By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2
This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.
In previous posts, I've described Valuism - my life philosophy. I've also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry.
Valuism and ...
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depression
How can you help friends or family members who are struggling with a mental health challenge?
I've noticed that it's quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it's also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations.
With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here's a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is ...
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Why “nature plus nurture” is sometimes the wrong way to think
It's common to try to explain things as either due to nature OR nurture.
Or, at best, we say: some percentage of the variation in outcome is due to genes, and some percentage is due to the environment. It's important to remember, though, that outcomes can be a complex interaction between the two.
Consider this:
Our genetically-influenced traits impact what environments we seek out and find ourselves in.
For instance, risk-taking seems to have moderate heritability, and it in...
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What’s the link between depression and anxiety?
If you study depression and anxiety (in the U.S.), you find that they are correlated to a shockingly high degree (e.g., in one of my studies, when I correlated PHQ-9 depression scale scores with GAD-7 anxiety scale scores, I found that r = 0.82 ).
Additionally, many studies have found that SSRIs (and other medications) help people with both depression and anxiety, as do certain therapeutic modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, suggesting further linkage.
Fin...
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The Many Models for Depression
People often argue whether depression is, or is not, caused by a "chemical imbalance".
Much of what happens in our brains is chemical, why would depression not be? If by "imbalance" we happen to mean "a state of brain chemicals that the patient doesn't want", as opposed to, say, some specific theory that is now discredited like "not enough serotonin" (i.e., the low serotonin myth), then depression can reasonably be thought of as a "chemical imbalance".
Disagreement about whether depressi...
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A Formula for Happiness
What does the formula for happiness look like? Here's my attempt at it:
happiness =
social-acceptance+ self-acceptance+ meaning+ hope+ pleasure+ efficacy+ resilience+ optimism
- physical-wants- pain- anxiety- loss and depression
Positives
social-acceptance = human interaction with the sort of people you want to interact with in the form of warm and trusting relationships, and the gut-level feeling that this group accepts you, likes you, and respects you
Interventions: exposure therapy if yo...
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Predicting Depression
I created simple statistical model (on a sample of people in the U.S.) to help predict how depressed someone is, based on 91 variables about them. I was attempting to predict the severity of the depression by their PHQ9 score, a simple subjective scale that averages scores on 9 common symptoms of depression. For instance, it asks how often you have experienced feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless" and how often you have experienced feeling "tired or having little energy" in the past two weeks....
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Break Your Downward Emotional Spiral
Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can form a vicious feedback loop, sending you into a downward emotional spiral. You get a bad review from your boss, and start to feel upset. This negative emotion brings on thoughts about when you've made mistakes at your job, and you feel even worse. You now start imagining your boss firing you, and your mood sinks into despair.
Let's dissect what's going on here. An event triggers an upsetting thought, and the thought causes negative emotion. With you...
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If That Didn’t Solve Your Problems, Try Something Else
One of the big challenges to self-improvement is getting yourself to try a new strategy instead of the same thing over and over again. If you already experimented with calorie counting diets four times, only to gain the weight back after a few months, you'll be very likely to gain the weight back again next time you try this type of diet. If you tried to get yourself to exercise by buying a monthly gym membership, but barely used the gym in six months, the fact that you have a gym membership pro...
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You Know That Worst Problem In Your Life? Go Fix It!
Sometimes it is obvious to us what our biggest problem is. We can pinpoint one thing in our life that is by far our biggest source of unhappiness or stress, and we know that if we were to correct it, our life would be substantially improved. When this happens, it makes self-improvement easier in a certain sense, since it provides us with an obvious route to improving life. If you have twenty problems, all of which produce roughly equal reductions in your happiness, it can feel overwhelming just ...
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