A replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks

I cannot yet speak to the efficacy of ACT, but because I had a similar relationship with my thoughts and emotions my therapist recommended a few books to me and I'm still working my way through The Happiness Trap.

Humans aren't really equipped to deal with those lies lodged in their hearts. God, however, can. He can replace those lies with Truth (with a capital T because a Supreme creative God is only found in an absolute reality).

I'm an ideologue and I'll admit it, but my God has brought me an incredible amount of peace even in the face of a seemingly fracturing world.

I can expand here or via email, if you'd like.

I am not joking.

I am on cold #3 in 3 weeks, each one introduced by our youngest and ripped through each family member one by one. Life is misery for the next month or so.

The age from 0-4 for me has been nothing like what you describe.

The first year is nothing but chronic sleep deprivation and recovery from it.

The next three years they are extremely dependent. Yeah they sleep for 10-12 hours, but you’re drained by then especially if you’re working a job on top of it. You have the time to do things but not the energy. Even when they sleep you’re still trapped at home because you legally (and ethically) can’t leave the house with them alone. If you’re lucky enough to have the financial stability to afford a nanny/babysitter for date nights you have to be strategic, is that random movie really worth blowing your one night out on?

Every moment that isn’t necessary for work or parenthood has to be strategically spent because moments of both high energy and free time are rare.

The workload is double (maybe more) for mom given the 9months of carrying the child, having a tiny person relying on them for food supply non-stop, and the raging hormones from all that.

This 4 year window resets every time you have a kid.

I’m guessing you’re not a parent, but maybe you have had an entirely different experience than me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

Oh yeah? People writing things like this tend to forget that there's a 1-2 year gap between "sleep a lot" and "go to daycare". In that period, a kid may sleep a total of 8-10 hours each day, which in practice means parents have to trade sleep against personal or couple time.

Small kids are like running the same movie scene, with the same pun, on a loop:

- Parents: It can't possibly get any worse.

- Narrator: It did.

What's the loop stop condition? I don't know. I'll tell you when I get there.

There is a ton of that period is which is amazing and profound. I think in general parenting get a bad rap. But I literally LOL'd at the GP's comment because it was so relatable. Also because I'm sleep deprived after being up several nights in a row helping one of my kids deal with a medication change that has messed with his sleep.

I think her take on life and suffering was similar to others that have extreme hardship. Like this quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about his time in the Gulag

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.

In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.

In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor.

In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. . . .

That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me:

“Bless you, prison!”

I . . . have served enough time there.

I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Volume 2, pp. 615-617.

Her approach may have been laudable in the 19th century. It was absolutely unacceptable in the late 20th century.

The only reason people accepted it was because it was happening in a poor country. If she had used the same approach in a North American or European country she would almost certainly have been put behind bars.

Edit: If you read the Wikipedia article about the response to criticisms of her, the major defense of her is that she never intended to create a place with clinical facilities, but instead a place where people could die peacefully.

If her institution was accurately promoted as such, I doubt it would receive the millions in funding it did, and even if it did, then the people who sent the funding should be shamed for not sending it to actual hospitals in the areas which actually saved lives. Further, that’s not what the people who went there thought. They didn’t go there thinking they were being given a “kinder” death. They went there thinking they would be treated well.

So, relax and enjoy the quiet. They even likely paid you a small sum to do that!

> Introduction (p2,3):

The participants were "19 large and varied cohorts, totaling 116 healthy and depressed adolescents recruited in person, 1,913 adults recruited online from across the United States, and 26,896 participants performing a gambling task in a mobile app."

> An important but implicit notion amongst behavioural and affective scientists is that each participant has a baseline mood or affective state that will remain constant during an experiment or only vary with emotionally salient events. Mood is modelled as a discounted sum of rewards and punishments, but many models hold that the time scale over which these events unfold is irrelevant and the passage of time itself has no effect on mood. > This assumption of a constant affective background has profound methodological implications for psychological experiments. First, consider a “resting state” functional brain scan in which a participant is asked to stare at a fixation cross. Based on the constant affective background assumption, comparisons of resting-state neuroimaging data between (for example) depressed and non-depressed participants are thought to reveal differences in their task-general traits, rather than their response to experimentally imposed rest periods.

> Second, consider an event-related design, such as a gambling or face recognition task, during which participants experience stimuli (wins or losses) that elicit emotional reactions. When analysing these data, responses to task stimuli are thought to occur on top of (and are often contrasted to) the affective baseline, which is presumed to be time-invariant.

> ...

> We find that participants’ mood worsened considerably during rest periods and simple tasks, an effect we call “Mood Drift Over Time” (“mood drift” for short). This downward mood drift was replicated in 19 large and varied cohorts, totaling 116 healthy and depressed adolescents recruited in person, 1,913 adults recruited online from across the United States, and 26,896 participants performing a gambling task in a mobile app. It was not observed when participants freely chose their own activities. We show that mood drift is related to, but not a trivial extension of, the existing constructs of boredom and mind-wandering. We show that mood drift slopes are positively correlated with reward sensitivity and that this relationship is moderated by overall life happiness. These findings may have profound implications for experimental design and interpretation in affective science ..."

Can't say I'm that interested in it all.