many other psychological studies points to the opposite. Humans naturally have a positive bias for things. People lie to themselves to stay sane.
Anecdotally what I observed is people don’t like to be told they are wrong. They don’t like to be told they are fat and overweight slobs. Additionally stupid people by all objective standards exist but practically every culture on earth has rules about directly calling someone a dumbass even if it’s the truth.
Like this is not a minor thing if I violate these positive cognitive biases with hard truths it will indeed cause a visceral and possibly violent reaction from most people who want to maintain that positive cognitive bias.
For example racial equality. Black people in America are in general taller and stronger than say Asians. It’s a general truth. You can’t deny this. Strength and height has an obvious genetic basis putting equality from a physical standpoint to be untrue. It is objective reality that genetics makes Asians weaker and smaller than black people in America.
So genetics effects things like size between races, it even effects things like size between species… black people are bigger than mouses. But you know what else? it affects intelligence between species. So mice genetically are less intelligent than black people and also black people are genetically more intelligent than fish. So what am I getting at here?
Genetics affects hair color, physicality, height, skin color between races. Genetics also effects intelligence between species (you are more intelligent than a squirrel) but by some black magic this narrow area of intelligence between races say Asians and black people… it doesn’t exist. Does this make sense to you? Is this logical? Genetics changes literally everything between species and races but it just tip toes around intelligence leaving it completely equal? Is all intelligence really just from the environment when everything else isn’t?
I mean at the very least the logic points to something that can be debated and discussed but this is not an open topic because it violates our cognitive biases.
Some of you are thinking you’re above it. Like you see what I’m getting at and you think you can escape the positive bias. I assure you that you can’t escape it, likely you’re only able to escape it because you’re not black. If you were black there’s no way what I said is acceptable.
But I’m Asian. How come I can accept the fact that I’m shorter and weaker than black people? Maybe it’s because height is too obvious of a metric that we can’t escape it and intelligence isn’t as obvious in the sense that I can’t just look at someone and know how smart he is.
But let’s avoid the off topic tangent here about racial intelligence and get back to my point. I know this post will be attacked but this was not my intention. I need to trigger a visceral reaction in order for people to realize how powerful positive cognitive bias is. That’s my point. It is frighteningly powerful and it’s also frighteningly evident but mass delusion causes us to be blind to it. Seriously don’t start a debate on racial intelligence. Stick to the point: positive cognitive bias.
Humans as a species that viscerally and violently bias in the cognitively positive direction.
Parent poster could not be more wrong. We are delusional and we lie to ourselves to shield ourselves from the horrors of the real world. It is so powerful that we will resort to attacks and even violence to maintain our cognitively positive delusions.
My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.
It just seems like a silly study.
That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.
Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.
What personally has me worried is the derivative and 2nd derivative. How much is my current comfort sustained purely because of the momentum of systems made possible less than a lifetime ago (post WW2 reconstruction). So ironically your comment induces more stress in me. The idea that just as recently as the 20th century, times that my grandparents were conscious for, that many people lived through that much suffering. To me it seems incredibly easy to end up right back there.
Go outside and interact with people.
There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.
Teach yourself how to choose
It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).
That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.
All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.
I am curious about whether your model of how the current Administration in the U.S. has benefited various countries so strikingly includes the United States itself.
Bodies do not "benefit" from fever. A fever is a signal that pathogens have recently entered the body, and the body is desperately at work trying to kick them out again. If it fails, you die. The fever is a direct mirror of the inflammation caused by that fight.
So, yes, the current administration certainly caused a fever. And the only thing the US benefits from are the antibodies fighting that pathogen.
I've moved, in 6 month, from a pretty pro-OTAN, "liberal" point of view toward an anti-OTAN, anti-Atlantist position, and i think i'm right. I now would even vote for an anti-atlantist right wing party rather than for the left of center, pro-US party i've voted for before (well, since an anti-Atlantist left wing party exist, and despite its radicality, i will probably vote for them, but i'm now a single-issue voter, and my issue is how omnipresent the US is in our culture).
DJT made me realized i'm part of the problem, and now i can take steps to fix it.
One, figure out why you're "anti-Atlantist", and anti-defense pact. Two, think about how radicality created the US problems, and why you think radicalism is the answer in your case.
Yes, Europe needs to change its stance, but electing a "burn-it-to-the-ground" faction is not actually going to do this in a productive way.
As for the "omnipresence" of the US, that is and has always been a lot of individual choices more than a political choice. By all means, fixate less on the US yourself, but I promise you that trying to force that on others by electing a more authoritarian party will backfire spectacularly.
Soft power isn't countered by hard power. The two working counters are increased soft power on your own (i.e. a culture that's more attractive than US culture), or said soft-power self-reducing. You can trust DJT to achieve the latter.
You don't have to "cut ties". You have to learn to think on your own.
But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.
edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse
So, yeah, I'd rather carry on as we are than go back and live through it all over again.
Considering the United States only for a moment; the distribution of national income has not been so unequal since the robber baron days. At the same time the visibility of wealth to make upward comparisons has never been greater due to complete permeation of media, both traditional and social. If my share of income in real dollars was slipping as is the case for many, while watching the .1% pocket it, I’d be pretty doggone dysphoric.
Can someone who works in this field explain to me how this study is anything other than evidence of one exam being a proxy for another?
The "Repetitive Negative Thinking" is then just, like, a marketing term for their questionnaire?
I don't see the questionnaire itself in the study (maybe I'm missing it?). Without understanding what questions were answered in a questionnaire, how am I supposed to take anything away from this study?
Can't they have a go-to list of positive things to think about when they notice they are thinking negative thoughts?
I have a go to list of positive things to think about.
I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.
It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).
The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.
It's very hard to control, over the years I've worked on reigning in my negative thinking, but every once in a while I still end up in a spiral of increasingly negative thoughts that don't just go away by focusing on positive things.
Also: Correlation is not causation; we don't know that avoiding these RNTs changes anything in the brain chemistry.
The parent comment comes off as flippant, but I am going to assume it's not intended that way.
Learning to think more positively takes an incredible amount of effort. An effort which seemingly never goes away. It just never gets easier. It's like my brain is simply wired to assume the worst, worry and of course just constantly make suicide seem like some kind of great way out. So much so, that when I was younger, I had assumed everyone just walked around constantly wondering whether it'd be easier to just die.
To this day, that's where my brain goes first. Decades of nearly daily thoughts of ending it. BUT and this is the crucial part, to me that was just always part of the noise. It's there, but it's not forcing my hand. I can both live and also constantly think that I don't particularly enjoy just existing for existence's sake and therefore death sort of seems like a viable alternative. I don't act upon it, because I'm too curious to see what's next, for the time being.
Anyway, the techniques that people are often taught in therapy sound simple and obvious, but they are harder to do than one might assume. Especially for people deep in depression.
Gratitude journaling is one of those things. It is quite boring and tedious to write down what one is grateful for in life. To write down every single good thing that happened in a day, no matter how small.
BUT, it sort of forces you onto a track of positive thought. It literally blocks / occupies thought, because it takes effort to do and focuses the mind on the positive, even if for a short period of time.
Similarly, as stupid as it sounds, sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile. There is some feedback loop between pretending to be happy and then sort of feeling a bit happier all of a sudden. Doesn't always work, won't work for everyone and deep clinical depressions are a whole different ballgame.
Exercise is a pretty big one for me as well. As much as I hate it, I always feel better afterwards.
Again, the sum of various small techniques can eventually make a bit of a difference.
I've come to terms with the fact that depression is hard-wired into my brain structure and it's not going anywhere. But, I have also made a ton of new pathways that allow me to more quickly switch into more positive and grateful modes of thinking. And this, in some ways, is like a list of positive things to think, like the parent comment alluded to.
Though without all of the above, I'd also take offense at the implication that depressed people can somehow choose to be depressed and need to just stop being depressed. That notion is ridiculous and has prevailed for (what feels like) centuries of ignorance of mental conditions.