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I've found a CBT* technique useful for overcoming that sort of anxiety (it's called catastrophising). I write down the situation and my prediction in a spreadsheet. An example would be: Situation - at work, I emailed [girl]; she hasn't emailed back yet. Prediction - She is going to break up with me.
Then when you receive an email back, you write down the outcome in a third column, e.g. received email back - we are meeting up tonight.
Looking back over the spreadsheet, you can see how accurate your predictions have been. I expect they tend to be too negative.
*CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a strong evidence base.
ETA: I hope that explanation is clear - I'm in a bit of a rush right now! I really wanted to explain it though, as it's had an extremely positive impact on my anxiety levels.
For similar advice, I highly recommend the Feeling Good Handbook for both anxiety and depression.
It has lots of written exercises primarily aimed at contradicting irrational thoughts.
I''v had success with Introducing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: A Practical Guide
Thanks for this advice.
One reason I've been reluctant in the past to try CBT is that it seems to be predicated on an assumption that I find implausible. The assumption is that, if you actually conform your beliefs to the available evidence, you will no longer feel depressed, or as depressed as you are currently feeling. For example, CBT applied to body dysmorphic disorder proceeds by challenging the beliefs that patients have about their own attractiveness. But what if you are, as you believe, truly unattractive (as most men seem to be)? And what if lack of physical attractiveness has a major impact on most aspects of your life (as seems to be the case for both men and women)? As far as I can see, in these cases CBT would be ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst, since the beliefs underlying your negative feelings would in fact be true, and supported by the available evidence.
Assuming both of those are true, CBT isn't be about denying that. The next step would be to ask "why is that bad?" and "exactly how bad is it?" Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you'll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, "if I'm physically unattractive I'll never find romantic love" may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
The act of writing it down and following a structured approach is also really important. Even if you know a thought is irrational, it helps to write down all of the reasons it's irrational. I don't know why, but the act of writing it down seems to be important even for things you already "know" in order to believe them on a gut level and actually start to feel better.
All of this is described in the Feeling Good Handbook, which you should be able to find a free pdf of if you can't afford it.
I don't want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse? People who are deceived about themselves typically suffer from illusory superiority, overestimating their positive qualities. So why think that a therapy that proceeds by correcting these false perceptions will make people feel better about themselves?
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
Thanks, I have a pdf of that book, which I intend to read partly on the basis of your recommendation (even though I don't suffer from depression).
I think it's not that an honest answer will make you feel better. It's that a detailed honest answer is more likely to help you find tools for improving your situation, while a generic honest answer will make you feel bad and very little else. It's really just general steps for solving any problem.
Much harder doesn't mean impossible! How much harder is it? How many people that look [a certain way] have partners and how many don't? Where did the ones that do have partners find their partner? Maybe you could look there. What other personality traits did they develop that helped them succeed at dating while looking [that way]? Maybe you could work on those!
This statement really requires data. Unattractive to whom? Probably not to them.
It's not an assumption; four weeks of bibliotherapy in the form of reading Feeling Good and doing the exercises has been shown in experiments to be superior to a placebo book for treating depression (75% of patients no longer qualified for DSM criteria of major depressive disorder afterwards), and the improvements were sustained at 3-month and 3-year followup.
Of course, you could then argue that the book doesn't actually make you evaluate your situation honestly and is just mindless positive thinking, but I don't think that'd be a fair assessment of the book.
Sure, but my example was "if I'm physically unattractive I'll never find romantic love" not " "if I'm physically unattractive I'll have a much harder time finding romantic love."
Yes, typically. Not always.
If you're suffering from illusory superiority, are you likely to be pursuing CBT to counter depression?
Almost everyone suffers from illusory superiority. If CBT doesn't work for people in this category, that is in itself a strong argument against CBT.
It seems like you are saying that depressed people suffer from illusory superiority - overoptimism - in respect to the foci of their depression.
This doesn't seem right.
Sometimes depressed people think they're too smart for everything and everyone and that's why they're depressed. And because they're too smart to ever be happy, then there's nothing out there that can help them. Brains get pretty warped sometimes. =[
But wouldn't bursting their bubble on this matter then help them in the medium and long runs?
Yes, definitely! But if they're smart, then they're really good at arguing, which means they're really good at explaining why you're wrong. So it's really really hard. =[
If I want to believe that I'm beautiful when I'm not beautiful, then I won't put myself in situation that might challenge my belief about my own beauty. This creates psychological stress.
People don't suffer because they have nothing but they suffer because they want something that they don't get.
This review of the Feeling Good Handbook, which I just found, makes essentially the same point:
That's not quite how it works. Sometimes rational people get depressed and they can tell that their thinking is distorted and un-distorting it doesn't make them feel better. They just feel bad. Meanwhile, some depressed people contribute to their depression through cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing that PECOS-9 pointed out, and CBT can help (though not necessarily cure) that subset of people.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can't completely fix a problem, then once you've done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn't feel bad anymore.
This is true, but not always helpful. People aren't necessarily at liberty to decide whether to feel bad or not.
Pain is extremely valuable as a motivator to address problems with our bodies, but when we're unable to address those problems, we can't simply decide to stop feeling pain, no matter how unhelpful the pain might be.
I should have phrased that differently. What I want to say is: once you've done everything you can about a problem, and you still feel bad, then feeling bad becomes your new problem. It becomes the new thing to work on! Which is how depression manifests itself sometimes. Which is why you should seek treatment for depression!
I was addressing the review's claim because it sounds like it's saying that feeling bad about something is a rational response to reality for some people. For some people, the only response to reality is to be depressed.
Does that address your comment?
Yes, but then, the acknowledgment that feeling bad despite it not being useful is your problem doesn't always make the problem easy to solve.
Can you decide to fall asleep? I can't. I can't do it consioucsly but I still fall asleep every night. I just lie in bed and sooner or later my brain decides to switch to sleeping mode.
Switching pain off is similar. Human's are quite capable of switching it off. At the same time few people can just do it because they want the pain to stop. Hypnosis allow people to switch off pain signals from their body completely.
If a human mind understands on a deep level that feeling the pain has no use, than it stops.
I've heard claims to this effect, but the results of the research I've found along those lines are rather less impressive. Bad Science has a short section on it, the gist of which is that most of the claims which are bandied about with respect to hypnotism are exaggerations of the findings of actual research, in which people have demonstrated an ability to tolerate levels of pain which we normally avoid subjecting people to in ordinary medical procedures, but which are not, in fact, greater than people have already been found able to tolerate without hypnotism.
Some people are better at dealing with pain than others, and it's an ability that can be improved with practice, but if it were possible for humans in general to block out the experience of pain entirely through hypnotism, the military would probably be utilizing that in the training of commandos to resist torture. The influence of the First Earth Battalion is such that this is the sort of prospect the military is very receptive to.
I'm not claiming that formal hypnosis is the only way that people can switch off pain perception. People can tolerate a lot if they have no other choice.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-560534/The-hypnotist-snubbed-anaesthetic-sent-trance-painful-bone-cutting-surgery.html would be an example of a hypnotherapist who went for a 83 minute operation without anesthetic and said that he felt no pain as the doctors chiselled out a walnut- sized chunk of bone from his wrist.
I grant that the guy isn't an average patient but had years of training in going into trance. The example still shows that the human mind is in principle capable of disassocing such pains.
I think you have a misconception about how torture works. It's not about inflicting a maximum of pain in the shortest amount of time.
A soldier that went through good military training shouldn't break after 5 minutes of maximum pain. The soldier is taught to make up plausible lies to his torturers.
The US used waterboarding to torture. Waterboarding has the advantage of not only inflicting pain but also triggering a feeling of being drowed. Even if the victim would be able to deal with the pain they still feel the reflex of wanting to avoid drowning.
There are many human drives besides the desire to avoid pain that a torturer can use to coerce his victim. Teaching soldiers to buy time by telling the tortures lies seems to be the best strategy for the military.
There nothing inherently New Agey about hypnosis. Mid 20st-century The US made hypnosis for medicial purposes by people without a medical degree illegal. Midwives were allowed to give their patients pain killers but weren't allowed to use hypnosis to reduce pain. Hypnosis would have a different standing today when it wouldn't have been effectively prosecuted.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid, I'd take its reports with a hearty dose of salt.
The military does have courses in enduring torture, beyond simply making up plausible lies, as part of commando training, but it doesn't entail hypnosis.
Not everything that spun out of the New Earth Battalion's influences is "inherently new-agey." Some of it is grounded thoroughly in hard science, and works quite well for its intended purposes. The influence of the New Earth Battalion has brought about a lot of investigation into outside-the-box, non-mainstream methods and technology for warfare, including but not limited to a lot of stuff that isn't well supported by evidence.
This seems to be predicated on the assumption that none of the things that cause you distress will be things that are actually just as bad as you think they are.
A person might only value attractiveness instrumentally as a means of attaining love, and over-weight its instrumental value for such, but what about a person who believes that they'll never be able to attain some major life goal due to reasons that actually preclude attainment of that life goal?
Then they'd probably find a different irrational thought somewhere, such as "Nothing else is worth anything if I don't achieve this goal."
Why is that?
CBT may work better than placebo (although the state of the research on this is controversial, see section four here,) but that doesn't mean that people suffering distress from some life circumstance always, or even usually, are evaluating those circumstances irrationally. Placebo therapy is pretty effective, a great deal of the effectiveness of CBT is likely due to the same qualities which make placebo therapy useful.
Having engaged in CBT, I felt that it was a worthwhile experience, but the benefits in my case had far more to do with being able to discuss the matters I was concerned with openly and in depth with another person, because I'm better at resolving problems when I feel accountable to someone other than only myself, rather than addressing particular irrationalities in my outlook (to the extent that my tendency to be less able to resolve problems without being accountable to other people is an irrationality, it's not one that CBT has been able to address.)
Yes. Face the loss. What is the cost? We worry that if X, then Y, and fret all day over the uncertainty of X, instead of facing the loss of Y as a done deal, and knowing that we'll survive and life won't be so horrible.
CBT is good for the times when our negative beliefs aren't supported by the available evidence.
E.g. yesterday my boss gave me some negative feedback. She also told me she thought I was an overall good worker, and that if I weren't she would have fired me already. I selectively paid more attention to the negative feedback, so my internal reaction was "Aaagh she thinks I'm a bad worker" even though she specifically said the opposite.
So it took conscious effort on my part to maintain a realistic view: "She thinks there are problems, but we talked about how I'm going to change, and I'm overall a good worker." CBT training is helpful to me in staying realistic.
I guess you're thinking of “I am ugly, therefore I'll weep”, but another possibility is “I am ugly, therefore I'll get a cool haircut, buy nice clothes, start working out, etc., and hopefully no longer be ugly”. One of them is actually useful.
A recent study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. On the plausible assumption that psychoanalysis doesn't work (better than a placebo), it follows that CBT doesn't work either.
For discussion, see this post by Scott Alexander (Yvain).
Please edit the above to read "by Scott Alexander" - the blog doesn't carry his name for patient privacy reasons.
Sorry about that. I have edited the comment.
Also, from Scott's post:
Do you still believe that "CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a strong evidence base"?
I'm less confident of that now, but it's still a great deal better than nothing (and I think it's probably better than psychoanalysis at teaching coping skills for this sort of anxiety).
I also think that the technique I suggested can improve the accuracy of your predictions, which is a good thing independently of whether it improves anxiety or not.
Thanks! I knew "CBT" would be the answer but I needed a zoom in on a particular technique. I'll try the action / expectation / outcome spreadsheet.
You probably already know this, but if your problems are big, you should try a therapist instead of self-help based on an advice from internet. (Although the advice given on this part of internet is usually better than average.)
Doing something is better than doing nothing. Unless you use it as an excuse for not doing more. (As in: "Nothing can fix my problems. What, CBT? No thanks, I tried one exercise based on an advice from internet, and it did not fix my problem. What, visiting a CBT therapist? I am telling you, I already tried an advice from internet, and it did not work.")
This reminds me that the first time I saw the Yes Minister quote “we must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do this” (out of context, in a signature on Usenet) I thought it was supposed to be surreal humour like “a hamburger is better than nothing; nothing is better than eternal happiness; therefore, a hamburger is better than eternal happiness”. I didn't notice that that quote had a non-patently-inane reading until years later.
I'm considering therapy. My pattern up to now has been more like read some advice, think "oh that would never work", continue to have problem, mope and complain. Baby steps.
If you try advice that was independently rated as good, and it doesn't have any beneficial effects, do a full write-up and I'll give you fifty USD.
I agree that a therapist is better. I actually got the technique I discuss above from a therapist, rather than a book or internet site, but therapy is expensive, and doing exercises by oneself is better than nothing.