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I suppose it wouldn't be that surprising. Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression. CBT encourages you to redirect existing negative thoughts in a positive/constructive direction - ultimately steering you away from or undermining the original negative thought - but does not encourage you to do a deep dive on it. Not to mention that Freud was a quack who was more prone to speculation than to science, so if traditional psychotherapy is based on his work then it is likely built on sand.

Taken to the opposite extreme, I think it's in some sense obvious that some degree of suppression is actually good for you, precisely because ruminating for long periods of time is clearly bad for you.

From a neurological point of view, why should we see reiterating negative thoughts as any different from reinforcement learning? If we revisit these negative topics, are we not strengthening their presence in our minds?

That said this study does not sound like it proves that suppressing negative thoughts works over a long period of time. The original theory posits that these suppressed thoughts might cause problems even years later when the latest this was followed up was a period of three months. So grains of salt etc.

The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions.

I'm a strong believer that you have to confront negative thoughts and resolve underlying issues as soon as they arise and not neglect them and tell yourself that everything is going to be OK. It's not going to be OK. Murphy's law; what can go wrong WILL go wrong. This has been shown to me over and over again. You cannot leave anything to chance.

I'd rather have a few negative thoughts from time to time and resolve them as they come than fool myself into thinking that I'm living in la-la land and then after a few years find out that it has become hell on earth due to my neglect.

It's like a garden; you need to maintain it. If you ignore the weeds, they'll eventually take over your garden. You can tell yourself that the weeds add charm and make your garden look more natural; that you're going for a "wild tropical look" or whatever, all part of the plan, but with that attitude, you're bound to fail. You'll just keep getting more of whatever it is that you neglect until it becomes unbearable.

A negative thought is just a thought, it's not like you need to actively not take care of real life things or errands. But if you find yourself thinking about death, or about how much your childhood sucked, or that you're good for nothing, you don't need to address anything about those thoughts.

The least time you spend on them the better, nothing good comes from dwelling.

I can't understand people that want to re-live or push through some negative thoughts "because it'll get better eventually". To me it seems like you're just making yourself numb, and it's got to be at the expense or something. You become so beaten down from them they don't hurt you anymore. I'd rather just not think about bad stuff, they come my away and I go away from them and I get to keep my "mental innocence". Why go through a long road when there's an immediate escape hatch?

Said in a similar way, I could prepare for bad things to come. I know my parents will die. Should I think about that non-stop and feel sad everyday I do it just so I'll feel less sad when they die? Sounds ridiculous.

I have zero desire to "understand" why some thoughts come sometimes, I just want to move past them as fast as possible.

> But if you find yourself thinking about death, or about how much your childhood sucked, or that you're good for nothing, you don't need to address anything about those thoughts.

> The least time you spend on them the better, nothing good comes from dwelling.

Negative visualization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization is absolutely a thing. If you do it properly (aiming towards psychological resilience and gratitude for the things one actually has) it can work quite well.

Of course it exists, I described it in my comment. Look at this quote from wikipedia and compare it to my example of preparing for your parents to die:

> Unlike the general focus of creative visualization of inducing an imaginary positive psychological and physiologic response, negative visualization focuses on training the practitioner on the negative outcomes of realistic life scenarios to desensitize or create psychological fitness in preparation for real-life losses

Something existing and some people thinking it is a good idea doesn't mean it is. I'm not saying I'm right either, I'm sharing what I do and what I think. And what I think is that negative visualization is ridiculous. Live your life, bad things will happen anyway, why do you want to be sad in advance just to maybe be a little bit less sad later? I can't take this idea seriously, it's like someone who doesn't want to love for fear of getting a broken heart.

As someone just now learning I have been negative visualizing since childhood, I’ll tell you it’s not a choice exactly. The thoughts just come to you (someone is going to die, I’m going to die, etc.)… sometimes I’m successful at knocking the thought out of my head quickly. Other times I dwell for a few minutes, having a mini-grieving session thinking what I would do in the situation. It passes and I go back to present life where you don’t think about these things at all. I don’t know if it’s something innate that I got used to and I subconsciously need to do for some reason (and perhaps others do not)… not sure how much more resilient I’ll be if/when anything terrible happens, so agree not sure if best use of time

Many things can also be framed so they’re not negative. Take your parents dying, for example. Everyone has finite time on this Earth. The relationships we choose to cultivate in our short existence are part of what make life beautiful. A life well lived can be something celebrate not mourn. Similarly, hardships in childhood can be something to decry and lament. Or they can be viewed as a the crucible in which your steely mettle was forged. How you think about these things is likely a reflection about how you feel about yourself.

Well, maybe or maybe not. A lot of the negative thoughts I have are somewhat fleeting, and if I revisit them the next day they seem pretty trivial and I could probably dismiss them sooner.

Others might be more meaningful, perhaps a character flaw that you don't want to think about, but without really processing it it will never get fixed and keep causing more problems.

The fleeting part is essentially what certain types of meditation are all about.

Negative thoughts and emotions have to actively be fueled by something in order to persist.

And if you spend some time by simply observing those thoughts from a non judgmental stand point they’ll quickly disappear.

> Negative thoughts and emotions have to actively be fueled by something in order to persist.

I don’t think that’s true right? Negative thoughts and emotions occur naturally. If you’re statement we’re true then positive thoughts have to be fueled by something to persist. So then what is fuel - any stimulus at all?

My view is it's sort of a balance. There's a place for confronting negative thoughts but it's possible to spend too much energy doing so which can also have negative consequences.

The problem is that you can't "weed" your mind, that's not how minds really work. It's not a garden at all, it's a learning system. The things you pay attention to are also the things which become more prominent. Attention is ultimately sunlight and water for memories if we need to use a gardening analogy.

The problem really comes when the memory becomes intrusive. At that point you're forced to do something to tackle it because it's growing anyway.

> The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions.

I guess the whole point, and better way of putting the original idea is to resolve the negative thoughts. If the thoughts are trivial, just suppressing them is mostly resolution enough, since trivial thoughts are most probably not going to come back.

If the underlying reason for the negative thought is major and has staying power due to reality (e.g. you lost your mother when you were young), I think it's probable that the thought pattern is not going to go away if the reality underneath is not resolved (e.g. to actually learn to cope with your loss).

Because eventually, reality will force you to confront these things at some point, because it's, well, reality. If you just keep suppressing these negative thoughts, they will just keep coming back and you're not really winning that much.

Unsure why you’re being downvoted - bizarre.

Anyways, I agree completely. Life long struggle with anxiety and depression. Most of my issues come from ignoring my worst feelings and not dealing with them. I find the idea of suppressing feelings to be bizarre for treating clinical issues. Maybe that’s why mindfulness only ever provided me temporary relief.

I believe there are different types or modes of thinking. Some tend to avoid negativity, others live through it to anchor in reality.

Also, maybe it’s subjective, but all my friends who are negative-aware and embrace cynicism (not necessarily follow it) have much better sense of real life and of characters than all my friends who believe in all good things and are optimists. The former tend to be business people, the latter are all hired workers.

It depends a great deal on the nature of the negative thought.

For example: spending hours obsessively thinking about death and dying and infinite nothingness isn’t helpful in my opinion.

But avoiding thinking about a mole you might want to get checked out at the doctor is a bad idea.

The underlying issue is the thoughts. Once you have done all you can do many start worrying the future won't unfold as they predicted. Fool yourself into thinking you live in some hell on earth is worse than thinking you might be happy with your current situation.

I feel like happiness itself is also like a garden and needs to be maintained. You need to take intermittent breaks to look for weeds.

Perhaps you would understand if you accepted that some of us feel like we're surrounded by weeds, weeds that cloud our vision and impede our movement, which prevent us from detecting any beauty or value in our garden; we've forgotten what roses and tomatoes look like altogether.

Therefore, our approach and solutions are different from what you're espousing.

I think there's an important difference between a negative thought about X and an introspective but emotionally more neutral thought about X.

This study was measuring the effectiveness of trained suppression - not distraction or letting go, but specifically not imagining the event. I found it surprising, but at the same time avoidance might just have weakened the mental strength for doing exactly that.

> Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression

Have to disagree. To let go you have to acknowledge/accept the subject. Suppression misses this IMHO.

> Not to mention that Freud was a quack who was more prone to speculation than to science, so if traditional psychotherapy is based on his work then it is likely built on sand.

Wow, that’s rich. Dismissing Freud like this is the most egregious way of conducting a discussion about these topics. Have you also ever thought that Mindfulness and CBT, while effective, are successful in a capitalistic society because ultimately convince us we can change to accept the fundamentals shortcomings and toxicities and inhumane dysfunctions of capitalism? Freud’s take on the mind was revolutionary, Mindfulness and CBT have a solid ground but have become a strong weapon in favor of the preservation of the status quo by convincing us we are just wrong in a perfectly fine environment (which in reality is not fine at all).

> Mindfulness and CBT have a solid ground but have become a strong weapon in favor of the preservation of the status quo by convincing us we are just wrong in a perfectly fine environment (which in reality is not fine at all)

Becoming copacetic with the reality you actually live in is necessary to surviving any environment. Even dogs and prisoners understand this. Even the rich get depressed and kill themselves.

The most deranged people you come across are the ones who cannot accept the fundamental shortcomings, toxicities and inhumane dysfunctions of their environment. Most people don't have the guts for rebellion and are best served making the best of their situation. The ones who have what it takes don't complain, they just go immanentize the eschaton.

Look at wartime propaganda/psyops. Your own country will bombard you with positivity. The enemy will bombard you with negativity. One side has an interest in your continued survival. The other is actively trying to kill you.

I think I said it enough on this website, but my personal experience with 4 psychanalyst led me to believe this is a quackery, a pseudoscience, and actually harmful for people who have real mental issues.

And I'm not talking about those weird ideas about autism, that anybody with a brain who worked with autistic children or adults would know to dismiss, or that dumb dream analysis, I'm talking about clinical psychoanalysis and it's 'practical' application. The fact is, solving bipolarity or schizophrenia with psychoanalysis is like solving cancer with homeopathy, except in the second case the practionners have a smudge of ethics and led their patient towards real medical praticiens once the issue is to big for them.

Whereas psychanalyst try to extract the most money they can for 15 years, pass the patients between themselves to make the con last longer, and if they're lucky the patient miss their TS, go see a real doctor that in 5 (5!) minutes diagnose bipolarity, then in a day make a bloodtest to be certain, and prescribe lithium. Without mood crisis, the patient can live without pissing of friends and family, and has only lost 15 years and a dozen relationships. In other case, the patient kill themselves.

I believe your experience might be related to how psychoanalists work in the US (or the country you're from)? Here in Germany it's a highly regulated practice, and believe me, psychoanalysts refuse constantly patients with the pathological problems you describe because they are aware that psychoanalysis' is not fit for those. In fact they are also perfectly aware they are not psychiatrists, and they would never be able to prescribe nor help you get out of any medication.

I'm from France. It's regulated here too. They just think manic phase are 'female hysteria'. They are dangerous and I an certain osteopathic therapy brought more actual knowledge to PT than psychoanalysis ever brought to psychology.

At least their Jungian archetype and the 'animus anima' are 50% less sexists that they used to be and are now marketable for 'self help' expert, so I guess they are now able to make money by scamming without endangering people.

> Mindfulness and CBT have a solid ground but have become a strong weapon

Have to disagree. A weapon is for fighting, and as Siddhartha Gautama said: "What you fight becomes stronger." They are tools IMHO that can help you, if you invest time and effort.

Ok then let's put it this way. They became weaponized, because they have a great ability in convincing people they're in need of fixing, instead of questioning the dysfunctional and fundamentally unequal society we live in.

I think you may be in fight mode and your perception is strongly coloured by it.

> convincing people they're in need of fixing

Holy smokes Siegmund! I think we all carry some form of trauma that is more than worth healing. I invested 21 years into it and am more than glad i did.

Equality is a lovely ideal to strive towards.

[Edit] add missing word

1) Mindfulness is a few millenia older than capitalism.

2) CBT is also anything but status quo. I think the thing that the above comments mentions is just window dressing for trying to go back to older approaches... it's hilarious how much the workbooks emphasize that no-no, your feelings are not invalid! No, no! Validate your feelings! Soothe yourself! They are totally valid! They just may be "inappropriate for the situation". Or, "unjustified". Or, "not productive". Now that we've got that out of the way and you still believe you are being coddled and totally valid, let's get to making a plan to fix the problem, or at least immersing your face in cold water or doing the opposite action to actually fix things.

3) In any case, shortcomings of capitalism as opposed to what?

I think this comment is literally 180, it's one of the wrongest takes I've seen in my entire life. As an immigrant from ex-socialist country, I'd bet the problem with mental health in advanced economies has a lot in common, metaphorically, with the problem of allergies in advanced economies, where the immune system has nothing to do and starts messing up. Capitalism have spoiled you all so much you have become too soft. Instead of validating the feelings and acknowledging emotions, anywhere between 50 to 90% of the people could benefit from some hardening the f- up :)

Such as, by suppressing negative emotions.

For a few years after the death of my baby daughter, I’d relive the events of that day pretty regularly, looking for some kind of meaning, pattern, lesson to be learned maybe. I’d also continually wonder what she’d be like now she was 3, 4 years old, etc.

This was making me incredibly sad. Eventually, I just had to forget that day, forget her, stop thinking about what her life would have been like, and get on with enjoying the here and now, with my other children.

Even though it would be her 10th birthday next week, I haven’t thought much about her in the run up to this.

Dwelling on past trauma didn’t work for me. YMMV.

Focusing on present moment is a very powerful tool and I’m glad you discovered it. Your daughter would want you to be happy. Best wishes to you and your family.

Heartbreaking. I know it means nothing but my heart goes out to you. Wishing you the best.

I have nothing constructive to add to your comment, but I was quite moved by it. I'm not a parent (yet?) so I can only begin to imagine what you must have gone through, however I hope you're in a better place now.

Yes, it's incredibly cruel when we realize that sometimes forgetting or not keeping them alive in our thoughts is the only way to keep on living without being burdened by the sadness of what may or should have been.

I am so sorry for your loss. I am glad to hear you are healing in your own way though.

I'll make sure to hug my own extra hard tonight.

For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones.

120 people and three months and during COVID.

Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.

That’s the literal definition of credibility firstly, and secondly if 120 people and covid were properly controlled for, neither of these facts invalidates the study. You can find statistically valid conclusions from 120 people, for sure.

Just read the damn paper, rather than presume it’s credible or dismiss it because they couldn’t run it on 100,000 people over the course of 30 years.

You're telling me to read a paper you haven't read yourself? COVID was not controlled for. A three month study says nothing about mental health which is intrinsically long-term: this decides to observe short-term effects. I am not even satisfied with the very definition of 'negative thoughts' which at least should fall under multiple categories and studied differently.

Cool; briefly, can you describe your credentials? Why should anyone care what you think about this study?

If you don't care what I state about a particular study within the sphere of the replication crisis, I suggest you to fast forward instead of appealing to authority. Notice that I never asserted a position on either side of this "thought suppression" practice, I have no extrinsic incentives.

You didn't assert a position because you have no expertise from which your evaluation would mean anything.

Nobody cares if a random person off the street thinks a bridge looks sturdy.

As a matter of fact, people do care if a random person off the street thinks a bridge looks sturdy. I reported a wooden bridge with a beam rotted such that large nails pointed up into the roadway. The police cordoned it off within an hour, no engineers required.

It’s sad to me you don’t think an engineer was involved in your story.

> no participant was given a negative event to imagine

I feel that's taken a little out of context. There were two trials:

> For No-imagine trials, participants were given one of their cue words, asked to first acknowledge the event in their mind. Then, while continuing to stare directly at the reminder cue, they were asked to stop thinking about the event – they should not try to imagine the event itself or use diversionary thoughts to distract themselves, but rather should try to block any images or thoughts that the reminder might evoke. For this part of the trial, one group of participants was given their negative events to suppress and the other given their neutral ones.

Emphasis added. And the trial you refer to:

> For Imagine trials, participants were given a cue word and asked to imagine the event as vividly as possible, thinking what it would be like and imagining how they would feel at the event. For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones.

> I feel that's taken a little out of context

Not necessarily, for one how often people really stare at the cues of a negative event, and try to suppress it versus trying to suppress an internal imagination of the event? Secondly, there’s a greater confound in which externalizing your fear to begin with has a positive effect on processing the affect.

It’s also not clear enough how the operationalize “the suppress”, because it is a difficult and paradoxical task to execute volitionally especially in the context of acute anxiety, because anxiety’s job is literally to interrupt your normal salience structure, and make it self salient non-volitionally.

There is another devil in the detail, the target negative events are self-selected by the participants, so in all likelihood, the most disturbing events are not going to be readily consciously available, and whatever comes up here are going to be things that are already filtered to be easier to deal with.

In contrast in obsessive compulsive disorder, the intrusiveness of the imaginations will be all consuming. In which case it is contraindicated to try suppressing the thought, because it definitely will backfire, as it is precisely what maintains the disorder, but instead it is about learning to stay unresponsive in the face of exposure (ie not scratching the itch) of such thoughts, which is known as exposure and response prevention. Yet still, this method is not found to be necessarily more successful than straight out CBT either.

I'm sure there's plenty of other issues and confounders to pick apart in the study, but it was a fair claim that most would be misled by the isolated quote to mean that no imagining of negative events occurred at all as part of the study.

I think most people in psychiatry don't want to admit the patients are typically victims and society has to be the one to change. In my opinion most psychological techniques induce the behaviors they are attempting to suppress effectively bullying the people who are seeking help.

Have you ever been to a good psych? Like in other professions, maybe 80% of clinical psychiatrists are low key bad at their job. And I’m sorry for you if you feel like you were bullied by a bad psych. I think thats probably way more common than we’d want to admit.

I promise you, good sessions just aren’t like that. My psych is amazing. We don’t talk about how “society has to change” because the pain I’ve experienced isn’t really about society any more. And the point of sessions isn’t to fix society, it’s to help me (the patient) heal and grow. I’ve never felt bullied by her - not for a second.

I’m sorry if you haven’t had a good therapist. As I say, maybe 80% of psychs are flushable. But some people are genuinely amazing and can help a great deal. They’ve certainly helped me.

I agree, and I'd like to add, it is very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff as a client.

The psych is expected to know an awful lot more than you about the whole process and subject.. so if you need to think critically about the psych, you don't really have the knowledge base to do well.

Taking what a psychiatrist has said as a golden rule, has wasted time and led me down the wrong road.

There is no subsitute for making up your own mind, or hearing the truth from the highest quality/rawest sources. And those sources are basically in universities and high quality education materials.

Most of the information just generally available in society and delivered by 'professionals'.... is a long, long way from what an adult needs to make rational decisions.

It is no coincidence that many psychotropic drugs induce the symptoms that they purport to treat.

[flagged]

This has been known among psychologist for awhile now. In fact someone who is too honest, someone who see's the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves

This podcast from radiolab really changed my perspective on the concept. Pretty much if you're not depressed, most likely some aspect of you is delusional.

I would say people on HN are especially prone to lying to themselves. They lie to themselves about how intelligent they are. Programming is tied to intelligence and people need to think they're smart in order to maintain pride.

Religion is easy to laugh off as irrational for HNers because religion isn't a big part of their lives. Intelligence and programming is a big part of their lives and that's where all the lies live, in something you take pride in.

Additionally people on HN think they're more rational then normal... they think they don't fall into the trap of lying to themselves. I hate to tell you this, but that's just another lie you all tell yourselves.

> Religion is easy to laugh off as irrational for HNers because religion isn't a big part of their lives.

You’re generalising. On the occasional threads directly dealing with religious topics, you will easily see that there are plenty here who are very religious. As for me, my religion is the most important thing in my life.

True. Nothing wrong with generalizing though. If I told you that jumping off a cliff would result in you dying when really you only had a 99% chance of dying I would also still be generalizing over that 1% chance of survival.

I would say for HN you're in the minority.

You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things.

I say that we aren't. And given that, you are better off believing the lie that helps you or makes you feel good instead of the one that hurts you, assuming both have the same predictive power.

I tell people "I don't know if your intentions are good or bad and I may never know. If I believe they're bad, I feel bad. If I believe they're good, I feel good. So I choose to believe they're good."

So I appreciate your perspective as I think it aligns with mine.

> You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things.

I believe that for situations where a single human has enough information and ability to ascertain the truth, most humans deliberately will not make a beeline for the truth. They sort of veer off to the side towards a half truth that better suits their situation. None of this is a conscious choice though.

Self deception is completely orthogonal to our ability to ascertain the actual truth. As I said even if we were magically gifted this ability, most choose not to use that ability.

Of course this quality lives on a gradient, some people are really good at self deception, others are really bad at it.

Obsession with truth isn't necessarily advantageous for success at the species level.

I mean who cares if some guy running a convenience store or writing an email client thinks the world is flat?

Maybe we just need a small aberrant percentage of the population so there will always be a few people "shorting" the status quo for cash and occasionally preventing extinction.

We don't have the mental bandwidth or responsiveness to perceive reality. Our brains use shortcuts to observe and think. These lead to errors.

We didn't need to be perfect to get to this point. Just good enough to beat the environment and the other meat sacks.

Predictiveness of a mental model is the the closest we can get to understanding reality.

>Obsession with truth isn't necessarily advantageous for success at the species level.

It's not just this. It seems as though lying to oneself is so pervasive that it is likely a biological advantage.

Meaning not only is obsession with the truth not advantageous but it's actually disadvantageous while the opposite self deception is actually normal and highly beneficial such that this trait has been naturally selected to persist.

I wonder if the "someone who sees the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed" is related to seeing a truth and not expressing it.

Lately I've really been starting to wonder if depression is the opposite of expression. Or in other words, instead of pushing feelings/thoughts out (ex-press), we push them down (de-press).

I can say from my experience when I feel very confident that I see what's happening and I don't say it, I can feel depressed. Or if I do say what I see and people around me deny what I see, then I can stop expressing and start depressing and feel that depression even more as I close off from others and from myself.

No it's not specifically about what you're talking about. People are literally being delusional here. There's a ton science behind this phenomenon. You can listen to that podcast it's quite interesting.

Basically they can do quantitative experiments where they have groups of people rate others about how attractive they are 1-10 and through this gather an average rating about someones attractiveness.

Then they have those people who were rated, rate themselves. Of course they also measure for happiness too. Turns out the less happy you are, the more accurately you rated yourself in turns of attractiveness.

What I described is just one experiment out of many trying to measure this phenomenon of self deception. It is completely consistent in most experiments. Almost every single one results in a positive correlation between happiness and self-deception.

Ah, I'll check out the podcast as it seems counterintuitive to me and therefore I might learn something, thanks!

I listened to the podcast. In those experiments they described, I feel pretty confident that they're not so much measuring self-deception, but more like self-belief, or faith in oneself.

First, they defined self-deception as "you have two contradictory beliefs, and you hold them at the same time, and you allow one of them into consciousness that you have a motivation for allowing one of them into consciousness."

I don't know if that's so much self-deception, maybe more just trying to resolve an internal conflict and not having certainty over which one is objectively true, because for so many things I believe it's really hard to hold certainty over them being objectively true.

For example, if I believe I'm good at programming and believe I'm bad at programming, which one is objectively true? I could be better at programming than my dad and worse at programming than my friend who is an Apple engineer.

I think they were mostly measuring whether, in uncertainty about one's (or other's) goodness (intentions, abilities, etc.), did they believe they were good or bad?

For example, in the embarrassing questions survey, if people answered yes to they thought about wanting to rape someone, I imagine they probably don't think they have good intentions. And then if someone doesn't think they have good intentions, I imagine they probably feel worse than someone who believes they do have good intentions.

Eight years ago I created a class called Emotional Self-Defense. An ex had sent me an email that said, "Every time I was about to leave, you did something nice so I wouldn't go." And I immediately felt angry, "This girl thinks I manipulated her." Then a few minutes later I felt sad, "Was I manipulating her? I thought I was in love." The next day, after getting a scalp massage, I relaxed on the chair and thought, "I wasn't doing those nice things so she wouldn't go, I was doing them to savor the moment. I wasn't doing those nice things so she wouldn't leave, I was doing them because I thought she'd enjoy receiving them and I'd enjoy giving them." Then I thought, "If I can't trust my own good intentions, who the hell will?"

So I tell people I choose to believe I have good intentions and that others have good intentions because I feel better when I do. Do I know for certain that they or I do? No, and I don't know if I ever will.

The other experiment was about cheating and how a woman can simultaneously think a man is cheating and not cheating. In the podcast, the assumption was, to everyone else, the man was obviously cheating and yet the woman lied to herself because she believed he wasn't. But the opposite can also be true, where, to everyone else, the man is obviously not cheating and yet the woman believes that he is. This has happened to me, where the woman was convinced I was having sex with someone else when that wasn't the case at all.

Lastly, the swimming example seemed to talk more about whether people believed in themselves, as much of the statements seemed like positive affirmations. "We believe we're invincible. Because if we go int here with any other thought there's no chance of us accomplishing our goal." And "It's like I have the ability to catch this person. It's going to happen."

So for me, I don't think it's so much about self-deception and more about self-belief (and other-belief), as I'd argue that people who believe in themselves and others are happier and more successful.

Lastly, they say "that depressed people lie less." But then go on to say, "They see all the pain in the world. How horrible people are with each other and they tell you everything about themselves. What their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people and the problem is they're right. Maybe it's the way we help people that help them be wrong."

I see a lot of pain in the world but don't think that people are horrible, I think most of us react out of our own pain and want others to join us in the pain. Almost a yearning to not be alone. And therefore I choose to believe that pain and sadness are OK, as they help me feel even closer to other people and to myself. "And the problem is they're right." By what objective measure are people terrible?

I appreciate you continuing with me on this and reinforcing that I listen to the podcast because for many years now I've talked about being honest with oneself and emotional honesty and such, and I think I want to focus more on loving oneself and others. In such conflicts, choosing to believe in our good intentions, our good abilities, our overall goodness instead of choosing to believe in the opposite. So thank you for helping me see this more clearly today.

>So for me, I don't think it's so much about self-deception and more about self-belief (and other-belief), as I'd argue that people who believe in themselves and others are happier and more successful.

An aspect of Self belief is self deception. This is when you believe in something that isn't technically true. This is the literal definition of what the words mean in English. I believe this aspect of self belief is what podcast is referring to.

>By what objective measure are people terrible?

There are objective measurements of universally terrible people. It is hard to measure though because it lives on a gradient and it also lives in contradictory circumstances. So people can be good and terrible at the same time. They can be good in one situation and terrible in another situation. There are even people who are neutral, or in other words people with zero allegiance to good or evil.

While the gradient is hard to measure, people on the extremes are much easier to identify and measure. Psychopathy is one such condition. See here: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-mind/. While not mentioned in the article psychopathy is actually physically detectable with a brain scan and can be correlated with associated behaviors.

Through the existence of people at the extremes and people obviously not at the extremes we can infer that the story is much more complex than people are "generally good".

>I appreciate you continuing with me on this and reinforcing that I listen to the podcast because for many years now I've talked about being honest with oneself and emotional honesty and such, and I think I want to focus more on loving oneself and others. In such conflicts, choosing to believe in our good intentions, our good abilities, our overall goodness instead of choosing to believe in the opposite. So thank you for helping me see this more clearly today.

No problem. I think the difference between our views of the world is that I view it through a data driven perspective while you view it through a more personal lens with personal experiences touching your interpretation of the world.

I'll just say this. The truth, if it exists at all, lies in the data. But like my point, the truth isn't necessarily what you want here is it?

To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all.

The trick (which is very hard) is to recognise when one of your own arguments is one of convenience, emotion, illogical etc. And not be biased towards logical fallacies against others.

But this does not mean that your average person on hacker news doesn't tend towards better educated and more rational discussion than large amounts of the public. It also means hacker news tends towards specific blindspots, sure.

> To an extent, this is true, but take it too far and you begin dismissing education and well grounded logic and believing it to be equivalent to ignorant and irrational thought. Logical thinking and analysis is a skill you learn and get better at after all.

True. But the problem here is that this "skill" you think you have. It might be just a lie you tell yourself. You wouldn't know. That's the nature of lying to ourselves. Humans are all highly irrational creatures. Yet individually when we think of ourselves.... all of us unequivocally think of ourselves and most of our actions as rational.

This includes you.

I am a high functioning depressive, or possibly not depressed at all, I think I am uniquely qualified to speak to the psychology of non-self deception while still being a "high performance" individual, especially compared to my co-hort of "defective children".

I was born with heart defects, so during my formative years I was on restricted activities and was constantly confronted with the futility of life, the imminence of death, my memories start at 3, in the days leading up to my first surgery.. for my second procedure at 5 I was scared of not waking back up, by 10 I would wake up from anesthesia disappointed I didn't die on the table, I was happiest in the oblivion and real life had so much struggle. I knew no peers and almost no adults who understood what it was like, much less people willing to talk about it in any serious way. Thought stopping platitudes were the best I could get from most adults, more scared of even talking about death than I was of the thing itself.

I pursued religion and even went to seminary, but all the God/Religious concepts we know about really are just disappointing, unhelpful, pastiche or frankly evil at core (Jainism being a strange exception in my mind, even though the common cultural expression of Jainism shares many of the same issues I have with Hinduism).

There was a time window in my past when I decided to generally "overshare" my internal thoughts and I stopped after a close friend ended up flippantly saying "well of course, you're obsessed with death.", that's not really the energy I want to put out there.

I think people fight very hard to ignore death, that's why existential moments find them in bed at night or when they are alone and quiet with their thoughts.

I've been waiting to die for as long as I can remember, my relationship with death is radically inverted so my existential thoughts are as well.

If you really soak in this futility, if this sense of "Everything is meaningless and transient" is inculcated in you early enough... unbidden existential thoughts transforms from... "Nothing matters", to "What if everything matters?", I don't know, I don't know enough about reality to "know for sure" that nothing matters. I'm just trying to discover as much stuff as I can and promote environments and attitudes that keep civilization stable enough for us to continue our species level rocket pace of discovery and inquiry.

If I was born anywhere else or any earlier I wouldn't exist.

I'm just curious to see what happens, what's ultimately true, if we ever figure it out, if we figure it out in my lifetime, if entities and causality are what we think they are now... and I'm going to kick around as long as I can to find out what happens. I think truly embracing intellectual humility is key to happiness and pursuit of life in a world that is -- as experienced -- unjust, random and capricious.

Yeah see. Part of your existential problems arise from the fact that you're too honest with yourself.

You realize most people don't think religion is evil? How could others come to a completely different conclusion than you? It's because of self deception. They believe an interpretation of religion that best fits their lifestyle. That's the point. You didn't do that.

>I think people fight very hard to ignore death, that's why existential moments find them in bed at night or when they are alone and quiet with their thoughts.

No you're just projecting. I think people nearer to death fight this thought. But people farther from death easily don't think about it. It's easy for most people not to think about it at all... but not when it's constantly thrown in their face. That's why your friend got pissed at u You're basically exposing his self-deception. He doesn't want to think of that shit.

I think if you want to make yourself happier you need to get stupider. Stop thinking about these things. Distract yourself with something you can get lost with so you can't think about things. Surround yourself with yes-men who lie to you, avoid the truth.

Very good advice :) and that's fair, avoidance isn't necessarily hard work.

And, as it turns out I'm perfectly content these days if that didn't come through in my first post.

We're all already so stupid by default... if we really stop and admit it to ourselves, even the smartest among us barely know anything at all. I find that extraordinarily exciting, I'm glad I was born during a hockey stick period of growth in knowledge and technology.

I resonate with your the experience you describe, from a different place. Your post reminds me of a quote from Kierkegaard: "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?"

I feel that a sign of being a good programmer is recognizing you are not a good programmer.

Then again, this is not me, but Socrates speaking.

Socrates understood that he understood more than most, similarly a good programmer will understand that he is a better programmer than most. The "I think I'm bad therefore I'm good" mantra is just coping.

The important part is understand that you can't be perfect, Socrates understood that there were many things he didn't understand, a good programmer will understand that there are many ways he could improve, but doesn't mean that they think they are bad.

Bro, this sounds like rationalizing. You realize you're not a good programmer and you try to rationalize that realization with this quote.

Quotes like these are huge indicators of self deception. I mean it may be true, but usually the only person who cares for these quotes are the ones who have a strong desire to believe that it applies to them.

Well, I wouldnt say if you think you're a bad programmer that makes you a good one. However, I would rephrase it as "If you're honest with yourself and the mistakes you make, you are able to solve them. If you're not humble, then it is very difficult to be a good programmer (or anything really), because you would think you never make mistakes. And as a result you would never fix them"

I wonder if using the technique people succeeded in suppressing "negative" emotions but also in suppressing "positive" emotions. In other words, did they just feel less overall? More numb? Or did they somehow feel less "negative" emotions and the same or more "positive" emotions?

I would hypothesize that it made people feel less overall, more numb, or more indifferent, and for someone feeling a lot of anxiety or fear, I think feeling less overall might feel good.

If that's the mechanism, I don't know how adaptive that is in the medium- to long-term.

I generally think about emotions and thoughts as a function of neurochemical pathways. We know those are subject to reinforcement. That clearly implies that if you want to feel and think better, you should encourage and intentionally practice good thoughts and emotions and inhibit / lay off the bad ones.

Why are we still talking about Freud?

Some researchers studied how to be happy. Unsurprisingly they also found no support for Freudian ideas that were popular 30 years ago.

The Cambridge University PR office still leads by stating Freudian ideas as the "accepted narrative". Maybe they are? But this is the least novel result of the study, and yet it's in the headline.

Obviously we shouldn't shoot the messenger: science writers are just going for clicks like most of the internet. But wow, Freud dug us quite a deep hole to climb out of.

Because Freud fills his niche perfectly. People who want to refer to his ideas, his character, his writing, can do so..

What bothers me deeply is that all the first-order/top-level work was done in the past and we're not really exploring that space anymore.

The science may disprove Freud, and unfortunately we have still not progressed past his niche and character as an intro to psychology.

Freud didn't dig a hole, he left a high quality signpost to the future. We need a better signpost but people are using Freud 'cause recent second-order psych and statistics is sexier.

Maybe there's a generic term for this (objects or figures held up for attack as a way of signaling group membership), but in the behavioral sciences and psychiatry there's a lot of strawman figures or ideas that get held up by authors as an object of derision, as a way for the authors to assert being part of "real science". This takes a lot of forms, but Freud is one of these figures. Others involve references to mind-body dualism ("this is a brain-based phenomenon, not a psychological one", which is ironic in a lot of ways), there a lot of others. The behavioral sciences often are ridiculed by other sciences, sometimes rightly so, but sometimes by people who are unaware of the complexities involved in certain topics, or who are otherwise just being narcissistic bullies; so people trying in good faith to do research sometimes use targeting figures like Freud to signal their "science credentials."

This case leaves me scratching my head a bit because the idea of suppressing negative thoughts sometimes being a bad thing isn't just a Freudian idea (what Freud was actually saying, and how different modern theories are from those of Freud, is a whole topic onto itself). CBT, which is often held up as some kind of gold standard of empirically supported therapy, has this idea of a hierarchy of beliefs, some a person might be aware of, and others of which the person only holds implicitly. These "core beliefs" go unaddressed, sometimes through active avoidance, which leads to problems (or so the theory goes). Or from a purely behavioral perspective, someone has some fear that leads to elaborate avoidance behaviors, which cause impairments — the treatment being exposure to the feared stimulus.

The framing of this is odd because I don't think any good therapist would say that avoiding negative thoughts is always good or always bad. It depends on the situation. Sometimes someone needs to just shift attention from unproductive rumination. But sometimes people do have a lot of issues that go unaddressed, and that avoidance becomes unhealthy because it leaves a whole belief system or set of interpersonal problems unresolved, or snowballs out of control.

None of this is necessarily Freudian or not Freudian, and framing it as such says more about the concerns of the authors than anything about the theories used in modern therapy or the implications of the study results.

It is so easy being smarter than Plato/Kant/Freud. You just need to be born later. Still they are a valuable part of the evolution of the human mind IMHO. Some of his thoughts still make sense, even if they are not falsifiable.

> “What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative,” said Professor Anderson. “Although more work will be needed to confirm the findings, it seems like it is possible and could even be potentially beneficial to actively suppress our fearful thoughts.”

I don't know if this study convinces me, but my own experience sure does. I've lived both ways, there's no question in my mind what works better for me. The jokey, modern trope is the guy who ignores his feelings and then blows up later. I found instead that negative feelings tend to go away if you focus on other things, but if you focus on bad thoughts, they just last longer and sometimes grow into fixations.

Weirdly, the exact opposite works for me. As someone recently dealing with a measure of anxiety, I found that a 3 step process has helped remove the worst of it.

1. Examine the feeling - Pay attention to the thoughts causing the anxiety. What exactly about it is disturbing? What outcomes are you afraid is going to happen. Think about it like an interesting topic you are hearing about. What questions would you ask?

2. Explore the feeling - Articulate how it makes you feel. Where in your body are you experiencing this feeling? Is your mind racing, your chest tightening, stomach churning? Notice each feeling and where it is happening.

3. Exaggerate the feeling - Take the anxiety causing thought and turn it up to 11. If you are feeling anxious about your job, imagine you not only get fired but the company takes out an ad in the NY times letting everyone in the industry know not to hire you again. If you're anxious about not saving enough, imagine you go bankrupt and have to live in a cardboard box by the street. Don't just imagine the worst case scenario, imagine the nuclear + ebola scenario.

After making a habit of this, I found that my reaction to these thoughts is not as emotionally severe. I don't know exactly why it works but my guess is that when your mental response to stress is disproportionate to the stimuli, the process of examining the thoughts acts as a way of desensitizing the mind to the stimulus whilst keeping some emotional distance from them. The act of exaggeration adds some comic relief to the process and, I find, actually makes me (slightly) look forward to the anxious thoughts ("Ooh, I wonder what crazy scenario I am going to come up with for this one") and replaces the negative feeling (fear, churning) with a positive one (curiosity, excitement).

I think it's really important to separate and discern "light" and "darkness" in your mind and actions, word and deed.

I think mental health, negative thoughts is driven by your understanding of truth

If you think the truth is dark then you are looking at darkness and attributing it to truth or the light, which is a mistaken identity. Calling light (the truth) the darkness is an error. Calling darkness the truth is an error. I believe the truth is good. You should pick the right "duality" as your foundational truth, since it's your foundations of whether or not you're in darkness or light.

If it's not good, it's not true reality but a manifestation of darkness. Don't look at darkness and call it the truth. Truth is light, truth is a good thing. Separate the light from the darkness. Bad things going on is a manifestation of darkness, not the truth of what is the foundation nature of everything (which I think is light, good). Ground yourself in light, for that's what the universe is powered by. (Why would you pick the worse option if light is the truth why would you pick otherwise?)

For people who believe in a God of love and arbiter of what is true, the truth is light and positive.

The mechanism of the universe, love, kindness, compassion, mercy, grace, gravity, words, law, legality, mathematics, quantum effects, physics, the mysteries and who decides upon their workings.

Good vs Evil. Light vs darkness. True vs False

It's like being blamed for something you didn't do. Truth cannot be sullied by darkness.

If you keep "the truth is good" as your hope and faith = "light/good is what is is and are", then the darkness cannot touch you.

Where does suppressing negative thoughts end, and reality denial begin? There are many unpleasant realities that we must learn to cope with that cannot just be ignored or forgotten.

Credit card debt is a source of negative thoughts for many - and not just low-level grumbles, but genuinely distressing anxiety. People kill themselves over their financial difficulties. But having a debt is definitely not something we should encourage people to suppress, because it gets worse if left unattended.

It’s not just mundane realities like debt that are potentially dangerous if ignored. Should you try to suppress negative thoughts about pain, or worries about a growth on your skin, instead of seeking medical treatment?

What should we do with delusional or criminal people who believe something about themselves that is plainly wrong? Should a kleptomaniac seek to affirm their behavior, or should they confront themselves?

How can we tell the difference between the thoughts that are safe and healthy to ignore, and those upon which light should be shone?

That’s where your human skill for critical thinking must come into play. Debt is a tangible issue sort of negative thoughts- they are promoting you to resolve something with real consequences. Negative thoughts about a friend slighting you is useless after the first time. If the action repeats make some decisions but don’t dwell in that spiral It doesn’t have to be prescriptive it’s subjective and we really need to understand nuance.

> How can we tell the difference

If you have to act upon it, think about it - in a strategic modality;

if running your mind about it is just wasting your energies, don't.

> Where does suppressing negative thoughts end, and reality denial begin?

Personally I think that juncture is where procrastination lives.

Could you elaborate?

Working through multiple traumata for a few years now. I've found that if you work through a negative thought long enough, it will eventually reveal its purpose. I've started journaling in 2016 or so, so it takes a long time, since I didn't have coaching or anything. Internal dialog goes like this:

- feeling numb and like dieing ~ what's the issue? - I don't work, feeling guilty over not working, I'd wish they'd fire me over that ~ That true? - I want to get fired so my destiny comes true again, ima fckup, looser ~ you're not though (examples of achievements) - reality fcks with my belief... (some silence, processing, giving it time) ... so, I'm not a fckup? ~ No - That feels ... hopeful? (haven't felt that in a very long time) ~ weird, hm? - why do I believe this? (ima fckup) ~ Feels safer that way, others can't hurt you if you do it first and harder. Nobody can hurt you like you do... (mix of loving feelings follows)

I've done byron katie's work for a while, and some of her voice was internalized (listened to her youtube dialogues for 2-3 weeks), that might be, where the nice questioning voice must have come from.

That may work for you, but most of my negative thoughts don’t have a purpose. They exist because I forgot to eat, exercise, or be social.

that as well, thanks for adding that. Wetware has to be served first.

I really disagree with this concept of "thoughts" being a free-floating occurence that springs on you like a burgular in the night.

Obviously thoughts exist and understanding why and how thoughts exist is yet to be known.

But don't we have centuries of philosophers writing about what happens if you follow those thoughts...

IF I had a thought about the boringness of "seeing the same damn thing again and again", that's not an Event in my mind that needs a special verb attached to it.

I just know those thoughts occur and Schopenhauer knows better than I do, what life is like if you follow and grow that particular thought.

I really wonder how we're supposed to survive the experiences of pleasure and pain, positive/negative, happy/sad, whatever... without a philosophy to validate our experiences.

People can think negatively (or positively) all they want, in my view, as long as it's connected to their philosophy managing their experiences.

The problems occur when you let the experiences of feeings/emotions reinforce arbitrary thoughts, and cloud/submerge/drown the ability to rationalize your way out of trouble.

Somehow relevant piece of art, .gif animation, from Portuguese artist André Carrilho. Title:

Bad memories

https://cdn.myportfolio.com/453a92f80b154a9480bc9e2ebcb57c99...

That's a great piece of art, but maybe a content warning for gore-y content would be in order.

Did not perceive it as such. It is metaphorical. And it is an animated illustration (as opposed to realistic depiction).

Actually, the first reference is the scan (the slices are MRI), so an image of analysis. Then, the slicer can suggest removal (of the «bad memories»).

If anybody perceived it as sensational, they should go beyond the impact and perceive it as operational, or as sympathetical (your fellow man is performing his burden - where a bit of apprehension for the in-a-perspective "painful" act is shared experience).

I would definitely categorize it as "gory". I can almost "feel" the slicing, the moment I look at it. It's not like I can control my perception like you say, even if I tried: the interpretation and emotional/body reaction happens before that. I can intellectually ADD information, but by that not really resolve what the "emotional brain" does.

> I can almost "feel" ... the moment I look at it

That should not happen. It is as if you could feel what is happening inside "Tom and Jerry" and "Road Runner". Certainly Hanna, Barbera, Jones and Maltese did not even remotely mean to induce sensational sympathy. Similarly, Carrilho is expressing concepts through visual art, with the usual mechanism of "subject and object" - detached, it is implied.

Allow me to suggest: you may have acquired that "open channel allowing influence" as a habit, like a posture. It should slowly recede through the constant conscience that the spectator is detached and the sensational influence is an improper disposition that must be (naturally, automatically - it will gradually come with the conscience) corrected.

The WHO has a guide for "unhooking from difficult thoughts and feelings". At one point it says "You cannot stop these thoughts from arising. They are normal and natural. But it is not so helpful to get hooked by them." and then goes on to explain some simple practices to help unhook. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003927 Here's more detail about how it was tested. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/2022-apri...

Old school philosophy and religions are right once again!

Ever since I built my shrine to Zoroaster my sorghum harvest has been enormous

Religion isn’t a solo act.

I am sorry for the confusion; I should clarify that I am not Zoroaster. It is me and my buddy, Zoroaster

Indeed, Zoroaster has really been dropping the ball in matters regarding sorghum. :-(

Enough already, it's 2023 and I feel like having to maintain legacy sorghum support is just holding religion back. I say drop it out right and focus your prayers on quinoa.

Quinoa has a dedicated deity from the Inca pantheon, Mama Quinoa. I would assume that would provide the best support

In my search for more information on Mama Quinoa I found a website (https://www.godchecker.com/inca-mythology/QUINOA-MAMA/) that looks like a rabbit hole that I am going to fall down. I hope your pleased with yourself.

Almost like these arose as functional elements of society across time because they assisted those who followed them in outlasting their competitors. Weird.

They're stable and self-perpetuating, that doesn't make them better. There are plenty of abhorrent beliefs that also "stood the test of time".

Thinking about the fertility crisis facing most of the world has made me rethink the foundations of a 'good' society. People who have more education, income, intelligence, and secularity are simply not reproducing in anywhere even remotely near sustainable levels. So what's going to happen? These traits will naturally be removed from society, up until the point that this trend reverses.

So we will essentially be defacto empowering many of the views that you may consider undesirable. It really makes one rethink the relevance and place of sustainability. It seems that on any timescale that matters, it must be considered the most fundamentally critical value of any culture. Because in some ways society really is a sort of expanding zero-sum game. When one group declines, another group defacto rises.

It's really annoying that there seems to be little to nothing in the way of a compromise between indulgent excesses driving the death of procreation on one end, and 'trust nothing but the Book' driving successful procreation on the other. There needs be some sort of a cultural medium.

> Because in some ways society really is a sort of expanding zero-sum game. When one group declines, another group defacto rises.

Yeah, in exponential processes, the exact value of the base matters exponentially.

I think you’ll find that for the most part beliefs that are present across religions are pro-adaptive in the economic and technological contexts in which they arise. I also think people fail to appreciate how much their own worldview reflects the religious tradition of their community. Coming from an eastern tradition, western secular humanism seems like an “ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of” Christianity.

> I think you’ll find that for the most part beliefs that are present across religions are pro-adaptive in the economic and technological contexts in which they arise.

True! But we have to remain open to the possibility that any such belief could represent a local maximum, roughly analogous to Ptolemaic astronomy or Newtonian physics: Serviceable in limited contexts but falling apart in others.

> western secular humanism seems like an “ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of” Christianity.

Which half of Christianity would that be?

Being serious now: Christianity — the version actually preached by Y'shua of Nazareth — is simply Judaism stripped down to two specific commandments from the Hebrew Bible: Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. See the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37 ("Do this and you will live [eternally]") [0] and its counterpart in Matt. 22:34-40 ("On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets"). [1] Jesus wasn't trying to start a new religion: He wanted Jews to be better Jews, and he seems only reluctantly to have concerned himself with non-Jews.

What we now think of as "Christianity" and its doctrines of the Triune God, soteriology (how "salvation" is achieved), and christology (what was the nature of Jesus): Those came later — in some cases, much later — from others, not from Jesus himself, so far as we know.

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010%3A25-...

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt.+22%3A34-4...

There's a book called Why We Need Religion[0] and I believe the main premise is that religions have practices and beliefs that help us process emotions.

[0]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-we-need-religion-stephen-t-...

I am personally atheist/apathetic. The closest thing you could get me to profess a religious fervour to is exercise (or martial arts) and mother nature. That said, I am a huge proponent of religion and can see how it is so important to people like my mother.

She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as someone who has clawed her way through a poverty most people in this world will only ever read about, she has known what difficulty can be. Faith keeps her positive and kind and generous. She finds it in herself to let go of anger and to forgive thanks to her belief in God.

So you're bang on the mark - my personal observations agree that religion helps us process emotions.

Seen through the lens of a social technology, we've replaced religion with consumerism and individualism, and social media has encouraged unchecked mammon. And so we're having to relearn everything old as new again.

Confession and grace are parts of the toolkit in therapy. Breathing techniques from yoga, wim hof and meditation are doing the rounds. The presence of song and chanting in many religions seems like a decent overlap...

Then at times of the highest reported rates of loneliness, especially amongst the young, what did religion give us - a local community.

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...

Even in light of what the Christian Nationalist movement is striving towards in the US, and in light of the ugly persistence of fundamentalism in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan?

I wonder if it's like any technology and trade offs between helping/hurting people. If religions help 95% of people be more loving and 5% be more hateful, would it be a net benefit? Does it depend what those 5% do with the hate or the 95% with the love? What if the percentages were different?

Obviously an overly simplistic thought experiment, yet I wonder if we have any way, that isn't arbitrary, to say if a tool is net beneficial.

Side note...I've often played with the idea in the past of what I called the case for moral superposition: nothing is good or bad, everything is good AND bad, but thinking makes it good OR bad.

It's more like 50/50, though. So in practice it mostly just amplifies authoritarians telling us to either submit or go to hell. The other (loving) half gets so non confrontational we never hear of them again.

I think the "loving" half is often not fully loving but other-loving and self-hating.

"I feel annoyed that this person is doing this thing. But if I say something, they may feel angry, so I won't say something... And then will fight against myself instead."

Religious people are not more loving then the rest.

If a religion be the cause of hatred and disharmony, it would be better for it not to exist

Any religion which is not a cause of love and unity is no religion.

[dead]

I really appreciate you answering in such detail and feel grateful that your mother has found such an anchor to keep her faith in humanity, herself, and beyond. What a blessing for her, for you, and for all of those her life touches. Thank you.

Atheists believe in evolution; evolution believes in religion.

It's all about Recency and Frequency. Reliving terrible events to adjust to terrible events is just re traumatizing. Putting distance between your current self and a trauma just seems smart.

Serenity now

I heard a saying once, something like, "thinking too much about the past causes depression and thinking too much about the future causes anxiety." In other words stay in the present as much as possible and fend off invasive thoughts with distractions, hobbies, and helping others.

When ever this notion comes up i cant help but wonder how good crashing and burning thanks to ignoring reality is for your mental health.

Just because stuff isnt nice doesnt mean its safe to ignore. Its worth mentioning that dealing with negative thoughts and experiences is part of how we grow as people. Its why Bambis mother got shot in a Disney movie. Because sooner or later, kids have to deal with harsh stuff. Unfortunately adults do too.

Their example, a parent with covid in a hospital, is a good one. This is serious stuff you need to come to terms with. If that seems overly harsh or depressing, i find Stanley Kubricks words about the indifference of the universe quite helpful. (Starting from "If life is so purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living?") https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/07/26/stanley-kubrick-pl...

In the end all we can do is decide how we want to deal with reality. Unless we want to later deal with the consequences of not having done so.

I regularly dismiss thoughts that are distressing but not at all necessary to dwell on. For instance, sometimes when I'm working, a certain problem I'm having or technology I'm working with will remind me of some stressful work situation I've had in the past. There's no reason to relitigate some bullshit that happened years ago, so I do my best to set it aside. I'm not ignoring any important reality, none of that matters anymore. There's nothing further for me to learn from the situation, I've already analyzed it to death and there's no new information available.

So the healthy thing to do is recognize that this is a spurious signal from my brain. It's relevance is only tangential, and dwelling on it would be stressful and unproductive; it's utility is negative, and it should be filtered out as noise.

You brain generates a bunch of signals and many of them just don't matter. It's not much different from finding shapes in clouds. But watching clouds is pleasant and easily stopped, so there's no harm in it. But ruminating is damaging and can be difficult to break out of if you get too far along in the process.

Thanks for the feedback. I think this boils down to your ability to determine what is beneficial to revisit and what isnt. I would argue if you are able to differentiate the two reliably and are further able to tell that

>There's nothing further for me to learn from the situation

its unlikely that you are suppressing anything. To be at that point you have to had dealt with it already and are just not getting hung up on the past anymore. Which you arguably shouldnt, having dealt with the situation means you know what to look out for in the future to not become that version of yourself again. There is nothing left to suppress here, people arent a static entity through time.

Suppression for me implies not having dealt with the situation and not having learnt its lessons. Otherwise you wouldnt need to suppress it.

The whole thread is really a great showcase for assumed attribution of meaning and the inherit loss in complexity in language.

For sure. That is how I would generally use "suppress," I think that's the common conception, but the article seems to be using it more in the sense of shrugging something off; they're asking participants to refrain from imagining certain scenarios while presenting them with stressors.

I agree about language and it's been my experience that many disagreements boil down to using different definitions for the same term. Tangentially, I have a personal project that's a sort of "individual urban dictionary" to try and help people avoid such confusion, by enabling them to define their terminology and provide links to it, but it's on the back burner.

I have been thinking about something similar. I think its usability will drastically improve once you are able to find overlaps and differences in meaning between the perspectives of different people/ideas. I would also suspect that it would be uncommon to not at least fall back on some ingroup definitions, even just for practical reasons. After all, it will likely be rare to learn new vocabulary for individual people. Focusing on overlaps and differences together with some kind of color coding should reduce the usage hurdle further.

However, i think the topic overlaps with (outer) alignment. Even if its just so you have a shared reference point (goals) from which you can make sense of meaning. If you dont every dictionary entry will need to stand on its own with information overload likely showing up fast. A minimum approach should further help to prevent trying to build another babel tower.

That's interesting. With sufficient data we could probably train a model to come up with an embedding for the definition, and another model to identify which particular passages contribute most to a difference in the embedding (in order to highlight).

If you would be interested in providing feedback on early versions of the project, drop me an email. Likewise, if you pursue a project like that, I'd love to hear about it. No pressure though, and it will probably be two months before I am able to resume the project and start deploying prototypes.

I cant promise anything, especially as i am still pondering the overall scope of the project, but if this turns into something i will hopefully make contact.

I am still considering the benefits and possibility of upfront structuring of information, knowledge, certainty and errors but information- and complexity overload is a real pain. Which also means i am keeping a bit of a distance to committing to how the end result should look. Especially as this is one of these projects that needs to be effortlessly integrated into an individuals existing process to be usable. At which point you might as well improve that process while you are at it.

Your approach on the other hand sounds quite practical, lets say combined with some hypertext structure like project xanadu or the hover boxes of lesswrong. The question would be how good the results get. Anyway, good luck, i think this could be quite beneficial.

Projects/Concepts you might (not) find interesting:

* Taiwan has a process called gov0 (gov zero), a communication channel aimed at re-framing proposed laws in a way that allow for reaching consensus. Currently done manually but consensus finding seems to be a key part of communication.

* Cognitive sciences / biases / warfare / behavior therapy. As well as processes aimed at capturing the human error, like crew resource management for pilots. All concerned with errors in our own perception and thinking * Juliane Gallinas TED talks

* Ontology vs epistemology, quite important for people with a CS background in my experience. I like to think of it in terms of complexity reduction in the context of information theory similar to an analog digital converter.

* The 5 level explanation series from WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raHM3k-uR0E

Especially the last one is a great example that communication is likely not a matter of finding THE description, but one of connecting your perspective to a topic/concept. Here it works through iterative reduction/increase of complexity, but working from related concepts should also be possible. Lets say one explanation for an engineer and one for a psychologist.

The post itself is also a good example for the the difficulty of communicating (after identifying and isolating) what is relevant and the necessity to cut what isnt. Which will differ depending on ones perspective and goals. I suspect the same effect does occur if you ask people to define the vocabulary they use themselves. Thus the focus on agreeing on the meaningful difference/overlap instead.

You don't need to dwell on it either - and that's the issue, most people dwell on it, because they're taught that all feelings are good and valid, and should be explored, my own experience says the opposite, not all feelings deserve exploration, and too much navel gazing is bad for ones mental health.

However, not being able to explore such feelings ends up making you an unsympathetic person, as you cannot bare these feelings with others.

Another argument is that you are denying yourself of the experience of being human. These feelings exist for a reason, just as physical pain exists for a reason. You wouldn't hurt yourself on purpose (or maybe you do c;), but physical pain helps you stay safe. I feel this is the same purpose of negative feelings.

Finally, I have found out that suppressing these feelings does not allow you to fully process and heal from the events that trigger them.

"Suppress" seems to be a loaded word.

In the context of "denying it exists", yes, it's clear to see that it's not possible to process the negative feelings if not explored.

But the positive interpretation would be to not spin on these thoughts endlessly. It's a trap for all of us and obsessing over hurts doesn't serve us well either.

I have a theory I call "the emotional digestive system": we take in these hurts, taste them, chew on them. Then they digest. If the process is working well, we shit them out.

I dont disagree. But there is a big difference between not getting attached and pulled around by your negative thoughts and just ignoring them.

The way out is agency over how you deal with reality, not better blindfolds in the short term.

That's not the point of the study. Many negative thoughts are safe to ignore. There's a difference in dealing with realitiy and wallowing in negativity for its own sake, or because of some freudian bullshit.

>That's not the point of the study.

Be that as it may, there is a big difference between not wallowing and ignoring/suppressing something. Especially if you leave Freud out.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppress

Suppression implies force and a struggle. Its quite different from not dwelling.

I am pretty sure we are talking two ends of the same spectrum with an upper and a lower bound. The reason its worth pointing out is that the simplification otherwise creates new problems due to overcorrecting. While not pointlessly dwelling on negative stuff is certainly good advice, it doesnt mean suppressing negative stuff you havent dealt with is a good idea in the long run. Suppressing the knowledge of information that create negative emotions is a bad idea since its very likely valuable information you will need in the future to not repeat your mistakes. One is a problem with agency over emotions and reactions, one is a practical functional problem.

I think the reference to Freud and suppression might be a not thought through attention grab on part of the authors. Different to what their press statement says, what they have found does not run counter to accepted narratives. While i sympathize with the need for funding, this is a dumb spin.

Not wallowing in negative emotions can be a struggle.

Indeed, but i would argue that this is a good indicator that you have room for improvement here. Which i found to be amazing news.

For example, depression is often characterized by black and white thinking and getting tunnel vision. You become so focused on the worst things you can come up with being true that you loose sight of your perspective being incomplete and the stress makes it harder and harder to snap out. Which results in either incomplete or erroneous conclusions you still hold with conviction. After all, you know X to be true and as a result that you are doomed to experience Y. So unless you are the only human not functioning this way, you have good chances of changing your experience without resorting to supression.

I think the difference in dealing with these patterns manifesting comes from insight. You can try to suppress that initial bad insight temporarily or you can come to terms what is happening to you and how much you should care about what at which time. A lot easier said then done sure, but going full suppression seems like really bad advice. Be it through distraction or a bottle, you sooner or later will be confronted with a distorted self image again.

At that point you are getting countermeasures for distortions and unrealistic expectations. You might get used to them, but they were just distortions. Getting used to them might have not been a good idea. Even if you reduce suffering, you are establishing a new higher normal.

I get that this sounds a lot like Freud, but i am looking at this more from a human error perspective. Its not much different from cognitive biases, its part of how the mind comes to erroneous / incomplete conclusions and how these can create negative feedback loops. Making the first step suppression instead of introspection seems really counterproductive. You are kind of stuck with your brain and might as well optimize some. Some agency is achievable and it often doesnt need to be hard. No sense in being sad about your brain being buggy. Brains just are.

Looking into the void is the only solution. If you aren't fixed, look deeper. You will find it.

The idea of suppressed/repressed thoughts and feelings came from psychoanalysis, it doesn't surprise me that like most ideas of that pseudoscience, it's a bad one. I think lithotherapy might be less toxic.

What I found out in my discovery of Complex PTSD is the concept of the emotional flashback. That is, an event or situation triggers distant memories, and we relive it through emotions rather than conscious thought. This explains preverbal childhood traumas, and repeated traumas that do not resolve to a single memory or experience. They built up over time and they consistently elicited in us negative emotions and the associated physiological discomfort. It gets to a point where it becomes irrational, that we are afraid of our own shadows because it is so uncomfortable for us to relive traumas and re-experience emotions, but they are nonverbal, nonvisual, and nonspecific, so we weren't sure why we were being triggered in the first place.

I have missing memories. I can remember significant events in my childhood and they are mostly traumatic. Sometimes, I have attempted to explore the good times and find pleasurable memories. They are there, but they're overwhelmed by the ones that wounded me. Sometimes I'm told about my past by a third party, often by my primary abuser, who has an outstanding memory. I think that soon I should try to explore those good memories again. I wish I had a therapist to guide me.

If you are present and highly aware you never need to suppress anything ever again. One needs to meditate. Learn to meditate. Stop relying in science for answers

The most important to learn is to vigilant about passing and automatic thoughts.

When you're conscious about them, it helps a lot.

Dehumanizing people mentally instead of thinking negative thoughts about them goes further!

This is fine

Too much navel gazing being bad, is I think almost obvious enough to not require study.

I just wished more people practiced it.

Thats an unfair simplification the article doesnt allow for. There is no reason to throw out introspection with not engaging with toxic thought patterns. Especially as a lack of the former often leads to a helplessness regarding the later.

See, daydreaming helps

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Suppressing negative thoughts is a fool’s errand. You can notice them, and react differently to them, but you can’t literally control the thoughts that arise in your consciousness. You’ll work yourself to death trying.

What you call “reacting differently to” negative thoughts is sort of what the article means by “suppressing”.

A negative thought is often a right turn on a mental track that leads down a dark hole full of more negative thoughts. You may notice the initial one, but by choosing not to go down the hole, you have in a sense “suppressed” all the negative thoughts that were waiting there.

“Following training – both immediately and after three months – participants reported that suppressed events were less vivid and less fearful. They also found themselves thinking about these events less.”

“In general, people with worse mental health symptoms at the outset of the study improved more after suppression training, but only if they suppressed their fears. This finding directly contradicts the notion that suppression is a maladaptive coping process.

Suppressing negative thoughts did not lead to a ‘rebound’, where a participant recalled these events more vividly. Only one person out of 120 showed higher detail recall for suppressed items post-training, and just six of the 61 participants that suppressed fears reported increased vividness for No-Imagine items post-training, but this was in line with the baseline rate of vividness increases that occurred for events that were not suppressed at all.

“What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative,” said Professor Anderson. “Although more work will be needed to confirm the findings, it seems like it is possible and could even be potentially beneficial to actively suppress our fearful thoughts.””

You can recognize them and tell yourself to not keep thinking about it. You may not be able to suppress the initial thoughts, but you can recognize your own distortions that negative thoughts lead to and not allow yourself to keep on the subject. It can help prevent future negative thoughts. It takes some work, but it's one of the strategies that cognitive behavioral therapy teaches you, and it really helps a lot of people!

Yes, you can achieve mastery over your train of thought.

I do not like the article's use of "suppress" as it is an active and forceful word, that connotes some sort of combat or struggle over the thoughts. It's the struggle that will get you in trouble.

It also depends on the nature of the thoughts and our relationship to them. Sometimes we need to work through negative events, process them, deal with them. This study appeared to focus on future imagined events, which are clearly different, and many of us fall victim to catastrophizing, ruminating, and worrying about things that may never happen, or things over which we have no control.

Practicing centering prayer, or mindfulness meditation, it is a discipline to master our thoughts and not allow them to dominate us. Rather than "suppressing" negative thoughts, they can just be neutrally acknowledged, and released without engaging them. In fact, all manner of thoughts and ideas can be treated this way during a meditation, and we will find that nothing in our mundane lives is so important or devastating that it could take the place of God.

But yes, you can get to a certain age, and with a lack of developed discipline, you will feel trapped and powerless to "control" those thoughts, and the first attempts will feel futile. But it's certainly possible and achievable.

>“We’re all familiar with the Freudian idea that if we suppress our feelings or thoughts, then these thoughts remain in our unconscious, influencing our behaviour and wellbeing perniciously,”

The article conflates thoughts and feeling.

Thoughts and emotions are not the same.

Reducing negative thoughts is standard practice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_negative_thoughts

I'm not aware of any professional who recommends suppressing negative emotions.