I recently ran across a question on Reddit r/selfhelp about how to pick yourself up when emotions are weighing you down. This past year has taken a toll on our mental health. If you’ve found yourself feeling sluggish, heavy, lethargic, or flat-out depressed, you’re most certainly not alone. Here are a couple things that work for me (I am not a doctor, so don’t take this as medical advice).
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Optimistic people are better.
They have fewer heart issues, live longer, experience less post-operative pain, heal faster, and have been linked with better athletic performance. Meanwhile, pessimism and anxiety have been connected with chronic inflammation, depression, and can even cause people to misread social cues.
As a pessimistic and anxiety-ridden person - that is, one who expects negative future outcomes - the mystical, perhaps not as well researched, studies heralding optimism as a panacea to all ills do not interest me. I just feel immense stress and panic constantly and want it to end. But other than vague remonstrations to “stay upbeat” or “exercise more” there isn’t really a robust system to change mindset. Furthermore, psychological tests to determine a person’s level of optimism and pessimism are vague, relying on memory, feeling, and generalities.
Over the last 90 days I’ve noted the number of discrete, moment-to-moment instances of anxiety I’ve experienced using a simple hand tally counter. After each day I recorded the number in order to obtain a more accurate metric. I’ve written about this here:
Glass Half Full: 90 Days of Tally Clicking Pessimism to Optimism
Glass Half Full Day 16: The Thanksgiving Blues
Glass Half Full Day 25: Mythology
Glass Half Full Day 85: Under Pressure
As with other vices, my “tally clicking” system simultaneously diminishes mental habits, charting the change across time. I also took a battery of more traditional psychological tests for various facets of mindset to provide a before and after snapshot.
Before and after tests:
Revised Life Orientation Test (LOT-R): 1/40 (Before), 20/40 (After)
Optimism/Pessimism Test (SeeMyPersonality.com): 100 % Pessimist (Before), 50% Pessimist (After)
Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS): 1.75/7 Happy (Before), 3/7 Happy (After)
Oxford Happiness Scale: 2.27/6 Happy (Before - Not happy/Somewhat Happy), 4.52 (Moderately Happy/Average person)
Mental Fatigue Scale (MFS): 16.5/40 (Before), 8.5/40 (After)
Yes and no.
As the graph and the tests indicate, the changes were massive.
Incidences of anxiety decreased, and most of the anxiety/cynicism/optimism scales changed positively by 50%. In addition, my mental fatigue got significantly better, confirming my suspicion that this would affect other mental processes.
But in the few days after the challenge some of the anxiety returned, leading me to conclude that for a large scale, permanent change this is just the beginning – but a very good beginning.
Throughout the challenge I noticed certain patterns to my anxiety. I tend to get nervous in the morning and at night. I also noted different vectors of emotion:
Depression - which seemed to be past facing and tends to get better with gratitude.
Jealousy - a present facing, comparison-based phenomenon that gets better with compassion.
Anxiety/optimism/cynicism - future facing, improving with reframes .
Other vectors, like energy and happiness
The project started with simply tallying and recording all instances of anxiety during the day. Early on I added a simple mental reframe - “what if it all goes perfectly?” - after every click. Halfway through the project I added another action - cherry picking evidence of the past where things in that situation went well. Unfortunately I wasn’t as diligent when I did this.
The pattern to this in terms of the graph was pretty similar to other instances of tally clicking (alcohol, food, beer) . And the internal feelings progressed similarly. It first started with a weird sensation of reordering in the mind. I began to catch a precursor to anxiety and counter it. My mind then focused on imaginary situations - whether just pure fantasy or dream scenarios – where vices or anxiety would pop up. Spontaneous optimism popped up significantly more throughout the day.
One unforeseen benefit was how it affected other people. I found myself automatically verbalizing positive positioning on events. I was also able to help out people and influence their thinking in many stressful instances.
I did not click general, formless anxiety (like being stymied in life or work), nor did I click very minute instances like the ones that cause me to tap my fingers or pick at my lip. Predictably, those did not diminish during the course of the challenge. It was also sometimes difficult differentiating between concern over outcomes in order to adequately plan versus becoming consumed with irrational fear over negative outcomes.
I think I’m on the right path.
As a diagnostic and metric tool, this method is far superior to the standbys. There is a visual map of day-to-day improvement that is clear and not as reliant on generalities as the normal psychological tests. It also provides tools for changing mindset in the moment, something that can’t be stressed enough.
But I believe this challenge needs to be taken further to become totally ingrained. It confirmed my early suspicion that removing anxiety is only a part of the equation. One also has to add positivity. I believe the best way to do this is just regular click training. And I intend to do another 90 day challenge to do just that.
Over the holidays Lydia’s family had an Indian food night. Cooking Indian food for anyone gets me stressed. As an Indian, there’s a tacit obligation to get it right, and I tend to be a perfectionist in the kitchen, so the pressure is on - literally in this case since we were using pressure cooker recipes. Everything went wrong - temperatures didn’t get high enough on the grill, two pressure cookers just stopped working, and we had to adapt to get everything done in time.
While I was primed to worry, my mind was steady - I didn’t even have to click. Inside I was stoic, repeatedly stating - “Hey sometimes things go wrong” and “what if it all turns out great?”. I was even able to offer this calm fatalism to other people who were stressing out. I can’t tell you how different this is to what I’m usually like inside. So while I might not always be so Zen, this case alone is proof enough that tally clicking is making a solid change.
Here’s my data for the last 85 days:
Since my last update, I got stressed out from deadlines, small things like crossing the street, driving, or trying new things like classes, cooking devices, and restaurants. I had larger bouts of frustration at life in general. I was nervous, sad, depressed, and jealous, but as the chart shows, I was less and less anxious.
As before, there were many instances where I observed a proto-cynical thought form, catching it and automatically reframing it before it solidified into full blown negativity. I experienced more spontaneous optimism, gratitude, and the warm regard of other people, feelings that are alien in my normal mental frame.
But my project also left impressions on other people.
Lydia said I seemed generally less sad with fewer bouts of true depression. When I did get anxious, she noticed I bounced back quickly. And vice versa - I heard Lydia automatically use my “what if it turns out perfectly?” reframe right after she said something cynical. It’s yet another example of how the optimism/pessimism spectrum subtly influences people around me.
I also found greater clarification in what counts and what doesn’t in this project. Many cases of life frustration or irritation at people weren’t necessarily future projected prophecies of failure. I had instances of general worry that weren’t really directed at anything, which I didn’t click. Nor did I click away very minute behaviors, like tapping fingers, feet, or picking at my lips. Examined closely, it was difficult to see if this was just nervous energy or bona fide worry.
My mother and I had a fantastic discussion on how we both fuse worry with problem solving. We are both concerned that we will collapse into laziness and procrastination without anxiety. But I believe there is a third option - becoming a person who is both an efficient problem solver and anxiety free. Lydia, for example, doesn’t really have recursive, energy draining negativity, but yet she still gets things done. I’m beginning to distinguish the line between calm concern over my plans (like I felt while cooking) and depleting energy over an outcome I can’t change.
There were also unusual instances that defied categorization.
The first was imaginary scenarios: memories of anxiety, or reading books where a character would get anxious would get me get a bit nervous in the present. I’d also have fantasies of interactions where I got a chance to unleash my anger.
Originally I didn’t know whether or not I should include these in my clicking, but I realized that many of my previous attempts at vice removal eventually got into changed behaviors in dream states. In fact, I think that these liminal states are quite telling of deeper change.
Back in reality, I also realized that I had few instances of social anxiety - perhaps because socializing generally gives me something else to concentrate on. But people bothered me in other ways. I’d future project negative judgements of people I got an annoying first impression of. Though, when I actually interacted with them, I found they were quite nice and not at all like I had initially assumed.
Cynicism has far larger reaching consequences than I originally thought.
I tend to hate people when I first meet them. I usually stop going to group meetings because of my prejudgements of how everyone will probably act. I have serious issues making plans accurately, and I feel that might be connected to how often I project the future so negatively.
—
Our Indian feast was more than just a success – some of the dishes were the best I’ve ever cooked. I’m glad this project got me to a point where I didn’t have to worry about circumstances beyond my control. But something is still missing. After the 90 days are up, I want do more than simply remove mental conditioning - I want to add more positivity into my life. I want to be that eternal optimist, not just for myself, but the people around me. And I think basic click training might help me do just that.
photocred: pressure gauge by Cory Denton, grumpy cat by Richard Walker, dreamcatcher by Scott Schwartz, emotions AbsolutVision
One of the best things about rap is the way artists continually remythologize themselves. Ludacris “gave Bill Gates some binoculars and said look out for me!” while Drake reminds us that he and his crew “started from the bottom now we here”.
On week 3 of my experiment to tally click pessimism, I realize just how much I continually create my own story in small moments throughout the day.
Here’s my data:
One thing I noticed this week is that I’m not noting detailed, minute anxiety - like why I’m picking my lip. I used to count all of this in my dynamic meditation experiment several years ago. That might be something to add as I progress.
The small bits of anxiety I did notice this week were:
Interpersonal events, like whether a food delivery order would go ok in the handoff.
Decision making. For example, when trying to decide where to go out to eat, I got nervous over whether my choice of food would be perfect.
Unusual feelings. I recently had several work-related successes and it lead to nervousness. I’m not used to success at work, and this anxiety emerged from a sense of difference, which added on to a host of identity issues.
Lack of worry. Momentary anxiety reared its head when I didn’t have anything to fret about. I could feel my mind actively searching. But this wasn’t future projected. It was just being nervous and anxious in the present, which was really weird.
I also felt that same sort of momentary negativity with sadness.
Last week I mentioned a sense of sadness for no reason, one connected to awe. This week I had a deep sense of feeling stuck in amber as everything went by, and it reminded me of an episode of Parks and Rec. Ron Swanson, the show’s old school paragon of gruff masculinity, is teaching the boys in the area to camp. It’s filled with misery - a smoky fire, baked beans, real manly stoic stuff - while the rival version of the Girl Scouts has a smorgasbord of fun activities courtesy of their eternally optimistic leader, Lesley Knope.
Ron’s boys abandon him for Lesley’s version of the Scouts, and he’s left alone. Lesley asks him to enter the circle of warmth and community but he quietly refuses. The world has past him by, but it’s who he is, and he will not change. For Ron it’s not a depressed hopelessness, but one filled with an odd sense of peace and acceptance.
At first glance, it’s not a cynical, future projection of bad times to come. But I think the sadness is very similar to loneliness and creates a negative mythology. It assumes there are no others like you, and as time goes on the world moves in a way that selects fewer people like you.
But there was also a lot of positivity this week.
I had several spontaneously optimistic thoughts looking towards the future, often powered by gratitude. I thought about how I was lucky being born in this time, that everything was working out for me. And that’s a rarity - I have to deliberately practice gratefulness, so having it manifest on its own was huge. I also spontaneous reframed several negative statements by immediately telling myself “what if I make the perfect choice?”
And while this felt good for me, it also effected others. At one point Lydia said something cynical and I automatically asked her “What if this turns out perfect? What if all this worry is for nothing?”
This project is quite selfish, but moments like this spur me on even more, showing me how I can potentially become a person who uplifts those around me.
And that lead me to times when friends cheered me up. My old roommate use to be my confidant for all the drama that went on in my college years. After I moaned over a new trial he’d say “yeah, but at least things are interesting, right?” It’s a good story, and isn’t it even better if it’s an underdog tale, when, like Drake says, you started from the bottom?
My reflections this week helped me update my protocol.
I naturally future project cynicism and cherry pick evidence from the past to bolster that prophecy. Why not hack that? From now on, after reframing the situation, I’m also going to dip into the past to select a bit of positive evidence.
Let’s take the earlier example of a food delivery gone wrong.
Once I notice myself future projecting nervousness at how it could potentially go wrong I will:
[CLICK my tally counter] + [REFRAME = “what if this delivery goes perfeectly”] + [FIND POSITIVE PAST EVIDENCE = “the last time I ordered something it went perfectly”]
What’s interesting is how so many rappers do this. They take all the bad things of the past and use it to tell a better story where they become great. Your identity may be your past, present, and future, but active reframes retell that story from moment to moment.
But I’ll leave Kanye and Eminem to become rap gods. I’ll just settle for becoming an optimist.
photocred: statue of Alexander by Herbert Frank, boat by lensnmatter, broken car mirror by Agustín Ruiz
During the last few weeks I’ve been tally clicking my pessimism. It culminated in a fantastic long weekend with family and friends. While the postcard image of a Thanksgiving feast is family seated peacefully around a dinner table expressing gratefulness, the actuality is saturated with worry. This was definitely the case with me. I clicked away while fretting constantly about the cook on the turkey or if the guests would socialize well.
Here’s my data so far:
On Day 5 there were two mental moments that I can only describe as a coalescence - a gathering feeling of subtle mental tensing that is a precursor to a thought. As I automatically zoomed in to observe it, it dissipated, not quite crystalizing into full blown negativity. This happened a lot in my first attempt at “dynamic meditation” 5 years ago. While the original experiment didn’t last very long, I started constantly noticing these precursors and dispersing them. My friend once described something similar. He said he sometimes had the ability to banish negativity by what felt like relaxing the “muscles” of the brain.
The other interesting issue was entangled timelines.
The flow of how anxiety progresses is fascinating. I’ll get frustrated, future project how bad my life will be, then dip into the past and cherry pick evidence for that failed future. This happens in an instant, and it takes practice to zoom in and untangled that web.
Loneliness came up a lot in these two weeks. If I zoomed in, it unfolded as a sadness of how this time in my life is devoid of any of the rich sense of community it once had. But if I look even more deeply it’s the future projection of a life of where I’m always lonely that’s so difficult to bear.
This is a point where depression and anxiety merge with identity issues. It makes me understand why Eastern religions are so obsessed with the sense of self as the root of all suffering. All these pessimistic projections rest on the belief of a persistent identity that’s not good enough.
Thanksgiving really is a great metaphor for this. Someone once said that anxiety is looking towards the future with worry, while depression is looking towards the past. I tend to agree. The antidote to depression appears to be gratitude. It underscores past experiences that were good instead of what most of us do, which is artificially emphasize the bad. Once gratitude gets going, it feels like counting blessings that we haven’t earned, and we begin to feel lucky.
Affirmations as I’m doing them now appear to be the antidote to worry. In the absence of evidence, you can equally reframe the current situation as turning out well.
It is supremely ironic that giving thanks is a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually come up on Thanksgiving. No wonder people are so stressed out.
But anxiety and depression aren’t all there is - there are outliers in the tangled knots of negativity in my head.
The first is jealousy, which can be an issue with the present. I’ll scroll on Instagram and won’t like how I measure up to what I see. Gratitude is good for that, but a really good counter is metta - essentially wishing people well as people who, like us, just want to live a good life free from suffering. It’s a knack - and for me it’s a practice of understanding them as complete people rather than snippets we’re given glimpses of on social media.
This is also temporally entangled. When I zoom in to observe the emotion, I’m not just comparing my current state to them; it’s also a future projection of how I will never be the person I’m jealous of, a future lens to judge the present.
There are moments of anxiety and sadness that are even more difficult to parse. There was a moment while I was driving around before Thanksgiving where I looked up at the sky, with its expanse of clouds slowly moving in the distance, and felt utterly overwhelmed with a deep sadness.
In this Men’s Health article, Michael Behar discusses awe and its powerful effect on humans. I’ve personally felt this sense of glory and wonder on my travels. It’s both deeply healing and life affirming. The Stoics might call it a view from above - a realization that what I’m worried about is like making a mountain out of a molehill.
But sometimes such experiences give me the feeling that I will never be anything but insignificant. It reminds me of my mortality, frailty, and lack of true agency. Is this pessimism? I don’t know.
In the past weeks I’ve found new reframes to match these unusual outliers. Some great ones come from Arnold Schwarzenegger in the documentary Pumping Iron. In it he says that sometimes he feels the pain he experiences in the gym is overwhelming, a pain few people will ever endure. But that’s how he knows he’s going to be one of the greats. I like this idea of loving pain as a harbinger of better times.
Another reframe is a simple question that’s particularly salient on thanksgiving - “What if it all turns out perfect?” Lydia has posed this question a lot, and it makes my brain hurt. For a moment it’s as though my mind is trying to hold both modalities – the negative and positive – at once. I can only assume this is a good thing.
On day 8 I had several spontaneous moments of utter optimism. They’ve periodically come up since then, but it reminds me of an old Reddit thread describing a girl click training happiness. This is much more in line with how classic click training works. It also makes me wonder if there are two separate trainings here: 1) what I’m doing now, clicking AWAY negativity and 2) what this girl was doing - increasing and rewarding the act of having good thoughts. There seems to be an overlap, but only time will tell which one is better.
—
It’s been a struggle changing the course of this river of worry. I was distraught about my cooking and if it would turn out well. It did, and all the tension was needless. My mind has already turned to new fears. But what if, as Lydia is so eager to remind me, those also turn out well?
photocred: turkey by Carol von Canon
“What fresh hell awaits me now?”
That’s the usual thought going through my head before I open my email.
“What’s the point when it’s all definitively going to end in ruin?”
It’s really a wonder I get anything done at all.
I’ve always considered myself a pessimist, but to figure out just how bad it is I decided to take every related psychological test I could get my hands on.
I found that not only am I a pessimist (rated 100% pessimist on one test), but I have low self-esteem, high anxiety, low subjective happiness, depression, and high mental fatigue, all of which I believe is highly connected to my mindset. No matter how good I get at manipulating behavioral techniques, it’s hard to get anywhere if you’re starting with no gas in the tank.
A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend who was dealing with a lot - relationship issues, work problems - just life problems in general. He understandably felt pretty down, but I actually saw his situation as immensely positive. I felt that he was just about to break through on everything, and it made me realize just how subjective the pessimism/optimism scale in my own head is.
Someone once defined anxiety as “worrying about the future”. But it’s often not so much about the facts, but the interpretation of the data that builds in a prophecy of the future. Things will go bad. And it stands in opposition to the other end of the spectrum, where optimist believe it’ll all eventually go well. Both stances appear self fulfilling.
And that’s reflected in my self-talk.
The problem for me is that mental health is hard to chart. People tell you to keep your chin up, but it’s rare to see people actually change. People don’t stick to mental hygiene techniques, and if they do it’s difficult to see if once a day psychological work, like meditating or affirmations, carry over to what is a systemwide problem.
Tally clicking, with its emphasis on catching urges in the moment, seems like a good method to change this and perhaps make a deep, psychological change. I’ve used it to successfully counter a number of vices, from curbing alcohol to eating healthy. It offers daily metrics and a process to observe tendencies that pop up throughout the day. It also has the potential to ingrain an alternate behavior.
To test this, I’m going to take 90 days to click every instance of cynicism running through my head. But my added step will be to replace my normal inner dialogue with an optimistic interpretive message. Things like:
“What if everything is going completely to plan?”
”What if this is all leading to something really good?”
”What if the bad things now are briefly eclipsing what will eventually become really good?”
”What if all the struggles I’m facing are about to break, causing me to take a new path that will get me something awesome?”
”What if denial now is saving a wonderful experience for my future self?”
I think tally clicking might hold the key to rewriting my “base code” of operation.
Unlike my other 90 day challenges, I’m going to try something different and blog regularly about my thoughts during this challenge as they come up.
photocred: glass half full by Jess C, depressed by Gianfranco Blanco, tally counters by JaulaDeArdilla
Why do some people cope with trauma better than others? We’re finally beginning to understand.
A great article that discusses the possibility that historic trauma and anxiety changes brain structure and can be inherited, predisposing the next generation to have more problems.
Recently I’ve been really noticing how anxious my mother is. I suppose it has come to the forefront because I’ve been really working on it all year in my own practices in meditation. She mentioned before that she must have gotten it from her own parents.
My feelings in interacting with her with regards to the article is that the opposite is also true - that meditative practices can change the structures in the brain. And I find this to be much more satisfying an option than pursuing drugs to combat the changes in the brain.
In discussing her anxiety, I tried to come up with a series of steps to follow. And this isn’t just for her - I want to come up with a program for anyone, because I personally know how debilitating anxiety can be - you get stuck in well worn roads of thought for so long you don’t even realize that what you’re doing is abnormal. Here’s a run down of what I suggested:
Record. In recording we understand the paths we take and just how abnormal they are. We also distance ourselves from the anxiety.
Practice specific techniques regularly - relaxation through Vipassana noting technique, physical relaxation, tantric transformative energy technique, the modulating future expectations technique, etc.
Practice the techniques daily, using a tiny habit formation, making small in-roads like any habit
Push the practice by bringing up anxiety and quelling it
Now this isn’t the final form of a complete practice. There are still a lot of questions - should you practice recording just an hour a day? Because it is quite difficult to do this all the time. How do you best habituate a trigger-response - that is, a continual habit?
I believe that the answers will come through experimenting with any continual habit. So I am quite excited to try something not as personal and central to my being as emotional control. Like posture or something totally random. But it is a seed for a program to remove incessant anxiety.