I wrote this for the Positive Vector website awhile back and lots of people have found it valuable, so I want to share it with the Less Wrong community as well. I think this applies to most people - meta suffering thing is something I see everywhere, even though it is most prominent with people who have depression. This is based on my experience with working with depressed people and with studying Buddhism, especially Big Mind. Enjoy!
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The roots of suffering are often deep. But not all of the suffering happens at the root. A lot of the suffering that people experience is “meta” suffering. Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering. You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end. That you will feel this way forever. This fear of the suffering persisting can cause you much more suffering than whatever started your suffering. And it can last much longer. At some point days later, you might think to yourself about how terrible that initial suffering was, and feel fear and suffering about the possibility of it coming back.
Many people suffer as much or more from meta-suffering than suffering that comes from physical or situational sources!
The good news is that meta suffering is much easier to fix than deeper forms of suffering.
One thing you can do is to collect data* in order to develop an accurate model of how often you actually feel bad. Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are. At least half of the people who have suffered from major depression who have done this and spoken with me about it have been surprised to find that they often feel better than their self-perception when they assess their mood at random points throughout the day.
Regardless of what your default mood state or range is, once you know what it is, you are likely to feel less fear. You can look at what your mood historically does over time, and feel more confidence that this is what it will do in the future. When you are in the state of despair and wondering if it will last forever, odds are that it won’t.
Another extremely powerful technique for dealing with meta-suffering is accepting that you are suffering. The meta suffering is suffering because you really want to change your state and are not successful. If you can just be with the state and not making yourself bad or wrong for being in that state, then all you have to deal with is the base state of suffering, which will be less intense and last less long than if you tack on that extra meta layer.
The ironic thing is that just by thinking that thought, if you are prone to depression, you will probably notice yourself meta suffering and then feel guilt or shame about it. If this happens, my advice is to take it to the next level – feel compassion and acceptance for your meta-meta-suffering.
As you make this a practice, and feel acceptance and compassion for your suffering, you will feel more freedom from the meta level, and have more resources to work with the underlying suffering or depression.
Another common way in which meta suffering sabotages people with depression is for them to feel depression as soon as they start feeling good. The story that some people have is that it is futile to think that they might feel so good in the future, and it is better not to get their hopes up and have them crushed. I encourage the person with this meta suffering story to assure the meta suffering part that they do not have obligation to feel good in the future. Feeling good in the present is of value, for however long it lasts, and that is worth appreciating and a good thing.
Desiring more pleasant states is great. Working to create those states is fabulous.
Feeling guilt, shame, depression, or other suffering because of not liking your current state or projected future state does not contribute to your feeling better, and is something that is pretty purely good to release.
Alternate hypothesis: The vividness of my emotions is not under my direct control, and it is least under my direct control while I am already experiencing vivid emotions.
Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I have spent approximately 30 years training myself to 'gain control' of my emotional responses, especially fear, anger, and shame. Several times, when I have noticed that 'gaining control' was simply a 'bottling up' process that led to an exacerbating explosion later, I have torn down the regulating mechanisms and attempted to build new, better ones.
Model-based evidence for alternative hypothesis: In the human brain, the amygdala has much shorter and stronger neural pathways to the thalamus and cerebellum than the neocortex. In fact, many of the neocortex's pathways must pass through the limbic system to reach the somatic control areas.
Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Gravity, like neurochemistry, is a force that we cannot escape. On earth, a bird may "hack" gravity to convert its gravitational potential into forward momentum rather than downward momentum by spreading its wings in the correct way, but only if it also possesses the correct wing structure. Birds with sufficiently damaged wings cannot fly. Likewise, humans with sufficiently damaged limbic systems or cingulate cortices cannot self-regulate; otherwise, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder would simply be a matter of willpower, not medication.
Conjecture: When most people talk about "controlling their emotions", they are constructing a narrative to explain the fact that their emotions happened to subside long enough for them to experience something that feels from the inside like making a decision to calm down.
Alternative hypothesis: I care enough about the people around me to not inconvenience them with a body and a lot of emotional fallout. I care about the people around me enough to not inconvenience them with rabidly non-functional behavior. I continue to look for a solution so long as I believe that I can contain the rabidly non-functional behavior enough that it does not outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with a body and a lot of emotional fallout.
Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I continually seek out opportunities to push people away, explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will have to deal with my crazy, and explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will be harmed if I am unceremoniously removed from the tapestry of their lives. I will strategically wield rabidly non-functional behavior against people who I feel I am becoming to attached to, explicitly and consciously so that they will decide that they are no longer emotionally entwined with my well-being, and will feel justified and satisfied with their own decision to remove me from their lives.
Model evidence for alternative hypothesis: My personal narrative, when confronted with setbacks, consistently contains ideation that I am the only being who is ultimately responsible for my situation (self-oriented blame for negative events), that the past is the only viable source of information with which to predict the future (a preference for permanency over transience), and that most failure modes tend to be interrelated interactions between multiple systems (a belief in pervasive processes rather than isolated processes). This is called a 'pessimistic explanatory style' (or more pessimistically, 'depressive realism'), and tends to indicate depression and very poor self-esteem.
Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Human behavior and motivation tends to follow something like a bell curve (or at least a curve with a clump in the middle and long tails on either side) across most axes. Just as there are sociopaths, who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing others, there are likely to be people who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing themselves. This can be due to organic disorder (either via brain damage or genetic abnormality), or this can be induced as a pervasive kind of "learned helplessness", if started early enough (the old "baby elephant tied to a tree" story).
Conjecture: Most people take their self-interest as a given; if they need help with self-interest due to depression or learned helplessness, they simply need to build on the basic survival drives that already exist. For some people, those survival drives have been so thoroughly corrupted that they are useless - or worse, dangerous to tap into. (Most situations where I have had people encourage me to think selfishly have ended in rather terrifying displays of sadistic cruelty on my part, because that's simply the only model of 'selfishness' that my brain can really wrap its head around.)
Side note: These are not attempts to refute you. These are acknowledgments of my own internal refutations, which I must overcome before I accept the potential wisdom of what you are saying, and which I myself do not possess the strength-of-will to disable so that I can give your hypotheses a fair shake.
Would it be useful to find social circumstances where a terrifying display of sadistic cruelty is the appropriate response, appreciated as an art form by observers and savored by the nominal victim?