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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anxiety
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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Tricks for Getting Started on a Project When You’re Stuck
If you ever have trouble starting on something that's important or find yourself procrastinating on a project, you may find it useful to notice what you feel at that moment and design your approach based on it.
Here is a list of "feeling-based" strategies that may help you get started on what you have trouble getting yourself to do:
If you are feeling:
1. unsure of where to start-> think of three really small, simple, actionable steps that would constitute a small amount of progress...
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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 Four States of Distress: how should you comfort a friend or loved one in need?
(co-authored with Kat Woods)
When a friend or loved one has something bad happen to them, what should you do to help them feel better? This question can be difficult to answer because it seems that at different times people want different things: empathy, problem-solving, optimism, distraction, and so on. See for instance this study where people give divergent answers about what they want from a friend after something bad happens.
We propose that there are four general states that a perso...
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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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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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Still Living with the Emotions of our Ancestors
According to evolutionary theory, emotions evolved because they were helpful for survival. Anxiety alerts us to potential danger and makes us wary. Anger motivates us to fight and shows our allies that we need help. Jealousy motivates us to keep our mates to ourselves to help maximize the number of our offspring that survive to child-bearing age. But the environment we live in today is obviously very different from the environment of our distant ancestors for whom these emotions were optimized. ...
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