Alicorn

This is a supplement to the luminosity sequence. In this comment, I mentioned that I have raised my happiness set point (among other things), and this declaration was met with some interest. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that's not your thing. In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail: 1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous: I had a history of suicidal ideation. This hadn't resulted in actual attempts at killing myself, largely because I attached hopes for improvement to concrete external milestones (various academic progressions) and therefore imagined myself a magical healing when I got the next diploma (the next one, the next one.) Once I noticed I was doing that, it was unsustainable. If I wanted to live, I had to find a safe emotional place on which to stand. It had to be my top priority. This required several sub-projects: * I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was appropriate or accurate to feel bad most of the time. I endorse my ability to react emotionally to my environment; but this should be acute, not chronic. Reacting emotionally is about feeling worse when things get worse, not feeling bad when things are bad for months or years on end. (Especially not when feeling bad reduces the ability to make things less bad.) Further, having a lower set point did not affect my emotional range except to shrink it; it reduced the possible impact of real grief, and wasn't compatible with the "react emotionally" plan. The low set point also compromised my ability to react emotionally to