Stop talking about your problems and just lock in

Harsh but actually good advice?

Could some people’s lingering issues just boil down to lacking a goal that is big enough to make them lock in?

A wandering mind is an unhappy mind

There’s a famous paper by Killingsworth and Gilbert titled A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The title is indeed the gist of the paper. Their experiment found that people were unhappy when they were not engaged with what they were doing and were just thinking about the past or the future.

They developed a web app for the iphone that contacted the participants of the study at random moments during the day, asked them a set of questions and then logged it in a database. At the time of the paper, the database was tracking nearly 5,000 people.

Two basic questions they asked were:
・What are you doing right now?
・How are you feeling right now?

They noted that:

“…multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not, and this was true during all activities, including the least enjoyable.

Although people’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics or unpleasant topics than about their current activity.”

Interesting that ADHD, an affliction that scatters focus and makes the mind wander, increases the risk of depression.

Our findings suggest that ADHD increases the risk of depression later in life and are consistent with a causal effect of ADHD genetic liability on subsequent major depression.
—ADHD and depression: investigating a causal explanation

Thinking about how bad things are only makes it worse

Abigail Shrier wrote a great book on how the overuse of therapy in teens to children is infantalizing their psyche. An over-reliance on their therapist strips them of the ability to figure out what to do the emotions that reality provokes in them. Shrier has said:

“The number one symptom of depression is rumination, pathologically obsessing over your pain. Getting out of your house and accomplishing anything is good for you, sitting around, talking and thinking about your problems is a bad habit.”

Indeed, as this 2014 paper explains: “Rumination is a well-established risk factor for the onset of major depression and anxiety symptomatology in both adolescents and adults.”

Key symptom of depression? Rumination.
How can we avoid rumination? Engage yourself in a task.

With that in mind, consider this quote from Victor Frankl’s The Will to Meaning

There, he said, he had found a lower frequency of neurosis as compared with the United States. He added that this might be traced to the fact that in Communist countries, as he felt, people are more often confronted with a task to complete. “This speaks in favor of your theory,” he concluded, “that meaning direction and task orientation are important in terms of mental health.”

[Later] I quoted the American psychoanalyst [to some Polish psychiatrists]. “You are less neurotic than the Americans because you have more tasks to complete,” I told them. And they smugly smiled. “But do not forget,” I added, “that the Americans have retained the freedom also to choose their tasks[…]” They stopped smiling.

—Victor Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy

Task orientation [is] important in terms of mental health.
—Victor Frankl

P.S. Becoming a communist won’t make you happier.