Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com
bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com
The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.
If you're interested in this approach, I'd recommend the works of David Burns, for example his book "Feeling Great" or the Feeling Good Podcast.
Wouldn‘t it be both? While the repeated negative thoughts are the cause, they‘re also the symptom how it show up and the reason why people seek out a diagnosis
I think if your depression is very deeply buried, it surely isn't enough to read it, but still it can open up quit some insights regarding the connection of what you think and how you feel. It makes it visible.
There can also be other causes for depression is course.
While studying and testing the exercises described in the book I discovered one other thing I'd like to share: to me it seems, to come out of a reappearing mental dip, you need to be very consistent in your efforts (mental / physical exercises and other habits you try to establish or change, to feel better). Anyone else?
Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-good/202503/... explicitly discusses the arrow of causality here
> and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.
"Things are only as bad as we perceive them to be" leading up to "have you tried reframing that and finding something positive in it", and "have you tried not thinking about that".
If I need dissociation and self-delusion, there are substances that are a far more impactful option.
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.
When really it's "We've found an interesting association, and we are going to explore it more to see if there's an causation that we can influence"
It's really clickbait territory sometimes (IMO)
We used to think stress caused ulcers, based on a correlation. We now know the actual cause is a bacterium.
Having things that are wrong, but we don't know any better, or having things that are right, but we don't have the skills to prove it?
We often laugh how people in times before thought "crazy" things about health maintenance, but we're no better.
It really should be a shared responsibility to report and understand the meaning of statistically significant correlation. Unfortunately, few journalists seem to have much interest in understanding it. And given that their readership likely has about average (i.e poor) numeracy and iffy understanding of probability, it’s a bad combination. The widespread misunderstanding about the iterative way that science converges on truth also contributes to this problem.
That said, I would rather know about interesting findings such as this if for no other reason than to start digging for the original paper.
What helped the most wasn’t medicine. It was little things, like going for walks together or having simple conversations. Just giving the brain something new to pay attention to seemed to make a real difference.
After years of trying to push that person towards trying out new things and enriching their life, I kind of gave up. You simply cannot convince someone about a medicine if they don't feel there is a problem. Still it's hard to see believing the person could be enjoying life more, especially during their retirement.
This can be very sad. The person you love just fades away.
Just yesterday I randomly came across a song we often heard in our shared apartment during University, and immediately I had 10 different memories from that time swirling around in my head.
But now this! He has less time than I thought. I will have to forward it to him, and cross my fingers that he doesn't spiral. Thoughts and prayers, man. Before you suggest it, I can't tell him to just "think positive". He would physically explode. Implode? Something. Matter, antimatter.
To be honest, I don't think that line ever helped someone who sees himself in the middle of deep shit. There is nothing positive about being in shit. The only thing that can help people stuck in such a mindset is somehow change their perspective. And yes, maybe that study will help in a way.
Much more comfortable to think; (everything sucks, those in power are out to get me) than (wow I really had a high hope for what my life would be, and this sure isn't it).
This seems wrong. If "β" is the estimate here (not sure), it should be inside the confidence interval, but is way outside...
I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far: https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw
Thank you for the set up.
And things that add to entropy are favored by nature, undoing human labor & endeavor. Related?
Technological comfort just disguises it all.
I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?
The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?
Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.
I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.
That's an interesting formulation. I have someone in my family who could be described by these words.
Is this your own description or does this come from somewhere?
Frankly, abuse and childhood trauma has always been a staple of human history. Even in the Bible, so at least a few thousand years ago, physical punishment against children is described. Sexual abuse was rampant as well, the Quran documents marriages at age 9. Wars and all the horrors that came with them were all too common - Europe only got actually peaceful after WW2.
Just ask in your own family if you still got really really old people left alive... they will all report from some uncle, aunt or godknowswhat that just went loony. Or tell horror stories about rape, beatings, bullying...
Nothing is new, the only thing that is new is that abuse gets called out and, at least in some cases, perps get punished.
Less fighting, more opportunity, more food, more clean water, less disease than ever.
What we do have now is 24 hour news and social media screaming how bad it is so we watch ads.
I also observed things only getting worse in my life. So I really don't buy this narrative that things keep getting better. IMO, the only people who think things got better are billionaires and multi-millionaires; of course it got better for them but it didn't get better for the average-luck person. For the average ambitious person who worked hard to improve their situation, things got MUCH worse; there are all these artificial barriers preventing them from succeeding, depriving them of opportunities and then constant gaslighting to blame them for systemic issues (including their own failure to thrive). Low birth rates, high rates of depression, high rates of homelessness, high suicide rates speak for themselves.
The fact that it all gets covered up by social media echo chambers to the extent that some people think life got better, makes it MUCH, MUCH worse, not better. People just don't seem to notice the tent cities, the increased immigration (due to worsening conditions in poor countries), the political division (again, driven by poverty).
Of course maybe your grandma like my grandma ignored all the cases of people that had abjectly terrible lives back then because that wouldnt fit her world view of 'make the present the past again'. Birthrates dropped in the US long before we were born. Homelessness was very high in the US before the postwar 'irregularity'.
All those poor countries are still richer than ever historically, it's just that first world nations are that much better.
Just stop the billionaires from sucking up everything and it's not really too bad at all.
Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.
I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers
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.
The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
Realistically Both are factors.
>The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.
Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.
Additionally the logic is inescapable. If genetics is what causes something like down syndrome then of course it can cause the opposite of down syndrome.
>So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.
Either way can you stick to the main topic. Tired of this off tangent bs. The intelligence thing was just an example.
You cannot. And the smoking gun is, again, that we have seen massive rises in intelligence scores within racial subgroups over time correlating with environmental changes that are much larger than current spreads and still unevenly distributed.
Obviously a starving, stressed out person is going to have a much lower IQ score then someone who is happy and well fed. You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.
This is what I'm talking about. The mass delusion. The positive cognitive bias. You grasp for evidence that supports the conclusion you want.
The claim is not that genetics has nothing to do with intelligence. The claim is that race is a material, important driver of intelligence. There is no rigorous evidence of this.
Please read what I wrote and respond to what I wrote and don’t make random assumptions.
I don’t give a shit if you believe yourself to be part of the (immaterially) superior race.
It's not about race, it's about facts. Like I said in another comment, Jewish people have the highest measurable average IQ, and they are "White".
I think you should walk away. You brought racism into the conversation while I'm just arguing facts. I never made a claim asians were "superior" and I'm NOT from an asian country with the highest IQ either.
If we see huge variation in intelligence scores intra group, that strongly suggests that there are social/cultural/environmental factors in play driving a large part of this.
It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.
>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.
I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.
>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.
There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.
Common sense says nothing about the weight of these factors nor does it say anything about “genetics” being archetypally delineated by race. Genetics for sure plays a role in intelligence.
You are appealing to non cognizance as a premise to support your biases. But that’s… dumb.
You are welcome to point to specific studies if you wish but the general consensus is that there is no statistical evidence of what you’re claiming to be obvious.
Most studies that attempt to normalize against socio cultural features recognize that it’s basically impossible to do. That’s why the best available premise is that since we broadly observe huge gains in population intelligence based on economic development within racial groups; it is most likely that economic and cultural differences occupy the lions share of any observable difference between racial groups currently as they’re all in different places.
Common sense says many things about genetics. In fact it’s the basis behind my entire premise which you didn’t even address. Genetics plays a role in the physicality and even temperament of a race (testosterone is measurably different across races). What black magic makes intelligence the only factor that is independent of race? Common sense says it’s a factor.
Common sense also says environment is the greater factor. If a person lacks practice or education vs. a person who practices math puzzles everyday. Obviously that is the bigger causal factor by common sense.
Both are factors by common sense. Environment is the bigger factor also by common sense but by that same reasoning genetics is not insignificant. The best way to put it is that environment influences IQ but genetics influences potential.
Why appeal to common sense? Because there’s lack of solid causal evidence. Evidence exists, but the replication crisis and the lack of causal experimentation makes all the tests not as solid as the correlative tests.
The stupidest thing here is that we are not in disagreement on what the evidence points too. It’s just I’m able to rely on induction and logic to predict conclusions where scientific evidence is lacking while you’re entire model of the world is essentially “if the science doesn’t exist then it must not be true“
If the science doesn’t exist, it means it’s unknown. I hope this was educational for you.
I’ll point to some resources when I have time. Im currently not able to cite them atm.
Does genetics influence intelligence? Yes. Does genetics influence race? Yes.
Does that mean that race is a _material_ driver of differences in intelligence? No. That just doesn’t follow at all. Every difference between groups is statistically significant at some obscene sample size but the claim in question here is about whether it is _material_ and important. That is not at all clear. Nor is intelligence the only thing that this applies to. There’s a basically infinite list of human traits, competencies, and capabilities for which race-affiliated genetic advantages alone is pointlessly small in terms of effect.
The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.
It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.
None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.
> The word I used is “significant”which I will specify here as a different mean value.
There are statistically significant differences between any two populations where randomness is included provided your sample size is big enough. Your thinking here is novice and misinformed. If an effect size is immaterial and unimportant then it definitionally does not matter. You win no points for saying HA! Technically there is an immaterial advantage for Asians! If it’s immaterial, it doesn’t matter.
> It applies because among top countries of different races with extremely high wealth, gdp and education standards there are clear differences in IQ. You can still attribute this to environment but it starts to lean towards genetics once you match wealthy countries.
Wealth is one of many things that matters. It’s not the only thing. As I have said before, culture is a huge one.
> None of this is solid but neither is your conclusion that genetics doesn’t influence racial intelligence in any significant way. If your conclusion is “we don’t know” then my counter is common sense and evidence suggests otherwise.
You need to learn how to interpret statistical effect sizes. The basic 101 conclusion of failure to reject null hypotheses is that you cannot conclude that population A is different from population B. But “different” doesn’t mean much. The important takeaway is much rather that there’s no evidence of a strong effect size showing that one race is materially intrinsically smarter than another. If there were a big gap, it would be visible in available statistics. It’s not, so we can largely conclude that there’s no material difference.
You’re talking a big talk about people being biased by trying to be equitable but ultimately you’re just saying “well I can’t provide it but my common sense biases say my race must be superior, even if it’s by a meaninglessly small margin”. Yeah, ok buddy. Take a lap.
And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
https://www.scribbr.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Normal-dis...
So yes you can very much find black people who are smarter than Asians and vice versa but the generality (aka the mean, aka the center of the bell curve) will be different for races.
>But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.
This is not proven to be true. The most likely explanation is that variation in a population can be explained by both environment and genetics.
People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it
In this case for example, it doesn’t really give a shit about your psychological well being or shaving years off your life because of some negative thought pattern
If being on your toes, anxious, paranoid, and always looking over your shoulder keeps you alive and making babies - then as far as the developer that nature is, it’s a feature not a bug
Common misunderstanding.
Evolution optimizes for system success. Not individual gene propagation. Genomes are not agents with individual goals.
Many species, but especially social animals, have numerous behaviors and traits designed to prompt communal success rather than individual survival and reproduction
Even saying it optimizes for system success is an oversimplification it just depends how far down the rabbit hole you want to go
My only intention was to communicate and stress that we aren’t “designed” in the way a lot of people think
But thanks for the clarification
Perhaps this translates into a tendency to dwell on the negatives of a situation rather than the potential benefits?
OTOH the human mind seems to fail in common ways when old age and dementia sets in, perhaps with no benefit, so this may just be one of those things. Old people tend to have bad joints. News at 11.
Just another fundamental asymmetry in existence.
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?
Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.
It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.
Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
[1] - https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2005...
I couldn't read the full text of the second, but likewise the conclusion does not imply causation.
I'm a parent, and have experienced significant 'psychological distress' as a result of having children. Every time I read a comment from someone advising people to have children for happiness reasons, it triggers me.
There's a practical issue with social science. Very near to 100% of researchers (from the US at least) share a common ideology, frequently to a fairly radical degree, and it regularly leaks into their research. You can even see this in the abstract of the paper. They show data indicating that parents have dramatically lower rates of mental illness than the general population and their conclusion? "Serious psychological distress is fairly prevalent among parenting adults." So for these sort of papers, I generally find their discussion and conclusions quite irrelevant, but the data is generally sound, so long as it's not overtly cherry picked.
I'd also add that the fact that positive psychological effects (in the second study) were not observed in childless couples seems to largely falsify the hypothesis that the psychological benefits of parenting were simply an observation of people with psychological issues being unable to have children in the first place.
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And yeah, having a child can be terrifying at times. My youngest recently went through roseola and we spent days in the hospital with him after his fever briefly spiked just under 107F/41.6C. That is sheer terror - holding your child who's running so hot that he's literally uncomfortable to hold against your body. Yet they have also changed my life, worldview, and overall psychological state in an unbelievably positive way on the whole, and I would (and do) wholeheartedly recommend them to any and every person who can provide a reasonably stable household with two loving parents.
Not really. What struck me as odd was someone citing papers as evidence for their opinion that having children increases your happiness, when the papers drew no such conclusion.
It's great that it has worked out that way for you. Sadly, I have a different experience, but life happens. If this makes any difference to you, I don't know, but let's move on.
I know you said you'd prefer to move on, but if you could share when/how things went south for you, that could be beneficial others to learn from, myself not the least.
You've added your own opinion on what the results might mean, and the message you're conveying is that the results support your opinion and that the actual researchers opinion is "extremely questionable".
I'll leave it to other readers to decide on how they interpret this. I know this is a bit of a silly side-track discussion, but as I say, I get triggered when I see people advocating having children as a means to happiness. I think this is careless, because children deserve to be brought into the world for the right reasons, and would be parents should be fully informed.
As you asked for my perspective, now having children, I can 100% say I was happier at every stage of my life until my first child was born. Some people just aren't compatible with the extreme stress and hardship of raising children, sad as this is for me to say. I wish I was you, and posting happily online that children have actually made my life so much better. Please don't mistake that as a lack of love for my children. I have learned what unconditional love means, how I would literally die for them, and I work daily to be the best dad I can be. I sometimes come home from work when they're in bed, asleep and curl up with them because I missed them so much during the day. But overall, it hasn't been good for my mental health and happiness. About 8 months in I had to go to therapy, because I didn't understand why I was not feeling what the online dads told me I should be feeling (eg. you). I ended up nearly suicidal and was medicated in the end. I have never come anywhere close to anything like that in my life before (and I'm in my 40s).
But the context here is important. Six years on and I also understand that our experience may not have been typical. We know that our eldest has some form of neurodivergence. Probably ADHD, since I was medicated for ADHD as a child. Possibly more on the ASD spectrum. He has extreme anger, extreme sensory issues, defiance, non-stop extreme meltdowns, and more. My wife and I are always at the end of our tether and our relationship is in the pits trying to figure out how we each deal with it. The youngest child is suffering because he needs attention, but our eldest is all consuming.
And we are not even having the worst time of it of the parents we know in our neighbourhood.
Please just remember, everyone is on their own journey, good or bad, but perhaps advocating children as a means to happiness is something to be more cautious about.
That said, amazing what it has done for your life, and best of luck with the journey!
We've definitely been fairly fortunate, or at least not unfortunate. Our youngest did go through a brief phase of colic and that was quite intense, moreso for the inability to help sooth him than for the effects itself. I can only imagine how it would have been if similar, let alone more intense, issues persisted. Thanks for sharing and I wish you and your family the best of luck going forward.
In particular I'm not especially religious, but also think that the contemporary efforts of people to deny their mortality (singularity, consciousness transfer, medical immortality, etc) are irrational coping mechanisms, religion for atheists, that I refuse to adopt. So that leaves one in a rather uncomfortable existential place.
But since having children, it feels like every day I can see more of myself in them, and it provides an immense amount of comfort, like I've never had before in my life. This is about as close as I think we'll ever get to realistically transferring our consciousnesses, and I'm more than okay with that, and now hope to have many many grandchildren before my final day.
This isn‘t really limited to weight lifting as to any kind of working out in general. Moving your body instead of only sitting at a desk constantly turns out to be healthy
Whoa. Far out.
This strongly implies that changing negative thinking behavior might reduce cognitive impairment. But the study has no way to establish a cause-effect relationship -- that would require an entirely different kind of study, one that studies the brain, not the mind. In other words, a neuroscience study, one probably not possible at present.
Like many psychology papers, this one implies a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence, but one that suggests a role for talk therapy.
It would be interesting to see a review of all modern psychological work, a hundred years from now, from the perspective of a neuroscience that doesn't yet exist, to see how often these articles turned out to be just-so stories with no connection to reality.
A similar finding is that kids who smoke marijuana are likely to experience serious mental health issues later on -- that's indisputable. The problem is the same as in this case -- people assume a cause-effect relationship that isn't supported by the evidence. Maybe kids predisposed to mental health issues are more likely to use marijuana -- that possibility can't be excluded because all the studies are retrospective.
Most people know I can be relied on to make this point, but until neuroscience matures, studies like this will suffer from a theory vacuum. One can only accomplish so much by studying symptoms, with no clue about root biological causes.
This is one of those topics where people will set an impossibly high standard for evidence and then use that to reject everything.
We do actually know that heavy marijuana use is associated with increases of mental health conditions. We know that discontinuing heavy use can result in improvements in depression scores over time (following the withdrawal periods which, yes, exists despite decades of people claiming it doesn’t). We know that the increased availability of high concentration THC products has made it worse.
Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.
This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist. I knew a guy who started believing that there isn’t any strong evidence that flossing or even twice-daily brushing were important because he didn’t think the science proved causation that flossing and brushing improved dental health. He believed it was just correlation and people who were healthier in general were also flossing and brushing, coincidentally. His breath was terrible and he later abandoned those ideas when the dental problems undeniably arrived.
Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on to justify a conclusion that would have required the impossible study. Saying that a study isn't practical can't be used to justify making a policy decision based on circumstantial evidence.
My use of marijuana studies is meant only to show how bad science steers public policy, not to advocate for its use. There are other, better reasons to avoid that drug.
> This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist.
This is why science exists. But if the science cannot be carried out, then we have no right to draw conclusions that would require actual science to be legitimate.
This is moving away from the original topic, which is the kind of sloppy science common in modern psychology, where people wave their hands instead of their scientific results.
> I knew a guy who ...
A red herring, but I think you knew that.
Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
> Exactly my point with this line of thinking: It’s used to argue that you can’t rely on any studies, therefore it becomes a free license to reject everything and inject your own desired conclusions.
The "therefore" section of your comment is your own interpretation, not the reality of a society steered by science. It's why uneducated people believe in Bigfoot. We can't disprove Bigfoot, therefore he exists. It makes a certain kind of pre-modern sense, but it fails to take scientific discipline into account.
I'm tempted to call it the Avi Loeb version of cosmology -- we can't disprove the alien provenance of a small distant glowing object, therefore it's an alien craft. And Loeb has a Harvard position on his side -- for those who believe in scientific authority.
When confronted by this kind of thinking, I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's remark: "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."
And finally, it's why psychology has the reputation it does -- many psychologists have no hesitation about leaping ahead of the evidence.
Having said all this, I don't let it get to me because I knew all this was coming as I became more "senior". All things being even, we do have the power to control our thoughts and should. Hope is a much overlooked word these days. People we know, family and not looking for trouble can help us stay hopeful. Unfortunately not everyone has family or their living condition may not be ideal, this is when community is very helpful. If I may say, if you know an older person who you wonder about, ask them what's going on.
"I've noticed a very strong correlation between being very bad at predicting the future, and worrying a lot about the future"
But because of this I'm locked out of medication :'(
I'm very typical of both though. AuDHD.
And yet those where the generations that by care and force of will eventually birthed ours.
Yes, it is a very scary time in the world right now. But it's not as scary as the Great Death, the Great Depression, or WWII and we were able to get from those to the prosperity that we have today.
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.
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.
Do a mental experiment. Suppose that the US disappeared. What would Europe do differently?
All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.
As for finding ways through, I don’t believe that for even a moment. Why? Because we’re still struggling with those same issues.
There is no out. There is no through. Keep that can kicking down the road. That’s what we do.
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.
In this century everything was cut and privatised due to globalization, neoliberalism and the financial crises. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, social security is less, national healthcare keeps being cut. I don't care about getting rich but I do want to live my life without worry.
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.
There is no profit in it. We've let corporations have far too much influence in our lives.
The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.
Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.
Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.
The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.
The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.
It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.
There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.
However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.
Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.
At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.
Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.
I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.
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.
So, yeah, I'd rather carry on as we are than go back and live through it all over again.
It would be nice if our wellbeing increased monotonically but events (covid, the financial crisis, the war in Ukraine) get in the way.
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
From the site guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
The period we are living through is a time of rapid technological change, whatever you want to call it, and suicide rates have been increasing for the past 25 years. Although I would take any studies and statistics on this with a large grain of salt I think it is not unreasonable to consider these things are related.
There are constant attacks, backstabbing, sues, etc.
What if something else causes negative thinking and then in the long run cognitive decline...
...like... eating excessive amounts of carbs and seed oils while also having a sedentary lifestyle and no exposure to the sun.
[and/]or, a contributing factor to the rightward shift of Western society?
Noticing your own cognitive decline is bound to be depressing.
Then, worse, you remember yourself saying "No, this is different", and how wrong you were, and it kinda bums you out a bit. You're watching a replay of yourself being a dumbass, which makes you angry at the situation.
That doesn't mean every old person is negatively inclined, because some will think "Well, this is the way of it", and take solace in that fact that it's been happening since at least the start of recorded history. You, and your ancestors are one. And you finally get your grandparents.
So even the optimists, feeling better, think "might as well play my part" then yell "get off my lawn!"
Can't they have a go-to list of positive things to think about when they notice they are thinking negative thoughts?
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.
I feel like I'm already aware of the good things in my life. I'm actually quite fortunate. But even that forms a baseline: "I was healthy today in a world where not everyone is" grows repetitive. Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Do you have any thoughts on how I might reframe that more beneficially?
> Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Perhaps an obvious statement but our experience with any type of practice varies in infinite ways from moment to moment. At times things just click or maybe we've built up enough momentum that it could feel effortless, but on just as many occasions it can feel like wading through sludge. When it's the latter I have to ask myself just how am I showing up for the activity. How mindful am I? What's my intention? Perhaps most importantly, is the sense of gratitude actually being felt in my body?
If you don't mind self-help type books, 'Hardwiring Happiness' by Rick Hanson is a fairly accessible resource that stresses the importance of the somatic side of this type of work. The tl;dr is that if more parts of the mind pay _sustained_ attention to the embodied experience of gratitude, compassion, joy etc. then we're increasing the chances of training our minds. So if I find myself enumerating things in a journal that I believe I'm grateful for but the exercise feels contrived or flat then that's a sign I should either tune even more into large parts of the body (can be anywhere but for me it's usually my face, chest, and arms) or just attempt to evoke warm feelings in those areas. That last part can feel fake at times but there's probably value in learning how to encourage more mind processes to sign up for the practice. The OP alluded to this bit with "sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile". If the body remembers what gratitude feels like then chances are that's going to influence the mind for the next few moments.
'Awakening Joy' by James Baraz is another book in this vein. In it the author makes the case that learning how to shift our baseline towards one coloured with joy and gratitude usually requires someone repeatedly and genuinely appreciating seemingly trivial things over the course of each day (food, shelter, mobility, pet, access to nature, etc.). Whereas shifts occurring solely due to significant positive life events are potentially less common.
You are touching on a few things that sound familiar. I _struggle_ with repetition. Tasks like emptying a dishwasher or taking out the trash, to me, are like pure torture. No idea why. Now you can probably imagine what gratitude journaling feels like for me as well ;)
Another commenter mentioned the mantra as a technique (even espoused by various religions, though I'm not religious at all). The mantra is a way to simply take up space / time / focus. As I also mentioned, gratitude journaling simply doesn't allow you to think anything else for a moment and that, in and of itself, can be a relief.
I tend to play around with how I write these things down. Prose takes more effort. Changing the wording, and writing it from different perspectives can be a way to dedicate more mind-resources to it and also make it less boring.
Crucially, however, my ability to do this is supported by the other things I do. I have found that another concept comes in handy here, something I've come to call "avoiding zero-days". A zero-day is a day where I have not done a single thing that contributes to my health. E.g. I have not eaten healthy, I have not learned anything, I have done no exercise, I have done no work and I have ALSO not relaxed (see, the thing with my depression is that I won't really do anything. The tell-tale sign for me is when I stop enjoying video games. That's when I know I'm in deep. So literally getting myself to even play a video game is a win which contributes to a non-zero-day).
The reason I try to avoid zero-days is because ANY of the aforementioned things can give me that tiny positive push to accomplish another thing. Eventually, that can lead to a cascade of me achieving 2-3 positive things I'd like to achieve. And that can be the beginning of crawling out of depression for a while.
Another tendency of mine is to retreat into repetition (ironically, despite hating it) for comfort / safety / convenience / efficiency. So my mind kind of goes "I can score non-zero days by just doing one thing over and over". Take gratitude journaling. I'll be really tempted to not put effort in. To the point where I'll just write single words "exercise, training, sunshine" and be done with it. I start to try to cheat my own system.
So, I then have to remind myself to mix up the activities and see if I can pivot away from the obsessive component locking me in.
It's a never-ending cat and mouse game. That's all I can add from my perspective, not sure if that's of any use to you.
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 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.