>a great job preventing obesity, keeping people the same weight even on 10,000+ calorie diets through extreme fidgeting and movement
I was skeptical, so I clicked the link, expecting some academic paper, but instead it linked to some website selling services, with no indication of where on that page the claim was even being made.
It looks like the link is redirecting and it should go somewhere else.
Thanks for sharing that. It looks like my skepticism was warranted, and that page doesn't support the contention that fidgeting will keep people the same weight on a 10,000 calorie diet.
On the contrary, it states:
>Some people were made to eat upwards of 10,000 calories/day. 10,000 calories per day! One man only gained 10 pounds with all that. However, most people did gain upwards of 20% of body weight. What happened to their energy expenditure? Metabolism, or Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) increased by 50%.
i was disappointed to find the same but it is followed by
> When the experiment ended, what surprised researchers the most was the rapidity with which body weight returned to normal. In fact, most of these people did not keep any of the weight they gained. So, here we see that overeating does NOT, in fact, lead to obesity. The body is more like a thermostat. While body weight may temporarily go above the set weight, it quickly reduces things back to normal
so the weight was rapidly lost, and presumably without effort after moving back to their normal diets. this still seems important, but it’s not as strong as “your body will burn 10k excess calories through fidgeting”
Importantly, though, the study as presented (without citation) by that post doesn't support it's claim that:
>So, here we see that overeating does NOT, in fact, lead to obesity.
On the contrary, the study caused people to gain a lot of weight by forcing them to eat a lot of food, and then observed them losing weight, by eating much less food.
The study was mostly relevant to the question of why people overeat. It seem to be claiming that people overeat because their bodyweight equilibria are set incorrectly. [Not that there's a direct correlation between calorie intake and weight gain; greater calorie intake can increase energy expenditure somewhat, but overall, the study doesn't seem to support the conclusion from it.]
I'm also curious about how well this replicates to even say anything about bodyweight equilibria. If prisoners are force fed massive quantities of prison food and are then freed from this torture, is it really surprising that they would go from a calorie surplus to a calorie deficit (and therefore lose weight)? Is that evidence that their bodies yearned for a lower weight equilibrium, or simply that if you force someone to eat 10,000+ calories of prison food every day, and then let them stop that they'll switch to eating very little for a while, perhaps being grossed out by the ordeal?
I think a better way of phrasing it might be that while overeating might cause *acute obesity* (whatever your objections, CICO is very strongly correlated to weight gain) but it does not result in *chronic obesity* (the actual disease of interest) - they returned to normal weight quickly after the forced calorie surplus ended.
Likewise, we usually see the same thing with dieting: it should cause acute weight loss, but will likely have little effect in the long term unless you continuously apply a forced calorie deficit.
I've noticed that when I'm anxious, I often think thoughts that make me more anxious. So, if I'm worried about work, I'll also start to worry about my health or loved ones. I think most people already understand that as a sort of state that they're in, like saying "I'm in an anxious mood" or "I'm on high alert", but we can also think of it as the mind trying to keep itself anxious/aroused. For that one, at least, there's some obvious evolutionary explanations too
I've heard before from someone I know with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), that the way they understand the disorder is very much like a higher set point on anxiety. In there case it was from an anxiety inducing childhood, that left them with a very hard to reset set point later in life.
I'm not sure what it means, but the number one takeaway I've had from talking with my GAD-having sister is that she views our shared childhood as significantly more anxiety-inducing than I do. She tends to explain this as "our family is very judgmental and this causes many of us to have anxiety" whereas I tend to weight toward "you got a lot of the family genes for anxiety, and therefore you see everything as anxiety-inducing."
Hmm....that's not my experience with anxiety. My interpretation was more like the following: I feel anxious for no obvious reason, so my brain gets confused and starts searching its archives for things that have caused anxiety in the recent past, and it then fixates on those things as if they were a current problem that would normally be anxiety inducing, like an angry bear charging at me or something. It does this because an angry bear charge is a big problem that needs to be solved and fast. Not seeing an angry bear anywhere in the vicinity, it goes to the memory banks, pulls something out, annoints it the source of the current state of anxiety, and then fixates on it, treating it like a problem that needs to be solved. This doesn't work, though, and the fixation and resulting thought loops only serve to reinforce and often exacerbate the general state of anxiety.
This just seems definitionally true to me. I don't (think that I) have Anxiety, but to me "feeling anxious" and "thinking thoughts that make you anxious" are the same thing.
>But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?
This begs the larger question: why would anyone - even someone not depressed - ever want to listen to depressing music.
Because I want to hurt myself? It's basically just the mental equivalent of cutting yourself, but a lot better since it doesn't leave any visible scars. I would rather feel pain than feel nothing.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you find happy emotions that you can feel.
As far as the post in general, it seems to make a lot out of depressed people supposedly seeking out depressive stimuli, with the depressive stimulant being a product consumed by all sorts of people - presumably not just people who would openly admit that they are seeking pain. So I think we need to first better understand why people in general listen to depressing music, before trying to work out why depressed people in particular also listen to it.
The post doesn't even claim, let alone demonstrate, that depressed people are any likelier than non-depressed people to listen to depressing music! So constructing a model meant to explain this anomaly, without demonstrating that the supposed anomaly exists, seems questionable.
You know what, I'm going to take back what I said 24 minutes ago. The whole self-harm thing was what my brain told me, and honestly it's starting to seem pretty stupid to trust anything it says now. Which is stupid, since who the hell do I(?) think is writing this?
Anyways, thinking about this too hard makes me want to die, so I suggest you avoid doing it too. Pretending that you're not just applied statistics is probably better for mental health.
Hey buddy, it sounds like you're in a really tough situation. I hope you're able to find resources that can help you feel better. You may be interested in this previous thread about how to find a therapist: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44783786.
One thing I'll say is that brains are weird, and nobody understands them 100%. It doesn't have to get us down too much; we can find ways to deal with elements of our thinking that seem strange, like intrusive thoughts, etc. This is just like the world at large. Not everything in the universe is known, or even knowable, but that doesn't mean we should be terrified to get out of bed, facing the unknown. We can still find patterns and things that consistently work, even if we don't understand everything.
This is the "paradox of tragedy", that has been discussed in philosophical discussion of art at least since Aristotle. Horror raises a similar question, as does spicy food.
Right. And that calls into question the premise of this post. If there is a more universal phenomenon of people seeking out stimuli that make them fearful, sad, or pained, and there is no evidence that this is more common among depressed people, then developing a theory for why depressed people do this is probably misguided. And the particular theories proposed there for the more general phenomenon do not seem particularly consistent with the one proposed in this post.
Right. Which is why it's unfortunate that the post never states that explicitly, let alone demonstrates it. At most one of the linked studies may claim it, but the full study is behind a paywall, so it's hard to tell.
The second study linked (Yoon et. al.) does appear to state so quite explicitly in its abstract. But also just anecdotally in my own experience it is nearly obviously true to the point where I don't need much in way of evidence that people prefer sad music when they're sad/depressed.
The key point IMO is that depressed people think that depressing music is relaxing or in some way helpful, whereas most people engaging with negative-emotional-valence art recognize that it will make their emotional state more negative. The analogy to fever might be people going in hot tubs to intentionally overheat themselves, whereas the feverish person doesn't typically think of what they're doing as intentionally overheating.
Somebody who expects the depression to be temporary, serving some necessary function, might actually be correct that the negative-emotional-valence art will make them feel better - not in the short term, but by getting the depressive episode over and done with faster.
Immune system response driving a fever could be looking for something along the lines of an integral, where high fever for a short time, or mild fever for a longer time, may be equally sufficient to kill the pathogens, and it'll take whichever it can get. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvenLogic Severe itch could be scratched in five frantic minutes with fingernails, or half a second with a belt sander. Precommitted evopsych incentive structure needs to cash out its actual rewards and punishments at some point, in order for back-propagation to update decision trees appropriately.
Women have a greater preference for horror than men in general, maybe they have a lower set point for being scared than men, and more often get a “I don’t deserve to feel this safe” feeling that inspires them to seek out horror
As do BDSM, rollercoasters, extreme sport, and defending EA in the wake of the FTX scandal.
I think the appeal of pathos is threefold:
1. The desire to stimulate one's empathy instincts. As the internet will tell you, crying over fictional characters proves you have a soul.
2. The relief that comes with witnessing someone in a worse situation than you. It's kind of like how snuggling feels better when it's pouring outside. Might be related to people's attraction to big scandals.
3. If you're in a bad place, it's reassuring to know that there are creators out there who could empathize with you.
My wife watches horror films in order to watch people be killed in "interesting" ways... Think about the people who would go out to watch public executions...
sadness isn't inherently unpleasant, in small quantities? even when i'm at my least depressed, i really enjoy a beautifully melancholic work of fiction or whatnot.
Right. And that calls into question the evidence in the post. If it's true that depressed people like depressing music, but it's also true that even the least depressed people like depressing music, and there is no demonstration that depressed people are particularly likely to like depressing music, then a theory meant to explain particularly why depressed people like depressing music probably isn't very robust.
It actually never states that depressed people listen to depressing music any more frequently than anyone else. Instead, what it claims is that:
>depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music
But it never tells us whether that is unique to depressed people. Maybe people who aren't depressed also prefer to listen to sad music rather than happy music.
The modern commanding dominance of poptimism across several artforms (most especially music) seems to be evidence against that hypothesis. Although I guess that invites the further category-spitting of "what is sad music"? Plenty of upbeat happy songs about truly horrific things, plenty of downbeat sad songs about teddy bears wrapped in puppies. What matters more, the subject or the wrapper? Part of why I don't really like rounding it off to "blues" - lots of blues-genre music is just, yknow, relaxing. No one cries while listening to Cantaloupe Island.
(I'd read the study to see what definitions they use, but the link seems to have moved...)
> No one cries while listening to Cantaloupe Island.
I was struck by a comment on a youtube video of a recording of Kilkelly ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVWUth6SjlU , though this might not be the same video), saying "I first heard this song when it came on the radio while I was driving, and I had to pull over and cry".
It is especially striking, to me, because the events described in the song are by most metrics a huge success for the protagonist and for his family. But despite that fact, everyone instinctively rejects the idea that the outcome might be viewed as positive.
But "least depressed" is a strange qualifier. Compare that to people who are happy as a room without a roof. If I am truly giddy I avoid sad/melancholic art.
Well, I'm usually only truly giddy when I am like actively having a blast hanging out with friends? But if I'm just generally content I don't particularly avoid sad art.
My experience is that sadness and melancholy(that's what you feel when depressed?) is not quite the same. When I was depressed I felt something like a dull emptiness, pain, anger but not sadness. Once I was able to feel sadness I felt much better and more alive. As if sadness implied there is something valuable and worth living to be sad in relation to.
So in that sense sadness is sometimes an appropriate healthy emotion.
I resonate with that experience - I get the sense that a sort of grey, lifeless feeling that I would call depression (even if it does not last long enough to be clinical maybe) can be a sort of repressed sadness that is not being felt fully. I have had the experience that once I am able to feel properly sad, I can cry, which will not only relieve the sadness but also the depression, returning me to a state where I have more energy and ability to enjoy things. This motivates me to seek out sad music when depressed: It helps me give myself permission to fully feel the sadness, maybe partly by creating the sense that it is not normal, I am not alone with this, so I do not need to hide it. Hence I believe that listening to sad music can help me get out of depression, essentially by helping me grieve. Opposite action on the other hand sometimes seems like a bandaid, with sadness / depression still buried underneath a surface layer of energy generated (it can still be helpful sometimes I think).
Actually isn’t it the same with fever? Body is overheating, starts sweating => loses heat
I remember the last fevers I had, and overheating always felt good exactly because of that rollercoaster release — push down too far to trigger different set of (extreme) regulatory systems (sweat, crying)
Depressing music, media in general, can be beautiful in a way that other things cannot. It reflects something about the world not captured elsewhere. When you're sad it rings true in your mind, and this can give you a sense of consonance with the world and its inhabitants, it's a positive feeling and generally an improvement on your previous state of mind in my experience. I do actually believe mood set points are a good model but I am extremely skeptical of the claim about sad songs being an example.
Part of that sense of consonance with the world is the feeling of being *at* your current set-point, rather than having the compulsion / pressure to continue adjusting something.
People care about more than momentary happiness. For example, it's hard to imagine life having much meaning if there was never any hardship over which to triumph.
What are your favorite songs? I'm willing to bet many of them aren't just straightforwardly happy, even if you wouldn't consider them depressing.
That would be my guess too. Personally, I love emotions in songs, and many of my favorites are quite sad, even though I am a generally positive and optimistic person.
"Freude, schöner Götterfunken" And the original ending, on point for Scott's writing, "und die Hölle nicht mehr seyn." Although "Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!" would make a good motto for a space program.
There was a great one on the radio a few days ago:
Skip to 1:35:00 for the final encore performance of the last movement of the 9th, although the rest is excellent too, especially Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.
Ah! Happy/triumphant classical / instrumental is often much easier for me to take than modern beat-driven pop/rock/edm/etc.
It's possible it's the beats that I *really* hate, although I don't hate them nearly as much in sadder music.
Anyway, it's hard to know how I really feel about certain ubiquitous pieces of classical music because I've heard them so many times, in so many contexts, across so much of media. The Minnesota Orchestra's performance is extremely competent, and the arrangement is just different enough that it's engaging, but I was *much* more pleasurably engaged in the calmer movement starting at 1:35 than I was when it got into the bombastic finale I've seen in 200 movies and 500 commercials.
Yeah, I noticed when I was listening to this performance on the radio, that the calmer introduction built up to the finale in a way I hadn't appreciated before, and which heightened the experience. A number of years ago, I ran across a description of Beethoven which was something like "every note was inevitable given the previous notes", and while I think it's an exaggeration, I've noticed that I keep recalling it when I listen to Beethoven, and this was one of the times where I really **felt** it. But it sounds like you've gone deeper into classical than I.
How about this, for a modern beat-driven pop cheery music? (If you've seen what it's from, there's a big ;-) there.)
Sticking within Scott's metaphor, a straightforward answer is that their mood is too high and they're trying to adjust downwards. That's bad if they're in a depressive episode, but very good if they're in a manic episode (or are just sub-clinically 'too happy').
Anecdotally, I use music to regulate my mood and focus a lot. If I'm feeling tired and low energy, I'll put on something peppy. If I'm feeling anxious or fidgety or like my thoughts are racing, I can put on something sad and get a noticeable boost in my focus and productivity.
There are also some nominally sad songs that I like for non-sadness reasons, like enjoying the sound of the music or because they're associated with happy memories.
So depressed people music like depressing music because they're trying to achieve a more depressed equilibrium, while people who are sub-clinically 'too happy' also like depressing music, because they don't want their moods to be too high?
That doesn't seem like a very useful model. Why don't the depressed people seek out happy music, just as the 'too happy' people seek out sad music, and vice-versa?
And if this were true, it would imply that desire to listen to depressing music would have a quadratic relationship with depression. That is, that desire to listen to depressing music would be highest in very depressed people and very happy people, and lowest in medium happiness people.
Is that true? Who knows? Nothing in the post showed that anyone has any greater proclivity for depressing music than anyone else.
Because...as with the other thermostatic models given, depression itself makes it really hard to do things that "obviously", objectively make one happy rather than sad, and in fact tends to encourage sadness-perpetuating activities instead? (Not in post: and cognizance of such dissonance makes one even sadder, due to digging the hole deeper, the same way failing at dieting while eating donuts induces shame rather than motivation to Git Gud, thus exacerbating the problem)
The second link says right in the abstract that depressed people do, in fact, prefer listening to sad music more than non-depressed people. It also cites the first link given here. You're correct that Scott himself did not state such in this post, but I mean...that's what links are for.
I was going to get to the links. I already followed up one link, saw it didn't say what was claimed, and Scott updated the post, accordingly. But when I tried to click the first link to Sci-Hub for the Millgram study, nothing loads for me. Sci-Hub doesn't have the second study, which is unfortunate, as studies are often misrepresented in abstracts. Importantly, the abstract is somewhat ambiguous, as it states that "MDD people were more likely to choose sad music" but that could either mean that they are more likely to choose sad music *than healthy controls*, or more like to choose sad music *than happy music.*
Here's a thought: maybe listening to sad music "tricks" a healthy brain into believing that its environment is sadder than it actually is, thereby making their internal sadness seem less sad by comparison, thereby raising one's mood. This could just feel like being "understood" (by someone else, like the singer, or some higher entity) from the inside.
This would mean the mechanism at play is different depending on whether someone is depressed or just sad. I suppose you could disprove this by trying to look for whether healthy sad people feel more or less sad after listening to sad music.
This has always been my suspicion. At least, that's how I feel when I'm doing it. I make up these dramatic stories behind the song that are way worse than my current problem.
It's sort of like a release valve for my issue, then when that's done I'm seeing it against a worse situation and feeling better.
My first thought is that depressed people seek out sad music because it makes them feel like they're not completely alone. There's the old saying, "Misery loves company", though I'm not sure what was intended by it.
It can be a strain to be around a mood which is much happier than one's own. Possibly depressed people need mildly cheering music.
This is probably the explanation for me at least. Especially if someone manages to express the particular mood or thoughts I'm having, too - the effect is similar to getting to rant about my problems to a friend.
Like how someone who's never been in love might hate love songs, but then once they fall in love, all of a sudden they like them? Or how someone working at a miserable job might gain an appreciation of old union songs?
As I said in my own comment, I hate happy music. I find it consistently grating. There is no time where I *ever* prefer it to something sad. The better the mood I'm in, the more I want to hear something romantically tragic.
Part of this is just a quirk of personality, but I should point out that no piece of happy content has ever given me the borderline-orgasmic sensation of physical frission which seems to be a vagus nerve response to the emotion of elevation, of witnessing something profound (be it hopeful, sacrificial, dignified, loving, etc). Straightforward happiness is a really terrific sensation, but for me, there's no "there," there.
This seems sort of circular. Getting up and dancing kind of requires a good mood in the first place! (it also requires not being physically ill or otherwise low on energy, but that's a whole other set of issues).
I tend to agree with this. Is there really a "correct" level of happiness, such that some people are too happy and need to listen to sad music to regulate themselves?
I asked ChatGPT which were the five greatest pieces of music and it said (i) Beethoven's 9th (happy), (ii) Bach's Mass in B Minor (happy?), (iii) Mozart's requiem (sad), (iv) Swan Lake (sad), (v) the Rite of Spring (neutral). I had thought maybe that we were more likely to think of sad music as great, but it seems not.
Also all of these pieces are long and complicated with multiple contrasting sections and even entire movements that don't track in a straightforward way onto a happy/sad dichotomy...
I fucking love the Rite of Spring and I think it's happy as shit. But maybe "energetic" would be a better word. (Also come to think of it the Rite is progressively less happy as it goes along, the energy doesn't really disappear though, it just becomes tenser and tenser until the noise at the end.)
Also that is a hilarious list.
I personally never listen to sad music to feel calmer. I do, however, put on energetic music to get myself to clean my room or do laundry or something.
I asked it again for a top ten list of the greatest pieces of music ever and (after its usual caveats) this is what it said:
1. Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 ("Choral"): Often considered Beethoven's greatest work, this symphony is known for its final movement, which includes the famous "Ode to Joy."
2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem Mass in D minor, K. 626: An unfinished masterpiece, Mozart's Requiem is renowned for its emotional depth and complexity.
3. Johann Sebastian Bach - Mass in B minor, BWV 232: One of Bach's major compositions, this mass is a monumental achievement in the baroque choral tradition.
4. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake, Op. 20: This ballet, composed by Tchaikovsky, is famous for its beautiful melodies and has become a symbol of classical ballet.
5. Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring: A revolutionary work in the history of music, Stravinsky's ballet score caused a sensation and changed the course of 20th-century music.
6. George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue: A unique blend of classical music with jazz influences, this piece is one of the most famous American musical works.
7. Johannes Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98: This symphony is often regarded as Brahms' magnum opus and is a staple of the orchestral repertoire.
8. Giuseppe Verdi - Aida: This opera is known for its grandeur and has become one of the most performed operas in the world.
9. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Album): Widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of popular music.
10. Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2 (Moonlight Sonata): One of Beethoven's most popular compositions for the piano, celebrated for its haunting beauty.
Interesting that the top five are the same pieces in the same order that it stated previously.
Johnny Cash, American legend. Not depressing to me, sad and somber, but I'm older and don't find (my) death all that depressing. (I wrote that sentence first with no (my) and you should read it both ways.) Awesome video BTW, thanks.
For me, sad art/music (and some horror) are pleasant in a similar way as a tough physical challenge. It lets me feel good about myself for being strong enough to handle it.
"This begs the larger question: why would anyone - even someone not depressed - ever want to listen to depressing music."
A couple of reasons I can think of:
1) Feeling depressed or sad at times is universal but can feel very lonely when you're in the midst of it. At least in my experience, sad music at those times makes me feel less alone and less like no one understands what I'm feeling.
2) There are times when I feel down and have a physical feeling that my body needs to cry, but the tears just won't come for whatever reason; some mental or emotional block holds them back. On those occasions, depressing music helps me feel what I'm feeling more intensely so I can push through that block. There are just times when stress and ignored emotions seem to build up inside to a point where it feels like I I need to cry it out like a sleep-training baby, and if I can't, it feels like the emotional equivalent of a sneeze that you can feel coming but never quite materializes.
I spent many years completely disconnected from nearly all emotions except anger. I was convinced that honestly expressing my real feelings when those feelings were sadness, disappointment, hurt, etc. was a display of weakness, and would provoke disgust from & abandonment by others. I was unable to even acknowledge those feelings to myself because to do so was offensive to my cherished self-image as an entirely autonomous man who handles whatever comes up on my own and takes pride in needing nothing, no help or support or connection of any kind, from anyone. As I eventually began to realize what that impenetrable armor was doing to myself and my relationships, I began to feel a shift inside that allowed me to at first start being vulnerable with my feelings to myself, and then gradually with others.
Stoicism is an indispensable strength in some situations but if one is unable to ever step outside of that way of being, my experience at least is that the negative emotions that are suppressed or repressed leak out in other ways to a limited extent and otherwise build up inside until a blowup takes place (a fight with a partner or loved one, a substance binge, etc.). For me it resulted in a constant low-level simmering irritability with accompanying reactivity as well as somatic symptoms like frequent headaches, all of which led me to generally withdraw from my wife & kids. When everything built up inside to the point where I now allow myself to cry, I used to act out in a way that provoked an acrimonious fight with my wife.
TL;No way I'm reading all that: Depressing music sometimes helps me process the kind of emotions everyone has at times but that I used to make a lifestyle out of suppressing or repressing to my own detriment as well as that of everyone around me.
Could be something to do with release? Recently I watched an experiment on a comparison between flipping and not flipping the steak while cooking.
The result was that flipping was better because it cooked the steak more evenly, because overcooking it caused by increasing the energy on the steak in really big bursts, like when you only flip it halfway during the cook. So spacing out the energy spikes by repeatedly flipping makes it cook more evenly since there aren't as massive spikes like with the traditional method.
Anyways, maybe listing to sad things when you're sad is like that. Applying a ton of energy onto your sadness to make you get over it faster like shock therapy. Basically being able to look back on short periods of like and say those were the sad times. Coraling your feelings into a big sad event, like overeating ice cream and watching sad movies, lets you compartmentalize your feelings easier.
In this theory, everyone has a "thymostat" set to some point on the sad-happy scale, not just people with depression. This theory predicts that everyone should occasionally be driven to listen to sad music, whenever they are "too happy" for their thymostat set point. (Of course, people respond differently at a conscious level to these drives; sad music, movies, thoughts; just like people eat different food when they're consciously hungry).
Your question is like asking: if people with fevers shiver and wear jackets because they want to warm up, why does anyone without a fever shiver and wear a jacket? Sometimes your environment is actually cold.
Because people like having their internal experiences validated by external sources. When you're depressed you don't want people telling you to be happy, you want people telling you they know what it's like to be sad. Misery loves company.
> Opiate addiction [could be considered] a recalibration of endorphin set point? I'm not sure.
You're not? I was under the impression that that was considered a fairly well-established fact about drug addiction at this point, that addictions "break" the ability of the body to maintain various biochemical levels to the point that dependency develops because you need the boost from the drugs to get back to normal. That's not *exactly* "recalibration of a set point" but it sure sounds pretty similar, don't you think? Or is there some nuance I'm missing?
There's certainly some aspect of this: tolerance and withdrawal seem straightforwardly a change in some set point. Based on my experience, the withdrawal from nicotine lasts a few days, but the habits associated with it are much harder to break. Conversely, some drugs/stimuli don't generate much acute withdrawal but can still be hard to break. In my experience alcohol works like that. When I don't drink for weeks or months, I feel fine–better even–but there are still triggers that make me want to drink.
I highly recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by addict-turned-neuroscientist Marc Lewis, which walks through the "extreme habit learning" theory in a fair amount of detail. (n.b., he has a very different theory of anorexia from this post. Not sure which is correct or if they are complimentary.)
You describe depression as a problem of set points, as if depression were _accidental_. I don't think that's correct. Instead, I think depression is often the result of *incentives*.
I was depressed. I remember wondering, “Why am I so depressed? What’s wrong with me? Why are brains so dumb?” There’s a five month period where I don’t know what I did. In fact, I was so depressed that I just didn’t bother to interact with anyone new.
I expected that I would just get hurt whenever I interacted with other people:
- A girl seemed to really like me. We hung out a few times and it was great. I texted her the day after one of these times and she never replied. For months after that, I felt like I had to make her respond, and I blamed myself for her ghosting me.
- A friend didn’t like my ideas about psychology, called me “dangerous”, and terminated our friendship. I felt like I had to fix his reaction.
- At a party, someone asked me, “I heard you quit your job. Why did you quit?” I didn’t want to answer, but I felt like I had to answer.
Near the end of my depression, I wondered, What if my depression wasn’t a symptom? What if it was a solution?
When I am depressed and low energy, I don’t want to interact with other people. So, if interacting with other people means getting hurt, then, here’s an interesting theory: a way to avoid getting hurt is to be depressed.
Maybe my depression was actually adaptive. And maybe I didn’t have a ‘dumb brain’ after all…
If that was true, all I would have to do was find a way to interact with other people without getting hurt as much. But how?
I think the most common way that people in my position cope with this problem is by becoming numb and rejecting any negative feelings they feel. This is not what I learned. In fact, I had already learned this strategy of numbness, and I would have to unlearn it as I learned a better way.
Instead, with help from a counselor and a little-known method called Coherence Therapy, I gradually altered the ways I was interpreting social interactions and my feelings. As I made progress, I had less incentive to avoid other people and it became less useful for me to be depressed.
These days, I’m not afraid of social interaction anywhere near like I used to be. I’m comfortable being really social now.
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The above is from a draft for a series I'm writing about unlearning social insecurities, supported by Epistea Residency and CFAR. It will be posted on my blog soon. https://chipmonk.substack.com/
I don't think this is the case for everyone, but it was the case for me and I would venture to say it's the case for most people. I was INCENTIVIZED to be depressed. I could not have told you that at the time, but looking back, yep: I was afraid of social interaction and I didn't know how else to cope.
From this perspective, it makes total sense to me that many people who are depressed seek stimuli that brings sadness. I don't think they're depressed _accidentally_. I think they're depressed as the result of an INCENTIVE. The Coherence Therapy Institute has documented many case studies of exactly this: https://coherencetherapy.org/discover/examples.htm
My experience with depression is that most cases aren't like this:
- Some are clearly the result of external biological shocks, like seasonal depression or hypothyroid.
- Some are clearly the result of random psychosocial shocks, eg a friend dies.
- In some cases, the patient knows the depression is maladaptive ("every time I go out, I have a good time, I just don't want to go out")
- I just don't think this explains most features of depression. If you were rationally following incentives, it would be reasonable to think "I got pretty far with a girl I liked, but then she ghosted me, so I should try to meet ten more girls, and maybe it will work out with one of them". Or "I feel embarrassed whenever anyone asks me about my job, so I'll work hard to get a job I'm proud of". Or "I hate social interaction, so I'll do something else useful, like learn to run marathons". Not "I'll lie in bed all day, doing nothing, thinking about my failures in an unproductive way, listening to sad music, and maybe having random sleep and appetite disturbances".
I think what you're saying is part of some kinds of depression, but that you need ideas like a trapped prior (incorrectly generalizing from one example to a much stronger pattern), frozen set points, and attempts to maintain these in order to make full sense.
> In some cases, the patient knows the depression is maladaptive ("every time I go out, I have a good time, I just don't want to go out")
Both of our theories explain this example.
> If you were rationally following incentives[…]
It doesn't need to be entirely rational. I certainly don't think it was "conscious", even if some more less conscious part of me did have the incentive and responded to it.
Just because you're responding to incentive doesn't mean that you're use all of your intelligence.
You've actually hit on *another* conceptual scheme we can use to think about the maintenance of depression and anxiety--good old fashioned reinforcement learning. Avoidance readily becomes self-sustaining via negative reinforcement, and further entrenched by habit. The first time you don't go to a party because you're afraid to talk to people, you successfully avoided the unpleasant thing (or stressful anticipatory thoughts about it), and unless you missed out on something really cool as a result (which you may be systemically discounting the likelihood of anyhow, see below) that's probably going down in the logbook as a win for avoidance.
I'm a little skeptical of the idea that your depression resolved just because it was no longer useful, if only because it doesn't usually do that! It seems more probable to me that your therapy shifted thoughts and behavior patterns which helped you expose yourself to circumstances where alternative behaviors (social engagement) brought greater rewards, in a virtuous upward spiral. One way to think about mood in general is as a representation of the likelihood that interaction with your environment will result in rewards vs punishments; if you were successfully convinced that there were more rewards to be had by engaging vs withdrawing, that's taking most of the wind out of depression's sails right there.
I think the OP's model is close to right but can be improved even further. In particular, I believe that all the intrusive-type thoughts, like ruminating on bad things, also serve a purpose. Not to stay unhappy but to find a feeling of being understood and empathize when. When a person is made to feel unsafe, (from sudden shocks or chronic shame or whatever), their body is concerned with avoiding the feeling if unsafety. When it doesn't know how to prevent it from happening it retreats into isolation to avoid any sort of repeat of the situation. Meanwhile it studies the feeling over and over, looking to understand it, and it studied stories of people being unhappy in hopes of finding answers-- some kind of way that it can be sure it won't be hurt again.
At least, that's how I came to understand my own depression, and it seems to resonate with other people's experiences.
This may be a special case but after a major manic episode the depressive episode was (predictably) obligate
All I could do for a month was lie on a couch and listen to the same sad album all day. I could eat, drink coffee, and then gladly go to bed to turn it off
Month by month, with time and medication, I was continually amazed to find I had a new stable set point of average sense of well being. It just kept happening in steps until I was so happy that I was reliably glad to be alive
After a year I was able to work. It was quite a new experience to wake up some days and know I had no choice but to call in and say I couldn't work that day. I presume my brain chemistry was completely incapable of engaging in stimulating experiences on those days
I would suspect that I had an updating set point of the amount of happiness I could tolerate that was at complete rock bottom when the manic episode had fully worn off, shadowing the capability of my brain chemistry to tolerate both positive and negative stimulus. The risk of being positively stimulated may have been the risk of experiencing the painful stimulation of change from a positive state of mind back to the inescapable set point far below that
So in service of my need for emotional stability I was obligated for a month to maximalize both a depressed state of mind and one with as little alteration as possible
I think control systems theory has a good shot at modeling bipolar. Oscillating mechanisms can be due to poorly calibrated attempts to restore balance. But severe mania might also be inherently damaging such that your brain needs time--years, in my experience--to repair itself (cf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02073-4).
>I texted her the day after one of these times and she never replied.
I guess now is the perfect time to tell you that phones just eat texts sometimes; my landlord just told me I never got back to him about a good time to repair something, but I'd never gotten the question because the phone ate the text. Important stuff does require a call.
Yeah, this is along the lines of what I was wondering about: How does psychoanalytic theory fit into Scott's framework of trapped priors or set points? I feel like psychoanalysis might view any of the patients in the original piece as having a specific defense mechanism against change. Which is to say a defense against addressing and healing from previous trauma or a formerly adaptive personality construction that has become maladaptive at the patient's current stage of life. So, a depressed person turns to sad music as a logical part of an ingrained, familiar strategy for maintaining psychological homeostasis (however miserable that may be at the present time). Anorexia often can be like this, too. So, "untrapping the prior" becomes especially fraught as the person is essentially having to dismantle a very familiar and previously CRUCIAL part of their capacity to function in life. I think physical therapy is a good metaphor. Someone's body has tried to adapt around an injury or malformation and, although the person is able to at least function as well as possible given their injury, the consequences of their body's adaptation is very painful and has itself become the #1 priority problem. Physical therapy will require that person to gradually and consistently work against the body's attempt to cope with the injury, building muscles in other places to help counteract the patient's lopsided gait (or whatever). The process for the patient is long and painful, but the end result is that they are both able to function as well or better than before AND without chronic pain. But it's an understandably big ask!
I find most of what you say convincing but I don't think the sad music part fits the theory.
As you point out, even non-depressed people seem to prefer to listen to sad music when feeling down. I don't know about other people, but while I almost always prefer bright popy songs when I'm really bummed more melancholy music makes me feel like my sadness is heard and has meaning. It's the musical equivalent of someone empathizing with your break up by telling you how awful they felt after their break up instead of telling you about how great their relationship is going.
There are all sorts of ways this may differ for depressed people. For instance, maybe you can hope for catharsis for momentary pain but not for the general feeling everything is bad. And maybe they react differently.
So I don't think it's in conflict with your story but it seems like it isn't obviously predicted by it either.
I think my theory predicts that non-depressed people would also prefer sad music. My model of normal sadness is something like:
1. Bad thing happens to you
2. Brain goes "Huh, seems like a good time to be sad, better lower the happiness set point for a few hours."
3. Happiness set point lowers. Your body makes you sad automatically, and you also do things to make yourself sad, like listen to sad music.
4. After a few hours, the brain raises the happiness set point again and you feel better.
I realize this makes it hard to differentiate "change in set point" from "the types of shock that set points exist to solve", and "successful control" from "your body changes the set point back to normal", but it does seem like "you get sad when bad things happen" is a feature and not a bug.
Why does step 2 happen? Why should an outside event making you sad make your brain think "now's a good time to be sad", when an outside event making you hot doesn't make your brain think "now's a good time to be hot"? The latter effect would mean that a non-feverish person would seek out blankets and hot drinks when their body temperature rises. (Oddly, I have heard some Europeans talk about espresso on summer days this way.)
I'm not exactly saying a sad event makes you sad - sadness isn't a property of events. I'm saying a negative event makes you sad.
I don't know why exactly sadness exists. But whyever it exists, it seems to be some kind of adaptation where, when bad things happen to you, you should react by adopting a specific emotional posture. Without knowing why, I think I can argue that, when a bad thing happens to you, the brain realizes it's time to adopt that emotional posture, and takes steps to make it happen.
On your theory if you get a negative shock and then a positive shock you should be less happy afterwards than if you got them in the opposite order since moving the set point down decreases impact of the good shock right? This is the opposite of my experience (at the very least isn't generally the case).
Alternative theory, when bad things happen you remember them so you feel crappy. It's just like being hot except that the stimulus often is pretty persistant (if you got dumped yesterday you are still dumped today) but usually set points bring you back to baseline if a bad situation persists long enough to become normal.
Agree. there's data about coloscopies without anesthesia. Not nice altogether but when its nice near the end of the procedure people like it much more.
Also can't we test this by looking at patients with memory impairment? If someone gets bad news (loved one dies) and then forgets that do they still act more sad for the rest of the day?
I think to answer why sadness exists we first need to determine whether its social or nonsocial. Is there a model of sadness in, e.g., fruit flies or snakes?
Here's a straw model for non-social sadness: happiness = risk appetite. (Can you have gamblers that are depressed while gambling?) You're more willing to take risks when happy, less willing to take risks when sad. The setpoint moving is about learning that you're miscalibrated on the likely success of risks you take in general.
I think risk appetite is definitely part of it. Or perhaps rather novelty seeking. That's similar, but not exactly the same.
Another aspect of sadness could be that it reduces your learning rate and how much you update your connections in the brain. When you are sad (but not depressed), it may be a good heuristic that you shouldn't repeat whatever you have been doing in the last hours. That heuristic won't always fit (when a beloved one dies and it wasn't your fault), but it does often enough (you said mean things to your friend and now they won't talk to you). I assume that our body doesn't want to reinforce the activation patterns from that day.
I would guess that depressed patients have impaired memory formation and impaired learning capabilities, and that the same is true for normal people when they are sad.
Now it gets more complicated. There must be a rodent model for depression for all the lab work. And rodents' risk behaviour can be radically changed by toxoplasma parasites. Human risk behaviour seems to be modulated a bit by these little worms as well. Are toxoplasma positive humans less depressed as well as less risk aversive?
Depressed person: bad event -> sadness regulator activates -> sad music -> feel sad -> brain interprets sad feeling as evidence of new bad thing -> baysian self-updating spiral into unreasonable sadness?
I think this is a plausible model, but it requires slightly more complexity than the other parts of the mood regulation system you suggest, so somewhat less credence in it on priors. More centrally I think this is a different mechanism than the anorexia one, which is just a lower set point but not a self-reinforcing spiral.
>Why should an outside event making you sad make your brain think "now's a good time to be sad"
I think the first question need to ask before that is, "why are brains even able to feel sad in the first place?"
Clearly, the ability to be sad confers some sort of fitness advantage - while it's possible it's just a random artifact of mutation, it seems too common and has too many downsides (for gathering food, copulating, etc) to have stuck around if it served zero purpose.
Therefore, if we assume it's some part of the brain's method of encoding certain memories as "that situation is bad, avoid it" in a healthy individual, we could posit that responding with a *longer, more severe* period of sadness and negative reflection would more strongly encode that negative stimulus in long-term memory as something to be avoided. Perhaps this includes ruminating on other examples of the negative stimulus so it's all encoded in adjacent/connected neurons/synapses for a stronger response.
Of course, like most things about our brains in the modern day environment, we have so many novel and out-of-distribution stimuli available to us, with so much more cognitive ability, that we can go, "you know what's better than just thinking about how the death of my kinsmen is bad? Partaking in Art that distills those feelings into an acute stimulus!"
Ohh so you think sad music really does make even non-depressed people you sadder too? Hmm, maybe I'll have to try forcing myself to listen to cheery stuff when sad.
However, while that's plausible about sad music I guess I don't really understand the larger theory on this view. Why would the brain change the set point in response to a negative shock? Why not just increase the extent of the shock to teach you to avoid that kind of thing in the future instead of making everything crap for a bit?
And, as you say, how could we even understand the idea of set points in this context? Like are there intermediate time frame set points that are then shifted by even longer term set points? Doesn't that feel a bit too epicycley?
This is basically just a shorter version of my comment, but what if it goes:
1. Bad thing happens to you
2. You think “oh no, maybe there’s still some way to prevent some of this harm”
3. Brain checks, and doesn’t see any promising strategy
4a. You still feel bad about accepting defeat, and so go back to (3)
4b. At some point, fighting feels worse than losing
5. Losing does feel even sadder, but also, the lack of internal conflict feels very relieving.
So listening to sad music, or any similar stimulus, would be easing the pain while increasing the sorrow, but would also allow that sorrow to run its course rather that being held at a lower lever for much longer.
I don't think it conflicts with his theory at all. For normal people, the emotional set point is whatever their emotional state currently is. But they usually just sleep it off and they feel better by the next day. The difference for depressed people is that this set point is significantly lower and resists outside efforts to change it.
...By the way, I wouldn't trust the justifications your brain gives for why it did something. It will completely make shit up, even in situations where it played no part in what happened. Pretty similar to modern AI in that regard.
It does seem to conflict with his theory - the difference between a person outside on a hot day and a person with a fever is that, when both of them have a body temperature of 100 degrees, the former sweats and takes off clothing while the latter shivers and pulls on a blanket. Similarly, it should be that a person who just had a sad event happen and a person with depression should have opposite reactions to the same current level of sadness.
Also, even non-depressed people probably prefer *good* music, and there is much more good sad music than good happy music, perhaps because goodness of music is in part about the strength, complexity, and/or nuanced-ness of the emotional response it creates in the listener, and it is easier for sad music to score high on all these dimensions. Hell, there are entire genres of music focused on evoking particularly exquisite and powerful sorts of sadness, like the famous "saudade" that fado musicians strive for.
This is evidently false. We can look at the top 40 charts and they are almost always mostly pretty upbeat songs. So either there isn't more good sad music or people don't prefer good music.
I mean if you really get into their lyrics they might be secretly depressing but most people aren't going to parse Mr brightside as sad.
Somehow this brings me around to remembering Peter Green's lavish blues guitar, with Jeremy Spencer's slide in the background. It's as if they held depression over their heads before an altar.
I agree. I think music is most enjoyable when it resonates with the listener’s emotions, and happy music fails to do this for sad people. I think a good sad song can help the listener process their emotions, like having a good cry. Happy songs are kind of discordant when you’re sad, making you feel like you don’t belong. It’s like how when you’re lonely at a party, that loneliness is so much worse than from the loneliness from being alone.
I think the best songs when you’re sad are the ones that resonate with sadness but are also high-energy. Songs that are anguished or vengeful, or songs that start melancholy and end triumphant. In my opinion, the worst part of sadness is the way it saps your energy and motivation, and good music can fix that (incidentally, I think “lack of energy” is the biggest reason why sad people avoid doing social things that would make them happier).
I've occasionally noticed something similar with procrastination. On days when I'm very distracted, I sometimes feel brain fog pour in right when I try to go back to work. The brain fog then goes away if I go back to being distracted. From the inside it feels like my body wants to be distracted and is enforcing this by making it hard for me to think well.
I sometimes have the same experience as Kel. (Today is one of them, which is why I'm here.) As for links to food intake, when I'm procrastinating on stuff I also tend to procrastinate on eating. The causative direction for me is definitely "procrastinate -> not eat" and not "not eat -> procrastinate" - for example, today I had breakfast right after getting up (because I had been excited the night before about the new cereal we got), but still didn't feel like doing anything.
It's completely irrelevant, but for breakfast I usually eat either generic brand cheerios or leftovers (home-cooked healthy meals).
In addition to low blood sugar, which can cause brain fog - I'm also gesturing at potential food allergens/sensitivities, of which brain fog is a relatively common symptom.
Try keeping a journal of diet and good versus bad days - see if some foods might be setting you up for failure, and whether others might be setting you up for success. Common offenders are dairy, gluten, and salicylates.
Without being familiar with any relevant studies, I can’t say much about whether this tracks with what’s known. Still, it seems strongly counterintuitive, and goes against what I seem to observe in myself and others.
For context: I’m certified in Peer Support, and I’ve been offering similar support as a personal coach for 7 years. In almost each case of depression or acute distress that I’ve seen, there seems to be a shared pattern: trying to figure out what’s wrong or improve matters tends to increase stress and a feeling of futility, whereas simply acknowledging how things are seems to provide relief and, as the post mentions, relaxation.
Certainly this could be described as “feeling worse”: staving off negative emotion means having some amount of disengagement from them, whereas letting them land and linger means dropping those barriers.
But the key principle seems to be that feeling any feeling, feels consonant; whereas fighting any feeling, feels dissonant.
In my own internal experience, and in the descriptions I’ve heard from everyone I’ve worked with—often friends who I just happened to be there for—this seems to be universal. The aversive/distressing quality of any emotion seems entirely separate from its placement on the happy-sad spectrum; instead, it seems to be a function of whether a person feels safe to simply immerse themselves in it, which in turn can often come a bit *after* voluntarily doing so.
It seems like the only way that the set-point narrative applies here, is in the difficulties we all have finding our way towards less familiar emotions: anything we’re used to navigating certainly tends to be easier than finding our way somewhere new. The persistent inertia of predominant affect is a fact; but the “emotional homeostasis” claim seems wrong. Rather, people (1) feel better when they aren’t fighting any feeling, and (2) tend not to know a way out of their common, negative emotions—if they did, they’d have used it already.
I don't think what you're saying disagrees with my point.
When your set point is set to "depression", trying to fight depression brings you away from your set point, and so feels (at least to start) aversive and bad.
I agree there's something awkward here, in that the sadness of depression, and the badness of being too far from your set point, are two different and conflicting kinds of bad emotion.
Yeah, I see how I made that unclear. I ended up implying what I should have stated, which is: it seems like at no point does depression replace happiness as the "baseline" that feels good to go towards. "Letting a particular feeling occur without being fought" is what seems to account for the listening to sad music, or similar preference--but this seems to be temporary, and to abate once the feeling stops generating itself. Any further attempt to take similar actions, once there's not a live feeling that needs un-fighting, seems to leave the people I've seen do it, and myself, not getting the desired effect.
No matter how depressed a person is, it appears that they still find sorrow, on the object level, unpleasant--and that they naturally tend towards and prefer moving through-and-out-of such feelings. Many can't/don't know how to; and of these, I've seen many try things that seemed to help in similar situations, like listening to more sad music. But they also indicate that this doesn't help, and usually become frustrated quickly when that's the case.
So there doesn't seem to be any person I've seen who exhibits the behavior I'd expect given your theory: acclimation to depression, with a kind of zen acceptance of it, but an aversive response to any competing emotion, which is responded to with self-soothing back into moroseness.
I’ve definitely clung to depressive feelings before— as Scott said, “I don’t deserve to be happy / feel comfortable after what I’ve done”, or “If I stop feeling upset about how they treated me, it means it must not be a big deal, and it was, so I’m going to keep thinking about it”.
“I agree there's something awkward here, in that the sadness of depression, and the badness of being too far from your set point, are two different and conflicting kinds of bad emotion.”
Yes! This helps me see that these really are two different theories.
One says: depression is feeling sad. It’s sticky because not feeling sad feels worse than feeling sad.
The other says: depression is feeling sad. It’s sticky because you feel sad about feeling sad.
The suggested cures are totally different. The cure for the first is to make feeling good feel OK. The cure for the second is to make feeling bad feel OK.
For what it’s worth, escaping depression feels like a combination of both tactics: CBT / William James pragmatist style go for a run see your friends; wisdom literature / acceptance yes this is awful the race is not to the swift but time and chance happeneth to all men.
There's activity motivation in the mix, which for good reason IMHO has been differentiated from mood in the definition of depression. So there should be two set points, one for mood and one for activity.
Have you read any Randolph Nesse on the evolutionary theories of depression? My very high level summary of his theory is that depression often happens after a failure of some kind and it encourages people to regroup, chill and take fewer risks. Perhaps awkwardness is that we currently judge depression as bad, so your body's like "let me stay depressed!" but your social conditioning is "depression is bad!" Also in modern life, being depressed is isolating. I wonder if in the past, being depressed meant you withdrew to your family/clan who would support you, and it would eventually pass. But in modern life depression comes with a loss of status that can be felt as ostracism. So maybe it's your body wanting to be depressed but then being confused as to why you're not getting comfort and freaking out at feeling ostracised, as the two conflicting kinds of bad emotion.
Isn't a consequence of a theory that explains depression as an error in set points that we should probably expect truly effective drugs for treating depression to also improve mood in non-depressed people?
You might be able to find some drugs that mostly just weaken the strength of the set-point but the problem is those could easily make things worse. Often depressed people will face real life problems as a result of their depression costing friends, jobs etc etc and weakening the set point could let it be pushed lower. Sure, regression to the mean probably makes these drugs worthwhile but it suggests that when you have a hard case and really need drastic intervention you probably need a drug that directly increases that set point in everyone.
This isn't necessarily bad per-se, you might want to avoid prescribing them to the non-depressed for risk of producing mania (which is presumably the opposite set point issue) but it likely means lots of trouble getting regulatory approval because they'll have some tendency for abuse and many people will get worked up about the idea of improving mood through chemistry since it doesn't just help the depressed.
You could have a treatment where a drug reduced the stickiness of the setpoint / allowed recalibration (do psychedelics do this?), and to eliminate depression you need to pair it with happiness inducing behavior. Such a drug might have risk for abuse if you take it when you're already deleriously happy or otherwise about to get a very large happiness shock, but should be fine insofar as setpoints have some grounding in reality and "normal events" can only bring your setpoint to "normally happy"
I agree that would be a nice tool but I don't see how you expect it to work in hard cases.
Should the psychiatrist find the patient someone to fuck/have a relationship with, a new job etc??
I presume you couldn't have (and if u did it would be super dangerous) a drug that just resets your set point to however u feel over a short time period like 12 hours and even then absent giving them a euphoriant, cash or sex how do u engineer this? Giving them a euphoriant plus reset drug might be a good treatment if this was possible but again feels like it will be hard to get approved.
I think psychedelics quite plausibly can reduce the stickiness of setpoints. They certainly soften your priors and are as such a quite effective tool for changing your mind: I can't recall if it was marijuana, or some classical psychedelic, which was shown to permanently increase subjects' score on openness to experience.
I'm not sure if it is the one you are thinking of, but psilocybin (of magic mushroom fame) has been found to increase openness to experience for at least a few weeks after taking it.
Yes, but note that while psychedelics may have some use treating depression they aren't great. It's still pretty hit or miss and can make things worse. Nothing like antibiotics for depression.
True. Although one might wonder what results we would get if we administered psychedelics alongside a procedure intentionally designed to recalibrate setpoints.
From memory a number of antidepressants induce mania in bipolar patients: SSRIs and apparently others too. While that's not exactly improving mood in mentally healthy patients, it is lifting an already buoyant mood to dangerously high levels.
But is that really a common effect or is this another thing like most serotonin syndrome warnings about SSRIs that happens only very very rarely? I've known a number of people who got SSRIs and bipolar disorder diagnosises. So I don't think it's likely to be something that even a bipolar person could count on to induce mania.
At an earlier more foolish and pretty depressed period in my life I tried pretty hard to induce serotonin syndrome by doing the things (except MAOIs and the other you actually might die warnings) warned against mixing with SSRIs (wanted to see if I could get mania) at huge doses and nothing and I'm not the only one who has been cavalier about that kind of thing.
Basically I suspect this is one of those: hey it might happen in rare cases things...but some psychiatrist here will know.
It's quite common (manic switch on antidepressant monotherapy), far more common than serotonin syndrome, but not universal. Your friends on SSRIs with bipolar are almost certainly also on mood stabilizers, which substantially mitigates the risk. It's not just SSRIs; I've yet to find something with antidepressant effects that doesn't also have some concern for mania in bipolar--even exercise!
I've never been clinically depressed, but at times when I was feeling at a bad point in my life and listened to a lot of goth music it was (a) a group identification with other people who felt the same way, and (b) made my emotions feel validated. Not laudable, just validated.
Maybe it's better modelled as multiple homeostatic systems interacting rather than one big one. The part of the mind that maintains an identity keeps trying to stick to "depressed" "worthless" etc. while the part that maintains happiness takes a back seat.
I could some up with some evo-psych handwaving that explains it: people try to fit into the right social role, this is very important for reproduction, and in pathological cases trying to "fit in" to a perceived social role can end up taking over your motivation completely.
Can one's happiness set point be miscalibrated too *high*? What would the behaviors to defend that set point look like? Would the resulting overall picture correspond to a well-known disorder or phenomenon? (perhaps not classified as a disorder, if not maladaptive)
I was wondering the same thing. IIUC mania is typically considered to be the opposite of depression (not just happy vs sad but energetic/lethargic, etc). Are there similar examples of maniacs doing "happiness-promoting behaviors?
Doesn't mania result in taking more risks (with the potential for high payout), being more social, doing more things in general? All of those seem "happiness-promoting" to me
Your first example doesn't work, unless you believe it makes sense for the same action to be simultaneously "happiness-promoting" and "sadness-promoting".
This all sounds like there's an alteration to the loss aversion parameter. It's usually around 2-2.5, but in mania, I think it goes down to less than 1, while in depression, it can be arbitrarily high.
[Epistemic state: Complete guesswork. It sounds plausible, but this isn't based on any studies.]
I know a woman whose father gave away the family’s life savings during a manic episode. It probably felt extremely generous and made him happy at the time, but I would not say it was adaptive to his family’s well-being.
I spent a decade being consistently much more happy than anyone I knew (or know now), and it mostly manifested in working on all the projects. It didn't feel like workaholism - I didn't feel like I was doing it to get some kind of reward, it just inherently felt right (which of course was the reward, I just wasn't conceptualising it that way) - but I guess it was? I never burnt myself out with it, because I was cognisant at the time of my stress levels and took care not to raise them, but I think the drive to do things constantly (draw, write, run roleplaying campaigns, program, all in parallel to a normal regimen of studying/working, eating, and sleeping quite a lot actually (average of nine hours)) could have been my body defending its very high happiness set point? No clue if the shoe fits, it's all a bit alien to me in hindsight ever since grief ate my brain.
❤️ Thank you, that's very kind of you and I appreciate it. It's year three, so I'm not sure it will happen, but I am functioning and not depressed on most days.
The theory that we have a happiness set point doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Almost by definition, we try to be as happy as possible, subject only to external constraints, and to trade-offs between short-term and long-term happiness. (Perhaps also to other constraints such as morality, but that can still be modeled as having a clear conscience being a factor in happiness.)
The hedonic treadmill theory doesn't contradict the above (that we seek to maximize happiness, rather than set it to a particular point). AFAIUI it just posits that, after a life(style) change that, on the short term, makes one happier, happiness eventually returns to the previous level even if the change persists. But we still try to maximize happiness, even if most actions for that purpose are only effective for a relatively short time.
I may have experienced some of the changing set point in fluid intake that you describe.
As part of a weight-loss plan, I deliberately increased the amount of water I was drinking to 8-10 cups daily. Later, due to other medical issues, I changed my target to 12-14 cups daily. More recently, I've found that I feel thirsty more often, and I'm now drinking 13-16 cups daily without much effort (I take potassium and magnesium supplements to avoid issues with low electrolytes resulting from drinking so much).
There's definitely a short-term set point for fluid intake. My understanding is that aldosterone and vassopressin are the hormones controlling the mechanism. If you overhydrate, your kidneys will remove water from your body more quickly. Because there's some delay in the feedback mechanism, your kidneys will continue to be in overdrive even for a short while after you go back to normal water intake. So your hydration level will drop and you'll get thirsty.
Weight-class athletes sometimes take advantage of this "hydration over-correction" to achieve rapid water loss, in a technique called "water loading".
> Which other conditions seem like cases of miscalibrated set points?
Isn't this a model for basically all chronic illness that persists after the acute shock disappears? The body is a complicated control system, sometimes acute stimulus drives the system into a different equilibrium point, the equilibrium point being bad makes us label it "chronic illness". At least this should work for chronic pain and chronic inflammation, right?
If you generalize "setpoint" just a little bit, I think autoimmune disorders might also fall into this category. (Does the body have mechanisms for determining when it should learn that something is a pathogen and when it should resist learning that something is pathogenic?)
Taken too far one might find themselves saying that the body has established a new-normal set point of right handed ring finger tiplessness after an acute workplace accident.
Many of the things depressed people have to do to avoid depression are quite effortful, like exercise, or aversive, like calling a friend when your entire cognitive architecture is telling you they secretly hate you.
Taking a pill is fairly easy. Perhaps depression works at the level of "all those things you can do to help yourself are gonna suck", by racheting up the level of predicted, and perhaps actual, negative affect you feels like doing the things. But an SSRI pill or whatever isn't like calling a friend or going for a walk, you can do it without being thwarted by all the negative generative predictions your cortex is spinning up.
Yeah. As effortless as taking a pill and probably about as effective would be to have someone who cares about you fumble on your back a few times daily. But home grooming therapy still has to be established .
> I've never heard of anyone giving themselves a primary polydipsia by voluntarily drinking more water (maybe because they heard that bogus eight glasses per day statistic) and then being unable to stop; if there were cases like this, it would lend this theory significant support.
During fall of 2015, I was sick with semi-bad pneumonia, and my doctor told me to drink more water. (This was somewhat of a common refrain from many of my doctors, over the years.) So I did. Got into the habit of drinking regularly, two glasses of water per hour I was awake, summing up to about 300oz per day. (Where, before this, I was drinking smaller total quantities less consistently, maybe ~100-200oz/day on average.)
I kept this habit up after that. When I was sick and doctors told me to drink more, I'd do so temporarily for the duration of my sickness, escalating to two glasses per 40 minutes, but I'd go back to two-per-hour once no longer sick. It was stable enough that I could even pretty often *tell the time* by it: notice a pang of thirst, check the clock, find that, yes, as expected, it was the top of the hour. Until, in mid-2019, I became chronically sick with a bunch of inconvenient effects, including, among other things, continually-escalating thirst, to the point where I felt near-permanently thirsty. And even *I* knew better than to escalate up to drinking every half-hour, as my body was trying to push me towards.
As is likely obvious given the context of this story, it turns out, whoops, drinking 300oz/day is Too Much! This was eventually, after a half-year-ish of chronic sickness, a thing someone managed to figure out, following my sodium levels testing out-of-reference-range-ishly low during an ER-visit-for-a-kidney-infection at the start of 2020. So the nurse told me to cut my water-intake levels way back, and I did, and the chronic sickness and all its side-effects receded as I did, and now I'm down to drinking only ~90oz of water per day and being pretty stably in the middle of the reference-range sodium-wise and everything is pretty solidly fixed.
But the interesting thing in the meantime was: during the acute chronic sickness in 2019, I felt permanently thirsty due to not drinking enough relative to the runaway spiral my thirst-levels had fallen into. When I dropped my water-intake in 2020, I went a couple weeks feeling even more deeply unpleasantly thirsty than I had before, but then after a couple weeks it turned around, with the reduction-in-thirst from breaking the spiral becoming larger than the increase-in-thirst from drinking like a quarter the water I was accustomed to. So things were better, at that point. But they weren't *fixed*, in any quick way. It took probably on the order of 2-3 years, after that, before my thirst levels really finished recalibrating on my new baseline water-intake-rates, and during those years I was in a state of, if not constant thirst, then at least *frequent and conspicuous* thirst, enough that I had to be very actively *limiting myself* to drinking only one glass of water per two hours even when this was unpleasant. (And supplementing in the middle of those two-hour spans, sometimes, with Gatorade, when not-drinking-at-all proved too unbearable.) It's only relatively recently, the last year or two, that I've hit the point of being basically-comfortable-most-of-the-time with my current water-intake-rate.
So I suppose the bottom line I'm trying to get at, here, is: the overly-high water-intake-set-point wasn't strong enough to *make me unable to stop* the overly-high water-intake, once I realized it was bad; but it sure did *make it difficult*, and stuck around as a conspicuous factor in my psychology for a while even post-stopping.
(Even now, I have very little trust in my intuitive sense of thirst as a means of calibrating my water-intake. I may not be unpleasantly thirsty most of the time any more, but my Gatorade-intake-rate between scheduled drinks remains not all that much smaller than it was back when things were worse. (I factored it into the ~90oz/day number above; my scheduled water-drinks alone would be only 80oz..) I suspect that, if I were to drop the scheduling, sooner or later I'd find myself back retreading the same ground that led me eventually into the hyponatremia-feedback-loop half a decade ago.)
(The eight-glasses-a-day statistic in particular, to be clear, had nothing to do with anything here. If anyone ever told me to drink eight glasses a day, I told them "yeah, already drinking more than that" and then forgot about the whole thing. But many doctors just sort of abstractly told me to drink More, presumably on the assumption that most people drink unhealthily little rather than unhealthily much, and that definitely was a contributing factor to things.)
Have you tried using throat lozenges to soothe thirst ever? I once had a really bad sore throat, went through a bag of throat lozenges in a couple days, and noticed that (a) my body started manufacturing the throat lozenge sensation in anticipation of a lozenge, sometimes, and (b) once I no longer had a sore throat I had the impulse to suck on a lozenge in reaction to thirst, a couple times (it went away pretty quickly though).
Not sure I'd recommend, but it's a thing to experiment with if you want to
Seconded. When I had polydipsia I spent a lot of time sucking on lozenges, and it did take some of the edge off my thirst even though I still felt pretty horrible.
That happened to me, too, except even more so. I was on focalin for just under two years when I was younger, and it made me urinate more, so I drank a cup of water every hour so I wouldn't become dehydrated. Even after I went off the focalin, I'd trained myself to crave more water, and no one had ever told me that drinking too much water was unhealthy, so I kept drinking more and more. By the time I realized I had a problem, it was April of 2020, I was pretty much constantly thirsty, and I'd developed these weird psychological side effects like irritability and increasing anhedonia. The worst of it lasted roughly from late June to late August, when I was constantly, excruciatingly thirsty as well as woozy from hyponatremia and felt almost no pleasure from almost anything. Eventually my survival instincts won out over my thirst and I cut my fluid intake, and the thirst and other side effects started to get better. But it took a few years before my amount of thirst pretty much went back to normal, and my happiness set point still hasn't quite returned to where it was, although it's always getting better.
Edited to add: I still drink on a schedule, too, although I make allowances for the temperature and how much I'm exercising.
Do you think the same applies to mania, just with the mood set-point too high instead of too low? This theory matches my internal experience of depression reasonably well, but I haven't heard of anything analagous to depressed people listening to sad music for mania.
See my last reply above. It has been well argued that psychiatry is much like alchemy and probably in the history of both disciplines the roadside is strewn with smart well-meaning people's interesting theories having led nowhere so far. In the eighties, I attended a seminar about the chronobiology of endogenous psychoses. The basic assumption was about a circadian wave rythm of mood and drive being desynchronized. So there the set point would be moving in time. Our host's control theory stuff still sounds fine to me as far as it goes, except for the music part.
...All this talk about predictive coding and free energy and the brain just being applied statistics is starting to make me think that this whole topic is a legitimate information hazard. There's probably a damn good reason that the brain thinks it's not just math and that it believes there's actually something special about it, and you can't rob people of that illusion without consequences. We are walking into very dangerous territory here.
I understand that further AI research and research by the AI themselves will continue to unveil inconvenient truths about our own existence, but... maybe it's better if we don't think about this too much for the time being. We've already killed God, we can't afford more nihilism and existential horror right now.
> There's probably a damn good reason that the brain thinks it's not just math and that it believes there's actually something special about it, and you can't rob people of that illusion without consequences.
Like what... Nothing leaps out at me. Do people tend to fall into deep depression after reading/learning about free energy? Seems improbable.
I also think about this in terms of someone being in constant "recovery". For example, one of the primary mechanisms behind feeling better after crying is that it is an intense release of emotion all at once, and often people would prefer to feel very bad for a short period of time than have it stretch out over the course of days. For most people, listening to sad music or doing things that make them feel terrible can actually help them. For depressed people, I think it sort of works in the same way, but there's some sort of constant pressure of sadness that invariably returns fairly quickly, sending them down the same path again. Because of this, many natural coping mechanisms don't really work long-term for depression, but people keep seeking them in hopes of some short-term respite.
When people go to live blues concerts, does it make them feel worse? I have trouble believing this. They look cheerful. Perhaps they are cheered by the social atmosphere, not the music.
Blues fans are the people most likely to go to blues concerts. They are also the people who are most likely to listen to recorded blues music, which presumably makes them sadder. Are blues fans generally more depressed than other people? I suspect they are. Live music bars often prefer blues bands perform because the audience is a heavier drinking one than audiences of most other genres of music.
But then why do these depressed people seek out blues concerts, which cheer them up?
- When I'm in a depressive episode and feel like sitting in dark rooms doing nothing, my internal justification is usually something like "I just need to rest and save energy, and then I'll go do things later when I feel better." (Most of the time, this is probably untrue. Maybe my brain heard too much "spoon theory" at some point and miscalibrated its incentives on that basis?)
- Some of the internal experience of depression for me is just feeling an indefinite sense of melancholy, and trying to follow that and put into words exactly what it is that I'm feeling. Sad music sometimes has the effect of helping me put the emotion into explicit words, and that causes some kind of cathartic release that allows me to move on. So there may be some situations where sad music is actually the right choice.
Some of this definitely resonates with me too. I also always thought of it as seeking some sort of environmental alignment. If/when/where my depressive mood feels internally-caused (which it usually is for me), I'm desperately seeking external stimuli that align with how I'm feeling internally. To provide some sense of sanity, relevance, connection, where my brain otherwise feels most positive stimulus are jarring and artificial. I usually default to sad music or sad movies, which feel like the lightest form of indulgence, with the potential benefit of displacing the internal feelings onto something external. So sometimes, as you say, those mediums put into words and images that highly-relatable "indefinite sense of melancholy", and some other times it lets me un-stick depressive feelings' suction cups from my own brain so I can gently place them onto those other things while I try to move on with my life. At the very least, it tends to stall my spiral, and I'm thankful that my ~rational ~healthy mood-brain returns eventually and stops craving those sad things.
I often think about an episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, "Painfotainment", where he reviews the history of public torture and executions. There's a part where he talks about the striking absence of nausea in old accounts of public torture.
Keep in mind these were hours long, ended in gruesome deaths beyond anything you'd see in a theater, and people voluntarily went to see them. Yet nobody seems to get sick. Meanwhile, transport most modern non-sociopaths to the same scene and most of us would feel at least a little sick. Plenty of dads don't do well during labor and delivery.
This is interesting to me, because it not only suggests a link between physiological reflexes and psychological conditioning, but it extends that to social conditioning as well.
I haven't listened to the podcast, but I imagine context of *who* was getting tortured/executed - criminals - is highly relevant to how people felt about their suffering.
After all, historically most people were *much* more vulnerable to all sorts of crime; if someone steals the horse which is critical for your livelihood, you might die of slow starvation when you can't making a living without it (and so on). Predators had a much greater chance of getting away with violent crime, and invisible supernatural forces held mysterious sway over people's lives and were not to be messed with.
So when crime had a much greater negative impact on its victims than it does today, I can totally understand why the average historical townsperson might have had little or zero sympathy for criminals, and perhaps even felt that any amount of public suffering was appropriate. For many, these ceremonies were an affirmation that bad people will be made to suffer tremendously, and that must have brought some comfort to those that came to witness the punishment.
I'm sure that was part of it, but there's a famous saying that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. The customs are different. In this case, they were using torture as a sort of morality play, where the criminal had opposed the state - which in many cases meant opposing god himself - and therefore needed to be punished. But it was through punishment that the criminal found redemption, and indeed this is why local clergy were often part of the ceremonies.
For the onlookers, this was perhaps slightly analogous to witnessing a baptism or first communion. Here was a person who would come out of prison completely in opposition to god and all things good and holy, but by the end their suffering would lead them to find redemption and reconnection to the community they had wronged. Maybe there was a sense of retributive justice, or of assuring people that they were safe, but there was a lot more going on in public tortures that were almost ceremonial at times.
The reason I bring it up is because of the connection to what we normally think of as an innate physiological response. When you first learn about autonomic control, you don't think of it as something that can be altered by culture. It's autonomic - you can't change it if you tried! What, are you going to slow down your digestive tract, or tell your immune system to not react to a bacterial infection? Yet the visceral response to gore seems to have a high degree of cultural variance, even as an involuntary autonomic response.
This post feels way too much like assuming the conclusion.
1. The attraction to the sadness could equally well be hermetic, for instance.
2. It could be an attempt to normalize the depression: "See, it's not just me. Some people feel so sad that they actually write music to reify it! I'm not that sad-maybe I'm closer to normal than I thought."
From a first-person perspective, I understand this a bit. When my father died, I felt incredibly sad, and all-around horrible. I didn't enjoy being sad, didn't want to wallow in it (especially since he explicitly asked me to do the opposite!), but it did feel *wrong* to, say, eat cotton candy while skipping around on a sunny day.
In the midst of this, I had this thought experiment. Let's say there was a breakthrough in psychiatry and they'd solved sadness entirely with one easy pill a day. I wouldn't've wanted to take the pill, and I think anyone would agree that maybe sometimes one should be able to be sad for a time. I'm pretty anti-suffering, but justified not wanting to take the pill because maybe my sadness was teaching me something. But let's say there was also some amazing super AI tech that could instantly teach me everything I would've learned through sadness. I still don't think I'd've taken the pill.
That's a very interesting thought experiment. I think for me the justification would be less about learning than about a form of debt. Like despite the explicit instruction I'd feel I owed some sadness - maybe not even to my father but to the universe.
Maybe I'm just using owed as a substitute for "feeling compelled" which is no explanation at all. But I think that's how I think of it when I stay angry about something far longer than it's useful even as I try to consciously remind myself - what's the point in the holding onto this feeling now? It's like a pretense that the universe can actually sense my feeling and I need to feel it so the universe learns?
I think there’s a distinction between feeling sad and clinical depression. My depression, which I’ve grappled with for 30 years, is never triggered by external events. It emerges from the void over a period of several weeks.
Medication has helped me a lot, but at times the side effects of anorgasmia have led me to rationalize going off it. At the time I go off, I feel fine, and my happiness goes up for a while because I can experience sexual pleasure. But 60 days later I’m a wreck and desperate to get back to where I was before, side effects be damned. This past year, after this happened once again, I was prescribed an SNRI that miraculously doesn’t have that side effect. I hope I can stay on it forever.
I'd mostly avoid it for the same reason I avoid all pills; my body should be able to handle things, drugs are cheating. But just like Ibuprofen, some days call for cheating.
...the pill's like Ibuprofen, right? You take it and you're sad-free two hours later? It's not one of those "you'll start feeling this in three weeks" things?
>if an obese person diets for long enough, does their lipostat eventually recalibrate to the diet as a new set point?
Yes, unless they think that they have permanently recalibrated and abandon the diet for the more enjoyable "old ways". Diets work only if you actually can stick to them indefinitely, with only the occasional splurges. I though this was the conventional wisdom by now?
Well, a "diet" is an intentionally non-automatic eating regime. In this context, the lipostat resetting would be that the previously-non-automatic intentional regime (the "diet") becomes the new automatic regime ("just eating what you want when you want"). That's not "sticking to the diet", that's "the need to diet going away".
Right, that's exactly the problem with the popular conception of a "diet" being a temporary imposed remedy for a permanent issue. There's no point in it, if you can't commit to a lifestyle change where the regime eventually becomes automatic and frictionless.
It remains an open question whether a "diet" will _ever_ result in lipostat change and thus become "automatic/frictionless", which is exactly the question Scott posed that you quoted.
If you just keep doing a "diet" (in the sense of a non-automatic intentional regime) indefinitely, then it never becomes automatic and frictionless, by definition. You're just permanently dieting. But Scott is pondering whether there is a point past which you "stop dieting" but don't revert to your old behaviour - the new behaviour becomes automatic.
>But Scott is pondering whether there is a point past which you "stop dieting" but don't revert to your old behaviour - the new behaviour becomes automatic.
I think that Scott ponders a different question, this one seems confused.
As I understand it, the lipostat doesn't determine any particular behavior, it just makes you hungry at a certain point, and from then on it's your decision what to do about it.
Under the hypothesis in question, bad diet leads to lipostat damage which in turn leads to obesity. Even supposing your non-automatic intentional regime fixes the damage, as soon as you stop it, the damage presumably sets right back in and you'll eventually end up where you started.
However, if you get accustomed to your non-automatic regime so that it eventually becomes automatic (that is, not a constant struggle etc.) and you keep your weight loss, then this would be good evidence for the theory, and as far as I can tell, this in fact agrees with people's experiences (including my own, for whatever it's worth).
Okay, I think I get it now - it's not that you have to manually diet forever, it's that you have to manually diet until it becomes automatic. That's a lot more heartening, honestly.
Well, the problem often is, people have bad diets for reasons, and those don't tend to go away by themselves. That's why I like calling it a "lifestyle change" instead of a "diet" - for it to be a long-term success, you likely need to purposefully change something about your habits/outlook/etc. (what worked for me was taking up home cooking) so that the temptation to slip is lessened/no longer there.
>Well, a "diet" is an intentionally non-automatic eating regime
No, it's... just an eating regime. A Western diet is what typical Western people eat.
"Switching" diets implies non-automaticity. But switching is temporary; either you stick with the new diet, or you switch back to the old one (or a third even newer one).
> Yes, unless they think that they have permanently recalibrated and abandon the diet for the more enjoyable "old ways".
I'm confused - if they've permanently recalibrated, shouldn't they feel little desire to go back to their old ways? Or is it that they only think they've recalibrated?
> This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music.
But according to this theory, shouldn't a non-depressed person prefer to seek out happy music when their mood is down? Like, we would expect people without depression to play happy songs at funerals to cheer up.
According to set point theory, there should be two groups of people seeking out happy music:
1) people whose mood is temporarily down by sad events
2) people with mood regulation disorders that are opposite of depression - they are compelled to always listen to happy music regardless of life events
The opposite of depression would be mania. In a state of mania you don't have much time to listen to music at all; there are lots of more important things to do.
Which brings us to one aspect of depression I haven't seen mentioned here so far: drive / motivation to act. Classical depression is a low mood with low drive. There are two other pathologies of these aspects, of course, agitated depression and calm ecstacy, the latter barely known because it doesn't seem to happen much and you won't complain about it and if your spouse complains, you are too happy to care.
Not sure, but I think Scott may be implying that in ordinary sadness (say a reaction to a bad life event), it's good to feel sad, and therefore the body's happiness set point temporarily goes down, and you do things like hiding in a dark room listening to music. Depression in this framework is simply a maladaptive quirk where your body thinks you should be sad for *too long*.
I agree that the theory doesn't make sense if depression is supposed to be totally different from ordinary sadness. Anecdotally, I would expect more non-depressed people to listen to sad music because they are temporarily sad than because they are too happy and want to bring themselves down.
This is one of the biggest things in psychs' usual playbook I cannot reconcile with my own experience. Trying to force down "happy things" to feel happier seems to require assuming you can neatly separate Genuine Bad Feelings and depression and that while Genuine Bad Feelings carry some kind of useful information or relation to reality, depression never does and therefore the only thing you should do is pretend it isn't there/do not-depressed things until your mind recalibrates to match.
I don't listen to a bunch of drone and atonal free jazz when depressed because it's "relaxing". I listen because trying to feign happiness in the face of what made me unhappy feels immediately and clearly dishonest, which makes it impossible for me to *view* whatever piece of media as "happy" or really anything but dishonest. I'm also not even sure there's an objective outside view where you can say something *itself* is intrinsically "depressing" or "happy" at all -- there are tons of songs I know where both music & lyrics taken in isolation are "happy" but my reaction is the opposite, or vice versa.
The even bigger objection I have to this is that it seems to imply that:
1. Only the end goal of mental wellbeing matters
2. You can easily define what mental wellbeing really is
If you were to find some magical purely internal way to feel and think only things consistent with optimal mental wellbeing, it would lead you never to act at all unless you are compartmentalizing mental wellbeing entirely separately from e.g. meaning, morality, your feelings & duty toward others, some idea of duty to survive, ...
>>"Am I eliding some important differences in which these conditions are vs. aren't ego-dystonic? "
Sadness can function as a social signal, conveying emotions like regret or sorrow. This signaling is most effective when the emotion is authentic and perceived as involuntary.
The recruitment of the ego in maintaining sadness could undermine this authenticity. It could make the emotional expression appear deliberate or strategic, potentially reducing its ability to elicit genuine empathy and support from others.
So, I don't think it's a point against your theory. It makes sense that set-points would recruit all the mechanisms at their disposal that don't harm their underlying purpose.
I assume my experience is closer to universal than unique, but still:
I'm not depressed, but sometimes, when I'm angry at or feel hurt by someone close to me, I'm not just upset, but feel the urge to stay upset. I ruminate about how a person has treated me wrong, I realize that I'm keeping myself upset by thinking about it, but it feels somehow *wrong* or inappropriate to think happy thoughts or, yes, listen to happy music. And I'm pretty sure at least part of it is the "let them see how sad I am" component (like a smaller version of the "I'll be dead and then they all will be sorry" thought that might be a cliche by now).
The thing is: these are small, localized occasions, and pass after ten minutes or a few hours, depending on the situation. Not sure how this fits with the set point theory - either the set point has to be able to move for very short periods of time, or there has to be a different mechanism for what feels, on the surface, like a relatively similar experience.
I'm not clinically depressed. But still when I feel sad (for instance, when my grandmother died), I have a desire to listen to sad music. Using the set point theory, the natural response of someone like me (who's set point is... normal.. i.e. not depressed), upon hearing depressing news, should be to listen to happy music, to reset towards a normal state. But I don't. I still favour depressing myself further with sad music.
I don't think it's possible to square this with the idea that depressed people listen to sad music to keep a homeostatic depressed state. I just don't think it's logically consistent; if this was the case we'd see the opposite effect in people without clinical depression when they get sad news, but we don't. I don't have any particular problem with the overall homeostatic theory here; but the sad music component doesn't fit IMO. Which is inconvenient since it's the framing device for the entire article haha...
Perhaps the idea is that your set point temporarily changes when you hear sad news, like it changes when you have fever, and for depressed people, the change is permanent, as if they had fever forever?
I think of this in the context of dopamine a lot. Like cell phones, apps, games, tv all artificially set our dopamine thermostat level too high and it's hard for us to get it back down to a normal level where we can appreciate stillness and calm and thoughtfulness.
If it was just a matter of having a different set point to non-depressed people, then wouldn't we see non-depressed people start listening to lots of sad music when they get particularly happy (i.e. above their own set point)? And other depressed type behaviours?
I can't really buy the premise that sad music makes one sad. I really enjoy crying when listening to "Fields of Athenry" and feel the deep beauty of many other "sad" songs.
I am uncomfortable with the emphasis on the idea that patients with fevers are "too warm" and should seek to cool themselves. They aren't running fevers because their internal temperature set point is too high. They're running fevers because the optimal position of their internal temperature set point is higher than is normally the case.
We often treat fever with fever suppressants, and I always wonder whether that actually improves outcomes. You're more comfortable on a fever suppressant, but the purpose of the fever is to help you. 😕
If you're out in the wilderness with no medical support letting the body create a fever to kill the infection is probably a decent idea (as long as you don't get beyond the safe range). But given that we have modern medications and treatments that reduce the risks of infections spiraling out of control I suspect the risk-reward measure favors some degree of fever control (if you get really sick you can get antibiotics or antivirals etc).
i think there’s probably some evolutionary game theory between your immune system and infections. these days it seems most pathogens have evolved to be able to beat fever, so no immediate advantage to having one.
if everyone on earth started very consistently treating fever, maybe pathogens would come back that are vulnerable to fever. just my speculation.
the consensus as i (layman) understand it is that treating fever with NSAIDs or tylenol doesn't obviously hurt recovery, so is fine to do if you want, although not necessary.
I would say that what people are thinking is the same thing Peter Gerdes says: that the fever remains helpful, but that you're more comfortable suppressing it and, in the event that the rest of your immune system doesn't do the job the fever was meant to do, taking drugs that will hopefully do the same thing.
There are very strong fundamental reasons to believe that heat resistance is not developing in pathogens that don't already have it. Most obviously, they would be unlikely to function well within a human who was not running a fever, limiting them to infecting people who are already sick.
> Depressed people, when told a treatment will make them happy, very occasionally refuse on grounds that "I don't deserve happiness", but this is pretty rare
Really? This is very much my experience with some of my friends, giving all sorts of reasons not to get help when they're depressed. "It's not depression clouding my judgement, I really am worthless and I really do deserve do be miserable. I wouldn't want some shrink to stop me from perceiving the objective reality of my being a useless piece of crap." In fact, I perceive the "actually deciding to get help" as one of the biggest obstacles to overcoming depression; it's my experience that it's extraordinarily difficult to talk a depressed friend into seeing a doctor. Maybe your perception is shaped by some form of selection bias, since you only see the kind of depressed people who agree to see you in the first place?
in some countries, somebody notices they are psychotic and has them involuntarily committed and forced to take antipsychotics, which despite horrible side effects do work quickly for psychosis.
in other countries, this is rare/impossible, so we usually wait until they do something illegal and get arrested, and hope the police send them to a mental institution and they don’t get hurt or killed during the arrest.
> I perceive the "actually deciding to get help" as one of the biggest obstacles to overcoming depression
The kinds of "help" available are pretty shit, no treatment is very effective, the biggest obstacle to overcoming depression is that depression is hard to treat effectively.
That and therapy (the most effective treatment which even then is not like some kind of cure) is incredibly expensive and essentially impossible to access for most people.
>I wouldn't want some shrink to stop me from perceiving the objective reality of my being a useless piece of crap.
...I'm morbidly curious how they would react to just treating them like a servant. "You're worthless, but I'M not, so get me lunch and then tell me jokes until I leave for my worthwhile endeavors."
I have an adjacent explanation for why I’m fat: I was, legitimately, really really hungry.
I’m not even on Ozempic or anything - just inositol, a supplement, after hearing it can help women with PCOS like myself.
I’d *never* before felt the fullness I do now. Now I actually feel physically bad if I eat too much. I have a natural stop point. When I accidentally miss my pills, and when I accidentally took a lower dose for a few weeks, the uptick in hunger was felt almost instantly. I’d guess it’s something about insulin resistance (though some obese are insulin “normal” but most are not) and just adjusting appetite. Accidentally overeat by 200 calories for six months, you gain weight, appetite adjusts to the new weight.
I really do think “overweight people are more hungry” explains a lot about overweight and obesity. Yet it’s so rarely focused on. You don’t need to jump straight to meds - lots protein and fiber can go a long way. But our most effective treatments for obesity, Ozempic and co and surgery, seems to affect appetite a lot - surprise surprise.
My gut feeling would be that at least with regards to the title example, it's more typically the other way round than in the post:
Blues = music of sadness => we like listening to it in our sadness as it makes us feel less lonely in our sadness, i.e. at least a partial relief from the pain of sadness that is often paired with loneliness.
Happy music = music of the happy moving cheering people => making us feel even more lost in comparison to them, making us even sadder. We avoid it when we're sad; we'd lack the energy to feel truly part of it anyway.
I wonder about the possibility of a similar confusion in some of the rest: "They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies)" -> I'd avoid friends when I'm sad not because I want to be sad, but because in my sad state, I feel like my mood is a spoiler anyway. And I don't think that thought is only a trick by the brain; look at how popular you can be among a group of 'normal' people if you're a charismatic cheerful person, and look how much your popularity is lowered if you're that sad person (I have no stats on this, but it's a strong gut feeling/casual observation).
This control theory applies to society/politics as well.
In a society with minimal crime, a person will point to the one crime that's happened all year and say "Look at how much crime there is. This never would have happened in the good ol days [statistically, it happened all the time back then]. This proves how soft we've gotten on crime. Crime has been normalized. Our society has become so tolerant of crime to have allowed this to happen. It never used to be like this [no it was objectively much worse]"
People talk like that all the time, because when society has wound up at an extreme set point for something, it perceives itself at being at the opposite extreme of that something, and aims to correct by becoming more extreme in the direction that it's already extreme in.
2)
Now as for violent video games (i wound up on your streetlight effect article), imagine someone plays violent video games for too long. At first, their increased aggression is only temporary. But after too much for too long, it starts to "stick", and that post-GTA aggression level becomes their new set point ....
> I've never heard of anyone giving themselves a primary polydipsia by voluntarily drinking more water (maybe because they heard that bogus eight glasses per day statistic) and then being unable to stop
Not sure how much this counts for but I've gotten into the habit of drinking a lot of water and I suspect I now get thirsty more easily than most people. Not exactly polydipsia though.
It could escalate into polydipsia, as it did for me. I recommend that you calculate how much you drink per day, and if it's more than a gallon, you should seriously consider drinking less.
Taking this from depressed people to non-depressed people as well:
I wonder why our usual happiness set point is where it is – and whether some reasons we act irrationally like knowing *what to do* to have a some version of a better life and then for some inexplicable reason *not doing it* are because of some unconscious regulation attempts of our thymostat.
Do we believe our current setpoint to be the correct one and act in ways to keep it like that? Does it make sense to interpret some of our behavior this way and might knowing this help us raise our happiness set point to new levels, in effect making us perform more healthy actions that a healthier, happier person would take?
If I strip out http://sci-hub.tw/ , however, I can get the cited publication.
I apologize in advance for the lack of humility in making suggestions to a top tier psychologist in his area of focus. I hope this isn't entirely redundant with things you've considered already.
Anorexia is a really weird and maladaptive example of an altered set point. You'd think that if you starved an organism and made it exercise that it would adopt a set point of desiring a pathologically large quantity of food, not refusing food if it was available.
"(is) Opiate addiction a recalibration of endorphin set point? I'm not sure. What would it mean, philosophically, to answer yes vs. no to these questions?"
Alternate models:
1. Lack of a set point. If you have a fever, presumably you're still averse to burning your skin. If opiate addiction is well modeled by set points, we should still expect a certain amount of opiates to be aversive and a new, stable set of satisfycing behaviors that involves opiate addiction. A set point that wanders outside control limits is not a *set* point. Similarly, if anorexia is about set points rather than outright food aversion we should still expect a minimal level of food consumption to still be hedonic. Do we?
2. "This person has a new set point for opiate exposure" could be an incorrect assessment of the scope of what is being 'set.' Opiate addiction is a form of stimulation. Maybe the relevant 'set point' isn't for opiates, specifically, but is a set point for stimulation, instead. "If a person is stimulated in other ways then their tendency to use opiates will decrease" is a contrary case to the notion that opiate addiction involves altered set points for opium exposure, specifically.
3. Habit or stimulus-response should be at least partially distinct from set point. The notion that a crack addict seeing a crack pipe will lead to increased *desire* does not seem entirely in line with a set point model. In contrast, does a feverish person feel colder if they see a blanket? Probably not?
4. Lack of capacity is a simpler and more treatment friendly model than altered set points. If someone has higher blood pressure because of kidney dysfunction, then theirs may be 'a new set point' in some sense. But it may be simpler to defer to Occam's razor and just say that a person has kidney dysfunction. It seems common enough and functional enough to describe diseases based on their expected cures. A genuine, physical lack of ability to do a thing should probably supersede a set point model.
"Depression is a trapped prior on low mood"
I feel like 'depression' is a bit of a wastebasket diagnosis. Lets say that in some cases depression is a trapped prior on low mood. In other cases, it's a result of a thyroid disorder. Or the physiological effects of cancer (Which, yes, can be hard to disentangle from the looming mortality that goes with cancer.) Or starvation. Or some other condition where depression is an entirely logical and adaptive state.
If we're going to apply set point theory to depression it would seem helpful to tease out some subpopulation of people to focus on.
It might have been intended to go to the sci-hub PDF, in which case https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2016.11.005 (using the DOI) works. I think the .tw domain might have disappeared since this was written.
> This seems paradoxical (why does someone with a fever, ie someone who is too hot, feel cold?!)
An alternative (or maybe better, and additional/intensifying) explanation of this is _heat flow_ versus temperature. I am (perhaps incorrectly) under the impression that our bodies do not have a temperature sensor but rather a heat flow sensor (hence why a 120F piece of metal feels very hot and a 120F piece of wood does not feel very hot).
Under "normal circumstances" - i.e. a 98F body temp and a 72F room temp, there is a certain heat flow from the body to the environment.
Under "cold circumstances" - i.e. a 98F body temp and a 50F room temp, there is a greater heat flow from the body to the environment, and this prompts "warming behaviour" (shivering, blankets, heaters).
Under "feverish circumstances" - i.e. a 102F body temp and 72F room temp, there is also a greater heat flow from the body to the environment, and this also prompts warming behaviour.
As I said, doesn't need to replace the set-point hypothesis, as I think the feeling of cold in a fever is stronger than the 4-5F change would merit, but it does drive in the same direction.
An excellent and useful article. From a certain perspective, the idea seems extremely likely; humans are full of dynamic systems on various levels of abstraction (metabolic, physiological, psychological, etc), and it just appears that many of these dynamic systems happen to be metastable (that is, they each have more than one stable equilibrium.) Many complex systems are metastable, so this wouldn't come as a huge surprise.
Phrased this way, it also makes a lot of sense that depression, metabolic disorder, and so on share characteristics, even though they're all regulated by vastly different mechanisms - metastability is a property of (properly arranged) dynamic systems in general, not of any particular substrate.
There's also another question here; properly speaking, among all the metastable states a system has, one should be the *most* stable (or lowest-energy) state; in the very long run, this is the state the system will wind up in. We can hope that the most stable state is the healthy one for the system in question (proper weight, balanced mood, etc) but this isn't necessarily true; can we find out if, e.g., the lowest-energy state in our mood-regulation dynamical system is the best for human flourishing? (Is that even an answerable kind of question?)
Isn't the lowest energy state of any living organism death? It therefore seems entirely plausible to me that there could be many metastable states in a healthy organism, and it doesn't seem necessary to focus on the lowest energy ones.
In my case, listening to music at all is inversely correlated with depression. Graphing hours per month on Amazon music would give you a very good proxy for mood in a way I don't think any other simple metric would.
Same. When I’m depressed I don’t listen to music at all. I’ve tried to do it to boost my mood, but the music doesn’t make me feel anything at all. I liken it to how dogs and other animals (don’t) respond. They don’t start tapping their toes to the beat. It’s just random sounds to them.
Not sure if you’ve already come across Maxime Taquet’s mood homeostasis work (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32320005/) but it sounds very relevant to your thinking on this subject
I was curious about the basic study design and their terminology; here's what I found:
> (Dataset 1) Participants volunteered by downloading a mobile application for ecological momentary assessment of mood and behavior via short questionnaires presented at random times throughout the day. The 2 questions of interest were “How are you currently feeling?” (on a sliding scale from 0 [very unhappy] to 100 [very happy]) and “What are you currently doing?” (from a nonmutually exclusive list of 25 activities, eg, exercising, chatting, working)
> (Dataset 2) The participants were asked to name, in chronological order, the activities that they engaged in during the day11 (eg, religion, subsistence farming), their mood (eMethods 1 in the Supplement), and whether they were ever depressed
> Mood Homeostasis
> We define mood homeostasis as the extent to which a person preferentially engages in mood-increasing activities such as exercising when their mood is low and saves the mood-decreasing activities such as housework for when their mood is higher. Thus, individuals who preferentially engage in mood-increasing activities when their mood is already high and unpleasant activities when their mood is already low would have a low mood homeostasis.
> Mood homeostasis represents the extent to which people demonstrate hedonic flexibility.7 Mood homeostasis is an aspect of the broader concept of mood regulation,12 but it specifically refers to the moment-to-moment regulation of mood states via choices of activities. Details on mood homeostasis and its computation are presented in eMethods 3 to 5 and eFigures 1 and 2 in the Supplement.
Brief thoughts from just skimming this below:
I bet the datasets would be useful to analyze the main post, but their analysis and conclusions might not be directly relevant. They seem to assume that everyone has the same(?) homeostatic set point, and treat the selection of the "appropriate" activity towards that set point as a learned skill(?) If I'm reading correctly, that's a different framework than assuming a higher or lower set point, and automatic activity selection to maintain it, as proposed by the OP.
After reading comments, I realized there is a fair bit of unclarity about what it means to have a set point. For instance, is a set point
A) Merely a baseline against which changes are evaluated. In other words opiate tolerance is an increase in the set point for mu-opiate receptor activation since you now need more than that usual level to feel the high of endorphins and below that level feels like too little.
Or
B) The level which the body tries to maintain via some kind of homeostasic process?
In this case opiate tolerance probably doesn't qualify because, while you feel shitty if you go cold turkey, your body doesn't act to regulate your opiate levels to that baseline (it doesn't produce more endorphins to avoid withdrawal and you can't call drug seeking a homeostatic mechanism since you don't feel shitty when you have more than the normal amounts
And I think this really matters for the theory since in case A the claim is essentially trivial and I don't think you've given much evidence that depression is like fever rather than just merely having too high a baseline of what it takes to feel good (internal drug w/d essentially).
I’ve worked with CBT with depressed teenagers and it’s not uncommon that a prolonged depression or otherwise difficult period gets caught up in their identity formation. Thus the idea of medication or treatments that ask them to behave differently are sometimes scary because, if it works, it feels like loosing what makes you you. I wonder to what extent this is an additional cognitive mechanism and to what extent it’s just an epiphenomenon emerging from some “set-point”. I am from a cognitive-behavioral school so I’m inclined to seeing things as a bunch of additional things rather than grouping it all together into one mechanism.
A PCT familiar friend read this and replied “I’m not sure that this applies control theory correctly. Mood regulation isn’t a goal in itself, it’s the means of altering behaviour. People aren’t trying to make themselves more unhappy, they’re trying to get sacked, get out of a relationship, get out of family responsibilities. It’s easy for the helper to make this mistake because it is their job (goal) to make the person happy”.
But I also suspect that the behavior altering often doesn't work as intended, basically because the modern world is more complicated than the ancient jungle our emotions evolved for. For example, the things you are trying to get out of keep waiting for you much longer than they would if everyone just followed their instincts.
There's a tension in a certain kind of depressed person that runs like this:
- I deserve to be miserable
- I nevertheless (viscerally or instinctively) try to avoid being miserable
This leads to some weird things. First off, it causes distress through fairly standard self-discrepancy theory: I'm a piece of shit who deserves to be miserable, but I'm not. Something is wrong! Oh no! Quick, resolve the distress by reminding yourself what a piece of shit you are! As soon as that's done, the immediate crisis is resolved: you're a piece of shit and you correctly feel like one. Peace has been restored to the world.
I'm confident at least some flavors of depression also involve self-destructive tendency or warped cognition. Consider somebody who is obese who wants to eat healthily but struggles to do so. He has a choice, at some point, to eat a chef salad or four Big Macs. Naively, in the realm of pure thought segregated from physical desire, one might imagine he would be happier with the idea of eating a chef salad than four Big Macs:
- "I am eating healthily. That's good!"
- "I did it again, I ate four Big Macs. What a mistake."
Details aside, the emotional pressures here are at least working in the correct direction. But the fact that fat and salt taste better than unseasoned lettuce aside, even in the realm of pure thought there's a way to invert this logic with sufficiently warped thinking.
- "What the fuck are you eating a salad for, you fat fuck? Pathetic. You're just going to eat twice as many Big Macs later."
- "That's right, you fatass. Eat four Big Macs like the fat fuck you are."
Somehow, in the locality of the moment, eating healthily has somehow become more locally stressful than eating four Big Macs. A fat man should be eating Big Macs, not salads. Somehow that's just become the way things work. I imagine lot of nominally self-destructive behavior or simple refusal to engage in depression-alleviating activities is a result of hyperlocal avoidance of immediate distress.
As for depressed people trying to get better, there's a second tension involved:
- I deserve to be miserable
- I am aware on some level that I should not think this way
In my experience with depressive episodes I am cross-pressured both ways. Sometimes I'll put on disgustingly upbeat bubblegum pop to try and simply drown out my thoughts with positivity. At other times I'll actively look for audio clips of somebody telling me I'm an awful piece of shit. (I've never actually found any. Most of the audio out there that promises to abuse the listener seems to be sexually charged S&M fetish stuff, as opposed to thirty minutes of somebody telling you you're a failure at life because you struggle to accomplish basic tasks and are bad at your job.)
I'm wondering now if I've allowed my tiredness thermostat to be set too low.
Obviously it's difficult to separate from jet lag but I find that when I've stayed up very late one night, I might stay up even later the next night and the one after... Eventually exhaustion and normal life demands pull me back - but whether its true or not, I think I may use this model as a further push to re-up attempts around personal discipline and going to bed earlier.
Anecdote of one, but I I have what seems to be a slightly higher-than-normal happiness set point and I *truly* LOATHE most happy music, particularly bouncy, insistent pop tunes.
For example, in Christmas music, I never want to hear Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas is You," "Jingle Bell Rock," "Feliz Navidad," etc ever, *ever* again.
My favorite Christmas songs are the really serious traditional pieces like "O Holy Night," and "Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel" (and the more serious the performance, the better), but in modern music, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," "Grown Up Christmas List," "Mary, Did You Know" (but only super-sad acoustic versions; no stupid pop-style cheese, please) and similar are my favorites.
In almost any given musical, my favorite song is going to be the unhappiest, or at least the one filled with the most pathos / longing / determination / inspiration (which is different from "happy")/ etc. Never the cheerful comedy number.
Happy music just feels so grating, so goddamned *insistent*, like a toddler constantly tugging on me, trying to get me to engage with their banal favorite preschool video, over and over and over again. I hate uptempo pop beats so much that if I'm forced to consciously endure them at an unignorable volume (in a restaurant or whatever), my mood deteriorates and I have to consciously conceal that I'm feeling irritable and resentful. If it goes on for a while I'll start to feel something akin to mild despair.
People are always astonished by this until I explain that basically every happy song I hear is Baby Shark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w). Although even that isn't a great analogy because almost a billion people have watched that video and a nonzero number of them loved it!
In contrast, I'm elevated by sad music. There's a bittersweet frission between the pathos itself and the beauty of its execution that I find both calming and inspiring.
But if I'm actually sad for some reason, I'm not comforted by sad music. I still really loathe happy music, but I don't want to hear sad music either. I just quit music entirely.
It seems possible that you are in the good situation of having a happy life with a relatively average target happiness. Sad songs are only appealing when you are not sad. Happy songs rarely appeal, potentially because you are above your happiness target.
Yeah, it does seem to be something along those lines!
Although I kind of feel like "contentment," is a more accurate word than "happiness," per se. But that's not the framing of the discussion.
You'd think that "more happiness is always better," but, like I said, happy music strikes me as grating and insistent. As I said in a comment above, "there is no time where I *ever* prefer it to something sad. The better the mood I'm in, the more I want to hear something romantically tragic," something which will stimulate my vagus nerve into a sensation of elevation and full-bodied frission.
What about songs with lyrical dissonance, e. g. an upbeat song with grim lyrics (e.g. Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal), or an ear-shattering, thematically-jovial song (e.g. Sophie - Ponyboy)?
I mean I’d say to some degree that describes O Come O Come Emmanuel (“Rejoice! Rejoice!”)
I’ve been told that the association of minor keys with melancholy is culturally determined. Which seems true to some degree when observing the world and hearing traditional wedding music in some cultures played in a minor key. But I have trouble buying it. The association is so tight that it’s tough to imagine it being otherwise.
I do think the lyrics might read as a contradiction of the melancholy of O Come O Come Emmanuel, but I don't necessarily process it that way. While we usually think of "joy" as excited glee, "joy" can also be a kind of calmer intense bliss, too. Especially as it relates to spiritual matters. The word "rejoice" here is about the relief at the end of profound suffering, after all. That could be cheering and jumping up and down, but it could also be an exhausted whisper of, "thank God."
FWIW, I also really like We Three Kings, which is often paired with O Come O Come Emmanuel in arrangements. We Three Kings is hopeful and optimistic, but it isn't offensively exuberant (for my taste).
Never heard of either song before, so I pulled them up on YouTube. The Fleet Foxes version is fine. I felt neutral about it and could easily ignore it if it was in the background of a party or something.
I actually disliked the more upbeat approach and especially all the snapping / body percussion stuff.
Although the video probably enhanced my irritation - the song was obviously recorded in a studio, so the artifice of setting ostentatious a cappella in the woods as an aggravating factor, heh. :)
sad songs work for me during breakups and other similar life events. I think it makes the feeling a bit universal. This however is sadness, not depression.
I've had fevers, though not really high fevers. I've never wanted to cover myself with blankets or any such thing.
It might be relevant that I generally like being a little chilled-- the joke version is that in a past life, I was a head of lettuce. I was well into adulthood until "warm" was a meaningful concept-- before that, I would go straight from "pleasantly chilled" to "too goddamn hot" without noticing the intermediate stage.
It's possible for fat people to be anorexic-- to eat so little that they're malnourished. Anorexic does not equal extremely thin.
" At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).
“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watching, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me.” She rose swiftly, loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
He sighed, defeated by her threat. “I’ll dial what’s on my schedule for today.” Examining the schedule for January 3, 1992, he saw that a businesslike professional attitude was called for. “If I dial by schedule,” he said warily, “will you agree to also?” He waited, canny enough not to commit himself until his wife had agreed to follow suit.
“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,” Iran said.
“What? Why did you schedule that?” It defeated the whole purpose of the mood organ. “I didn’t even know you could set it for that,” he said gloomily.
“I was sitting here one afternoon,” Iran said, “and naturally I had turned on Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends and he was talking about a big news item he’s about to break and then that awful commercial came on, the one I hate; you know, for Mountibank Lead Codpieces. And so for a minute I shut off the sound. And I heard the building, this building; I heard the—” She gestured.
“Empty apartments,” Rick said. Sometimes he heard them at night when he was supposed to be asleep. And yet, for this day and age a one-half occupied conapt building rated high in the scheme of population density; out in what had been before the war the suburbs one could find buildings entirely empty … or so he had heard. He had let the information remain secondhand; like most people he did not care to experience it directly.
“At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I read how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s small has emigrated, don’t you think?”
“But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”
“I program an automatic resetting for three hours later,” his wife said sleekly. "
Globally raising hedonic set-points (or ""thymostats") world-wide should be our long-term goal as a civilization - in human and nonhuman animals alike. For sure, genome reform is a controversial issue. But if we _don't_ tackle the biological-genetic basis of low mood, then the "cancer of the soul" will persist and proliferate indefinitely.
This needs an explanation why some set points are more vs. less malleable. Like the set point for blood oxygen level seems pretty much cast in stone.
The obvious route is the evolutionary one. Probably someone with a malleable blood oxygen set point is just much less likely to pass on the genes that include that malleability.
But why would a malleable thymostat (great word coinage!) be evolutionarily stable?
I would hypothesize it is adaptive in a situation of being at the bottom of the social pecking order, chiefly by massively reducing aggression. Because of the many lies that depression tells, "you're going to lose any fight, so stay out of all fights" is one that might have a strong effect on survival to reproduction when in conditions roughly like slavery.
Something like blood pH is tightly and redundantly controlled because we'd rapidly expire if it weren't. Likewise I think you'd die pretty quickly trying to maintain much less than 98% O2 or so with respiration or exercise (the behavioral levers that exist), because the binding affinities and partial pressures involved have not changed in a way to render that physiologically plausible, let alone desirable. (Oh look, an esoteric hypothesis for the cause of SIDS!)
Our behavior, thankfully, affords more tolerance, and if we're talking evolution, mood is ultimately about behavior regulation. A malleable thymostat is more adaptive than a fixed one, because the whole point of having moods at all is to adjust your behavioral dispositions to your circumstances. I'd expect the relationships between environmental contingencies and mood changes to be pretty robust. It would be pretty odd to find someone who became sad on experiencing success and happy on experiencing failure, for example. High mood tells you, more or less, now is a good time to get out there and do stuff, and low mood tells you not to get out there and do stuff. So long as the reward landscape varies with variables as disparate as social status and the seasons, there's probably some reproductive utility in adapting to it.
Had a coworker recently whose dysfunction seemed anti-fragile. Like we'd try an intervention, e.g. "let's pair program together for an hour" and it would be massively effective - it would be followed by a productive day or two - but then they'd start making excuses to avoid pairing. Similar with various other interventions. As a system, they became resilient against intervention attempts.
Can you elaborate on “massively effective”? Was it more effective than both of you working individually? Or just seemed like a good delta for that coworker?
Their work output was usually bordering on zero. Lots of avoidance and "oh i was stuck on a bug but now i'm not, everything's going okay" but nothing to show for it. The ~three times we pair programmed, afterwards they would have several productive days in which they completed meaningful chunks of work. Their most productive days were all _after_ substantive interaction.
As their kind-of sort-of manager, it was an economical use of my time: I could pay two hours and get 16-24 hours of decent work out of it. It wasn't ideal (i'm not your dad, don't wanna make you sit down and eat your vegetables), but it was preferable to the alternatives (to me, anyways. They chose the alternatives).
As an antisocial person, I feel I should mention I put sizable effort into being civil in in-person interactions and there's very much a "sour spot" I'll hit where I run out of energy and just tell people exactly what I'm thinking, social consequences be damned. Like, I've had these interventions happen, and they do help sometimes, but other times making excuses to avoid the event is in fact the lesser evil.
What seems like "everything finally works okay" from outside may feel like some important resource being depleted from inside. It works okay until you run out of the resource... and then suddenly it does not.
When I played Depression Quest I felt so down, I played aggressively happy music in the background to make myself feel worse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkpHRB5FOM). I don't usually listen to any music when I'm really sad. I don't want to taint it.
Wait wait wait. Does that mean diets cause obesity?
For the weight set point to change you need a mechanism, an evolved adaptation that used to change a set point beneficially in the ancestral environment, like an immune system changing temperature set point. What could be a reason for your weight set point to be able to go way higher than is healthy? I can think of one possibility: feast-or-famine situations.
When you either have more food than you can eat or you are starving, with nothing in between, you need to eat all you can while starving and you need to store as much fat as possible when food is plenty. You should always eat more. So it makes sense to just raise the set point for weight.
In modern times, what can trigger similar response from your body? One possibility is high-stress lifestyle with real risk of not having money for food, but another is dieting! Especially jumping from one diet to another, "looking to see if one works", meanwhile teaching your body that food can disappear without warning and it's best to prepare and store as much food as possible!
Why not just have the set point elevated in response to a resource-rich environment? The expectation/need to prepare for eventual famine is the kind of thing it's better to be born with than have to learn. Then we have a prediction that matches observation--people, including small children, tend to gain weight on the standard 'western diet,' whether or not they have experience dieting. You find the same thing in rodents, who I don't think are doing much by way of intentional weight loss.
"Why not just have the set point elevated in response to a resource-rich environment?"
Because it's unhealthy. It's another interesting question *why* we evolved in such a way that obesity causes various health problems. But given that we did, the disadvantages of being fat outweigh the advantages if the food supply is stable, but not if it's unstable.
Obesity was rarely expressed in the ancestral environment, providing few opportunities to select against it. Moreover, the diseases of obesity and metabolic derangement tend to affect health past the age of reproduction, and don't result in death until later still. But famine and hunger were common enough, and anyone can starve to death at any time, so the adaptations we do have, such as wanting to gorge ourselves on fatty, sugary foods when they turn up, are a defense against those fitness-thratening conditions.
Having a lot of fat is not only unhealthy - you run worse, you fight worse, you are less attractive in a culture where you are expected to work or hunt. It's only advantageous to be fat if it will save your life.
"Having a lot of fat" was not selected for, per se. The behavioral and metabolic dispositions that prevented starvation in the ancestral environment were selected for, at which time they caused obesity less often. The fitness effects of obesity are more variable (in some cultures it is still considered attractive because it's predictive of access to resources), have later onset, and are less severe than death by starvation. And most people under most circumstances would not have been obese. In the modern food environment, those same dispositions are resulting in widespread obesity. You don't need to be personally exposed to starvation for your body to "learn" that it's a threat; the some million years of prior evolution took care of that. Prior evolution did not take care of the dangers of an environment replete with twinkies and big gulps, because that's only been going on for less than a hundred. What I'm relating is pretty much the received view on why everyone is getting fat all of a sudden; google "thrifty gene hypothesis" or even just "obesity evolution" for lots more if you're curious.
Devil's Avocado: depressed people are drawn to sad music because it elicits a stronger emotional response than the alternatives. They're not capable of feeling all that good, that's why we call them depressed, so listening to happy, upbeat, I'm Walking On Sunshine type music does nothing for them. It's just noise. You want music to make you *feel* something, and the only thing that can do that for depressed people is sad music. The sadder, the better.
Source: me. Used to be depressed as a teenager, listened to a lot of sad music.
I don't have any reason to disagree with the overall point of the post, and appreciate the interesting theory.
I do wonder if "depression" (which covers a wide range of feelings and behaviors) can be categorized as the same kind of incorrect mind reaction as anorexia. Maybe extreme depression that a psychiatrist would deal with regularly is in the same category as anorexia, but not everyone who listens to sad music or is feeling down is clinically depressed.
Judging from my personal experience with sad music, I feel like it helps me "complete" the mood and therefore get through it with some benefit. Trying to listen to happy music feels forced and unnatural and often fails to work. It feels to me as though I need the sadness, maybe in the same way that mourning the loss of a loved one is necessary if more extreme, and that listening to sad music helps with this process.
Extreme depression could still be a misfiring/recalibration, but if I'm right then we wouldn't look at every bit of sadness/mild depression as something to be eliminated.
I had a major psychotic break as a young man— one year continuously incarcerated in mental hospitals ( some pretty rough) and four months on day care. So anyway, one Spring morning I’m in the cab, running along next to a stream ( the Fens in Boston), and I roll down the window a little and I feel happiness for the first time in a long,long time. I hadn’t even been aware until that moment that I’d been existing without happiness. So, there was a depression completely beyond human control…
I think people ruminate in depression because thinking about how bad everything is both explains and justifies how awful they feel. There is a sense of letting go of the struggle against the depression, not fighting anymore and feeling that a new reality has has been revealed: there is no point, no hope and no purpose. The world consists of nothing but pain, and anything happy or cheerful is a lie. If you were to believe it you would be fooling yourself, and now you can see the world as it really is. Oddly, whilst descending to such a state is very painful and unpleasant, once you get there you feel too numb to feel—anything. It is easier to stay just like that than it is to fight to regain what seems like an illusion now, that the world is a good place full of positive things. All you have left is the physical feeling of complete emptiness, and you are just a short step from the hypochondriacal delusions that your body is rotting, dead, or full of cancer. You can sit motionless for hours and not have a thought cross your mind. Just the odd voice calling your name, but you don't know what it wants.
Well, that's how it felt to me. That was over twenty years ago now, and it still terrifies me how much I would have welcomed death.
As a supporting observation, both anorexia and depression have opposite disorders (obesity/bulimia and hyperthymia/mania, respectively) that can be explained using control theory.
Per QRI's theory that the valence of an experience is associated with its topological harmony vs dissonance, maybe people listen to sad music and do other things that resonate with dissonant patterns because it helps them get in touch with the similarly dissonant parts of their own organism.
Becoming conscious of an unconscious dissonance is unpleasant in the moment (although some people say that doing so with enough courage somehow counters the suffering, so maybe doing it on purpose via sad music is like exposure therapy), but allows for the dissonance to bump up against other patterns in the organism and potentially merge into something more unified and less inefficient.
According to this model, if someone doesn't have the right kind of dissonance stored in their organism, they wouldn't resonate with certain sad songs or other dissonant experiences in the same way, and wouldn't feel like seeking them out since they wouldn't assist with resolving internal dissonances.
You understandably, but mistakenly, equate sadness with depression. Sadness is a state of feeling acute, achingly unhappy and painfully mournful. A sharp, piercing state. Depression, in a way, is the opposite of sadness. Depression is dulled, blunted, defeated, generic feelings of lack of self-worth, lack of hope, and a type of cognitive distortion directed to seeking out justification for one's state. Depression is like taking a superb elegant kitchen knife and rubbing it, blade down, on concrete creating a dull instrument. The reason cognition is not helpful in figuring out depression when one is depressed is the cognitive distortions that are part of depression. It is like tyring to scramble an egg with an egg. Ain't gonna happen. The reason sad/depressed people like listening to the blues is that the mood evoked by the blues is synchronous the inner feeling state of sadness. It can make someome feel "understood/known." Almost a coming home brought on by the right chords. The blues, or sad songs, can begin to ease someone dulled with depression into a zombie-like state back toward a more human state of being and feeling acutely sad. Sad is sharp and aching but not crippling. The other prescription that should be given to depressed people is to move their muscles. Do anything, but do. Move. Feel.
Tangential, but the idea that music would affect your mood one way or another is pretty weird to me. I listen to a lot of music of all kinds of moods, and the only time it actually acts on my emotional state is if it's so good that it gives me a feeling of rightness and affirmation. This can happen whether the music is happy or sad in tone.
Metal is probably the saddest music not only in terms of music but also lyrics, esthetic, music videos etc but metal fans are reported by studies as being among the happiest group of music listeners.
I would say metal helps me feel more agentic, great house cleaning music. In that way it's the opposite of the plaintive, Elliott Smith or Gregory and the Hawk style music which spoke to me so much as a teenager, of feeling sad and powerless but not even necessarily in a dignified way; part of me used to, totally irrationally, almost wish for me to be in an actually difficult situation for the sad feelings to be justified.
Metal isn't sad, it's generally *epic*. Energetic at the least. It may treat with sad topics, but not in a despairing or giving up way, but rather in an "I will fight this" way.
It's the glory of battle, of glorious conflict willfully entered, of facing the mountains of life and saying "no, YOU move," however Sisyphean or doomed that conflict may be. You're not giving up or despairing at all.
As a lifelong metalhead, "sad" is probably the LAST word I'd reach for to describe it!
Old school 80s heavy metal like Manowar was more "I will fight this" but after the collapse of hair metal in 1991 modern metal is far less so. Sure there are still acts in that vein like Sabaton but not many.
I don't know, I definitely get the "glorious battle" fight-stuff vibe from Amon Amarth (1992), Kittie (1996), Static X (1994), Slipknot (1995), and Parkway Drive (2002).
But those are all at least 20 years old (and of course, I'm an "old" overall, like most folk here). Nevertheless, I hear from younger, hotter metal heads than me that there's still a ton of great high-energy stuff from more recent, less famous bands.
On a less psychological note, I have tinnitus (ringing in the ears). I am fairly sure it was caused by years of playing in marching band in school without earplugs. I’ve read tinnitus characterized as a neurological sensory condition where your brain’s auditory system adopts a new “setpoint” for silence which is higher than it should be and apparently results in a constant ringing. I’m not educated enough on brain hardware stuff to know how true it is.
I know one supposedly promising treatment is “bimodal neuromodulation”, a silly term for playing sounds in sync with little electric shocks on your tongue. Apparently this can somehow reset the setpoint for silence. I haven’t tried it for myself, but I’m going to one of these days. Sure would be nice to hear silence again.
A complimentary take on sad music: It makes you feel connected, not alone. An artist has created a vehicle for emotional states or experiences that at some level are common to all humanity, and that you now are especially able to connect with. It can both articulate and elevate the experience. There is some level of two way empathy here, I think. Therapeutic or not? Some pieces of music can be poignant and uplifting at the same time, of course.
On other internal set-points and their adjustability: gender?
Some programs are hard to change consciously, no matter how much you want to change. This is a topic worth exploring through the lens of so-called energy techniques. For example, check out the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology - https://www.energypsych.org
Not a psychiatrist or anything, and I'm not depressed but I can identify with the "being sad and wallowing in your own sadness and self-pity instead of going for drinks with friends" tendency.
As to why I would do said wallowing, a few things come to mind:
* if I go for drinks with friends then it's a lot of mental energy to act happy and sociable with friends, vs sitting at home and sulking.
* It feels like I need to spend some time sulking to "get it out of my system". I don't know how to square that with the stuff about how the fun activities make you happier, but it's my subjective feeling.
* If I am happy too soon after whatever Bad Thing, it feels like denying the Badness of the Thing. If I ask a girl out and she says no, and my friends ask if I want to hang out, then it's like, by expecting me to be normal and happy, they're not respecting how woeful my life is. I was rejected by a girl, I'm worse off than one of those kids from a famine-stricken country, don't you get it? But instead of a conversation between me and my friends, it's different parts of my own brain.
For decades, I have been my own laboratory with regards to depression, anxiety, talk therapy, and medication. Here are my current theories:
The brain, among other things, is a social organ. There is no such thing as an individual human. We have always evolved in groups, taken care of each other, and needed to be taken care of. We regulate together as groups, tribes, and collectives. We always have.
Depression, for me, is a happiness-strike. My brain internalizes the social outlook and conditioning of its groups and belongings, and if it does not feel like happiness is appropriate given our social and existential outlook and circumstances, it does not feel justified in pursuing or going along with behavior and attitudes of prosperity and happiness.
The pervasive and underlying social beliefs of communities and societies impact individual human mental and emotional states. Many of us are waking up from organizational narratives that have fueled tremendous materialism, consumerism, corporatism, and enhancements to productivity, technology, and growth. Many of us are now seeing the larger, macro impacts of the mass organization of human patterns and behaviors on a global and historical scale, and this causes existential angst and despair to which depression, anxiety, and self-sabotage may be natural and understandable responses in individuals who are perhaps more appropriately considered part of larger social macro-organisms.
This can play out on smaller social scales: amidst wealthy families whose children cannot suppress the psychic disconnect between their own privilege and the inequality and suffering they see in the wider world. To pursue happiness with privilege while "in-group"-considered others cannot do so is sociopathic. This can lead depressed individuals to feel noble and justified in their suffering, given their perceived social landscape.
Would love feedback. Am I way off base? over-thinking this? I just think many of our psychosocial issues stem from a skewed understanding of what kind of organisms we are, and what it means to be a complex social primate that necessarily organizes meaningfully and existentially with other members/individuals.
As of this comment, there have been two prior mentions of **catharsis** as an alternative explanation. Wikipedia seems to say that it's been used as therapy, but oddly not for depression. I feel there should be some studies testing this.
That thing that happens in depression , where people perpetuate and deepen it by saying awful things to themselves, and staying isolated and inactive — I think a process of that kind goes on with most human appetitive and emotional states. For instance if you are hungry, you ruminate about food. Maybe you seek out food cues — read recipes online, or wander into your kitchen. It is hard to keep yourself from doing these things, even if you are trying to lose weight, and know that thinking about food or staring at your fridge is going to intensify your urge to eat. If you are feeling sexually turned on, you crave to think about or look at sexy things, and that intensifies your arousal. Or consider anger. I often catch myself mentally intensifying anger by focusing on the most annoying aspects of what’s around me. In fact, on days when I am carrying around a lot of annoyance, I often find myself having daydreams that intensify it. Once, for instance, I was on my way to pick up a prescription at a chain drugstore that usually has long lines and bad service, and noticed that I first mentally relived some of the most irritating things that had happened there, then had a fantasy about a clerk there being far ruder and more inefficent than anyone at the store ever had been — then, in the fantasy, I delivered a diatribe that was far louder and ruder than anything I would ever say in real life. And when I noticed what my mind was doing, and tried to get my thoughts on another track, I met real resistance — “no, dammit, this is what I’m thinking about and I have a right to think about it and I do not want to stop and you can’t make me.”
So the upshot is that I see depression as an instance of this kind of phenomenon, where a person semi-deliberately deepens a state, as part of the drive to reach consummation: eating something delicious, having an orgasm, or blowing up at someone. I think. a model of depression based on the idea that it’s in this class better captures what’s going on than a set-point theory. So what is the consummation that depression is driving towards? Some kind of radical giving up one oneself — at the most extreme, this would be suicide. Under this theory what keeps people stuck in depression is that we are all wired to have tremendous internal barriers that protect us from giving up on ourselves, or from suicide. So people end up stuck indefinitely in the revving-up-to-it phase.
Control theory and predictive coding are both complicated enough to implement arbitrary circuits... you might as well introduce a "Turing machine theory" of human psychology. That is not to say they can't individually yield some insights, just that they are all equivalent, and are all too powerful to suggest that they are telling us how things work on a fundamental level. No matter how it turns out to work biologically, you will be able to express the resulting behavior in any "programming language."
In the original Romantic sense, the ideal "self-expression" was to express something you felt, which no one else had ever felt before--to express your uniqueness, or to be a prophet bringing new insight. Some people report that they listen to sad music that expresses their own feelings in order to feel less alone--to know that their feelings /aren't/ unique. These 2 things are opposites. Which one is more like the way you feel?
Personally, I feel my depression is mostly characterized by a lack of energy to get up and do stuff.
The tasks which would offer long term rewards (like working on my thesis, or more hypothetically online dating) will likely be something between a chore and a pain in short term, so I tend to avoid them.
Even tasks with a shorter time span, such as spending 10 minutes to cook a basic meal are not accomplished reliably.
I waste a lot of time playing video games, but I actually like playing video games and do not feel they make me more depressed. There are times when I even lack the energy to get out of bed to play for hours, though. And I could probably get more utility out of BG3 than trying yet another FTL run, but after thousands of hours of playing I know FTL very well (something something surprise minimization).
I had certainly phases when I was wallowing in my depression, though. Like spending a birthday alone in my room (because who has the energy to organize a birthday party) and then deciding that Watkins 'The War Game' (a pseudo-documentary on the effects of nuclear war) would be the perfect movie for the evening.
In general, I think that for a certain mood, there is a window of media and activities which are mood-affirming enough that you could stomach them. If you had made me watch a 'romantic comedy' on that birthday instead that would have worsened my mood more than anything. Likewise, spending time with more neurotypical people can be dreadfully depressing because it makes you feel deficient.
Unrelatedly, I am a bit skeptical of the set point theory of happiness. Locally, this should mean that if something good happened to you unexpectedly, you should compensate by doing something which makes you feel bad to maintain your equilibrium. It certainly works that way for temperature regulation. A set point which gets adjusted whenever you find a quarter on the ground is not much of a set point, in my opinion.
We ought to distinguish between: 1) the ways in which all emotions are equipped with self-perpetuating mechanisms, and 2) the idea of an overall set point to which any perturbance will likely eventually return. If set point theory is true, I would think that different mechanisms are responsible for a euthymic person preferring sad music when in a sad mood, and a depressed person preferring sad music all the time--if this is indeed part of their control mechanism, and not an artifact of them usually being sad. Unless every emotional deviation is trying to establish itself as a new set point!
I wonder if depression/suicide is an example of the set point being set very low to conserve resources for other family members? If I feel that my prospects for reproduction and caring for my offspring are quite low, then, in a world with limited food, it makes sense for me to act like a depressed person to conserve resources for others sharing my DNA, culminating in suicide so that I no longer consume any resources. So, kin-selection theory of depression.
Happiness and sadness have been a curiosity of mine ever since that time I talked myself out of a really good mood. Not enough to, like, look into them, but... uh...
so My take has been that people think in ratios, and happiness or sadness is the difference between a semi-arbitrary memory of themselves, and a semi-arbitrary point of comparison. So, changing either of those can change your mood, and then doing depressing things would add more depressing points to the "you" side to be semi-randomly chosen as the starting point of comparison. So, not a set point, just a point in the set.
As for why people seek depressing things... self-expression. I read this blog because I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup was a really good expression of an idea I'd been trying to put to words for a couple of years, but couldn't get close enough to express it and properly be done with it. So people seek out depressing music and movies as an attempt to express their own depression, but most of them aren't close enough to do it justice so they keep searching. (Just like porn.)
The well-understood setpoint disorders are rare. Listening to sad music when sad is almost universal. If this were due to a setpoint disorder, it would mean that the setpoint is /normally/ disordered. This is evolutionarily implausible.
Letting a theory convince you to tell your patients to do the opposite of what they're naturally inclined to do is a medical hubris with a bad history: the "rest cure" for "hysteria", the coach's "walk-it-off" cure for sprained ankles.
I think we must consider a huge difference between eating and listening to music which Scott overlooks: music, especially music with lyrics, is /cognitive/.
I looked into the research on why people listen to sad music for a talk I gave at Bronycon 2016 on why people like sad stories. The physiological crowd mostly argued that people are self-medicating, trying to induce an anti-depression chemical response, such as prolactin (Huron 2011), oxytocin & dopamine (Eerola et al. 2016), or endorphins (Dunbar et al. 2016) (read my slides at https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/903438/ for the references).
I instead looked into the cognitive aspects. My talk was motivated by my observation that literary theorists still teach that tragedy induces catharsis, whereas observing readers and people watching sad movies shows that every genre /except/ tragedy induces catharsis. Tragedy is the genre which deliberately /forestalls/ catharsis. This is obvious if you're writing tragedy for a fan-fiction audience. The reader comments show people avoiding the sadness you're trying to induce by providing ways in which the tragedy could have been avoided. Only after you rewrite to prevent any possible catharsis, by blocking off all plot avenues by which the tragedy could have been avoided (while keeping the characters true to themselves), can you consistently make your readers cry.
Aristotle was a conservative reactionary writing shortly after the time when Euripides' plays had challenged conservative Athenian beliefs. Aristotle developed a theory of tragedy which completely and explicitly denied that the challenging /ideas/ in a tragedy were of any importance, which conveniently made Euripides a less-important playwright.
I studied about 800 reader comments on 6 sad stories that I wrote. All but one were tagged 'sad' or 'tragedy', so the readers chose to read a sad story. The substantive comments were mostly descriptions or explanations of the reader's emotional and/or cognitive response. Only one reader said anything that could be interpreted as personally experiencing catharsis. Many readers merely described their emotional state, but almost as many tried to explain the /ideas/ in the story that troubled them. What troubled them was cognitively complex and story-specific:
- Readers of "The Case of the Starry Night" concluded that the characters' flaws made the tragic outcome inevitable.
- Readers of "Burning Man Brony" said the futility of the main character's stubbornness and contempt made them re-evaluate their own attitudes.
- Readers of "Twenty Minutes" contemplated how society can suppress or corrupt good people.
- Readers of "Pony Play" wrote about the awful consequences of hiding from trouble and pain.
I also read a lot of responses to Quora.com questions asking why people listened to sad music or watched sad movies. The most-common responses were:
- to try to understand sadness, what causes it, and how others deal with it
- to feel understood by seeing that other people have gone through the same sort of thing
- because happy things seem fake, and so repel or anger them and make them feel more alone
- in order to process their emotions at a distance, through a fictional character, without being judged themselves
- in order to feel something, anything
So I don't think you should try to explain why sad people listen to sad music using nothing but physiology. The ideas in sad stories are the important thing. Music is not as cognitive as story, but most of it has lyrics, often very poetic. Pink Floyd's /The Wall/ is sure as hell cognitive, as are Wagner's operas. Even instrumental sad music sometimes seems to tell a story through its structure, like Beethoven's 5th. So don't leave out the ideational part of the mind.
That's an interesting and rare perspective, thank you for sharing it!
> Only after you rewrite to prevent any possible catharsis, by blocking off all plot avenues by which the tragedy could have been avoided (while keeping the characters true to themselves), can you consistently make your readers cry.
Huh. The best definition of tragedy I've heard (I don't think I came up with it on my own) was something about how it flows inevitably from the characters and the situation, where at every step you can understand why each character acts the way they do, and could not act otherwise without becoming someone different, and the product of all the actions leads to disaster. I'd thought that was a Greek idea, but I can't seem to find it now. It sounds somewhat Christian or Buddhist, in that pride/ego is the thing preventing a better outcome. Have you ever run across this?
That definition sounds very similar to what I wrote. If there's a difference--as I think there is, since you say your definition sounds Christian or Buddhist--then I think you're supposing that "each character could not act otherwise without becoming someone different" really means "each character could not act otherwise without becoming someone better", whereas I think it means "each character could not act otherwise without becoming someone worse". That is, you think (agreeing with Aristotle) the characters fall because they have flaws or make mistakes, whereas I think the whole point of tragedy is that someone without flaws, like Hector, can still come to ruin.
I don't think I have heard others give my view of tragedy, because I've argued for my idea with quite a few people over the years, and none of them seemed familiar with my argument.
Consider these 3 views of ancient Athenian tragedy:
1. The one I'm using: Tragedy is when virtuous people suffer disaster despite doing everything right. I think this is the view the ancient Athenians held, for at least these reasons:
a) It fits best with the events in the ancient tragedies that I know. Even in the plays Aristotle used most as examples–Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and maybe the Orestia tho I forget right now–didn't have any characters making an obvious mistake. I don't accept that Oedipus or Antigone were "flawed" for being proud and stubborn; they acted as the Greeks thought great people should act. The Orestia very explicitly shows that it's impossible for Orestes to obey all the commands of either the gods or the duties agreed on by society. Euripides' Medea is a monster, but the play shows that it was Athenian patriarchy and sexism that made her a monster.
b) It fits with the way the Athenians used tragedy. Tragedy was introduced at about the same time as democracy, and all Athenian citizens were (eventually?) required to attend the tragedies at the Festival of Dionysius. Watching tragedy was supposed to get citizens used to pondering the kinds of moral dilemmas they would confront as jurors and voters. (I don't have an ancient source for this, but it's a widespread opinion.) So tragedies confronted them with situations where one duty or ethical value was pitted against another, and some judgement must be made despite the absence of any perfect or completely moral solution.
(I think that most of today's political conflicts are due entirely to the fact that people no longer believe dilemmas are possible. All political activists today--I don't think I'm exaggerating--believe that the thing they are active about has a clear moral answer, and that it's impossible for two good and intelligent people to remain in conflict if they just talk things over.)
c) The ancient Greeks were obsessed with the uncertainty and unjustness of fate. The Greek myths were quite clear on the point that there was no justice, not in life or afterwards. The gods were not just; neither were the Fates. This was the moral puzzle the Greeks kept returning to. Tragedies were about virtuous people who had much worse fates than they deserved.
d) Tragedy always went hand-in-hand with democracy, and was abandoned immediately when Athens lost its democracy, although they continued making comedies for centuries. As democracy became more-powerful over the course of the 5th century, tragedy more and more turned to social criticism, highlighting injustices or inconsistencies in Athenian ethics.
2. Aristotle's, from Poetics: Tragedy shows the fall of a noble person of high station and good but not perfect character, due to that person making a mistake (hamartia, missing the mark). This produces in the [presumably upper-class] viewer pity for the character, and fear for himself, thus [mysteriously] purging these emotions from the viewer.
Aristotle didn't even consider the idea that the purpose of tragedy was to highlight unsolved problems with ethics or with the nature of life. He was for oligarchy, and oligarchs thought most social problems would be solved by returning to oligarchy. Claiming Athens had always had some unsolved, let alone unsolvable, ethical problems, was something democrats did.
What's more, Aristotle got his view of the Good from Plato, and as far as I know went along with the idea that there was just one Good, and reason led one to be and do good; so a good person could never come to harm (as per Plato's "Crito"), two good people could never disagree, and the only reason anyone was not good was through ignorance. So, if the tragic hero actually comes to harm, /he must have made a mistake/, even if it is only the mistake of ignorance of some important fact.
3. The Christian interpretation of Aristotle: Tragedy shows the fall of a noble person due to a tragic flaw, which is the noble person's sin. The Christian interpretation /blames/ the tragic hero; his or her fall is presumed to be a just retribution. The Christian God does not allow injustice to prevail, so /tragedy is impossible in Christianity/. Instead, we get a story of a hero falling because he /sinned/.
This is basically the same as Aristotle's view, and this is because Platonism is basically the same thing as Christianity. To both Plato and Christians, a completely Good person can never really come to harm. Christians called the tragic flaw "sin" because the New Testament uses the same word for "sin" (hamartia) that Aristotle used for "missing the mark" – so to a Christian who learned New Testament Greek, Aristotle literally said that a tragic hero has sinned.
But this makes no sense, because the ancient Greek view of ethics was not Christian, Platonic, or Aristotelian. Virtue and ethics were different things. Virtues were good qualities for an individual to have--good for /themselves/, and secondarily for their allies. A strong body and a sense of humor /were/ virtues, despite having no moral valence. Honesty was not a virtue, because lying could sometimes be more useful (as with Odysseus). Honesty, and all altruistic or pro-social behavior, fell under ethics. Ethics said how you interacted with /your fellow citizens/, not with the world at large. Virtues provided a person with power; that person's ethics determined how they used that power.
I think the Christian concept of "sin" didn't really exist. There is no ancient Greek word for "sin". They had a concept of "anti-social", behavior which deprives one of honor and glory. The Greeks might judge Achilles harshly for refusing to fight. But this judgement had more of a transactional than a moral nature: You help us, and we'll honor you; you don't, and we won't. There was no "sin" involved. If a tragic hero fell due to a flaw, it wouldn't be a moral flaw, but a lack of virtue. And falling due to a lack of virtue was not a tragedy; it happened every time a smart person outwitted a dumb person, or a strong person beat up a weak person. So the idea of a "tragic flaw" would not have interested the Greeks: not if "flaw" meant a lack of virtue (because the virtuous /should/ defeat the less-virtuous), nor if it meant "sin" (which they didn't much care about).
Maybe there's something about experiencing extreme trauma that makes set points especially reprogrammable? Maybe terror causes the bayesian brain to ratchet all of its priors way up and you get stuck with whatever strategy you adopted in response to the trauma (e.g. "All I know is that the only way to make my mom happy is to be thin" or "the only way I can tolerate being conscious in the wake of my wife leaving me is to totally shut down the feeling parts of my brain" etc).
That was one of the 5 most-common explanations I found given on quora.com of why people listen to sad music. (See my comment made a few hours before yours.)
Hm. Seems plausible, but I kind of worry that it's stretching set-point theory a bit far. On the other hand, why not go all the way and apply it to [redacted], too?
My personal experience is that the negative-feedback cycle is like wallowing. It feels "right", somehow. Like I need to burn all the dead trees before the forest fire dies out. Like if I run with the wind, I'll be safe. Like there's some resolution just around the corner. And sometimes that pans out, but it's really hard on the rest of my life.
One of my theories about depression, both mild and severe, is that it's like an elimination diet crossed with a shit-test. Something bad happens in our life, and maybe it was caused by something we did. So we stop doing everything except the minimum to survive, and slowly add stuff back to see whether anything goes horribly wrong. Or at least, that's how it worked in the ancestral environment, when humans lived in small groups, and everyone's labor was essential, and most of that labor was stuff that had easily measured metrics of success. If you got too depressed to hunt or gather, and you were valuable to the tribe, someone (probably several someones) would make you do it anyway, nicely or otherwise. And if they did, you knew that you were valuable. (If they didn't, if they just left you in a ditch somewhere, that also provides a resolution.) But now we're in a complicated interconnected-yet-atomistic society, where the bonds that tie us together are things which our primate instincts don't recognize, which do not fill our emotional nutritional needs. (Internet parasociality is empty calories from junk food.)
Another random theory: melancholy music and art is like emotional BDSM, converting something normally-bad into something beautiful and transcendent. Some people don't see the point, others can take it or leave it, but some people try it once and get hooked for life.
>"Some anorexic people, when told that a treatment will help them gain weight, often refuse out of fear of becoming fat (though others are happy to accept treatment). Depressed people, when told a treatment will make them happy, very occasionally refuse on grounds that "I don't deserve happiness", but this is pretty rare; most of them are glad to accept the treatment. Is this just a quirk of how each of these different drives is implemented, or is it a strike against the theory?"
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I don't think this is a strike against the theory, rather it points to there being additional nuances and wrinkles in the theory. One of the reasons why therapy works is convincing the patient that it will work if they do the things, and as you pointed out they have to be convinced that it's worth doing the things. To get to that point the patient often has to feel understood and affirmed, otherwise they won't do the things or won't do them too well.
For anorexic people refusing treatment because they're afraid of getting fat, maybe you have to affirm and validate their fears and concerns but why it's still worth it. So maybe something more akin to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy before trying to move onto more CBT practices?
I find applying siloed reductive rationalism to complex holistic systems like the human body rather dissatisfying. Perhaps best kept for philosophy where what one is mapping is largely made up so it doesn't need to accurately model an incredibly complex real system.
I think to have a meaningful discussion on any emotion or nervous system state one must begin by considering the evolutionary contexts in a holistic sense. The best psychologists I've read contend that emotions are evolutionary signals that drive us towards what we need. So rather than adopting some mind splitting modernistic reduction of life to "happiness is good, sadness is bad, then what's the point of sad? Must be broken thermostat", I think the question to ask is what is the evolutionary purpose of sadness? And an entirely different question altogether would be what is the evolutionary purpose of depression?
From this perspective many of these phenomena become easier to answer for. For instance, a large part of sadness is to release the nervous system energy of grief, which would otherwise get trapped in the body. The other reason, and the reason why sadness is often so visible on a person (tears, sobbing, a down demeanour) is that evolutionarily it's meant to solicit a response of empathy, compassion and support by those around us who can support us and form deeper bonds that will protect us in the wake of something threatening happening like a split from a sexual partner of the death of a loved one. The question of why people feel drawn to listen to sad music when they are sad comes to light as well: sad music helps us to excavate our sadness, which is serving an evolutionary purpose of energetic catharsis. Sometimes we want to cry until all the tears are gone and we feel much better. Also, evolutionarily, mourning with another (the empathy response) allows us to know that we aren't alone. We are seen, we are understood, and we won't be abandoned in the wild. So listening to music and lyrics that reflects our experience of sadness is like an empathetic mirror where we feel seen in the art of another. It's actually deeply evolutionary.
Depression on the other hand, firstly, is not well ontologically defined. It refers to many different conditions and they aren't all the same. But in the case of temporary depression - depressions lasting a few days, few weeks or few months, I'd say that depression serves an evolutionary purpose as well. Depression is somewhat linked to the nervous system freeze state. In my experience with depression, which I've experienced intermittently for most of my adult life (A few times a year, for most years), depression is signal to stop and rest. For me it usually happens from overexerting myself and ignoring and overriding my emotions towards some end. After a while this leads to burn out, or just flat out feeling tired, unmotivated and unwilling to do anything other than sit around and wait. Why would the body want us to sit around and wait? Many spiritual teachers point towards the birthplace of vision (motivation and desire for the future) being a space of deep stillness and reflection, sometimes prescribed in the form of a vision quest where one sits in the woods without shelter or food for several days with very little stimulation until meaning and vision 'comes'. Other times this can take several weeks or months of relative austerity and stillness in ones life in waiting for the next threads of meaning, purposes and motivation to emerge after wrapping up some previous purpose that no longer feels meaningful. So depression then, actually gives us the stillness to listen to our inner guidance system, IF we don't overide it by forcing ourselves to cease being depressed. For those who have become depressed because their nervous system has been through the ringer, or they have ignored and overidden their emotions and nervous system needs until their body has finally 'given up', it serves as a time where one is forced to listen to the quiet directions of one's own emotions and inner guidance, that will inevitably lead a person into living in a healthy, happy, social equilibrium again where they feel motivated and alive. In that sense, when I'm depressed, on a rational level I don't want to force myself out of depression. The depression has come for a reason. It's time for me to sit with it, make friends with it, and listen to it until it's said what needs to be said, and the small flourishes of desire and meaning begin to unveil themselves again.
I was really moved by the story of a director friend told to me onetime. He had become deeply depressed, but for the first time in his life he was doing well financially and coild afford to take time off work for as long as he wanted. So thats what he did. He just sat, alone in his apartment, and intermittently listened to Alan Watts lectures, for 3 weeks straight. He made no other attempt to make his way out of it or to change anything. 3 weeks laters, and his depression had lifted and completely left. Which was not his usual experienc with depression, that would tend to hang around and linger in times where he would try to push past it and keep going. As I began to learn about somatic therapies and polyvagal theory and the deeply evolutionary nature of our emotional system and its inherent purpose for bringing us into healthy equilibrium, I began to understand the profundity of his experience. So now it seems wholly rational to me as to why someone would take actions that would seemingly have them 'stay depressed', even if the impulse is not in itself rational. My disclaimer here would be that with compounding co-morbities like anxiety, ADHD or a more clinical form of depression, that people can get stuck in depression and not know how to find their way out. In which case I feel the assertion to do the opposite of what the depression says can be useful, in conjunction with SSRI's and other interventions where depression dodoesn't run it's usual evolutionary course. (Also disclaimer, I am not a doctor)
The thermostat idea is an interesting concept, and perhaps not totally unuseful, but I just want far far more than that when trying to understand the body and the complex tapestry of our emotions.
The argument I have seen, by a neurologist whose name I sadly forget, was that if you're sad hearing someone else being sad makes you feel less alone, which would explain the love of depressing music by depressed people, as well as the emo and goth genres and the Gothic genre.
>This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?
I have very vivid memories of being extremely sad after fleeing the war in Ukraine. It was a wonderful sunny day in Cascais (near Lisbon, Portugal), which made me mad. I needed stormy, rainy, "bad" weather and sad, melancholic music. Not because of the reasons you describe in the post. But because I wanted the conditions outside my mind and body to resemble the feelings inside myself. I didn't feel good about dissonance. So maybe it can be a good reason for sad music lovers or depressed and anorexic people. They are just looking for harmony.
This is an interesting theory--I would like to offer an alternative one: There is evidence that sharing one's psychological pain and stress reduced the suffering. Perhaps listening to sad music reminds them that someone else made that music, and that makes them feel less alone?
As a father of two adult children that have long struggled with depression, I really, really appreciate this post. I’ve seen so much of what you’ve cited with both of them - ‘Whenever I feel good, I feel like I deserve it. I don’t feel like it’s the true me.’ This was always the hard part of depression for me to understand. Now it makes more sense. Thank you.
One 'good' reason I like listening to sad music when I'm down is that it gives a sense of community; the music makes you feel like other people have felt sad in similar ways. I'm never really depressed though, so maybe wanting that feeling is a sign of not having a 'set point' issue?
Setpoint disorders, which are well-understood, are rare occurrences. Engaging in activities like listening to sad music when feeling down is nearly universal. If such behavior were attributed to a setpoint disorder, it would imply that the setpoint is inherently disordered, which seems evolutionarily implausible.
Relying on a theory that leads healthcare professionals to advise patients to act contrary to their natural inclinations can be seen as medical hubris with a problematic history. Examples include the "rest cure" prescribed for "hysteria" and the coach's "walk-it-off" approach for sprained ankles.
It's essential to note a significant distinction between activities like eating and listening to music, as overlooked by Scott. Music, especially that with lyrics, involves cognitive processes, adding complexity to the comparison. idleofficetycoonapk.com
As many have pointed out, sad songs have both cognitive and emotional components. Arguably, listening to sad songs – even alone - is an indirect way to bond with other humans. It is a way to implicitly share the awareness that to live can be compared to falling off a high building. On the way down, we may say to ourselves as we pass floor after floor: “This is not as bad as I feared: I haven’t got a scratch yet!”
Someone who is uncomplicated “happy” in this situation is delusional, emotionally shallow, or a young child. Listening to sad songs is a way to bond based on the common knowledge that life is essentially tragic. The sadness accompanying such listening is not depression, rather a type of melancholia. Having said that, clinically depressed people may possibly also find comfort in sad songs (for the same reason), implying that the correlation between depression and listening to sad songs seizes to be puzzling. Whether it be Leonard Cohen’s many songs, Johnny Cash’ rendering of Hurt, or Randy Newman’s song at his father’s deathbed:
Curious about the claim on whether hypertension can be considered a re-calibration of a set point for blood pressure. I realize Scott's not really endorsing that view. In fact, I read him as just speculating that one might take the set point hypothesis in that direction. He's also expressing doubts (if I read him right) that that hypothesis won't work with blood pressure.
But I'd be curious if he, or anyone here, knows of credible sources that actually make or look into that hypothesis for blood pressure.
My own speculation is that hypertension isn't really a result of a set point, or it's not only a result of that. My understanding is that it's instead a result of arteries narrowing so as to require the same amount of blood to go through a less amount of space, meaning more "pressure." (Disclosure: I'm not an MD or anything, just someone who's concerned about hypertension.)
Contemporary behaviorism has a simpler explanation, based on Skinner's concept of verbal behavior, and advances in relational frame theory..
Making meaning is a very powerful generalized reinforcer (similar to money). The most common forms of meaning making accord with the correspondence theory of truth. That is, when a word can capture or reflect a meaning about some state of affairs, whether public or private, simple or complex, it reinforces both knowing and communicating about our experience.
Depressed people listen to sad music because that makes the most sense, and that is highly reinforcing.
Can't help but wonder what else is in some sense due to setpoints. Not straightforward chemical setpoints but neurological or social/behavioral ones.
"Not enough people are mad at me" setpoint -> disagreeableness.
"Things aren't bad enough, that's weird" setpoint -> neuroticism, anxiety.
I wouldn't be surprised if setpoints for status self- and other-perception governed a lot of interpersonal interactions. Consider something as simple as who feels entitled to take up space in a group conversation. There are implicitly setpoints governing how much each person should be talking.
Aside from the body weight setpoints (lipostat) there is also a myostat, a setpoint governing how much muscle mass your body wants to carry. Some people will carry much more muscle than others, even without exercising. Many people are capable of gaining muscle mass, but very quickly lose that muscle mass when not pushing very hard to train and consume excess protein, while some people will find it relatively easy to maintain the mass. Hormones obviously help with this, because hormones interact with (or perhaps directly define) this setpoint. There's a famous result that men taking extra testosterone and not exercising at all, gain more muscle than men who are doing mass-gain exercises and eating above-adequate protein.
I think once we figure out how to manipulate the myostat without causing permanent hormonal problems, this along with drugs like semaglutide are going to create a world of shredded, muscular desk jockeys.
Did the depression axis move from "confident belief evaluated to satisfaction or disappointment" to happiness vs. sadness because of predictability? Happiness and sadness are bundled with a kind of meta evaluation about whether the future is good for you or not I think. I am depressed and if I go for a walk rather than lie in bed all day, my prediction (I will lie in bed all day) evaluates as false, so I experience some kind of disappointment but it doesn't make me sad. My mother dying from a brain tumor happened as expected but I wouldn't say I was happy about it. I think the distinction is important because I believe that the feelings of disappointment and satisfaction are a component of your conscious experience that tells you whether your predictions are correct or not. Happiness and Sadness are the components where you factor the sensory experience you used to make that evaluation into your predictions about the future. Happy and Sad are louder because they're more important for producing future expectations.
Interesting take. Question, though: why wouldn't effective antidepressant drugs that provide relief for so many people who are depressed not alter the setpoint back to norm range?
My partner suffers from treatment-resistant depression, and while each new cocktail does do the trick, it doesn't seem to "stick" when the treatment's efficacy inevitably fades...
When I'm in a depressed state, listening to actively happy music can sometimes make me feel worse, in a way that's not necessarily related to the happy-sad emotional dimension. For example, "Happy" by Pharrell Williams would make me feel distinctly uncomfortable if I didn't actually feel happy when I listened to it. The particular feeling might be more related to disgust than anything else; the expression "sickeningly sweet" (as applied to media) comes to mind...
Listening to certain music does consistently help me feel better, though; the FFVI soundtrack almost always works. In general, it seems that what works for me when depressed are "sad but hopeful" stories with a Bittersweet Ending...
Maybe there's an exploration/exploitation set point (that shifts over the lifespan) and ADHD is when it's shifted "too" much towards exploration?
But that implies there should be an opposite set point shift, and I can't think of an obvious name/diagnosis for that. Something very introverted, extremely conscientious - like depressive personality disorder maybe?
I think many depressed people look at online media (like, ahem, this substack).
This would seem more to support a 'social junk food' theory than a broken thermostat ... your happiness thermostat is seeking more social interaction, but you'revtrying to obtain it online (which we're not evolved to deal with) and the online interaction fails to satisfy the craving.
Great piece, but I don't think music was the best example - there are too many subtle shades of sad/happy, especially when lyrics are involved. Is Everybody Hurts happy or sad? What about Sunny Afternoon by the Kinks? And so on. But I will look carefully for thoughts which have "I'm too happy" as the premise because I think there is something in this.
Humans generally like stuff that matches and resonates with their current mood and mindset. That includes music, art, political commentary, and most other stuff. It's just subliminal pattern matching by our bio-neural nets, just like if you could tell ChatGPT "play some music that goes with my current emotion".
On the other hand, given any theory about what would be optimal for humans to do, the optimal solution would for all humans to re-wire their brains both to prefer taking optimal actions and to actually take optimal actions. That is, assuming one doesn't care about such things as preferences and individuality and free will and non-coercion. All those things are irrelevant, to be burned away in the purifying fire of optimality (purgatory), leaving identical optimal drones who freely choose to have identical optimal musical preferences, political views, charitable inclinations, religions, child-raising habits, and taste in tea (clearly a puer of some sort).
Remember, if one enjoys something that is not specifically commanded in the Book of Optimality, that preference is non-optimal and will require an extended stay in purgatory (re-education) before one achieves optimal unity with the transcendent beating heart of Optimality (IT).
So if one happens to be sad, that is a non-optimal mood. If that sadness causes one to prefer sad music, that is a non-optimal preference that reinforces the non-optimal mood. If it is too difficult to directly rewire the mood or preference to be non-optimal, at least we have the ability to ignore the preference and use music to reset the mood. The "fake it 'til you make it" school of enlightenment. Keep that clown smile painted on, and never let the world see you feeling non-optimally.
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Real Zen story: The friend of a master died, and the master cried. The disciple asked the master, "Why are you crying? Isn't that a sign of attachment?" The master said, "You idiot! I'm crying because I want to cry!"
Much of depressed behaviour fits with the theory that depressives are trying to be depressed. How come?
I believe I mostly listen to sad music when I'm depressed because it fits with some slowly-updating social narrative that I have a myopic incentive to maintain. Depression gives me an excuse for things I've failed at. And because depression usually causes me to fail more things, I need to maintain the excuse.
Our self-view is a compromise between how we wish people would see us, and how people actually see us. Our feelings about ourselves are mostly determined by algorithms that have been optimised for giving us the kinds of feelings that we expect will make relevant others view us marginally more sympathetically.
The rest is implementation details. Quite important implementation details. :P
I had something-worth-being-sad-about happening to me a year ago and for various reasons I was often hidding / suppressing the sadness. Recently I started going to a psychotherapist and they recommended I dedicate some time to feeling sad, like walking in the rain and listening to sad music. It's hard to judge this things, but it felt like a good advice. How does it fit this narrative?
What you are describing is real but it is the opposite of blues, blues is about making light of the darkness, joining to sing with your community and seeing the beauty in the mundane. A great example of what you’re actually talking about is the band “have a nice life”. There’s also music that’s superficially similar to “have a nice life” that celebrates life instead of diminishing it (“different trains” by Steve Reich for example), it’s the undefinable essence of the music and the person making it that makes it pro or anti life. Anyways this was all completely unrelated but I felt like saying it.
Not super familiar with Beethoven (mostly Bach and 20th century composers for me in the classical department) but almost all classical music is pro life in my experience
One behaviour I notice in myself during incipient depression is that I want my set point to recalibrate as quickly as possible. Depression only feels bad on the downhill part; once you’re in the deep end it feels like nothing at all. Like going into cold water, if you dither you’ll only draw out the discomfort so best to plunge in with whatever will get you used to your low mood the fastest (sad music, isolation, etc).
I especially avoid socializing or “fleeting” pleasures since they interrupt the recalibration, meaning more discomfort overall.
The omnipresence of sugar in American food is far more likely the reason for increasing rates of obesity than any "lipostat". Americans have had the financial means to be fat for generations and have not been heavy labor lifestyles for at least 2 generations, but obesity hasn't been an issue until this one.
For me personally - eating sugary foods causes me to be more hungry regardless of how much I have eaten. If this is indicative of general experience, this itself would cause obesity to increase. Nor is avoiding sugar in food very easy - you have to work at it because so much of the food Americans eat is processed, and a large percentage of the processing involving adding things like sugar.
As for depression: I have zero professional experience. My mother is bipolar, but she gets depressed because
1) She "likes" being manic. She says she feels like she's doing something in that state
2) She knows what sets it off: staying up all night, usually because of a slot machine
To me - she appears to be a speed freak. Her own body and genetics are such that she can stay up all night for 48 hours even at 80, meaning her body is producing some methamphetamine equivalent. But the inevitable outcome is burnout = depression.
I don't have her genetics but I have enough that I only sleep around 5 hours a night, and have done so since high school. But unlike her - staying up all night doesn't send me into a mania nor would I like that. I can, however, get by on only 1 or 2 hours of sleep for several weeks but then I have to sleep 6-9 hours for some time.
In other words: genetics is a framework but behavior builds the actual behavioral construct.
Interesting. I think there's very plausibly truth in the set points, but I'm not yet convinced that depression works like a set point.
My slightly different speculation (possibly inspired by you), might be that depression is a long sequence of bad things putting the body into a "look for threats, endure and don't take any risks" mode as might be a good strategy in the face on a long string of bad experiences resulting from living a currently hostile environment. So that depressed you tends to look for threats (hence reasons to worry) and avoid taking initiative or risk (bad in a dangerous situation until you get desperate, but hence avoiding any action to improve depression or improve life or improve anything).
I think both this theory and the set point theory involve behaviours that put you back in depression, but that the set point theory suggests that the further up you get from the low point in the short term, the BIGGER the pressure to lower your mood (until it lasts long enough to reset the set point). Whereas my theory suggests that the further up you get, the LESS the pressure to lower your mood again (even if still present). I feel like my theory fits my experience better, and I think other experiences agree, but I'm definitely not sure.
Interesting comment section to this post. A take-home point after reading through: a set point theory of depression & listening to songs (and probably everything else related to emotions and moods) comes across as too atomistic-individualistic a theory. The "social" in the biopsychosocial overarching frame of reference is neglected/missing. All behavior is signalling behavior. We are signalling something when we act, including lie still in a dark room and listening to sad songs. Where the implicit receiver may be someone that can be named, or something like "the generalised other", or something/someone equally abstract. Our selves are tied to communicating, to something about humans that is social in nature. Even when we are all alone.
This didn't sit quite right with me, and it took me a little while to figure out why, but what I came up with was: when I'm sad, I don't listen to sad music to reinforce my sadness; I do it to lend meaning to my sadness. Not sure what that says about the thesis here, if anything.
I can speak to this from a personal experience pov. If I were to regard myself as a single-person within-subject case study, I would say that my experience has been that I tend to prefer and choose (almost by default) to listen to slow rhythm songs when I'm deeply unhappy or depressed and the reverse is true when I'm in an upbeat mood. I do most of my difficult readings when my mood is down, and I'm more thoughtful and paradoxically more satisfied with myself when I'm able to functionally roll with my depression.
A client with dissociative experiences once told me that when he switches to his angry, dark, destructive alter self, the only form of activities that make him feel better are songs or books that are dark, destructive, and demonic. I didn't question this claim because I immediately related it to my own experience of feeling actually consoled by depressing stimuli when depressed.
One commenter already made a very accurate inference as to why internal feelings seek external correlates: alignment or convergence or confirmation or normalization is a more powerful motive or appeal than contrast or divergence. We'll consciously choose anything that normalizes our experience than anything that flags them as abnormal. And there's an illusion of "better" or "not that worse" that's created when our own experience or state is contrasted with that of someone or something that is worse: not unlike the illusion of a normal temp water feeling slightly warmer if you're just coming from a freezing zone.
I actually wonder if the music issue isn't a sort of false lead in this area, or simply too complex to be productive. Admitting that all this is subjective and anecdotal, I'm a long time blues fan, and if you watch blues musicians, they often smile broadly (and, so to speak, deeply) while playing, sometimes through a whole song. They absolutely love it, and I don't think that's in some sort of masochistic way. It's a genuine and deep joy. I'm not a musician, so I can't speak to that side of it--except, as I've just done, what I perceive from the outside--but listening to blues proper, dark ambient, and all sorts of sad music gives me great pleasure. I like to listen to it when I'm happy, doing the things I like to do, etc. I don't think I'm the only one (and apologies if I'm not the first to say this in the comments). I would add that when I'm depressed--as in, when I'm having thoughts like "I don't deserve anything and I think my friends all rightly hate me"--I don't want to listen to music at all (or read or watch something or do anything). Among other problems, all this seems to me to complicate what would fit into the category of "happy" music. I will say I find at least some music that many might consider happy--like "Who could ask for anything more" or "Good morning" from "Singing in the Rain"--manic and annoying rather than "happy."
At the risk of going on, I will add that many blues songs are, indeed, deeply sad. "Saint James Infirmary" is one of the most painful songs I know. And yet, there's a pleasure in it. I think it may be something about human bonding and fellow-feeling. But I've never even thought of listening to it when I'm dealing with a loss of my own. Perhaps the real issue is what makes music, or anything, beautiful--an issue possibly so huge and venerable as to swamp even the important problems under consideration here.
This post affected me deeply and positively and I’m still processing it. The concept of an anxiety setpoint has unlocked many new insights. I also propose that setpoints interact: there are whole internal systems built on these.
I’ve always been an anxious person who is unwilling to commit to lifelong medications. I also have consistently put myself into high pressure job roles and relationships. I’ve made progress from talk therapy, EMDR, and most recently ayahuasca therapy. I now realize that I’ve been expending effort to artificially raise my anxiety setpoint to avoid Bad Feelings from childhood trauma ever since they happened. I had thought that my anxiety was the result of all of the situations I found myself in - the AHA! moment was the realization that I was putting myself into high stress situations to keep my anxiety high.
Since then I’ve been consciously deciding to lower my anxiety without worrying about causes and it’s been working. I also see that I have artificial setpoints for keeping a brave face and keeping my breath steady (I had a rare breathing disorder as a kid) and I’m sure there are more. I feel unlocked.
The entire concept is worthy of a school of psychiatry. Thanks Scott!
I feel compelled to point out that, since fighting against your set points is hard, it's good to have systems that work WITH your natural desires to lower your mood and subvert the actions you take to lift your mood instead.
This is why our ancient depressed forbearers created the Goth scene to save us.
Goth uses the things depression wants you to do to greatly lower the activation energy needed to go to a Goth thing. The music? Sad. The lyrics? Angsty. The aesthetic? All black (maybe with some highlight colors, preferably red or white to invoke blood or pallid death). The make-up? Hides your true face a bit. The dancing? Freeform expression of your inner turmoil. The venue? Cramped and very dark.
But it tricks you into being at a place that increases your mood!
It gets you out of your room. It gets you around other humans. It gets you some exercise (dancing). It exposes you to some mood-lifting music (there is some mood-lifting goth music, and it often gets played at goth clubs cuz its more dancy). You see a LOT of natural beauty. You feel accepted. You may make some new friends over time.
This makes me think about how helpful some people find psilocybin for depression. I wonder if the state of mind that hallucinogens put you in make it easier to move set points. Many anorexic people find cannabis helpful, obviously mostly because it gives you the munchies, but I wonder if there could be a similar pathway there. MDMA for PTSD is another example.
The general argument here makes sense to me, but does the specific point about listening to sad music not have a better explanation in the catharsis one gets from doing so? I feel depressed; I listen to a Joni Mitchell song; I have a good cry; I feel better, at least in the short term. This doesn't seem maladaptive in the way that other depressive behaviours (e.g. self-isolation) are. You could still be right about the overall phenomenon, but it strikes me as a poor example.
Im wondering if the reverse happens a lot more. There are people whose happiness set point is set higher, and even though they have friends, family, health, wealth, they keep looking to be more happy. More friends? Binge watching? Anybody knows anyone who exhibits this behaviour?
Reading Scott's older articles about predictive coding felt compelling back when I first read them, though in retrospect, my toy model of emotion had obvious structural flaws, not just those inherent to simplification. It'd be pretty annoying to specify them all right now, so I'll just go back to my intended point that my personal experience of depression feels intuitively linked to predictive coding (bias in emotions-as-predictions combined with a tendency to let them override my reason).
1. It "feels" like doing things will be much worse than actually doing the things almost inevitably turns out to be, including things I already know I enjoy.
2. Thinking about the future feels generally aversive.
3. Recursive thoughts feel especially bad.
I like the trapped prior frame too, where depression can be viewed as a selection effect, of specifically the people prone to mistaken ideas like sad music making them happy. Even after telling them it's not true, they still -feel- like it's true, they're not deliberately choosing to listen to it *because* it makes them sad.
I'm interested how attitudes to sad music varies between communities.
I'm a singer-songwriter and generally sing post-apocalyptic, sad and dark songs. I used to play at these cool open-mic nights with artsy Brits, and would get a good reaction and a decent number of compliments. Then I moved to a less artsy (I want to say "normie" in terms of music taste, but also with a bunch of EA/rationalist types) community, and while playing my first open mic, people were just looking at me with what seemed like barely concealed disgust, as if I'd just shat myself on stage.
I agree with the general comparison between fever and depression here, but the more interesting question then, is: why is it adaptive for depression to keep the individual in said low-mood set point?
Thanks, I'll look that up.
>a great job preventing obesity, keeping people the same weight even on 10,000+ calorie diets through extreme fidgeting and movement
I was skeptical, so I clicked the link, expecting some academic paper, but instead it linked to some website selling services, with no indication of where on that page the claim was even being made.
It looks like the link is redirecting and it should go somewhere else.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108135021/https://thefastingmethod.com/the-astonishing-overeating-paradox-calories-part-x/ and googling snippets suggests it moved to https://blog.thefastingmethod.com/the-astonishing-overeating-paradox-calories-part-x/
Thanks for sharing that. It looks like my skepticism was warranted, and that page doesn't support the contention that fidgeting will keep people the same weight on a 10,000 calorie diet.
On the contrary, it states:
>Some people were made to eat upwards of 10,000 calories/day. 10,000 calories per day! One man only gained 10 pounds with all that. However, most people did gain upwards of 20% of body weight. What happened to their energy expenditure? Metabolism, or Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) increased by 50%.
i was disappointed to find the same but it is followed by
> When the experiment ended, what surprised researchers the most was the rapidity with which body weight returned to normal. In fact, most of these people did not keep any of the weight they gained. So, here we see that overeating does NOT, in fact, lead to obesity. The body is more like a thermostat. While body weight may temporarily go above the set weight, it quickly reduces things back to normal
so the weight was rapidly lost, and presumably without effort after moving back to their normal diets. this still seems important, but it’s not as strong as “your body will burn 10k excess calories through fidgeting”
Thank you, you're right, I wrote this post piecemeal over a few years and lost track of my examples. I've corrected the sentence.
https://www.stoneageherbalist.com/p/the-fat-farms-of-mauritania
"MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY & WITCHCRAFT
The Fat-Farms of Mauritania
Force-feeding girls for marriage" some more examples of 10k-diets that do fatten, as intended
Importantly, though, the study as presented (without citation) by that post doesn't support it's claim that:
>So, here we see that overeating does NOT, in fact, lead to obesity.
On the contrary, the study caused people to gain a lot of weight by forcing them to eat a lot of food, and then observed them losing weight, by eating much less food.
The study was mostly relevant to the question of why people overeat. It seem to be claiming that people overeat because their bodyweight equilibria are set incorrectly. [Not that there's a direct correlation between calorie intake and weight gain; greater calorie intake can increase energy expenditure somewhat, but overall, the study doesn't seem to support the conclusion from it.]
I'm also curious about how well this replicates to even say anything about bodyweight equilibria. If prisoners are force fed massive quantities of prison food and are then freed from this torture, is it really surprising that they would go from a calorie surplus to a calorie deficit (and therefore lose weight)? Is that evidence that their bodies yearned for a lower weight equilibrium, or simply that if you force someone to eat 10,000+ calories of prison food every day, and then let them stop that they'll switch to eating very little for a while, perhaps being grossed out by the ordeal?
I think a better way of phrasing it might be that while overeating might cause *acute obesity* (whatever your objections, CICO is very strongly correlated to weight gain) but it does not result in *chronic obesity* (the actual disease of interest) - they returned to normal weight quickly after the forced calorie surplus ended.
Likewise, we usually see the same thing with dieting: it should cause acute weight loss, but will likely have little effect in the long term unless you continuously apply a forced calorie deficit.
I've noticed that when I'm anxious, I often think thoughts that make me more anxious. So, if I'm worried about work, I'll also start to worry about my health or loved ones. I think most people already understand that as a sort of state that they're in, like saying "I'm in an anxious mood" or "I'm on high alert", but we can also think of it as the mind trying to keep itself anxious/aroused. For that one, at least, there's some obvious evolutionary explanations too
I've heard before from someone I know with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), that the way they understand the disorder is very much like a higher set point on anxiety. In there case it was from an anxiety inducing childhood, that left them with a very hard to reset set point later in life.
Looking into that again now, after reading this post, there does seem to be some evidence for this understanding of GAD. This study for instance shows positive correlations with a variety of childhood sources of anxiety and a later diagnosis of GAD as well as Major Depressive Disorder. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Barry-Milne/publication/6599040_Generalized_anxiety_disorder_and_depression_Childhood_risk_factors_in_a_birth_cohort_followed_to_age_32/links/553ea4c50cf20184050f8a72/Generalized-anxiety-disorder-and-depression-Childhood-risk-factors-in-a-birth-cohort-followed-to-age-32.pdf
I'm not sure what it means, but the number one takeaway I've had from talking with my GAD-having sister is that she views our shared childhood as significantly more anxiety-inducing than I do. She tends to explain this as "our family is very judgmental and this causes many of us to have anxiety" whereas I tend to weight toward "you got a lot of the family genes for anxiety, and therefore you see everything as anxiety-inducing."
Hmm....that's not my experience with anxiety. My interpretation was more like the following: I feel anxious for no obvious reason, so my brain gets confused and starts searching its archives for things that have caused anxiety in the recent past, and it then fixates on those things as if they were a current problem that would normally be anxiety inducing, like an angry bear charging at me or something. It does this because an angry bear charge is a big problem that needs to be solved and fast. Not seeing an angry bear anywhere in the vicinity, it goes to the memory banks, pulls something out, annoints it the source of the current state of anxiety, and then fixates on it, treating it like a problem that needs to be solved. This doesn't work, though, and the fixation and resulting thought loops only serve to reinforce and often exacerbate the general state of anxiety.
This just seems definitionally true to me. I don't (think that I) have Anxiety, but to me "feeling anxious" and "thinking thoughts that make you anxious" are the same thing.
>But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?
This begs the larger question: why would anyone - even someone not depressed - ever want to listen to depressing music.
Because I want to hurt myself? It's basically just the mental equivalent of cutting yourself, but a lot better since it doesn't leave any visible scars. I would rather feel pain than feel nothing.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you find happy emotions that you can feel.
As far as the post in general, it seems to make a lot out of depressed people supposedly seeking out depressive stimuli, with the depressive stimulant being a product consumed by all sorts of people - presumably not just people who would openly admit that they are seeking pain. So I think we need to first better understand why people in general listen to depressing music, before trying to work out why depressed people in particular also listen to it.
The post doesn't even claim, let alone demonstrate, that depressed people are any likelier than non-depressed people to listen to depressing music! So constructing a model meant to explain this anomaly, without demonstrating that the supposed anomaly exists, seems questionable.
You know what, I'm going to take back what I said 24 minutes ago. The whole self-harm thing was what my brain told me, and honestly it's starting to seem pretty stupid to trust anything it says now. Which is stupid, since who the hell do I(?) think is writing this?
Anyways, thinking about this too hard makes me want to die, so I suggest you avoid doing it too. Pretending that you're not just applied statistics is probably better for mental health.
Hey buddy, it sounds like you're in a really tough situation. I hope you're able to find resources that can help you feel better. You may be interested in this previous thread about how to find a therapist: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44783786.
One thing I'll say is that brains are weird, and nobody understands them 100%. It doesn't have to get us down too much; we can find ways to deal with elements of our thinking that seem strange, like intrusive thoughts, etc. This is just like the world at large. Not everything in the universe is known, or even knowable, but that doesn't mean we should be terrified to get out of bed, facing the unknown. We can still find patterns and things that consistently work, even if we don't understand everything.
This is the "paradox of tragedy", that has been discussed in philosophical discussion of art at least since Aristotle. Horror raises a similar question, as does spicy food.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/puzzles.html#TragHorr
Right. And that calls into question the premise of this post. If there is a more universal phenomenon of people seeking out stimuli that make them fearful, sad, or pained, and there is no evidence that this is more common among depressed people, then developing a theory for why depressed people do this is probably misguided. And the particular theories proposed there for the more general phenomenon do not seem particularly consistent with the one proposed in this post.
I think the premise here was that listening to sad music *is* more common among depressed people.
Right. Which is why it's unfortunate that the post never states that explicitly, let alone demonstrates it. At most one of the linked studies may claim it, but the full study is behind a paywall, so it's hard to tell.
To me, the first three paragraphs of the post state it explicitly. One of the study links supports it in the abstract, at least:
> In the replication music task, MDD people were more likely to choose sad music.
The second study linked (Yoon et. al.) does appear to state so quite explicitly in its abstract. But also just anecdotally in my own experience it is nearly obviously true to the point where I don't need much in way of evidence that people prefer sad music when they're sad/depressed.
The key point IMO is that depressed people think that depressing music is relaxing or in some way helpful, whereas most people engaging with negative-emotional-valence art recognize that it will make their emotional state more negative. The analogy to fever might be people going in hot tubs to intentionally overheat themselves, whereas the feverish person doesn't typically think of what they're doing as intentionally overheating.
Somebody who expects the depression to be temporary, serving some necessary function, might actually be correct that the negative-emotional-valence art will make them feel better - not in the short term, but by getting the depressive episode over and done with faster.
Immune system response driving a fever could be looking for something along the lines of an integral, where high fever for a short time, or mild fever for a longer time, may be equally sufficient to kill the pathogens, and it'll take whichever it can get. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OvenLogic Severe itch could be scratched in five frantic minutes with fingernails, or half a second with a belt sander. Precommitted evopsych incentive structure needs to cash out its actual rewards and punishments at some point, in order for back-propagation to update decision trees appropriately.
Women have a greater preference for horror than men in general, maybe they have a lower set point for being scared than men, and more often get a “I don’t deserve to feel this safe” feeling that inspires them to seek out horror
The claim here is the opposite, that men are more likely to be fans of horror movies. https://hbr.org/2021/10/the-psychology-behind-why-we-love-or-hate-horror
As do BDSM, rollercoasters, extreme sport, and defending EA in the wake of the FTX scandal.
I think the appeal of pathos is threefold:
1. The desire to stimulate one's empathy instincts. As the internet will tell you, crying over fictional characters proves you have a soul.
2. The relief that comes with witnessing someone in a worse situation than you. It's kind of like how snuggling feels better when it's pouring outside. Might be related to people's attraction to big scandals.
3. If you're in a bad place, it's reassuring to know that there are creators out there who could empathize with you.
My wife watches horror films in order to watch people be killed in "interesting" ways... Think about the people who would go out to watch public executions...
sadness isn't inherently unpleasant, in small quantities? even when i'm at my least depressed, i really enjoy a beautifully melancholic work of fiction or whatnot.
Right. And that calls into question the evidence in the post. If it's true that depressed people like depressing music, but it's also true that even the least depressed people like depressing music, and there is no demonstration that depressed people are particularly likely to like depressing music, then a theory meant to explain particularly why depressed people like depressing music probably isn't very robust.
i mean i think the post certainly asserts that depressed people listen to depressing music disproportionately often, or something along those lines
It actually never states that depressed people listen to depressing music any more frequently than anyone else. Instead, what it claims is that:
>depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music
But it never tells us whether that is unique to depressed people. Maybe people who aren't depressed also prefer to listen to sad music rather than happy music.
The modern commanding dominance of poptimism across several artforms (most especially music) seems to be evidence against that hypothesis. Although I guess that invites the further category-spitting of "what is sad music"? Plenty of upbeat happy songs about truly horrific things, plenty of downbeat sad songs about teddy bears wrapped in puppies. What matters more, the subject or the wrapper? Part of why I don't really like rounding it off to "blues" - lots of blues-genre music is just, yknow, relaxing. No one cries while listening to Cantaloupe Island.
(I'd read the study to see what definitions they use, but the link seems to have moved...)
> No one cries while listening to Cantaloupe Island.
I was struck by a comment on a youtube video of a recording of Kilkelly ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVWUth6SjlU , though this might not be the same video), saying "I first heard this song when it came on the radio while I was driving, and I had to pull over and cry".
It is especially striking, to me, because the events described in the song are by most metrics a huge success for the protagonist and for his family. But despite that fact, everyone instinctively rejects the idea that the outcome might be viewed as positive.
I wonder whether sad, blues, and depressing are different things..
Sad and depressing are definitely different things.
But "least depressed" is a strange qualifier. Compare that to people who are happy as a room without a roof. If I am truly giddy I avoid sad/melancholic art.
Well, I'm usually only truly giddy when I am like actively having a blast hanging out with friends? But if I'm just generally content I don't particularly avoid sad art.
If I'm generally content I seek out "interesting" in art rather than "sad" or "happy".
My experience is that sadness and melancholy(that's what you feel when depressed?) is not quite the same. When I was depressed I felt something like a dull emptiness, pain, anger but not sadness. Once I was able to feel sadness I felt much better and more alive. As if sadness implied there is something valuable and worth living to be sad in relation to.
So in that sense sadness is sometimes an appropriate healthy emotion.
This description made me think of Inside Out.
No, I don't mean melancholy to refer to the dull emptiness of depression—I totally agree with everything you're saying.
I resonate with that experience - I get the sense that a sort of grey, lifeless feeling that I would call depression (even if it does not last long enough to be clinical maybe) can be a sort of repressed sadness that is not being felt fully. I have had the experience that once I am able to feel properly sad, I can cry, which will not only relieve the sadness but also the depression, returning me to a state where I have more energy and ability to enjoy things. This motivates me to seek out sad music when depressed: It helps me give myself permission to fully feel the sadness, maybe partly by creating the sense that it is not normal, I am not alone with this, so I do not need to hide it. Hence I believe that listening to sad music can help me get out of depression, essentially by helping me grieve. Opposite action on the other hand sometimes seems like a bandaid, with sadness / depression still buried underneath a surface layer of energy generated (it can still be helpful sometimes I think).
Yes, exactly.
I read this essay by Freud, which describes the same thing and found it interesting https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf
Actually isn’t it the same with fever? Body is overheating, starts sweating => loses heat
I remember the last fevers I had, and overheating always felt good exactly because of that rollercoaster release — push down too far to trigger different set of (extreme) regulatory systems (sweat, crying)
Depressing music, media in general, can be beautiful in a way that other things cannot. It reflects something about the world not captured elsewhere. When you're sad it rings true in your mind, and this can give you a sense of consonance with the world and its inhabitants, it's a positive feeling and generally an improvement on your previous state of mind in my experience. I do actually believe mood set points are a good model but I am extremely skeptical of the claim about sad songs being an example.
Part of that sense of consonance with the world is the feeling of being *at* your current set-point, rather than having the compulsion / pressure to continue adjusting something.
People care about more than momentary happiness. For example, it's hard to imagine life having much meaning if there was never any hardship over which to triumph.
What are your favorite songs? I'm willing to bet many of them aren't just straightforwardly happy, even if you wouldn't consider them depressing.
That would be my guess too. Personally, I love emotions in songs, and many of my favorites are quite sad, even though I am a generally positive and optimistic person.
Same here, except that I'm a bit more extreme. I can't think of any happy music off the top of my head that I'd want to listen to.
How about the glorious Ninth, by Ludwig van?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ewcRuGdgQ
"Freude, schöner Götterfunken" And the original ending, on point for Scott's writing, "und die Hölle nicht mehr seyn." Although "Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!" would make a good motto for a space program.
There was a great one on the radio a few days ago:
https://www.yourclassical.org/story/2023/12/15/minnesota-orchestras-2023-new-years-day-celebration
Skip to 1:35:00 for the final encore performance of the last movement of the 9th, although the rest is excellent too, especially Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.
Ah! Happy/triumphant classical / instrumental is often much easier for me to take than modern beat-driven pop/rock/edm/etc.
It's possible it's the beats that I *really* hate, although I don't hate them nearly as much in sadder music.
Anyway, it's hard to know how I really feel about certain ubiquitous pieces of classical music because I've heard them so many times, in so many contexts, across so much of media. The Minnesota Orchestra's performance is extremely competent, and the arrangement is just different enough that it's engaging, but I was *much* more pleasurably engaged in the calmer movement starting at 1:35 than I was when it got into the bombastic finale I've seen in 200 movies and 500 commercials.
Yeah, I noticed when I was listening to this performance on the radio, that the calmer introduction built up to the finale in a way I hadn't appreciated before, and which heightened the experience. A number of years ago, I ran across a description of Beethoven which was something like "every note was inevitable given the previous notes", and while I think it's an exaggeration, I've noticed that I keep recalling it when I listen to Beethoven, and this was one of the times where I really **felt** it. But it sounds like you've gone deeper into classical than I.
How about this, for a modern beat-driven pop cheery music? (If you've seen what it's from, there's a big ;-) there.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_J3UhPK-Zo
Sticking within Scott's metaphor, a straightforward answer is that their mood is too high and they're trying to adjust downwards. That's bad if they're in a depressive episode, but very good if they're in a manic episode (or are just sub-clinically 'too happy').
Anecdotally, I use music to regulate my mood and focus a lot. If I'm feeling tired and low energy, I'll put on something peppy. If I'm feeling anxious or fidgety or like my thoughts are racing, I can put on something sad and get a noticeable boost in my focus and productivity.
There are also some nominally sad songs that I like for non-sadness reasons, like enjoying the sound of the music or because they're associated with happy memories.
So depressed people music like depressing music because they're trying to achieve a more depressed equilibrium, while people who are sub-clinically 'too happy' also like depressing music, because they don't want their moods to be too high?
That doesn't seem like a very useful model. Why don't the depressed people seek out happy music, just as the 'too happy' people seek out sad music, and vice-versa?
And if this were true, it would imply that desire to listen to depressing music would have a quadratic relationship with depression. That is, that desire to listen to depressing music would be highest in very depressed people and very happy people, and lowest in medium happiness people.
Is that true? Who knows? Nothing in the post showed that anyone has any greater proclivity for depressing music than anyone else.
Because...as with the other thermostatic models given, depression itself makes it really hard to do things that "obviously", objectively make one happy rather than sad, and in fact tends to encourage sadness-perpetuating activities instead? (Not in post: and cognizance of such dissonance makes one even sadder, due to digging the hole deeper, the same way failing at dieting while eating donuts induces shame rather than motivation to Git Gud, thus exacerbating the problem)
The second link says right in the abstract that depressed people do, in fact, prefer listening to sad music more than non-depressed people. It also cites the first link given here. You're correct that Scott himself did not state such in this post, but I mean...that's what links are for.
I was going to get to the links. I already followed up one link, saw it didn't say what was claimed, and Scott updated the post, accordingly. But when I tried to click the first link to Sci-Hub for the Millgram study, nothing loads for me. Sci-Hub doesn't have the second study, which is unfortunate, as studies are often misrepresented in abstracts. Importantly, the abstract is somewhat ambiguous, as it states that "MDD people were more likely to choose sad music" but that could either mean that they are more likely to choose sad music *than healthy controls*, or more like to choose sad music *than happy music.*
Here's a thought: maybe listening to sad music "tricks" a healthy brain into believing that its environment is sadder than it actually is, thereby making their internal sadness seem less sad by comparison, thereby raising one's mood. This could just feel like being "understood" (by someone else, like the singer, or some higher entity) from the inside.
This would mean the mechanism at play is different depending on whether someone is depressed or just sad. I suppose you could disprove this by trying to look for whether healthy sad people feel more or less sad after listening to sad music.
This has always been my suspicion. At least, that's how I feel when I'm doing it. I make up these dramatic stories behind the song that are way worse than my current problem.
It's sort of like a release valve for my issue, then when that's done I'm seeing it against a worse situation and feeling better.
My first thought is that depressed people seek out sad music because it makes them feel like they're not completely alone. There's the old saying, "Misery loves company", though I'm not sure what was intended by it.
It can be a strain to be around a mood which is much happier than one's own. Possibly depressed people need mildly cheering music.
This is probably the explanation for me at least. Especially if someone manages to express the particular mood or thoughts I'm having, too - the effect is similar to getting to rant about my problems to a friend.
Like how someone who's never been in love might hate love songs, but then once they fall in love, all of a sudden they like them? Or how someone working at a miserable job might gain an appreciation of old union songs?
But then why do happy people listen to sad music too?
As I said in my own comment, I hate happy music. I find it consistently grating. There is no time where I *ever* prefer it to something sad. The better the mood I'm in, the more I want to hear something romantically tragic.
Part of this is just a quirk of personality, but I should point out that no piece of happy content has ever given me the borderline-orgasmic sensation of physical frission which seems to be a vagus nerve response to the emotion of elevation, of witnessing something profound (be it hopeful, sacrificial, dignified, loving, etc). Straightforward happiness is a really terrific sensation, but for me, there's no "there," there.
Dang, how can you hate happy music? Happy music is for getting up and dancing, and that's just a fun thing to do...Dance and celebrate life.
Do you love the Baby Shark song? (https://youtu.be/XqZsoesa55w?si=rFT5Q1af_R6LaaQv)
If so, how many times do you want to hear it?
Is there *ever* a point at which it would be annoying, and you want to turn it off and never hear it again?
If so, then we're not that different. We just have a different level of enjoyment/tolerance. For me, basically all happy pop songs are Baby Shark.
Don't like it, But Battu gets me moving every time, and when it's over I can totally say, "Again Again" and do it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxtkhUF58oY
I tried Battu and found it intolerable, way worse than Baby Shark, which is at least *simple,* if grating and ear-wormy.
I fully realize I'm the one with the extreme and unusual taste here; I'm just presenting myself as the outlier.
This seems sort of circular. Getting up and dancing kind of requires a good mood in the first place! (it also requires not being physically ill or otherwise low on energy, but that's a whole other set of issues).
I tend to agree with this. Is there really a "correct" level of happiness, such that some people are too happy and need to listen to sad music to regulate themselves?
I asked ChatGPT which were the five greatest pieces of music and it said (i) Beethoven's 9th (happy), (ii) Bach's Mass in B Minor (happy?), (iii) Mozart's requiem (sad), (iv) Swan Lake (sad), (v) the Rite of Spring (neutral). I had thought maybe that we were more likely to think of sad music as great, but it seems not.
> ii) Bach's Mass in B Minor (happy?)
Music in a minor key usually sounds sad.
Also all of these pieces are long and complicated with multiple contrasting sections and even entire movements that don't track in a straightforward way onto a happy/sad dichotomy...
+1
A Crucifixus is not going have the tone as an Et resurrexit.
I fucking love the Rite of Spring and I think it's happy as shit. But maybe "energetic" would be a better word. (Also come to think of it the Rite is progressively less happy as it goes along, the energy doesn't really disappear though, it just becomes tenser and tenser until the noise at the end.)
Also that is a hilarious list.
I personally never listen to sad music to feel calmer. I do, however, put on energetic music to get myself to clean my room or do laundry or something.
I asked it again for a top ten list of the greatest pieces of music ever and (after its usual caveats) this is what it said:
1. Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 ("Choral"): Often considered Beethoven's greatest work, this symphony is known for its final movement, which includes the famous "Ode to Joy."
2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem Mass in D minor, K. 626: An unfinished masterpiece, Mozart's Requiem is renowned for its emotional depth and complexity.
3. Johann Sebastian Bach - Mass in B minor, BWV 232: One of Bach's major compositions, this mass is a monumental achievement in the baroque choral tradition.
4. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake, Op. 20: This ballet, composed by Tchaikovsky, is famous for its beautiful melodies and has become a symbol of classical ballet.
5. Igor Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring: A revolutionary work in the history of music, Stravinsky's ballet score caused a sensation and changed the course of 20th-century music.
6. George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue: A unique blend of classical music with jazz influences, this piece is one of the most famous American musical works.
7. Johannes Brahms - Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98: This symphony is often regarded as Brahms' magnum opus and is a staple of the orchestral repertoire.
8. Giuseppe Verdi - Aida: This opera is known for its grandeur and has become one of the most performed operas in the world.
9. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Album): Widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of popular music.
10. Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2 (Moonlight Sonata): One of Beethoven's most popular compositions for the piano, celebrated for its haunting beauty.
Interesting that the top five are the same pieces in the same order that it stated previously.
Impressive visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jMlFXouPk8
...these count as depressing, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI
Johnny Cash, American legend. Not depressing to me, sad and somber, but I'm older and don't find (my) death all that depressing. (I wrote that sentence first with no (my) and you should read it both ways.) Awesome video BTW, thanks.
For me, sad art/music (and some horror) are pleasant in a similar way as a tough physical challenge. It lets me feel good about myself for being strong enough to handle it.
"This begs the larger question: why would anyone - even someone not depressed - ever want to listen to depressing music."
A couple of reasons I can think of:
1) Feeling depressed or sad at times is universal but can feel very lonely when you're in the midst of it. At least in my experience, sad music at those times makes me feel less alone and less like no one understands what I'm feeling.
2) There are times when I feel down and have a physical feeling that my body needs to cry, but the tears just won't come for whatever reason; some mental or emotional block holds them back. On those occasions, depressing music helps me feel what I'm feeling more intensely so I can push through that block. There are just times when stress and ignored emotions seem to build up inside to a point where it feels like I I need to cry it out like a sleep-training baby, and if I can't, it feels like the emotional equivalent of a sneeze that you can feel coming but never quite materializes.
I spent many years completely disconnected from nearly all emotions except anger. I was convinced that honestly expressing my real feelings when those feelings were sadness, disappointment, hurt, etc. was a display of weakness, and would provoke disgust from & abandonment by others. I was unable to even acknowledge those feelings to myself because to do so was offensive to my cherished self-image as an entirely autonomous man who handles whatever comes up on my own and takes pride in needing nothing, no help or support or connection of any kind, from anyone. As I eventually began to realize what that impenetrable armor was doing to myself and my relationships, I began to feel a shift inside that allowed me to at first start being vulnerable with my feelings to myself, and then gradually with others.
Stoicism is an indispensable strength in some situations but if one is unable to ever step outside of that way of being, my experience at least is that the negative emotions that are suppressed or repressed leak out in other ways to a limited extent and otherwise build up inside until a blowup takes place (a fight with a partner or loved one, a substance binge, etc.). For me it resulted in a constant low-level simmering irritability with accompanying reactivity as well as somatic symptoms like frequent headaches, all of which led me to generally withdraw from my wife & kids. When everything built up inside to the point where I now allow myself to cry, I used to act out in a way that provoked an acrimonious fight with my wife.
TL;No way I'm reading all that: Depressing music sometimes helps me process the kind of emotions everyone has at times but that I used to make a lifestyle out of suppressing or repressing to my own detriment as well as that of everyone around me.
Could be something to do with release? Recently I watched an experiment on a comparison between flipping and not flipping the steak while cooking.
The result was that flipping was better because it cooked the steak more evenly, because overcooking it caused by increasing the energy on the steak in really big bursts, like when you only flip it halfway during the cook. So spacing out the energy spikes by repeatedly flipping makes it cook more evenly since there aren't as massive spikes like with the traditional method.
Anyways, maybe listing to sad things when you're sad is like that. Applying a ton of energy onto your sadness to make you get over it faster like shock therapy. Basically being able to look back on short periods of like and say those were the sad times. Coraling your feelings into a big sad event, like overeating ice cream and watching sad movies, lets you compartmentalize your feelings easier.
In this theory, everyone has a "thymostat" set to some point on the sad-happy scale, not just people with depression. This theory predicts that everyone should occasionally be driven to listen to sad music, whenever they are "too happy" for their thymostat set point. (Of course, people respond differently at a conscious level to these drives; sad music, movies, thoughts; just like people eat different food when they're consciously hungry).
Your question is like asking: if people with fevers shiver and wear jackets because they want to warm up, why does anyone without a fever shiver and wear a jacket? Sometimes your environment is actually cold.
Because people like having their internal experiences validated by external sources. When you're depressed you don't want people telling you to be happy, you want people telling you they know what it's like to be sad. Misery loves company.
> Opiate addiction [could be considered] a recalibration of endorphin set point? I'm not sure.
You're not? I was under the impression that that was considered a fairly well-established fact about drug addiction at this point, that addictions "break" the ability of the body to maintain various biochemical levels to the point that dependency develops because you need the boost from the drugs to get back to normal. That's not *exactly* "recalibration of a set point" but it sure sounds pretty similar, don't you think? Or is there some nuance I'm missing?
There's certainly some aspect of this: tolerance and withdrawal seem straightforwardly a change in some set point. Based on my experience, the withdrawal from nicotine lasts a few days, but the habits associated with it are much harder to break. Conversely, some drugs/stimuli don't generate much acute withdrawal but can still be hard to break. In my experience alcohol works like that. When I don't drink for weeks or months, I feel fine–better even–but there are still triggers that make me want to drink.
I highly recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by addict-turned-neuroscientist Marc Lewis, which walks through the "extreme habit learning" theory in a fair amount of detail. (n.b., he has a very different theory of anorexia from this post. Not sure which is correct or if they are complimentary.)
'complimentary' should be 'complementary'.
You describe depression as a problem of set points, as if depression were _accidental_. I don't think that's correct. Instead, I think depression is often the result of *incentives*.
I was depressed. I remember wondering, “Why am I so depressed? What’s wrong with me? Why are brains so dumb?” There’s a five month period where I don’t know what I did. In fact, I was so depressed that I just didn’t bother to interact with anyone new.
I expected that I would just get hurt whenever I interacted with other people:
- A girl seemed to really like me. We hung out a few times and it was great. I texted her the day after one of these times and she never replied. For months after that, I felt like I had to make her respond, and I blamed myself for her ghosting me.
- A friend didn’t like my ideas about psychology, called me “dangerous”, and terminated our friendship. I felt like I had to fix his reaction.
- At a party, someone asked me, “I heard you quit your job. Why did you quit?” I didn’t want to answer, but I felt like I had to answer.
Near the end of my depression, I wondered, What if my depression wasn’t a symptom? What if it was a solution?
When I am depressed and low energy, I don’t want to interact with other people. So, if interacting with other people means getting hurt, then, here’s an interesting theory: a way to avoid getting hurt is to be depressed.
Maybe my depression was actually adaptive. And maybe I didn’t have a ‘dumb brain’ after all…
If that was true, all I would have to do was find a way to interact with other people without getting hurt as much. But how?
I think the most common way that people in my position cope with this problem is by becoming numb and rejecting any negative feelings they feel. This is not what I learned. In fact, I had already learned this strategy of numbness, and I would have to unlearn it as I learned a better way.
Instead, with help from a counselor and a little-known method called Coherence Therapy, I gradually altered the ways I was interpreting social interactions and my feelings. As I made progress, I had less incentive to avoid other people and it became less useful for me to be depressed.
These days, I’m not afraid of social interaction anywhere near like I used to be. I’m comfortable being really social now.
---
The above is from a draft for a series I'm writing about unlearning social insecurities, supported by Epistea Residency and CFAR. It will be posted on my blog soon. https://chipmonk.substack.com/
I don't think this is the case for everyone, but it was the case for me and I would venture to say it's the case for most people. I was INCENTIVIZED to be depressed. I could not have told you that at the time, but looking back, yep: I was afraid of social interaction and I didn't know how else to cope.
From this perspective, it makes total sense to me that many people who are depressed seek stimuli that brings sadness. I don't think they're depressed _accidentally_. I think they're depressed as the result of an INCENTIVE. The Coherence Therapy Institute has documented many case studies of exactly this: https://coherencetherapy.org/discover/examples.htm
My experience with depression is that most cases aren't like this:
- Some are clearly the result of external biological shocks, like seasonal depression or hypothyroid.
- Some are clearly the result of random psychosocial shocks, eg a friend dies.
- In some cases, the patient knows the depression is maladaptive ("every time I go out, I have a good time, I just don't want to go out")
- I just don't think this explains most features of depression. If you were rationally following incentives, it would be reasonable to think "I got pretty far with a girl I liked, but then she ghosted me, so I should try to meet ten more girls, and maybe it will work out with one of them". Or "I feel embarrassed whenever anyone asks me about my job, so I'll work hard to get a job I'm proud of". Or "I hate social interaction, so I'll do something else useful, like learn to run marathons". Not "I'll lie in bed all day, doing nothing, thinking about my failures in an unproductive way, listening to sad music, and maybe having random sleep and appetite disturbances".
I think what you're saying is part of some kinds of depression, but that you need ideas like a trapped prior (incorrectly generalizing from one example to a much stronger pattern), frozen set points, and attempts to maintain these in order to make full sense.
> In some cases, the patient knows the depression is maladaptive ("every time I go out, I have a good time, I just don't want to go out")
Both of our theories explain this example.
> If you were rationally following incentives[…]
It doesn't need to be entirely rational. I certainly don't think it was "conscious", even if some more less conscious part of me did have the incentive and responded to it.
Just because you're responding to incentive doesn't mean that you're use all of your intelligence.
I agree with trapped priors bit
You've actually hit on *another* conceptual scheme we can use to think about the maintenance of depression and anxiety--good old fashioned reinforcement learning. Avoidance readily becomes self-sustaining via negative reinforcement, and further entrenched by habit. The first time you don't go to a party because you're afraid to talk to people, you successfully avoided the unpleasant thing (or stressful anticipatory thoughts about it), and unless you missed out on something really cool as a result (which you may be systemically discounting the likelihood of anyhow, see below) that's probably going down in the logbook as a win for avoidance.
I'm a little skeptical of the idea that your depression resolved just because it was no longer useful, if only because it doesn't usually do that! It seems more probable to me that your therapy shifted thoughts and behavior patterns which helped you expose yourself to circumstances where alternative behaviors (social engagement) brought greater rewards, in a virtuous upward spiral. One way to think about mood in general is as a representation of the likelihood that interaction with your environment will result in rewards vs punishments; if you were successfully convinced that there were more rewards to be had by engaging vs withdrawing, that's taking most of the wind out of depression's sails right there.
I think the OP's model is close to right but can be improved even further. In particular, I believe that all the intrusive-type thoughts, like ruminating on bad things, also serve a purpose. Not to stay unhappy but to find a feeling of being understood and empathize when. When a person is made to feel unsafe, (from sudden shocks or chronic shame or whatever), their body is concerned with avoiding the feeling if unsafety. When it doesn't know how to prevent it from happening it retreats into isolation to avoid any sort of repeat of the situation. Meanwhile it studies the feeling over and over, looking to understand it, and it studied stories of people being unhappy in hopes of finding answers-- some kind of way that it can be sure it won't be hurt again.
At least, that's how I came to understand my own depression, and it seems to resonate with other people's experiences.
This feels very accurate to my experience.
I will be posting much more about this on my blog soon
This may be a special case but after a major manic episode the depressive episode was (predictably) obligate
All I could do for a month was lie on a couch and listen to the same sad album all day. I could eat, drink coffee, and then gladly go to bed to turn it off
Month by month, with time and medication, I was continually amazed to find I had a new stable set point of average sense of well being. It just kept happening in steps until I was so happy that I was reliably glad to be alive
After a year I was able to work. It was quite a new experience to wake up some days and know I had no choice but to call in and say I couldn't work that day. I presume my brain chemistry was completely incapable of engaging in stimulating experiences on those days
I would suspect that I had an updating set point of the amount of happiness I could tolerate that was at complete rock bottom when the manic episode had fully worn off, shadowing the capability of my brain chemistry to tolerate both positive and negative stimulus. The risk of being positively stimulated may have been the risk of experiencing the painful stimulation of change from a positive state of mind back to the inescapable set point far below that
So in service of my need for emotional stability I was obligated for a month to maximalize both a depressed state of mind and one with as little alteration as possible
I think control systems theory has a good shot at modeling bipolar. Oscillating mechanisms can be due to poorly calibrated attempts to restore balance. But severe mania might also be inherently damaging such that your brain needs time--years, in my experience--to repair itself (cf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-02073-4).
Depression & anxiety are ways to be in the world when things dont quite line up with your predictions.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
>I texted her the day after one of these times and she never replied.
I guess now is the perfect time to tell you that phones just eat texts sometimes; my landlord just told me I never got back to him about a good time to repair something, but I'd never gotten the question because the phone ate the text. Important stuff does require a call.
Yeah, this is along the lines of what I was wondering about: How does psychoanalytic theory fit into Scott's framework of trapped priors or set points? I feel like psychoanalysis might view any of the patients in the original piece as having a specific defense mechanism against change. Which is to say a defense against addressing and healing from previous trauma or a formerly adaptive personality construction that has become maladaptive at the patient's current stage of life. So, a depressed person turns to sad music as a logical part of an ingrained, familiar strategy for maintaining psychological homeostasis (however miserable that may be at the present time). Anorexia often can be like this, too. So, "untrapping the prior" becomes especially fraught as the person is essentially having to dismantle a very familiar and previously CRUCIAL part of their capacity to function in life. I think physical therapy is a good metaphor. Someone's body has tried to adapt around an injury or malformation and, although the person is able to at least function as well as possible given their injury, the consequences of their body's adaptation is very painful and has itself become the #1 priority problem. Physical therapy will require that person to gradually and consistently work against the body's attempt to cope with the injury, building muscles in other places to help counteract the patient's lopsided gait (or whatever). The process for the patient is long and painful, but the end result is that they are both able to function as well or better than before AND without chronic pain. But it's an understandably big ask!
I find most of what you say convincing but I don't think the sad music part fits the theory.
As you point out, even non-depressed people seem to prefer to listen to sad music when feeling down. I don't know about other people, but while I almost always prefer bright popy songs when I'm really bummed more melancholy music makes me feel like my sadness is heard and has meaning. It's the musical equivalent of someone empathizing with your break up by telling you how awful they felt after their break up instead of telling you about how great their relationship is going.
There are all sorts of ways this may differ for depressed people. For instance, maybe you can hope for catharsis for momentary pain but not for the general feeling everything is bad. And maybe they react differently.
So I don't think it's in conflict with your story but it seems like it isn't obviously predicted by it either.
I think my theory predicts that non-depressed people would also prefer sad music. My model of normal sadness is something like:
1. Bad thing happens to you
2. Brain goes "Huh, seems like a good time to be sad, better lower the happiness set point for a few hours."
3. Happiness set point lowers. Your body makes you sad automatically, and you also do things to make yourself sad, like listen to sad music.
4. After a few hours, the brain raises the happiness set point again and you feel better.
I realize this makes it hard to differentiate "change in set point" from "the types of shock that set points exist to solve", and "successful control" from "your body changes the set point back to normal", but it does seem like "you get sad when bad things happen" is a feature and not a bug.
Why does step 2 happen? Why should an outside event making you sad make your brain think "now's a good time to be sad", when an outside event making you hot doesn't make your brain think "now's a good time to be hot"? The latter effect would mean that a non-feverish person would seek out blankets and hot drinks when their body temperature rises. (Oddly, I have heard some Europeans talk about espresso on summer days this way.)
I'm not exactly saying a sad event makes you sad - sadness isn't a property of events. I'm saying a negative event makes you sad.
I don't know why exactly sadness exists. But whyever it exists, it seems to be some kind of adaptation where, when bad things happen to you, you should react by adopting a specific emotional posture. Without knowing why, I think I can argue that, when a bad thing happens to you, the brain realizes it's time to adopt that emotional posture, and takes steps to make it happen.
On your theory if you get a negative shock and then a positive shock you should be less happy afterwards than if you got them in the opposite order since moving the set point down decreases impact of the good shock right? This is the opposite of my experience (at the very least isn't generally the case).
Alternative theory, when bad things happen you remember them so you feel crappy. It's just like being hot except that the stimulus often is pretty persistant (if you got dumped yesterday you are still dumped today) but usually set points bring you back to baseline if a bad situation persists long enough to become normal.
Agree. there's data about coloscopies without anesthesia. Not nice altogether but when its nice near the end of the procedure people like it much more.
Also can't we test this by looking at patients with memory impairment? If someone gets bad news (loved one dies) and then forgets that do they still act more sad for the rest of the day?
I think to answer why sadness exists we first need to determine whether its social or nonsocial. Is there a model of sadness in, e.g., fruit flies or snakes?
Here's a straw model for non-social sadness: happiness = risk appetite. (Can you have gamblers that are depressed while gambling?) You're more willing to take risks when happy, less willing to take risks when sad. The setpoint moving is about learning that you're miscalibrated on the likely success of risks you take in general.
I think risk appetite is definitely part of it. Or perhaps rather novelty seeking. That's similar, but not exactly the same.
Another aspect of sadness could be that it reduces your learning rate and how much you update your connections in the brain. When you are sad (but not depressed), it may be a good heuristic that you shouldn't repeat whatever you have been doing in the last hours. That heuristic won't always fit (when a beloved one dies and it wasn't your fault), but it does often enough (you said mean things to your friend and now they won't talk to you). I assume that our body doesn't want to reinforce the activation patterns from that day.
I would guess that depressed patients have impaired memory formation and impaired learning capabilities, and that the same is true for normal people when they are sad.
Now it gets more complicated. There must be a rodent model for depression for all the lab work. And rodents' risk behaviour can be radically changed by toxoplasma parasites. Human risk behaviour seems to be modulated a bit by these little worms as well. Are toxoplasma positive humans less depressed as well as less risk aversive?
So according to this it looks something like:
Normal people: bad event -> sadness regulator activates -> sad music -> feel sad
(analogy: Fever happens -> heat regulator activates -> wear extra jacket -> heat up)
Depressed person: bad event -> sadness regulator activates -> sad music -> feel sad -> brain interprets sad feeling as evidence of new bad thing -> baysian self-updating spiral into unreasonable sadness?
I think this is a plausible model, but it requires slightly more complexity than the other parts of the mood regulation system you suggest, so somewhat less credence in it on priors. More centrally I think this is a different mechanism than the anorexia one, which is just a lower set point but not a self-reinforcing spiral.
Thanks that's a much better way of phrasing the question I tried below.
>Why should an outside event making you sad make your brain think "now's a good time to be sad"
I think the first question need to ask before that is, "why are brains even able to feel sad in the first place?"
Clearly, the ability to be sad confers some sort of fitness advantage - while it's possible it's just a random artifact of mutation, it seems too common and has too many downsides (for gathering food, copulating, etc) to have stuck around if it served zero purpose.
Therefore, if we assume it's some part of the brain's method of encoding certain memories as "that situation is bad, avoid it" in a healthy individual, we could posit that responding with a *longer, more severe* period of sadness and negative reflection would more strongly encode that negative stimulus in long-term memory as something to be avoided. Perhaps this includes ruminating on other examples of the negative stimulus so it's all encoded in adjacent/connected neurons/synapses for a stronger response.
Of course, like most things about our brains in the modern day environment, we have so many novel and out-of-distribution stimuli available to us, with so much more cognitive ability, that we can go, "you know what's better than just thinking about how the death of my kinsmen is bad? Partaking in Art that distills those feelings into an acute stimulus!"
Ohh so you think sad music really does make even non-depressed people you sadder too? Hmm, maybe I'll have to try forcing myself to listen to cheery stuff when sad.
However, while that's plausible about sad music I guess I don't really understand the larger theory on this view. Why would the brain change the set point in response to a negative shock? Why not just increase the extent of the shock to teach you to avoid that kind of thing in the future instead of making everything crap for a bit?
And, as you say, how could we even understand the idea of set points in this context? Like are there intermediate time frame set points that are then shifted by even longer term set points? Doesn't that feel a bit too epicycley?
>Hmm, maybe I'll have to try forcing myself to listen to cheery stuff when sad.
You could try making a playlist which starts out sad (to indulge your desire for sad music), then gradually transitions to happier and happier music.
This is basically just a shorter version of my comment, but what if it goes:
1. Bad thing happens to you
2. You think “oh no, maybe there’s still some way to prevent some of this harm”
3. Brain checks, and doesn’t see any promising strategy
4a. You still feel bad about accepting defeat, and so go back to (3)
4b. At some point, fighting feels worse than losing
5. Losing does feel even sadder, but also, the lack of internal conflict feels very relieving.
So listening to sad music, or any similar stimulus, would be easing the pain while increasing the sorrow, but would also allow that sorrow to run its course rather that being held at a lower lever for much longer.
I don't think it conflicts with his theory at all. For normal people, the emotional set point is whatever their emotional state currently is. But they usually just sleep it off and they feel better by the next day. The difference for depressed people is that this set point is significantly lower and resists outside efforts to change it.
...By the way, I wouldn't trust the justifications your brain gives for why it did something. It will completely make shit up, even in situations where it played no part in what happened. Pretty similar to modern AI in that regard.
It does seem to conflict with his theory - the difference between a person outside on a hot day and a person with a fever is that, when both of them have a body temperature of 100 degrees, the former sweats and takes off clothing while the latter shivers and pulls on a blanket. Similarly, it should be that a person who just had a sad event happen and a person with depression should have opposite reactions to the same current level of sadness.
Also, even non-depressed people probably prefer *good* music, and there is much more good sad music than good happy music, perhaps because goodness of music is in part about the strength, complexity, and/or nuanced-ness of the emotional response it creates in the listener, and it is easier for sad music to score high on all these dimensions. Hell, there are entire genres of music focused on evoking particularly exquisite and powerful sorts of sadness, like the famous "saudade" that fado musicians strive for.
This is evidently false. We can look at the top 40 charts and they are almost always mostly pretty upbeat songs. So either there isn't more good sad music or people don't prefer good music.
I mean if you really get into their lyrics they might be secretly depressing but most people aren't going to parse Mr brightside as sad.
People don't prefer good music in a way, I reckon. Or maybe good sad songs stay in memory and you don't need new ones all the time.
Somehow this brings me around to remembering Peter Green's lavish blues guitar, with Jeremy Spencer's slide in the background. It's as if they held depression over their heads before an altar.
I agree. I think music is most enjoyable when it resonates with the listener’s emotions, and happy music fails to do this for sad people. I think a good sad song can help the listener process their emotions, like having a good cry. Happy songs are kind of discordant when you’re sad, making you feel like you don’t belong. It’s like how when you’re lonely at a party, that loneliness is so much worse than from the loneliness from being alone.
I think the best songs when you’re sad are the ones that resonate with sadness but are also high-energy. Songs that are anguished or vengeful, or songs that start melancholy and end triumphant. In my opinion, the worst part of sadness is the way it saps your energy and motivation, and good music can fix that (incidentally, I think “lack of energy” is the biggest reason why sad people avoid doing social things that would make them happier).
I've occasionally noticed something similar with procrastination. On days when I'm very distracted, I sometimes feel brain fog pour in right when I try to go back to work. The brain fog then goes away if I go back to being distracted. From the inside it feels like my body wants to be distracted and is enforcing this by making it hard for me to think well.
Question: Is this possibly correlated with eating breakfast, and what you eat for breakfast? (Or lunch, if it's later in the day)
I sometimes have the same experience as Kel. (Today is one of them, which is why I'm here.) As for links to food intake, when I'm procrastinating on stuff I also tend to procrastinate on eating. The causative direction for me is definitely "procrastinate -> not eat" and not "not eat -> procrastinate" - for example, today I had breakfast right after getting up (because I had been excited the night before about the new cereal we got), but still didn't feel like doing anything.
It's completely irrelevant, but for breakfast I usually eat either generic brand cheerios or leftovers (home-cooked healthy meals).
In addition to low blood sugar, which can cause brain fog - I'm also gesturing at potential food allergens/sensitivities, of which brain fog is a relatively common symptom.
Try keeping a journal of diet and good versus bad days - see if some foods might be setting you up for failure, and whether others might be setting you up for success. Common offenders are dairy, gluten, and salicylates.
Without being familiar with any relevant studies, I can’t say much about whether this tracks with what’s known. Still, it seems strongly counterintuitive, and goes against what I seem to observe in myself and others.
For context: I’m certified in Peer Support, and I’ve been offering similar support as a personal coach for 7 years. In almost each case of depression or acute distress that I’ve seen, there seems to be a shared pattern: trying to figure out what’s wrong or improve matters tends to increase stress and a feeling of futility, whereas simply acknowledging how things are seems to provide relief and, as the post mentions, relaxation.
Certainly this could be described as “feeling worse”: staving off negative emotion means having some amount of disengagement from them, whereas letting them land and linger means dropping those barriers.
But the key principle seems to be that feeling any feeling, feels consonant; whereas fighting any feeling, feels dissonant.
In my own internal experience, and in the descriptions I’ve heard from everyone I’ve worked with—often friends who I just happened to be there for—this seems to be universal. The aversive/distressing quality of any emotion seems entirely separate from its placement on the happy-sad spectrum; instead, it seems to be a function of whether a person feels safe to simply immerse themselves in it, which in turn can often come a bit *after* voluntarily doing so.
It seems like the only way that the set-point narrative applies here, is in the difficulties we all have finding our way towards less familiar emotions: anything we’re used to navigating certainly tends to be easier than finding our way somewhere new. The persistent inertia of predominant affect is a fact; but the “emotional homeostasis” claim seems wrong. Rather, people (1) feel better when they aren’t fighting any feeling, and (2) tend not to know a way out of their common, negative emotions—if they did, they’d have used it already.
I don't think what you're saying disagrees with my point.
When your set point is set to "depression", trying to fight depression brings you away from your set point, and so feels (at least to start) aversive and bad.
I agree there's something awkward here, in that the sadness of depression, and the badness of being too far from your set point, are two different and conflicting kinds of bad emotion.
Yeah, I see how I made that unclear. I ended up implying what I should have stated, which is: it seems like at no point does depression replace happiness as the "baseline" that feels good to go towards. "Letting a particular feeling occur without being fought" is what seems to account for the listening to sad music, or similar preference--but this seems to be temporary, and to abate once the feeling stops generating itself. Any further attempt to take similar actions, once there's not a live feeling that needs un-fighting, seems to leave the people I've seen do it, and myself, not getting the desired effect.
No matter how depressed a person is, it appears that they still find sorrow, on the object level, unpleasant--and that they naturally tend towards and prefer moving through-and-out-of such feelings. Many can't/don't know how to; and of these, I've seen many try things that seemed to help in similar situations, like listening to more sad music. But they also indicate that this doesn't help, and usually become frustrated quickly when that's the case.
So there doesn't seem to be any person I've seen who exhibits the behavior I'd expect given your theory: acclimation to depression, with a kind of zen acceptance of it, but an aversive response to any competing emotion, which is responded to with self-soothing back into moroseness.
I’ve definitely clung to depressive feelings before— as Scott said, “I don’t deserve to be happy / feel comfortable after what I’ve done”, or “If I stop feeling upset about how they treated me, it means it must not be a big deal, and it was, so I’m going to keep thinking about it”.
“I agree there's something awkward here, in that the sadness of depression, and the badness of being too far from your set point, are two different and conflicting kinds of bad emotion.”
Yes! This helps me see that these really are two different theories.
One says: depression is feeling sad. It’s sticky because not feeling sad feels worse than feeling sad.
The other says: depression is feeling sad. It’s sticky because you feel sad about feeling sad.
The suggested cures are totally different. The cure for the first is to make feeling good feel OK. The cure for the second is to make feeling bad feel OK.
For what it’s worth, escaping depression feels like a combination of both tactics: CBT / William James pragmatist style go for a run see your friends; wisdom literature / acceptance yes this is awful the race is not to the swift but time and chance happeneth to all men.
There's activity motivation in the mix, which for good reason IMHO has been differentiated from mood in the definition of depression. So there should be two set points, one for mood and one for activity.
Have you read any Randolph Nesse on the evolutionary theories of depression? My very high level summary of his theory is that depression often happens after a failure of some kind and it encourages people to regroup, chill and take fewer risks. Perhaps awkwardness is that we currently judge depression as bad, so your body's like "let me stay depressed!" but your social conditioning is "depression is bad!" Also in modern life, being depressed is isolating. I wonder if in the past, being depressed meant you withdrew to your family/clan who would support you, and it would eventually pass. But in modern life depression comes with a loss of status that can be felt as ostracism. So maybe it's your body wanting to be depressed but then being confused as to why you're not getting comfort and freaking out at feeling ostracised, as the two conflicting kinds of bad emotion.
Isn't a consequence of a theory that explains depression as an error in set points that we should probably expect truly effective drugs for treating depression to also improve mood in non-depressed people?
You might be able to find some drugs that mostly just weaken the strength of the set-point but the problem is those could easily make things worse. Often depressed people will face real life problems as a result of their depression costing friends, jobs etc etc and weakening the set point could let it be pushed lower. Sure, regression to the mean probably makes these drugs worthwhile but it suggests that when you have a hard case and really need drastic intervention you probably need a drug that directly increases that set point in everyone.
This isn't necessarily bad per-se, you might want to avoid prescribing them to the non-depressed for risk of producing mania (which is presumably the opposite set point issue) but it likely means lots of trouble getting regulatory approval because they'll have some tendency for abuse and many people will get worked up about the idea of improving mood through chemistry since it doesn't just help the depressed.
You could have a treatment where a drug reduced the stickiness of the setpoint / allowed recalibration (do psychedelics do this?), and to eliminate depression you need to pair it with happiness inducing behavior. Such a drug might have risk for abuse if you take it when you're already deleriously happy or otherwise about to get a very large happiness shock, but should be fine insofar as setpoints have some grounding in reality and "normal events" can only bring your setpoint to "normally happy"
I agree that would be a nice tool but I don't see how you expect it to work in hard cases.
Should the psychiatrist find the patient someone to fuck/have a relationship with, a new job etc??
I presume you couldn't have (and if u did it would be super dangerous) a drug that just resets your set point to however u feel over a short time period like 12 hours and even then absent giving them a euphoriant, cash or sex how do u engineer this? Giving them a euphoriant plus reset drug might be a good treatment if this was possible but again feels like it will be hard to get approved.
And yes I'd totally abuse it in exactly the way you describe!
I think psychedelics quite plausibly can reduce the stickiness of setpoints. They certainly soften your priors and are as such a quite effective tool for changing your mind: I can't recall if it was marijuana, or some classical psychedelic, which was shown to permanently increase subjects' score on openness to experience.
I'm not sure if it is the one you are thinking of, but psilocybin (of magic mushroom fame) has been found to increase openness to experience for at least a few weeks after taking it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ which states:
>A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience.
The study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537171/
Yes, but note that while psychedelics may have some use treating depression they aren't great. It's still pretty hit or miss and can make things worse. Nothing like antibiotics for depression.
True. Although one might wonder what results we would get if we administered psychedelics alongside a procedure intentionally designed to recalibrate setpoints.
This sounds exactly like the mechanism of the ongoing psycho assisted therapy studies.
From memory a number of antidepressants induce mania in bipolar patients: SSRIs and apparently others too. While that's not exactly improving mood in mentally healthy patients, it is lifting an already buoyant mood to dangerously high levels.
But is that really a common effect or is this another thing like most serotonin syndrome warnings about SSRIs that happens only very very rarely? I've known a number of people who got SSRIs and bipolar disorder diagnosises. So I don't think it's likely to be something that even a bipolar person could count on to induce mania.
At an earlier more foolish and pretty depressed period in my life I tried pretty hard to induce serotonin syndrome by doing the things (except MAOIs and the other you actually might die warnings) warned against mixing with SSRIs (wanted to see if I could get mania) at huge doses and nothing and I'm not the only one who has been cavalier about that kind of thing.
Basically I suspect this is one of those: hey it might happen in rare cases things...but some psychiatrist here will know.
It's quite common (manic switch on antidepressant monotherapy), far more common than serotonin syndrome, but not universal. Your friends on SSRIs with bipolar are almost certainly also on mood stabilizers, which substantially mitigates the risk. It's not just SSRIs; I've yet to find something with antidepressant effects that doesn't also have some concern for mania in bipolar--even exercise!
Well, to induce a mania-like state, cocaine has been shown to work. Not for long, of course.
I've never been clinically depressed, but at times when I was feeling at a bad point in my life and listened to a lot of goth music it was (a) a group identification with other people who felt the same way, and (b) made my emotions feel validated. Not laudable, just validated.
Maybe it's better modelled as multiple homeostatic systems interacting rather than one big one. The part of the mind that maintains an identity keeps trying to stick to "depressed" "worthless" etc. while the part that maintains happiness takes a back seat.
I could some up with some evo-psych handwaving that explains it: people try to fit into the right social role, this is very important for reproduction, and in pathological cases trying to "fit in" to a perceived social role can end up taking over your motivation completely.
Can one's happiness set point be miscalibrated too *high*? What would the behaviors to defend that set point look like? Would the resulting overall picture correspond to a well-known disorder or phenomenon? (perhaps not classified as a disorder, if not maladaptive)
I was wondering the same thing. IIUC mania is typically considered to be the opposite of depression (not just happy vs sad but energetic/lethargic, etc). Are there similar examples of maniacs doing "happiness-promoting behaviors?
Doesn't mania result in taking more risks (with the potential for high payout), being more social, doing more things in general? All of those seem "happiness-promoting" to me
Your first example doesn't work, unless you believe it makes sense for the same action to be simultaneously "happiness-promoting" and "sadness-promoting".
This all sounds like there's an alteration to the loss aversion parameter. It's usually around 2-2.5, but in mania, I think it goes down to less than 1, while in depression, it can be arbitrarily high.
[Epistemic state: Complete guesswork. It sounds plausible, but this isn't based on any studies.]
I know a woman whose father gave away the family’s life savings during a manic episode. It probably felt extremely generous and made him happy at the time, but I would not say it was adaptive to his family’s well-being.
Isn't that just drug addiction?
I spent a decade being consistently much more happy than anyone I knew (or know now), and it mostly manifested in working on all the projects. It didn't feel like workaholism - I didn't feel like I was doing it to get some kind of reward, it just inherently felt right (which of course was the reward, I just wasn't conceptualising it that way) - but I guess it was? I never burnt myself out with it, because I was cognisant at the time of my stress levels and took care not to raise them, but I think the drive to do things constantly (draw, write, run roleplaying campaigns, program, all in parallel to a normal regimen of studying/working, eating, and sleeping quite a lot actually (average of nine hours)) could have been my body defending its very high happiness set point? No clue if the shoe fits, it's all a bit alien to me in hindsight ever since grief ate my brain.
Hope you get back to some nice place. Wish you well.
❤️ Thank you, that's very kind of you and I appreciate it. It's year three, so I'm not sure it will happen, but I am functioning and not depressed on most days.
The theory that we have a happiness set point doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Almost by definition, we try to be as happy as possible, subject only to external constraints, and to trade-offs between short-term and long-term happiness. (Perhaps also to other constraints such as morality, but that can still be modeled as having a clear conscience being a factor in happiness.)
The hedonic treadmill theory doesn't contradict the above (that we seek to maximize happiness, rather than set it to a particular point). AFAIUI it just posits that, after a life(style) change that, on the short term, makes one happier, happiness eventually returns to the previous level even if the change persists. But we still try to maximize happiness, even if most actions for that purpose are only effective for a relatively short time.
I may have experienced some of the changing set point in fluid intake that you describe.
As part of a weight-loss plan, I deliberately increased the amount of water I was drinking to 8-10 cups daily. Later, due to other medical issues, I changed my target to 12-14 cups daily. More recently, I've found that I feel thirsty more often, and I'm now drinking 13-16 cups daily without much effort (I take potassium and magnesium supplements to avoid issues with low electrolytes resulting from drinking so much).
There's definitely a short-term set point for fluid intake. My understanding is that aldosterone and vassopressin are the hormones controlling the mechanism. If you overhydrate, your kidneys will remove water from your body more quickly. Because there's some delay in the feedback mechanism, your kidneys will continue to be in overdrive even for a short while after you go back to normal water intake. So your hydration level will drop and you'll get thirsty.
Weight-class athletes sometimes take advantage of this "hydration over-correction" to achieve rapid water loss, in a technique called "water loading".
> Which other conditions seem like cases of miscalibrated set points?
Isn't this a model for basically all chronic illness that persists after the acute shock disappears? The body is a complicated control system, sometimes acute stimulus drives the system into a different equilibrium point, the equilibrium point being bad makes us label it "chronic illness". At least this should work for chronic pain and chronic inflammation, right?
If you generalize "setpoint" just a little bit, I think autoimmune disorders might also fall into this category. (Does the body have mechanisms for determining when it should learn that something is a pathogen and when it should resist learning that something is pathogenic?)
Agree, I was nervous about asserting this because it seems like a strong claim, but I think it's definitely possible.
Taken too far one might find themselves saying that the body has established a new-normal set point of right handed ring finger tiplessness after an acute workplace accident.
Many of the things depressed people have to do to avoid depression are quite effortful, like exercise, or aversive, like calling a friend when your entire cognitive architecture is telling you they secretly hate you.
Taking a pill is fairly easy. Perhaps depression works at the level of "all those things you can do to help yourself are gonna suck", by racheting up the level of predicted, and perhaps actual, negative affect you feels like doing the things. But an SSRI pill or whatever isn't like calling a friend or going for a walk, you can do it without being thwarted by all the negative generative predictions your cortex is spinning up.
Yeah. As effortless as taking a pill and probably about as effective would be to have someone who cares about you fumble on your back a few times daily. But home grooming therapy still has to be established .
> I've never heard of anyone giving themselves a primary polydipsia by voluntarily drinking more water (maybe because they heard that bogus eight glasses per day statistic) and then being unable to stop; if there were cases like this, it would lend this theory significant support.
During fall of 2015, I was sick with semi-bad pneumonia, and my doctor told me to drink more water. (This was somewhat of a common refrain from many of my doctors, over the years.) So I did. Got into the habit of drinking regularly, two glasses of water per hour I was awake, summing up to about 300oz per day. (Where, before this, I was drinking smaller total quantities less consistently, maybe ~100-200oz/day on average.)
I kept this habit up after that. When I was sick and doctors told me to drink more, I'd do so temporarily for the duration of my sickness, escalating to two glasses per 40 minutes, but I'd go back to two-per-hour once no longer sick. It was stable enough that I could even pretty often *tell the time* by it: notice a pang of thirst, check the clock, find that, yes, as expected, it was the top of the hour. Until, in mid-2019, I became chronically sick with a bunch of inconvenient effects, including, among other things, continually-escalating thirst, to the point where I felt near-permanently thirsty. And even *I* knew better than to escalate up to drinking every half-hour, as my body was trying to push me towards.
As is likely obvious given the context of this story, it turns out, whoops, drinking 300oz/day is Too Much! This was eventually, after a half-year-ish of chronic sickness, a thing someone managed to figure out, following my sodium levels testing out-of-reference-range-ishly low during an ER-visit-for-a-kidney-infection at the start of 2020. So the nurse told me to cut my water-intake levels way back, and I did, and the chronic sickness and all its side-effects receded as I did, and now I'm down to drinking only ~90oz of water per day and being pretty stably in the middle of the reference-range sodium-wise and everything is pretty solidly fixed.
But the interesting thing in the meantime was: during the acute chronic sickness in 2019, I felt permanently thirsty due to not drinking enough relative to the runaway spiral my thirst-levels had fallen into. When I dropped my water-intake in 2020, I went a couple weeks feeling even more deeply unpleasantly thirsty than I had before, but then after a couple weeks it turned around, with the reduction-in-thirst from breaking the spiral becoming larger than the increase-in-thirst from drinking like a quarter the water I was accustomed to. So things were better, at that point. But they weren't *fixed*, in any quick way. It took probably on the order of 2-3 years, after that, before my thirst levels really finished recalibrating on my new baseline water-intake-rates, and during those years I was in a state of, if not constant thirst, then at least *frequent and conspicuous* thirst, enough that I had to be very actively *limiting myself* to drinking only one glass of water per two hours even when this was unpleasant. (And supplementing in the middle of those two-hour spans, sometimes, with Gatorade, when not-drinking-at-all proved too unbearable.) It's only relatively recently, the last year or two, that I've hit the point of being basically-comfortable-most-of-the-time with my current water-intake-rate.
So I suppose the bottom line I'm trying to get at, here, is: the overly-high water-intake-set-point wasn't strong enough to *make me unable to stop* the overly-high water-intake, once I realized it was bad; but it sure did *make it difficult*, and stuck around as a conspicuous factor in my psychology for a while even post-stopping.
(Even now, I have very little trust in my intuitive sense of thirst as a means of calibrating my water-intake. I may not be unpleasantly thirsty most of the time any more, but my Gatorade-intake-rate between scheduled drinks remains not all that much smaller than it was back when things were worse. (I factored it into the ~90oz/day number above; my scheduled water-drinks alone would be only 80oz..) I suspect that, if I were to drop the scheduling, sooner or later I'd find myself back retreading the same ground that led me eventually into the hyponatremia-feedback-loop half a decade ago.)
(The eight-glasses-a-day statistic in particular, to be clear, had nothing to do with anything here. If anyone ever told me to drink eight glasses a day, I told them "yeah, already drinking more than that" and then forgot about the whole thing. But many doctors just sort of abstractly told me to drink More, presumably on the assumption that most people drink unhealthily little rather than unhealthily much, and that definitely was a contributing factor to things.)
Have you tried using throat lozenges to soothe thirst ever? I once had a really bad sore throat, went through a bag of throat lozenges in a couple days, and noticed that (a) my body started manufacturing the throat lozenge sensation in anticipation of a lozenge, sometimes, and (b) once I no longer had a sore throat I had the impulse to suck on a lozenge in reaction to thirst, a couple times (it went away pretty quickly though).
Not sure I'd recommend, but it's a thing to experiment with if you want to
Seconded. When I had polydipsia I spent a lot of time sucking on lozenges, and it did take some of the edge off my thirst even though I still felt pretty horrible.
I'd expect lozenges to stimulate saliva glands. Their capacity is limited but they love to do conditional reflexes (see Pavlov's dogs).
That happened to me, too, except even more so. I was on focalin for just under two years when I was younger, and it made me urinate more, so I drank a cup of water every hour so I wouldn't become dehydrated. Even after I went off the focalin, I'd trained myself to crave more water, and no one had ever told me that drinking too much water was unhealthy, so I kept drinking more and more. By the time I realized I had a problem, it was April of 2020, I was pretty much constantly thirsty, and I'd developed these weird psychological side effects like irritability and increasing anhedonia. The worst of it lasted roughly from late June to late August, when I was constantly, excruciatingly thirsty as well as woozy from hyponatremia and felt almost no pleasure from almost anything. Eventually my survival instincts won out over my thirst and I cut my fluid intake, and the thirst and other side effects started to get better. But it took a few years before my amount of thirst pretty much went back to normal, and my happiness set point still hasn't quite returned to where it was, although it's always getting better.
Edited to add: I still drink on a schedule, too, although I make allowances for the temperature and how much I'm exercising.
Do you think the same applies to mania, just with the mood set-point too high instead of too low? This theory matches my internal experience of depression reasonably well, but I haven't heard of anything analagous to depressed people listening to sad music for mania.
See my last reply above. It has been well argued that psychiatry is much like alchemy and probably in the history of both disciplines the roadside is strewn with smart well-meaning people's interesting theories having led nowhere so far. In the eighties, I attended a seminar about the chronobiology of endogenous psychoses. The basic assumption was about a circadian wave rythm of mood and drive being desynchronized. So there the set point would be moving in time. Our host's control theory stuff still sounds fine to me as far as it goes, except for the music part.
...All this talk about predictive coding and free energy and the brain just being applied statistics is starting to make me think that this whole topic is a legitimate information hazard. There's probably a damn good reason that the brain thinks it's not just math and that it believes there's actually something special about it, and you can't rob people of that illusion without consequences. We are walking into very dangerous territory here.
I understand that further AI research and research by the AI themselves will continue to unveil inconvenient truths about our own existence, but... maybe it's better if we don't think about this too much for the time being. We've already killed God, we can't afford more nihilism and existential horror right now.
> There's probably a damn good reason that the brain thinks it's not just math and that it believes there's actually something special about it, and you can't rob people of that illusion without consequences.
Like what... Nothing leaps out at me. Do people tend to fall into deep depression after reading/learning about free energy? Seems improbable.
I think math is special.
I also think about this in terms of someone being in constant "recovery". For example, one of the primary mechanisms behind feeling better after crying is that it is an intense release of emotion all at once, and often people would prefer to feel very bad for a short period of time than have it stretch out over the course of days. For most people, listening to sad music or doing things that make them feel terrible can actually help them. For depressed people, I think it sort of works in the same way, but there's some sort of constant pressure of sadness that invariably returns fairly quickly, sending them down the same path again. Because of this, many natural coping mechanisms don't really work long-term for depression, but people keep seeking them in hopes of some short-term respite.
When people go to live blues concerts, does it make them feel worse? I have trouble believing this. They look cheerful. Perhaps they are cheered by the social atmosphere, not the music.
Blues fans are the people most likely to go to blues concerts. They are also the people who are most likely to listen to recorded blues music, which presumably makes them sadder. Are blues fans generally more depressed than other people? I suspect they are. Live music bars often prefer blues bands perform because the audience is a heavier drinking one than audiences of most other genres of music.
But then why do these depressed people seek out blues concerts, which cheer them up?
Some observations from internal experience:
- When I'm in a depressive episode and feel like sitting in dark rooms doing nothing, my internal justification is usually something like "I just need to rest and save energy, and then I'll go do things later when I feel better." (Most of the time, this is probably untrue. Maybe my brain heard too much "spoon theory" at some point and miscalibrated its incentives on that basis?)
- Some of the internal experience of depression for me is just feeling an indefinite sense of melancholy, and trying to follow that and put into words exactly what it is that I'm feeling. Sad music sometimes has the effect of helping me put the emotion into explicit words, and that causes some kind of cathartic release that allows me to move on. So there may be some situations where sad music is actually the right choice.
Some of this definitely resonates with me too. I also always thought of it as seeking some sort of environmental alignment. If/when/where my depressive mood feels internally-caused (which it usually is for me), I'm desperately seeking external stimuli that align with how I'm feeling internally. To provide some sense of sanity, relevance, connection, where my brain otherwise feels most positive stimulus are jarring and artificial. I usually default to sad music or sad movies, which feel like the lightest form of indulgence, with the potential benefit of displacing the internal feelings onto something external. So sometimes, as you say, those mediums put into words and images that highly-relatable "indefinite sense of melancholy", and some other times it lets me un-stick depressive feelings' suction cups from my own brain so I can gently place them onto those other things while I try to move on with my life. At the very least, it tends to stall my spiral, and I'm thankful that my ~rational ~healthy mood-brain returns eventually and stops craving those sad things.
I often think about an episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, "Painfotainment", where he reviews the history of public torture and executions. There's a part where he talks about the striking absence of nausea in old accounts of public torture.
Keep in mind these were hours long, ended in gruesome deaths beyond anything you'd see in a theater, and people voluntarily went to see them. Yet nobody seems to get sick. Meanwhile, transport most modern non-sociopaths to the same scene and most of us would feel at least a little sick. Plenty of dads don't do well during labor and delivery.
This is interesting to me, because it not only suggests a link between physiological reflexes and psychological conditioning, but it extends that to social conditioning as well.
I haven't listened to the podcast, but I imagine context of *who* was getting tortured/executed - criminals - is highly relevant to how people felt about their suffering.
After all, historically most people were *much* more vulnerable to all sorts of crime; if someone steals the horse which is critical for your livelihood, you might die of slow starvation when you can't making a living without it (and so on). Predators had a much greater chance of getting away with violent crime, and invisible supernatural forces held mysterious sway over people's lives and were not to be messed with.
So when crime had a much greater negative impact on its victims than it does today, I can totally understand why the average historical townsperson might have had little or zero sympathy for criminals, and perhaps even felt that any amount of public suffering was appropriate. For many, these ceremonies were an affirmation that bad people will be made to suffer tremendously, and that must have brought some comfort to those that came to witness the punishment.
I'm sure that was part of it, but there's a famous saying that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. The customs are different. In this case, they were using torture as a sort of morality play, where the criminal had opposed the state - which in many cases meant opposing god himself - and therefore needed to be punished. But it was through punishment that the criminal found redemption, and indeed this is why local clergy were often part of the ceremonies.
For the onlookers, this was perhaps slightly analogous to witnessing a baptism or first communion. Here was a person who would come out of prison completely in opposition to god and all things good and holy, but by the end their suffering would lead them to find redemption and reconnection to the community they had wronged. Maybe there was a sense of retributive justice, or of assuring people that they were safe, but there was a lot more going on in public tortures that were almost ceremonial at times.
The reason I bring it up is because of the connection to what we normally think of as an innate physiological response. When you first learn about autonomic control, you don't think of it as something that can be altered by culture. It's autonomic - you can't change it if you tried! What, are you going to slow down your digestive tract, or tell your immune system to not react to a bacterial infection? Yet the visceral response to gore seems to have a high degree of cultural variance, even as an involuntary autonomic response.
This post feels way too much like assuming the conclusion.
1. The attraction to the sadness could equally well be hermetic, for instance.
2. It could be an attempt to normalize the depression: "See, it's not just me. Some people feel so sad that they actually write music to reify it! I'm not that sad-maybe I'm closer to normal than I thought."
From a first-person perspective, I understand this a bit. When my father died, I felt incredibly sad, and all-around horrible. I didn't enjoy being sad, didn't want to wallow in it (especially since he explicitly asked me to do the opposite!), but it did feel *wrong* to, say, eat cotton candy while skipping around on a sunny day.
In the midst of this, I had this thought experiment. Let's say there was a breakthrough in psychiatry and they'd solved sadness entirely with one easy pill a day. I wouldn't've wanted to take the pill, and I think anyone would agree that maybe sometimes one should be able to be sad for a time. I'm pretty anti-suffering, but justified not wanting to take the pill because maybe my sadness was teaching me something. But let's say there was also some amazing super AI tech that could instantly teach me everything I would've learned through sadness. I still don't think I'd've taken the pill.
That's a very interesting thought experiment. I think for me the justification would be less about learning than about a form of debt. Like despite the explicit instruction I'd feel I owed some sadness - maybe not even to my father but to the universe.
Maybe I'm just using owed as a substitute for "feeling compelled" which is no explanation at all. But I think that's how I think of it when I stay angry about something far longer than it's useful even as I try to consciously remind myself - what's the point in the holding onto this feeling now? It's like a pretense that the universe can actually sense my feeling and I need to feel it so the universe learns?
I think there’s a distinction between feeling sad and clinical depression. My depression, which I’ve grappled with for 30 years, is never triggered by external events. It emerges from the void over a period of several weeks.
Medication has helped me a lot, but at times the side effects of anorgasmia have led me to rationalize going off it. At the time I go off, I feel fine, and my happiness goes up for a while because I can experience sexual pleasure. But 60 days later I’m a wreck and desperate to get back to where I was before, side effects be damned. This past year, after this happened once again, I was prescribed an SNRI that miraculously doesn’t have that side effect. I hope I can stay on it forever.
I'd mostly avoid it for the same reason I avoid all pills; my body should be able to handle things, drugs are cheating. But just like Ibuprofen, some days call for cheating.
...the pill's like Ibuprofen, right? You take it and you're sad-free two hours later? It's not one of those "you'll start feeling this in three weeks" things?
>if an obese person diets for long enough, does their lipostat eventually recalibrate to the diet as a new set point?
Yes, unless they think that they have permanently recalibrated and abandon the diet for the more enjoyable "old ways". Diets work only if you actually can stick to them indefinitely, with only the occasional splurges. I though this was the conventional wisdom by now?
Well, a "diet" is an intentionally non-automatic eating regime. In this context, the lipostat resetting would be that the previously-non-automatic intentional regime (the "diet") becomes the new automatic regime ("just eating what you want when you want"). That's not "sticking to the diet", that's "the need to diet going away".
Right, that's exactly the problem with the popular conception of a "diet" being a temporary imposed remedy for a permanent issue. There's no point in it, if you can't commit to a lifestyle change where the regime eventually becomes automatic and frictionless.
It remains an open question whether a "diet" will _ever_ result in lipostat change and thus become "automatic/frictionless", which is exactly the question Scott posed that you quoted.
If you just keep doing a "diet" (in the sense of a non-automatic intentional regime) indefinitely, then it never becomes automatic and frictionless, by definition. You're just permanently dieting. But Scott is pondering whether there is a point past which you "stop dieting" but don't revert to your old behaviour - the new behaviour becomes automatic.
AFAIK this is not well-understood.
>But Scott is pondering whether there is a point past which you "stop dieting" but don't revert to your old behaviour - the new behaviour becomes automatic.
I think that Scott ponders a different question, this one seems confused.
As I understand it, the lipostat doesn't determine any particular behavior, it just makes you hungry at a certain point, and from then on it's your decision what to do about it.
Under the hypothesis in question, bad diet leads to lipostat damage which in turn leads to obesity. Even supposing your non-automatic intentional regime fixes the damage, as soon as you stop it, the damage presumably sets right back in and you'll eventually end up where you started.
However, if you get accustomed to your non-automatic regime so that it eventually becomes automatic (that is, not a constant struggle etc.) and you keep your weight loss, then this would be good evidence for the theory, and as far as I can tell, this in fact agrees with people's experiences (including my own, for whatever it's worth).
Okay, I think I get it now - it's not that you have to manually diet forever, it's that you have to manually diet until it becomes automatic. That's a lot more heartening, honestly.
Well, the problem often is, people have bad diets for reasons, and those don't tend to go away by themselves. That's why I like calling it a "lifestyle change" instead of a "diet" - for it to be a long-term success, you likely need to purposefully change something about your habits/outlook/etc. (what worked for me was taking up home cooking) so that the temptation to slip is lessened/no longer there.
>Well, a "diet" is an intentionally non-automatic eating regime
No, it's... just an eating regime. A Western diet is what typical Western people eat.
"Switching" diets implies non-automaticity. But switching is temporary; either you stick with the new diet, or you switch back to the old one (or a third even newer one).
Words mean different things in different contexts, jeeze. Yes, that is _another_ meaning of the word diet, but not the meaning being used here.
"Diet" as in "dieting" means intentionally modifying your eating to lose weight, which is what we're discussing here.
> Yes, unless they think that they have permanently recalibrated and abandon the diet for the more enjoyable "old ways".
I'm confused - if they've permanently recalibrated, shouldn't they feel little desire to go back to their old ways? Or is it that they only think they've recalibrated?
I've elaborated on my view in another reply - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues/comment/46509854
Does that clarify it?
> This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music.
But according to this theory, shouldn't a non-depressed person prefer to seek out happy music when their mood is down? Like, we would expect people without depression to play happy songs at funerals to cheer up.
According to set point theory, there should be two groups of people seeking out happy music:
1) people whose mood is temporarily down by sad events
2) people with mood regulation disorders that are opposite of depression - they are compelled to always listen to happy music regardless of life events
Does it match the observed reality?
The opposite of depression would be mania. In a state of mania you don't have much time to listen to music at all; there are lots of more important things to do.
Which brings us to one aspect of depression I haven't seen mentioned here so far: drive / motivation to act. Classical depression is a low mood with low drive. There are two other pathologies of these aspects, of course, agitated depression and calm ecstacy, the latter barely known because it doesn't seem to happen much and you won't complain about it and if your spouse complains, you are too happy to care.
Not sure, but I think Scott may be implying that in ordinary sadness (say a reaction to a bad life event), it's good to feel sad, and therefore the body's happiness set point temporarily goes down, and you do things like hiding in a dark room listening to music. Depression in this framework is simply a maladaptive quirk where your body thinks you should be sad for *too long*.
I agree that the theory doesn't make sense if depression is supposed to be totally different from ordinary sadness. Anecdotally, I would expect more non-depressed people to listen to sad music because they are temporarily sad than because they are too happy and want to bring themselves down.
This is one of the biggest things in psychs' usual playbook I cannot reconcile with my own experience. Trying to force down "happy things" to feel happier seems to require assuming you can neatly separate Genuine Bad Feelings and depression and that while Genuine Bad Feelings carry some kind of useful information or relation to reality, depression never does and therefore the only thing you should do is pretend it isn't there/do not-depressed things until your mind recalibrates to match.
I don't listen to a bunch of drone and atonal free jazz when depressed because it's "relaxing". I listen because trying to feign happiness in the face of what made me unhappy feels immediately and clearly dishonest, which makes it impossible for me to *view* whatever piece of media as "happy" or really anything but dishonest. I'm also not even sure there's an objective outside view where you can say something *itself* is intrinsically "depressing" or "happy" at all -- there are tons of songs I know where both music & lyrics taken in isolation are "happy" but my reaction is the opposite, or vice versa.
The even bigger objection I have to this is that it seems to imply that:
1. Only the end goal of mental wellbeing matters
2. You can easily define what mental wellbeing really is
If you were to find some magical purely internal way to feel and think only things consistent with optimal mental wellbeing, it would lead you never to act at all unless you are compartmentalizing mental wellbeing entirely separately from e.g. meaning, morality, your feelings & duty toward others, some idea of duty to survive, ...
>>"Am I eliding some important differences in which these conditions are vs. aren't ego-dystonic? "
Sadness can function as a social signal, conveying emotions like regret or sorrow. This signaling is most effective when the emotion is authentic and perceived as involuntary.
The recruitment of the ego in maintaining sadness could undermine this authenticity. It could make the emotional expression appear deliberate or strategic, potentially reducing its ability to elicit genuine empathy and support from others.
So, I don't think it's a point against your theory. It makes sense that set-points would recruit all the mechanisms at their disposal that don't harm their underlying purpose.
Great point
I assume my experience is closer to universal than unique, but still:
I'm not depressed, but sometimes, when I'm angry at or feel hurt by someone close to me, I'm not just upset, but feel the urge to stay upset. I ruminate about how a person has treated me wrong, I realize that I'm keeping myself upset by thinking about it, but it feels somehow *wrong* or inappropriate to think happy thoughts or, yes, listen to happy music. And I'm pretty sure at least part of it is the "let them see how sad I am" component (like a smaller version of the "I'll be dead and then they all will be sorry" thought that might be a cliche by now).
The thing is: these are small, localized occasions, and pass after ten minutes or a few hours, depending on the situation. Not sure how this fits with the set point theory - either the set point has to be able to move for very short periods of time, or there has to be a different mechanism for what feels, on the surface, like a relatively similar experience.
very interesting article with thought provoking questions.
69 love songs has a lot of good (and hilarious) writing on this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vSh4vMOH0&pp=ygUdYml0dGVyIHRlYXJzIG1hZ25ldGljIGZpamVsZHM%3D
I'm not clinically depressed. But still when I feel sad (for instance, when my grandmother died), I have a desire to listen to sad music. Using the set point theory, the natural response of someone like me (who's set point is... normal.. i.e. not depressed), upon hearing depressing news, should be to listen to happy music, to reset towards a normal state. But I don't. I still favour depressing myself further with sad music.
I don't think it's possible to square this with the idea that depressed people listen to sad music to keep a homeostatic depressed state. I just don't think it's logically consistent; if this was the case we'd see the opposite effect in people without clinical depression when they get sad news, but we don't. I don't have any particular problem with the overall homeostatic theory here; but the sad music component doesn't fit IMO. Which is inconvenient since it's the framing device for the entire article haha...
Perhaps the idea is that your set point temporarily changes when you hear sad news, like it changes when you have fever, and for depressed people, the change is permanent, as if they had fever forever?
This was really interesting!
I think of this in the context of dopamine a lot. Like cell phones, apps, games, tv all artificially set our dopamine thermostat level too high and it's hard for us to get it back down to a normal level where we can appreciate stillness and calm and thoughtfulness.
If it was just a matter of having a different set point to non-depressed people, then wouldn't we see non-depressed people start listening to lots of sad music when they get particularly happy (i.e. above their own set point)? And other depressed type behaviours?
I can't really buy the premise that sad music makes one sad. I really enjoy crying when listening to "Fields of Athenry" and feel the deep beauty of many other "sad" songs.
I am uncomfortable with the emphasis on the idea that patients with fevers are "too warm" and should seek to cool themselves. They aren't running fevers because their internal temperature set point is too high. They're running fevers because the optimal position of their internal temperature set point is higher than is normally the case.
We often treat fever with fever suppressants, and I always wonder whether that actually improves outcomes. You're more comfortable on a fever suppressant, but the purpose of the fever is to help you. 😕
If you're out in the wilderness with no medical support letting the body create a fever to kill the infection is probably a decent idea (as long as you don't get beyond the safe range). But given that we have modern medications and treatments that reduce the risks of infections spiraling out of control I suspect the risk-reward measure favors some degree of fever control (if you get really sick you can get antibiotics or antivirals etc).
i think there’s probably some evolutionary game theory between your immune system and infections. these days it seems most pathogens have evolved to be able to beat fever, so no immediate advantage to having one.
if everyone on earth started very consistently treating fever, maybe pathogens would come back that are vulnerable to fever. just my speculation.
> these days it seems most pathogens have evolved to be able to beat fever
Where is this conclusion coming from?
the consensus as i (layman) understand it is that treating fever with NSAIDs or tylenol doesn't obviously hurt recovery, so is fine to do if you want, although not necessary.
I think that's an accurate statement of the consensus, but what does it have to do with whether pathogens have become heat-resistant?
i infer that if they weren’t, fever would help, so reducing fever would hurt.
I would say that what people are thinking is the same thing Peter Gerdes says: that the fever remains helpful, but that you're more comfortable suppressing it and, in the event that the rest of your immune system doesn't do the job the fever was meant to do, taking drugs that will hopefully do the same thing.
There are very strong fundamental reasons to believe that heat resistance is not developing in pathogens that don't already have it. Most obviously, they would be unlikely to function well within a human who was not running a fever, limiting them to infecting people who are already sick.
> Depressed people, when told a treatment will make them happy, very occasionally refuse on grounds that "I don't deserve happiness", but this is pretty rare
Really? This is very much my experience with some of my friends, giving all sorts of reasons not to get help when they're depressed. "It's not depression clouding my judgement, I really am worthless and I really do deserve do be miserable. I wouldn't want some shrink to stop me from perceiving the objective reality of my being a useless piece of crap." In fact, I perceive the "actually deciding to get help" as one of the biggest obstacles to overcoming depression; it's my experience that it's extraordinarily difficult to talk a depressed friend into seeing a doctor. Maybe your perception is shaped by some form of selection bias, since you only see the kind of depressed people who agree to see you in the first place?
Incidentally, how do people in a psychotic state get help? They don't understand and can't be convinced that they are psychotic, right?
in some countries, somebody notices they are psychotic and has them involuntarily committed and forced to take antipsychotics, which despite horrible side effects do work quickly for psychosis.
in other countries, this is rare/impossible, so we usually wait until they do something illegal and get arrested, and hope the police send them to a mental institution and they don’t get hurt or killed during the arrest.
How they get help is a more complicated question, but it's a misconception that psychotic people necessarily lack insight.
> I perceive the "actually deciding to get help" as one of the biggest obstacles to overcoming depression
The kinds of "help" available are pretty shit, no treatment is very effective, the biggest obstacle to overcoming depression is that depression is hard to treat effectively.
That and therapy (the most effective treatment which even then is not like some kind of cure) is incredibly expensive and essentially impossible to access for most people.
>I wouldn't want some shrink to stop me from perceiving the objective reality of my being a useless piece of crap.
...I'm morbidly curious how they would react to just treating them like a servant. "You're worthless, but I'M not, so get me lunch and then tell me jokes until I leave for my worthwhile endeavors."
I have an adjacent explanation for why I’m fat: I was, legitimately, really really hungry.
I’m not even on Ozempic or anything - just inositol, a supplement, after hearing it can help women with PCOS like myself.
I’d *never* before felt the fullness I do now. Now I actually feel physically bad if I eat too much. I have a natural stop point. When I accidentally miss my pills, and when I accidentally took a lower dose for a few weeks, the uptick in hunger was felt almost instantly. I’d guess it’s something about insulin resistance (though some obese are insulin “normal” but most are not) and just adjusting appetite. Accidentally overeat by 200 calories for six months, you gain weight, appetite adjusts to the new weight.
I really do think “overweight people are more hungry” explains a lot about overweight and obesity. Yet it’s so rarely focused on. You don’t need to jump straight to meds - lots protein and fiber can go a long way. But our most effective treatments for obesity, Ozempic and co and surgery, seems to affect appetite a lot - surprise surprise.
Is this like a narrower version of Borsboom's network theory? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28127906/
My gut feeling would be that at least with regards to the title example, it's more typically the other way round than in the post:
Blues = music of sadness => we like listening to it in our sadness as it makes us feel less lonely in our sadness, i.e. at least a partial relief from the pain of sadness that is often paired with loneliness.
Happy music = music of the happy moving cheering people => making us feel even more lost in comparison to them, making us even sadder. We avoid it when we're sad; we'd lack the energy to feel truly part of it anyway.
I wonder about the possibility of a similar confusion in some of the rest: "They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies)" -> I'd avoid friends when I'm sad not because I want to be sad, but because in my sad state, I feel like my mood is a spoiler anyway. And I don't think that thought is only a trick by the brain; look at how popular you can be among a group of 'normal' people if you're a charismatic cheerful person, and look how much your popularity is lowered if you're that sad person (I have no stats on this, but it's a strong gut feeling/casual observation).
1)
This control theory applies to society/politics as well.
In a society with minimal crime, a person will point to the one crime that's happened all year and say "Look at how much crime there is. This never would have happened in the good ol days [statistically, it happened all the time back then]. This proves how soft we've gotten on crime. Crime has been normalized. Our society has become so tolerant of crime to have allowed this to happen. It never used to be like this [no it was objectively much worse]"
People talk like that all the time, because when society has wound up at an extreme set point for something, it perceives itself at being at the opposite extreme of that something, and aims to correct by becoming more extreme in the direction that it's already extreme in.
2)
Now as for violent video games (i wound up on your streetlight effect article), imagine someone plays violent video games for too long. At first, their increased aggression is only temporary. But after too much for too long, it starts to "stick", and that post-GTA aggression level becomes their new set point ....
> I've never heard of anyone giving themselves a primary polydipsia by voluntarily drinking more water (maybe because they heard that bogus eight glasses per day statistic) and then being unable to stop
Not sure how much this counts for but I've gotten into the habit of drinking a lot of water and I suspect I now get thirsty more easily than most people. Not exactly polydipsia though.
It could escalate into polydipsia, as it did for me. I recommend that you calculate how much you drink per day, and if it's more than a gallon, you should seriously consider drinking less.
I just wish the post was called The Sad Point.
Taking this from depressed people to non-depressed people as well:
I wonder why our usual happiness set point is where it is – and whether some reasons we act irrationally like knowing *what to do* to have a some version of a better life and then for some inexplicable reason *not doing it* are because of some unconscious regulation attempts of our thymostat.
Do we believe our current setpoint to be the correct one and act in ways to keep it like that? Does it make sense to interpret some of our behavior this way and might knowing this help us raise our happiness set point to new levels, in effect making us perform more healthy actions that a healthier, happier person would take?
Very interesting questions.
First off, this link doesn't work for me.
"It’s why, after you overeat, you might fidget a lot "
http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28011408?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
If I strip out http://sci-hub.tw/ , however, I can get the cited publication.
I apologize in advance for the lack of humility in making suggestions to a top tier psychologist in his area of focus. I hope this isn't entirely redundant with things you've considered already.
Anorexia is a really weird and maladaptive example of an altered set point. You'd think that if you starved an organism and made it exercise that it would adopt a set point of desiring a pathologically large quantity of food, not refusing food if it was available.
"(is) Opiate addiction a recalibration of endorphin set point? I'm not sure. What would it mean, philosophically, to answer yes vs. no to these questions?"
Alternate models:
1. Lack of a set point. If you have a fever, presumably you're still averse to burning your skin. If opiate addiction is well modeled by set points, we should still expect a certain amount of opiates to be aversive and a new, stable set of satisfycing behaviors that involves opiate addiction. A set point that wanders outside control limits is not a *set* point. Similarly, if anorexia is about set points rather than outright food aversion we should still expect a minimal level of food consumption to still be hedonic. Do we?
2. "This person has a new set point for opiate exposure" could be an incorrect assessment of the scope of what is being 'set.' Opiate addiction is a form of stimulation. Maybe the relevant 'set point' isn't for opiates, specifically, but is a set point for stimulation, instead. "If a person is stimulated in other ways then their tendency to use opiates will decrease" is a contrary case to the notion that opiate addiction involves altered set points for opium exposure, specifically.
3. Habit or stimulus-response should be at least partially distinct from set point. The notion that a crack addict seeing a crack pipe will lead to increased *desire* does not seem entirely in line with a set point model. In contrast, does a feverish person feel colder if they see a blanket? Probably not?
4. Lack of capacity is a simpler and more treatment friendly model than altered set points. If someone has higher blood pressure because of kidney dysfunction, then theirs may be 'a new set point' in some sense. But it may be simpler to defer to Occam's razor and just say that a person has kidney dysfunction. It seems common enough and functional enough to describe diseases based on their expected cures. A genuine, physical lack of ability to do a thing should probably supersede a set point model.
"Depression is a trapped prior on low mood"
I feel like 'depression' is a bit of a wastebasket diagnosis. Lets say that in some cases depression is a trapped prior on low mood. In other cases, it's a result of a thyroid disorder. Or the physiological effects of cancer (Which, yes, can be hard to disentangle from the looming mortality that goes with cancer.) Or starvation. Or some other condition where depression is an entirely logical and adaptive state.
If we're going to apply set point theory to depression it would seem helpful to tease out some subpopulation of people to focus on.
It might have been intended to go to the sci-hub PDF, in which case https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2016.11.005 (using the DOI) works. I think the .tw domain might have disappeared since this was written.
Since that's the manuscript, it'd be better use the more-finished (and long-term reliable) PMC version instead: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5258678/
> This seems paradoxical (why does someone with a fever, ie someone who is too hot, feel cold?!)
An alternative (or maybe better, and additional/intensifying) explanation of this is _heat flow_ versus temperature. I am (perhaps incorrectly) under the impression that our bodies do not have a temperature sensor but rather a heat flow sensor (hence why a 120F piece of metal feels very hot and a 120F piece of wood does not feel very hot).
Under "normal circumstances" - i.e. a 98F body temp and a 72F room temp, there is a certain heat flow from the body to the environment.
Under "cold circumstances" - i.e. a 98F body temp and a 50F room temp, there is a greater heat flow from the body to the environment, and this prompts "warming behaviour" (shivering, blankets, heaters).
Under "feverish circumstances" - i.e. a 102F body temp and 72F room temp, there is also a greater heat flow from the body to the environment, and this also prompts warming behaviour.
As I said, doesn't need to replace the set-point hypothesis, as I think the feeling of cold in a fever is stronger than the 4-5F change would merit, but it does drive in the same direction.
An excellent and useful article. From a certain perspective, the idea seems extremely likely; humans are full of dynamic systems on various levels of abstraction (metabolic, physiological, psychological, etc), and it just appears that many of these dynamic systems happen to be metastable (that is, they each have more than one stable equilibrium.) Many complex systems are metastable, so this wouldn't come as a huge surprise.
Phrased this way, it also makes a lot of sense that depression, metabolic disorder, and so on share characteristics, even though they're all regulated by vastly different mechanisms - metastability is a property of (properly arranged) dynamic systems in general, not of any particular substrate.
There's also another question here; properly speaking, among all the metastable states a system has, one should be the *most* stable (or lowest-energy) state; in the very long run, this is the state the system will wind up in. We can hope that the most stable state is the healthy one for the system in question (proper weight, balanced mood, etc) but this isn't necessarily true; can we find out if, e.g., the lowest-energy state in our mood-regulation dynamical system is the best for human flourishing? (Is that even an answerable kind of question?)
Isn't the lowest energy state of any living organism death? It therefore seems entirely plausible to me that there could be many metastable states in a healthy organism, and it doesn't seem necessary to focus on the lowest energy ones.
In my case, listening to music at all is inversely correlated with depression. Graphing hours per month on Amazon music would give you a very good proxy for mood in a way I don't think any other simple metric would.
Same. When I’m depressed I don’t listen to music at all. I’ve tried to do it to boost my mood, but the music doesn’t make me feel anything at all. I liken it to how dogs and other animals (don’t) respond. They don’t start tapping their toes to the beat. It’s just random sounds to them.
Not sure if you’ve already come across Maxime Taquet’s mood homeostasis work (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32320005/) but it sounds very relevant to your thinking on this subject
I was curious about the basic study design and their terminology; here's what I found:
> (Dataset 1) Participants volunteered by downloading a mobile application for ecological momentary assessment of mood and behavior via short questionnaires presented at random times throughout the day. The 2 questions of interest were “How are you currently feeling?” (on a sliding scale from 0 [very unhappy] to 100 [very happy]) and “What are you currently doing?” (from a nonmutually exclusive list of 25 activities, eg, exercising, chatting, working)
> (Dataset 2) The participants were asked to name, in chronological order, the activities that they engaged in during the day11 (eg, religion, subsistence farming), their mood (eMethods 1 in the Supplement), and whether they were ever depressed
> Mood Homeostasis
> We define mood homeostasis as the extent to which a person preferentially engages in mood-increasing activities such as exercising when their mood is low and saves the mood-decreasing activities such as housework for when their mood is higher. Thus, individuals who preferentially engage in mood-increasing activities when their mood is already high and unpleasant activities when their mood is already low would have a low mood homeostasis.
> Mood homeostasis represents the extent to which people demonstrate hedonic flexibility.7 Mood homeostasis is an aspect of the broader concept of mood regulation,12 but it specifically refers to the moment-to-moment regulation of mood states via choices of activities. Details on mood homeostasis and its computation are presented in eMethods 3 to 5 and eFigures 1 and 2 in the Supplement.
Brief thoughts from just skimming this below:
I bet the datasets would be useful to analyze the main post, but their analysis and conclusions might not be directly relevant. They seem to assume that everyone has the same(?) homeostatic set point, and treat the selection of the "appropriate" activity towards that set point as a learned skill(?) If I'm reading correctly, that's a different framework than assuming a higher or lower set point, and automatic activity selection to maintain it, as proposed by the OP.
I think you’re right, it’s not the same framework - but some similarity
After reading comments, I realized there is a fair bit of unclarity about what it means to have a set point. For instance, is a set point
A) Merely a baseline against which changes are evaluated. In other words opiate tolerance is an increase in the set point for mu-opiate receptor activation since you now need more than that usual level to feel the high of endorphins and below that level feels like too little.
Or
B) The level which the body tries to maintain via some kind of homeostasic process?
In this case opiate tolerance probably doesn't qualify because, while you feel shitty if you go cold turkey, your body doesn't act to regulate your opiate levels to that baseline (it doesn't produce more endorphins to avoid withdrawal and you can't call drug seeking a homeostatic mechanism since you don't feel shitty when you have more than the normal amounts
And I think this really matters for the theory since in case A the claim is essentially trivial and I don't think you've given much evidence that depression is like fever rather than just merely having too high a baseline of what it takes to feel good (internal drug w/d essentially).
I’ve worked with CBT with depressed teenagers and it’s not uncommon that a prolonged depression or otherwise difficult period gets caught up in their identity formation. Thus the idea of medication or treatments that ask them to behave differently are sometimes scary because, if it works, it feels like loosing what makes you you. I wonder to what extent this is an additional cognitive mechanism and to what extent it’s just an epiphenomenon emerging from some “set-point”. I am from a cognitive-behavioral school so I’m inclined to seeing things as a bunch of additional things rather than grouping it all together into one mechanism.
A PCT familiar friend read this and replied “I’m not sure that this applies control theory correctly. Mood regulation isn’t a goal in itself, it’s the means of altering behaviour. People aren’t trying to make themselves more unhappy, they’re trying to get sacked, get out of a relationship, get out of family responsibilities. It’s easy for the helper to make this mistake because it is their job (goal) to make the person happy”.
This sounds approximately correct to me.
But I also suspect that the behavior altering often doesn't work as intended, basically because the modern world is more complicated than the ancient jungle our emotions evolved for. For example, the things you are trying to get out of keep waiting for you much longer than they would if everyone just followed their instincts.
There's a tension in a certain kind of depressed person that runs like this:
- I deserve to be miserable
- I nevertheless (viscerally or instinctively) try to avoid being miserable
This leads to some weird things. First off, it causes distress through fairly standard self-discrepancy theory: I'm a piece of shit who deserves to be miserable, but I'm not. Something is wrong! Oh no! Quick, resolve the distress by reminding yourself what a piece of shit you are! As soon as that's done, the immediate crisis is resolved: you're a piece of shit and you correctly feel like one. Peace has been restored to the world.
I'm confident at least some flavors of depression also involve self-destructive tendency or warped cognition. Consider somebody who is obese who wants to eat healthily but struggles to do so. He has a choice, at some point, to eat a chef salad or four Big Macs. Naively, in the realm of pure thought segregated from physical desire, one might imagine he would be happier with the idea of eating a chef salad than four Big Macs:
- "I am eating healthily. That's good!"
- "I did it again, I ate four Big Macs. What a mistake."
Details aside, the emotional pressures here are at least working in the correct direction. But the fact that fat and salt taste better than unseasoned lettuce aside, even in the realm of pure thought there's a way to invert this logic with sufficiently warped thinking.
- "What the fuck are you eating a salad for, you fat fuck? Pathetic. You're just going to eat twice as many Big Macs later."
- "That's right, you fatass. Eat four Big Macs like the fat fuck you are."
Somehow, in the locality of the moment, eating healthily has somehow become more locally stressful than eating four Big Macs. A fat man should be eating Big Macs, not salads. Somehow that's just become the way things work. I imagine lot of nominally self-destructive behavior or simple refusal to engage in depression-alleviating activities is a result of hyperlocal avoidance of immediate distress.
As for depressed people trying to get better, there's a second tension involved:
- I deserve to be miserable
- I am aware on some level that I should not think this way
In my experience with depressive episodes I am cross-pressured both ways. Sometimes I'll put on disgustingly upbeat bubblegum pop to try and simply drown out my thoughts with positivity. At other times I'll actively look for audio clips of somebody telling me I'm an awful piece of shit. (I've never actually found any. Most of the audio out there that promises to abuse the listener seems to be sexually charged S&M fetish stuff, as opposed to thirty minutes of somebody telling you you're a failure at life because you struggle to accomplish basic tasks and are bad at your job.)
I'm wondering now if I've allowed my tiredness thermostat to be set too low.
Obviously it's difficult to separate from jet lag but I find that when I've stayed up very late one night, I might stay up even later the next night and the one after... Eventually exhaustion and normal life demands pull me back - but whether its true or not, I think I may use this model as a further push to re-up attempts around personal discipline and going to bed earlier.
Anecdote of one, but I I have what seems to be a slightly higher-than-normal happiness set point and I *truly* LOATHE most happy music, particularly bouncy, insistent pop tunes.
For example, in Christmas music, I never want to hear Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas is You," "Jingle Bell Rock," "Feliz Navidad," etc ever, *ever* again.
My favorite Christmas songs are the really serious traditional pieces like "O Holy Night," and "Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel" (and the more serious the performance, the better), but in modern music, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," "Grown Up Christmas List," "Mary, Did You Know" (but only super-sad acoustic versions; no stupid pop-style cheese, please) and similar are my favorites.
In almost any given musical, my favorite song is going to be the unhappiest, or at least the one filled with the most pathos / longing / determination / inspiration (which is different from "happy")/ etc. Never the cheerful comedy number.
Happy music just feels so grating, so goddamned *insistent*, like a toddler constantly tugging on me, trying to get me to engage with their banal favorite preschool video, over and over and over again. I hate uptempo pop beats so much that if I'm forced to consciously endure them at an unignorable volume (in a restaurant or whatever), my mood deteriorates and I have to consciously conceal that I'm feeling irritable and resentful. If it goes on for a while I'll start to feel something akin to mild despair.
People are always astonished by this until I explain that basically every happy song I hear is Baby Shark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w). Although even that isn't a great analogy because almost a billion people have watched that video and a nonzero number of them loved it!
In contrast, I'm elevated by sad music. There's a bittersweet frission between the pathos itself and the beauty of its execution that I find both calming and inspiring.
But if I'm actually sad for some reason, I'm not comforted by sad music. I still really loathe happy music, but I don't want to hear sad music either. I just quit music entirely.
It seems possible that you are in the good situation of having a happy life with a relatively average target happiness. Sad songs are only appealing when you are not sad. Happy songs rarely appeal, potentially because you are above your happiness target.
Yeah, it does seem to be something along those lines!
Although I kind of feel like "contentment," is a more accurate word than "happiness," per se. But that's not the framing of the discussion.
You'd think that "more happiness is always better," but, like I said, happy music strikes me as grating and insistent. As I said in a comment above, "there is no time where I *ever* prefer it to something sad. The better the mood I'm in, the more I want to hear something romantically tragic," something which will stimulate my vagus nerve into a sensation of elevation and full-bodied frission.
What about songs with lyrical dissonance, e. g. an upbeat song with grim lyrics (e.g. Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal), or an ear-shattering, thematically-jovial song (e.g. Sophie - Ponyboy)?
I mean I’d say to some degree that describes O Come O Come Emmanuel (“Rejoice! Rejoice!”)
I’ve been told that the association of minor keys with melancholy is culturally determined. Which seems true to some degree when observing the world and hearing traditional wedding music in some cultures played in a minor key. But I have trouble buying it. The association is so tight that it’s tough to imagine it being otherwise.
I do think the lyrics might read as a contradiction of the melancholy of O Come O Come Emmanuel, but I don't necessarily process it that way. While we usually think of "joy" as excited glee, "joy" can also be a kind of calmer intense bliss, too. Especially as it relates to spiritual matters. The word "rejoice" here is about the relief at the end of profound suffering, after all. That could be cheering and jumping up and down, but it could also be an exhausted whisper of, "thank God."
FWIW, I also really like We Three Kings, which is often paired with O Come O Come Emmanuel in arrangements. We Three Kings is hopeful and optimistic, but it isn't offensively exuberant (for my taste).
Never heard of either song before, so I pulled them up on YouTube. The Fleet Foxes version is fine. I felt neutral about it and could easily ignore it if it was in the background of a party or something.
But the first version to come up was the Pentatonix cover (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10drRI3VQ0), which I found pretty irritating.
Sophie by Ponyboy got shut off as quickly as I was able to scramble to the appropriate button.
I should have probably said I hate not just happy beat-driven stuff, but EDM, death metal, rap, etc.
Sorry about that :/
(I find Pentatonix dull too.)
I actually disliked the more upbeat approach and especially all the snapping / body percussion stuff.
Although the video probably enhanced my irritation - the song was obviously recorded in a studio, so the artifice of setting ostentatious a cappella in the woods as an aggravating factor, heh. :)
sad songs work for me during breakups and other similar life events. I think it makes the feeling a bit universal. This however is sadness, not depression.
I've had fevers, though not really high fevers. I've never wanted to cover myself with blankets or any such thing.
It might be relevant that I generally like being a little chilled-- the joke version is that in a past life, I was a head of lettuce. I was well into adulthood until "warm" was a meaningful concept-- before that, I would go straight from "pleasantly chilled" to "too goddamn hot" without noticing the intermediate stage.
It's possible for fat people to be anorexic-- to eat so little that they're malnourished. Anorexic does not equal extremely thin.
I propose that I have a super-high happistat, and that’s why I am so good at doing the things that make me happy, sometimes to my long-term detriment.
But I’m in a good mood!
Here comes the classic..
" At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).
“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watching, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me.” She rose swiftly, loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
He sighed, defeated by her threat. “I’ll dial what’s on my schedule for today.” Examining the schedule for January 3, 1992, he saw that a businesslike professional attitude was called for. “If I dial by schedule,” he said warily, “will you agree to also?” He waited, canny enough not to commit himself until his wife had agreed to follow suit.
“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,” Iran said.
“What? Why did you schedule that?” It defeated the whole purpose of the mood organ. “I didn’t even know you could set it for that,” he said gloomily.
“I was sitting here one afternoon,” Iran said, “and naturally I had turned on Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends and he was talking about a big news item he’s about to break and then that awful commercial came on, the one I hate; you know, for Mountibank Lead Codpieces. And so for a minute I shut off the sound. And I heard the building, this building; I heard the—” She gestured.
“Empty apartments,” Rick said. Sometimes he heard them at night when he was supposed to be asleep. And yet, for this day and age a one-half occupied conapt building rated high in the scheme of population density; out in what had been before the war the suburbs one could find buildings entirely empty … or so he had heard. He had let the information remain secondhand; like most people he did not care to experience it directly.
“At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I read how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s small has emigrated, don’t you think?”
“But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”
“I program an automatic resetting for three hours later,” his wife said sleekly. "
(c) "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
A good time man like me don’t got no business singin’ the blues.
Insightful. Thanks.
Globally raising hedonic set-points (or ""thymostats") world-wide should be our long-term goal as a civilization - in human and nonhuman animals alike. For sure, genome reform is a controversial issue. But if we _don't_ tackle the biological-genetic basis of low mood, then the "cancer of the soul" will persist and proliferate indefinitely.
This needs an explanation why some set points are more vs. less malleable. Like the set point for blood oxygen level seems pretty much cast in stone.
The obvious route is the evolutionary one. Probably someone with a malleable blood oxygen set point is just much less likely to pass on the genes that include that malleability.
But why would a malleable thymostat (great word coinage!) be evolutionarily stable?
I would hypothesize it is adaptive in a situation of being at the bottom of the social pecking order, chiefly by massively reducing aggression. Because of the many lies that depression tells, "you're going to lose any fight, so stay out of all fights" is one that might have a strong effect on survival to reproduction when in conditions roughly like slavery.
Something like blood pH is tightly and redundantly controlled because we'd rapidly expire if it weren't. Likewise I think you'd die pretty quickly trying to maintain much less than 98% O2 or so with respiration or exercise (the behavioral levers that exist), because the binding affinities and partial pressures involved have not changed in a way to render that physiologically plausible, let alone desirable. (Oh look, an esoteric hypothesis for the cause of SIDS!)
Our behavior, thankfully, affords more tolerance, and if we're talking evolution, mood is ultimately about behavior regulation. A malleable thymostat is more adaptive than a fixed one, because the whole point of having moods at all is to adjust your behavioral dispositions to your circumstances. I'd expect the relationships between environmental contingencies and mood changes to be pretty robust. It would be pretty odd to find someone who became sad on experiencing success and happy on experiencing failure, for example. High mood tells you, more or less, now is a good time to get out there and do stuff, and low mood tells you not to get out there and do stuff. So long as the reward landscape varies with variables as disparate as social status and the seasons, there's probably some reproductive utility in adapting to it.
Had a coworker recently whose dysfunction seemed anti-fragile. Like we'd try an intervention, e.g. "let's pair program together for an hour" and it would be massively effective - it would be followed by a productive day or two - but then they'd start making excuses to avoid pairing. Similar with various other interventions. As a system, they became resilient against intervention attempts.
Fascinating (and horrible) to watch.
Can you elaborate on “massively effective”? Was it more effective than both of you working individually? Or just seemed like a good delta for that coworker?
Their work output was usually bordering on zero. Lots of avoidance and "oh i was stuck on a bug but now i'm not, everything's going okay" but nothing to show for it. The ~three times we pair programmed, afterwards they would have several productive days in which they completed meaningful chunks of work. Their most productive days were all _after_ substantive interaction.
As their kind-of sort-of manager, it was an economical use of my time: I could pay two hours and get 16-24 hours of decent work out of it. It wasn't ideal (i'm not your dad, don't wanna make you sit down and eat your vegetables), but it was preferable to the alternatives (to me, anyways. They chose the alternatives).
As an antisocial person, I feel I should mention I put sizable effort into being civil in in-person interactions and there's very much a "sour spot" I'll hit where I run out of energy and just tell people exactly what I'm thinking, social consequences be damned. Like, I've had these interventions happen, and they do help sometimes, but other times making excuses to avoid the event is in fact the lesser evil.
What seems like "everything finally works okay" from outside may feel like some important resource being depleted from inside. It works okay until you run out of the resource... and then suddenly it does not.
When I played Depression Quest I felt so down, I played aggressively happy music in the background to make myself feel worse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkpHRB5FOM). I don't usually listen to any music when I'm really sad. I don't want to taint it.
At present, I am on medication for a thyroid problem.
Which felt like a broken control mechanism in action ... I was losing weight so fast without even trying.
Which, of course, is a colossal red flag, so off I went to my doctor for blood tests, and yep, thyroid issue, and medication was prescribed.
Wait wait wait. Does that mean diets cause obesity?
For the weight set point to change you need a mechanism, an evolved adaptation that used to change a set point beneficially in the ancestral environment, like an immune system changing temperature set point. What could be a reason for your weight set point to be able to go way higher than is healthy? I can think of one possibility: feast-or-famine situations.
When you either have more food than you can eat or you are starving, with nothing in between, you need to eat all you can while starving and you need to store as much fat as possible when food is plenty. You should always eat more. So it makes sense to just raise the set point for weight.
In modern times, what can trigger similar response from your body? One possibility is high-stress lifestyle with real risk of not having money for food, but another is dieting! Especially jumping from one diet to another, "looking to see if one works", meanwhile teaching your body that food can disappear without warning and it's best to prepare and store as much food as possible!
Why not just have the set point elevated in response to a resource-rich environment? The expectation/need to prepare for eventual famine is the kind of thing it's better to be born with than have to learn. Then we have a prediction that matches observation--people, including small children, tend to gain weight on the standard 'western diet,' whether or not they have experience dieting. You find the same thing in rodents, who I don't think are doing much by way of intentional weight loss.
"Why not just have the set point elevated in response to a resource-rich environment?"
Because it's unhealthy. It's another interesting question *why* we evolved in such a way that obesity causes various health problems. But given that we did, the disadvantages of being fat outweigh the advantages if the food supply is stable, but not if it's unstable.
Obesity was rarely expressed in the ancestral environment, providing few opportunities to select against it. Moreover, the diseases of obesity and metabolic derangement tend to affect health past the age of reproduction, and don't result in death until later still. But famine and hunger were common enough, and anyone can starve to death at any time, so the adaptations we do have, such as wanting to gorge ourselves on fatty, sugary foods when they turn up, are a defense against those fitness-thratening conditions.
Having a lot of fat is not only unhealthy - you run worse, you fight worse, you are less attractive in a culture where you are expected to work or hunt. It's only advantageous to be fat if it will save your life.
"Having a lot of fat" was not selected for, per se. The behavioral and metabolic dispositions that prevented starvation in the ancestral environment were selected for, at which time they caused obesity less often. The fitness effects of obesity are more variable (in some cultures it is still considered attractive because it's predictive of access to resources), have later onset, and are less severe than death by starvation. And most people under most circumstances would not have been obese. In the modern food environment, those same dispositions are resulting in widespread obesity. You don't need to be personally exposed to starvation for your body to "learn" that it's a threat; the some million years of prior evolution took care of that. Prior evolution did not take care of the dangers of an environment replete with twinkies and big gulps, because that's only been going on for less than a hundred. What I'm relating is pretty much the received view on why everyone is getting fat all of a sudden; google "thrifty gene hypothesis" or even just "obesity evolution" for lots more if you're curious.
Devil's Avocado: depressed people are drawn to sad music because it elicits a stronger emotional response than the alternatives. They're not capable of feeling all that good, that's why we call them depressed, so listening to happy, upbeat, I'm Walking On Sunshine type music does nothing for them. It's just noise. You want music to make you *feel* something, and the only thing that can do that for depressed people is sad music. The sadder, the better.
Source: me. Used to be depressed as a teenager, listened to a lot of sad music.
I don't have any reason to disagree with the overall point of the post, and appreciate the interesting theory.
I do wonder if "depression" (which covers a wide range of feelings and behaviors) can be categorized as the same kind of incorrect mind reaction as anorexia. Maybe extreme depression that a psychiatrist would deal with regularly is in the same category as anorexia, but not everyone who listens to sad music or is feeling down is clinically depressed.
Judging from my personal experience with sad music, I feel like it helps me "complete" the mood and therefore get through it with some benefit. Trying to listen to happy music feels forced and unnatural and often fails to work. It feels to me as though I need the sadness, maybe in the same way that mourning the loss of a loved one is necessary if more extreme, and that listening to sad music helps with this process.
Extreme depression could still be a misfiring/recalibration, but if I'm right then we wouldn't look at every bit of sadness/mild depression as something to be eliminated.
I had a major psychotic break as a young man— one year continuously incarcerated in mental hospitals ( some pretty rough) and four months on day care. So anyway, one Spring morning I’m in the cab, running along next to a stream ( the Fens in Boston), and I roll down the window a little and I feel happiness for the first time in a long,long time. I hadn’t even been aware until that moment that I’d been existing without happiness. So, there was a depression completely beyond human control…
I think people ruminate in depression because thinking about how bad everything is both explains and justifies how awful they feel. There is a sense of letting go of the struggle against the depression, not fighting anymore and feeling that a new reality has has been revealed: there is no point, no hope and no purpose. The world consists of nothing but pain, and anything happy or cheerful is a lie. If you were to believe it you would be fooling yourself, and now you can see the world as it really is. Oddly, whilst descending to such a state is very painful and unpleasant, once you get there you feel too numb to feel—anything. It is easier to stay just like that than it is to fight to regain what seems like an illusion now, that the world is a good place full of positive things. All you have left is the physical feeling of complete emptiness, and you are just a short step from the hypochondriacal delusions that your body is rotting, dead, or full of cancer. You can sit motionless for hours and not have a thought cross your mind. Just the odd voice calling your name, but you don't know what it wants.
Well, that's how it felt to me. That was over twenty years ago now, and it still terrifies me how much I would have welcomed death.
I'm now imagining the kind of guy who is so depressed he can only watch Neon Genesis Evangelion.
(Anime classic. But it has a certain mood).
Scott, I remember that you hate jazz. What's your attitude towards blues?
As a supporting observation, both anorexia and depression have opposite disorders (obesity/bulimia and hyperthymia/mania, respectively) that can be explained using control theory.
Also, sometimes people undergoing hypothermia (the opposite of a fever) feel hot and undress themselves. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/541627/
Per QRI's theory that the valence of an experience is associated with its topological harmony vs dissonance, maybe people listen to sad music and do other things that resonate with dissonant patterns because it helps them get in touch with the similarly dissonant parts of their own organism.
Becoming conscious of an unconscious dissonance is unpleasant in the moment (although some people say that doing so with enough courage somehow counters the suffering, so maybe doing it on purpose via sad music is like exposure therapy), but allows for the dissonance to bump up against other patterns in the organism and potentially merge into something more unified and less inefficient.
According to this model, if someone doesn't have the right kind of dissonance stored in their organism, they wouldn't resonate with certain sad songs or other dissonant experiences in the same way, and wouldn't feel like seeking them out since they wouldn't assist with resolving internal dissonances.
Re listenting to the blues when depressed:
You understandably, but mistakenly, equate sadness with depression. Sadness is a state of feeling acute, achingly unhappy and painfully mournful. A sharp, piercing state. Depression, in a way, is the opposite of sadness. Depression is dulled, blunted, defeated, generic feelings of lack of self-worth, lack of hope, and a type of cognitive distortion directed to seeking out justification for one's state. Depression is like taking a superb elegant kitchen knife and rubbing it, blade down, on concrete creating a dull instrument. The reason cognition is not helpful in figuring out depression when one is depressed is the cognitive distortions that are part of depression. It is like tyring to scramble an egg with an egg. Ain't gonna happen. The reason sad/depressed people like listening to the blues is that the mood evoked by the blues is synchronous the inner feeling state of sadness. It can make someome feel "understood/known." Almost a coming home brought on by the right chords. The blues, or sad songs, can begin to ease someone dulled with depression into a zombie-like state back toward a more human state of being and feeling acutely sad. Sad is sharp and aching but not crippling. The other prescription that should be given to depressed people is to move their muscles. Do anything, but do. Move. Feel.
Tangential, but the idea that music would affect your mood one way or another is pretty weird to me. I listen to a lot of music of all kinds of moods, and the only time it actually acts on my emotional state is if it's so good that it gives me a feeling of rightness and affirmation. This can happen whether the music is happy or sad in tone.
Metal is probably the saddest music not only in terms of music but also lyrics, esthetic, music videos etc but metal fans are reported by studies as being among the happiest group of music listeners.
> metal fans are reported by studies as being among the happiest group of music listeners
I’m curious about this, do you happen to have a link to a study on it?
I would say metal helps me feel more agentic, great house cleaning music. In that way it's the opposite of the plaintive, Elliott Smith or Gregory and the Hawk style music which spoke to me so much as a teenager, of feeling sad and powerless but not even necessarily in a dignified way; part of me used to, totally irrationally, almost wish for me to be in an actually difficult situation for the sad feelings to be justified.
Metal isn't sad, it's generally *epic*. Energetic at the least. It may treat with sad topics, but not in a despairing or giving up way, but rather in an "I will fight this" way.
It's the glory of battle, of glorious conflict willfully entered, of facing the mountains of life and saying "no, YOU move," however Sisyphean or doomed that conflict may be. You're not giving up or despairing at all.
As a lifelong metalhead, "sad" is probably the LAST word I'd reach for to describe it!
Old school 80s heavy metal like Manowar was more "I will fight this" but after the collapse of hair metal in 1991 modern metal is far less so. Sure there are still acts in that vein like Sabaton but not many.
I don't know, I definitely get the "glorious battle" fight-stuff vibe from Amon Amarth (1992), Kittie (1996), Static X (1994), Slipknot (1995), and Parkway Drive (2002).
But those are all at least 20 years old (and of course, I'm an "old" overall, like most folk here). Nevertheless, I hear from younger, hotter metal heads than me that there's still a ton of great high-energy stuff from more recent, less famous bands.
On a less psychological note, I have tinnitus (ringing in the ears). I am fairly sure it was caused by years of playing in marching band in school without earplugs. I’ve read tinnitus characterized as a neurological sensory condition where your brain’s auditory system adopts a new “setpoint” for silence which is higher than it should be and apparently results in a constant ringing. I’m not educated enough on brain hardware stuff to know how true it is.
I know one supposedly promising treatment is “bimodal neuromodulation”, a silly term for playing sounds in sync with little electric shocks on your tongue. Apparently this can somehow reset the setpoint for silence. I haven’t tried it for myself, but I’m going to one of these days. Sure would be nice to hear silence again.
A complimentary take on sad music: It makes you feel connected, not alone. An artist has created a vehicle for emotional states or experiences that at some level are common to all humanity, and that you now are especially able to connect with. It can both articulate and elevate the experience. There is some level of two way empathy here, I think. Therapeutic or not? Some pieces of music can be poignant and uplifting at the same time, of course.
On other internal set-points and their adjustability: gender?
Strong agree; sad music when I'm sad helps me feel heard.
Some programs are hard to change consciously, no matter how much you want to change. This is a topic worth exploring through the lens of so-called energy techniques. For example, check out the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology - https://www.energypsych.org
Not a psychiatrist or anything, and I'm not depressed but I can identify with the "being sad and wallowing in your own sadness and self-pity instead of going for drinks with friends" tendency.
As to why I would do said wallowing, a few things come to mind:
* if I go for drinks with friends then it's a lot of mental energy to act happy and sociable with friends, vs sitting at home and sulking.
* It feels like I need to spend some time sulking to "get it out of my system". I don't know how to square that with the stuff about how the fun activities make you happier, but it's my subjective feeling.
* If I am happy too soon after whatever Bad Thing, it feels like denying the Badness of the Thing. If I ask a girl out and she says no, and my friends ask if I want to hang out, then it's like, by expecting me to be normal and happy, they're not respecting how woeful my life is. I was rejected by a girl, I'm worse off than one of those kids from a famine-stricken country, don't you get it? But instead of a conversation between me and my friends, it's different parts of my own brain.
For decades, I have been my own laboratory with regards to depression, anxiety, talk therapy, and medication. Here are my current theories:
The brain, among other things, is a social organ. There is no such thing as an individual human. We have always evolved in groups, taken care of each other, and needed to be taken care of. We regulate together as groups, tribes, and collectives. We always have.
Depression, for me, is a happiness-strike. My brain internalizes the social outlook and conditioning of its groups and belongings, and if it does not feel like happiness is appropriate given our social and existential outlook and circumstances, it does not feel justified in pursuing or going along with behavior and attitudes of prosperity and happiness.
The pervasive and underlying social beliefs of communities and societies impact individual human mental and emotional states. Many of us are waking up from organizational narratives that have fueled tremendous materialism, consumerism, corporatism, and enhancements to productivity, technology, and growth. Many of us are now seeing the larger, macro impacts of the mass organization of human patterns and behaviors on a global and historical scale, and this causes existential angst and despair to which depression, anxiety, and self-sabotage may be natural and understandable responses in individuals who are perhaps more appropriately considered part of larger social macro-organisms.
This can play out on smaller social scales: amidst wealthy families whose children cannot suppress the psychic disconnect between their own privilege and the inequality and suffering they see in the wider world. To pursue happiness with privilege while "in-group"-considered others cannot do so is sociopathic. This can lead depressed individuals to feel noble and justified in their suffering, given their perceived social landscape.
Would love feedback. Am I way off base? over-thinking this? I just think many of our psychosocial issues stem from a skewed understanding of what kind of organisms we are, and what it means to be a complex social primate that necessarily organizes meaningfully and existentially with other members/individuals.
This is a gorgeously logical framing
Thank you for the feedback 🙏
As of this comment, there have been two prior mentions of **catharsis** as an alternative explanation. Wikipedia seems to say that it's been used as therapy, but oddly not for depression. I feel there should be some studies testing this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Effects
That thing that happens in depression , where people perpetuate and deepen it by saying awful things to themselves, and staying isolated and inactive — I think a process of that kind goes on with most human appetitive and emotional states. For instance if you are hungry, you ruminate about food. Maybe you seek out food cues — read recipes online, or wander into your kitchen. It is hard to keep yourself from doing these things, even if you are trying to lose weight, and know that thinking about food or staring at your fridge is going to intensify your urge to eat. If you are feeling sexually turned on, you crave to think about or look at sexy things, and that intensifies your arousal. Or consider anger. I often catch myself mentally intensifying anger by focusing on the most annoying aspects of what’s around me. In fact, on days when I am carrying around a lot of annoyance, I often find myself having daydreams that intensify it. Once, for instance, I was on my way to pick up a prescription at a chain drugstore that usually has long lines and bad service, and noticed that I first mentally relived some of the most irritating things that had happened there, then had a fantasy about a clerk there being far ruder and more inefficent than anyone at the store ever had been — then, in the fantasy, I delivered a diatribe that was far louder and ruder than anything I would ever say in real life. And when I noticed what my mind was doing, and tried to get my thoughts on another track, I met real resistance — “no, dammit, this is what I’m thinking about and I have a right to think about it and I do not want to stop and you can’t make me.”
So the upshot is that I see depression as an instance of this kind of phenomenon, where a person semi-deliberately deepens a state, as part of the drive to reach consummation: eating something delicious, having an orgasm, or blowing up at someone. I think. a model of depression based on the idea that it’s in this class better captures what’s going on than a set-point theory. So what is the consummation that depression is driving towards? Some kind of radical giving up one oneself — at the most extreme, this would be suicide. Under this theory what keeps people stuck in depression is that we are all wired to have tremendous internal barriers that protect us from giving up on ourselves, or from suicide. So people end up stuck indefinitely in the revving-up-to-it phase.
This is incomplete, but I’m out of time.
Control theory and predictive coding are both complicated enough to implement arbitrary circuits... you might as well introduce a "Turing machine theory" of human psychology. That is not to say they can't individually yield some insights, just that they are all equivalent, and are all too powerful to suggest that they are telling us how things work on a fundamental level. No matter how it turns out to work biologically, you will be able to express the resulting behavior in any "programming language."
My experience is that I listen to sad music when I'm sad because I want to express how sad I am. (I guess to myself.)
Listening to Leonard Cohen sing "Everybody Knows" feels like crying to me - it's expressive.
(Or many other songs by Leonard Cohen.)
In the original Romantic sense, the ideal "self-expression" was to express something you felt, which no one else had ever felt before--to express your uniqueness, or to be a prophet bringing new insight. Some people report that they listen to sad music that expresses their own feelings in order to feel less alone--to know that their feelings /aren't/ unique. These 2 things are opposites. Which one is more like the way you feel?
Personally, I feel my depression is mostly characterized by a lack of energy to get up and do stuff.
The tasks which would offer long term rewards (like working on my thesis, or more hypothetically online dating) will likely be something between a chore and a pain in short term, so I tend to avoid them.
Even tasks with a shorter time span, such as spending 10 minutes to cook a basic meal are not accomplished reliably.
I waste a lot of time playing video games, but I actually like playing video games and do not feel they make me more depressed. There are times when I even lack the energy to get out of bed to play for hours, though. And I could probably get more utility out of BG3 than trying yet another FTL run, but after thousands of hours of playing I know FTL very well (something something surprise minimization).
I had certainly phases when I was wallowing in my depression, though. Like spending a birthday alone in my room (because who has the energy to organize a birthday party) and then deciding that Watkins 'The War Game' (a pseudo-documentary on the effects of nuclear war) would be the perfect movie for the evening.
In general, I think that for a certain mood, there is a window of media and activities which are mood-affirming enough that you could stomach them. If you had made me watch a 'romantic comedy' on that birthday instead that would have worsened my mood more than anything. Likewise, spending time with more neurotypical people can be dreadfully depressing because it makes you feel deficient.
Unrelatedly, I am a bit skeptical of the set point theory of happiness. Locally, this should mean that if something good happened to you unexpectedly, you should compensate by doing something which makes you feel bad to maintain your equilibrium. It certainly works that way for temperature regulation. A set point which gets adjusted whenever you find a quarter on the ground is not much of a set point, in my opinion.
We ought to distinguish between: 1) the ways in which all emotions are equipped with self-perpetuating mechanisms, and 2) the idea of an overall set point to which any perturbance will likely eventually return. If set point theory is true, I would think that different mechanisms are responsible for a euthymic person preferring sad music when in a sad mood, and a depressed person preferring sad music all the time--if this is indeed part of their control mechanism, and not an artifact of them usually being sad. Unless every emotional deviation is trying to establish itself as a new set point!
I wonder if depression/suicide is an example of the set point being set very low to conserve resources for other family members? If I feel that my prospects for reproduction and caring for my offspring are quite low, then, in a world with limited food, it makes sense for me to act like a depressed person to conserve resources for others sharing my DNA, culminating in suicide so that I no longer consume any resources. So, kin-selection theory of depression.
Happiness and sadness have been a curiosity of mine ever since that time I talked myself out of a really good mood. Not enough to, like, look into them, but... uh...
so My take has been that people think in ratios, and happiness or sadness is the difference between a semi-arbitrary memory of themselves, and a semi-arbitrary point of comparison. So, changing either of those can change your mood, and then doing depressing things would add more depressing points to the "you" side to be semi-randomly chosen as the starting point of comparison. So, not a set point, just a point in the set.
As for why people seek depressing things... self-expression. I read this blog because I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup was a really good expression of an idea I'd been trying to put to words for a couple of years, but couldn't get close enough to express it and properly be done with it. So people seek out depressing music and movies as an attempt to express their own depression, but most of them aren't close enough to do it justice so they keep searching. (Just like porn.)
The well-understood setpoint disorders are rare. Listening to sad music when sad is almost universal. If this were due to a setpoint disorder, it would mean that the setpoint is /normally/ disordered. This is evolutionarily implausible.
Letting a theory convince you to tell your patients to do the opposite of what they're naturally inclined to do is a medical hubris with a bad history: the "rest cure" for "hysteria", the coach's "walk-it-off" cure for sprained ankles.
I think we must consider a huge difference between eating and listening to music which Scott overlooks: music, especially music with lyrics, is /cognitive/.
I looked into the research on why people listen to sad music for a talk I gave at Bronycon 2016 on why people like sad stories. The physiological crowd mostly argued that people are self-medicating, trying to induce an anti-depression chemical response, such as prolactin (Huron 2011), oxytocin & dopamine (Eerola et al. 2016), or endorphins (Dunbar et al. 2016) (read my slides at https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/903438/ for the references).
I instead looked into the cognitive aspects. My talk was motivated by my observation that literary theorists still teach that tragedy induces catharsis, whereas observing readers and people watching sad movies shows that every genre /except/ tragedy induces catharsis. Tragedy is the genre which deliberately /forestalls/ catharsis. This is obvious if you're writing tragedy for a fan-fiction audience. The reader comments show people avoiding the sadness you're trying to induce by providing ways in which the tragedy could have been avoided. Only after you rewrite to prevent any possible catharsis, by blocking off all plot avenues by which the tragedy could have been avoided (while keeping the characters true to themselves), can you consistently make your readers cry.
Aristotle was a conservative reactionary writing shortly after the time when Euripides' plays had challenged conservative Athenian beliefs. Aristotle developed a theory of tragedy which completely and explicitly denied that the challenging /ideas/ in a tragedy were of any importance, which conveniently made Euripides a less-important playwright.
I studied about 800 reader comments on 6 sad stories that I wrote. All but one were tagged 'sad' or 'tragedy', so the readers chose to read a sad story. The substantive comments were mostly descriptions or explanations of the reader's emotional and/or cognitive response. Only one reader said anything that could be interpreted as personally experiencing catharsis. Many readers merely described their emotional state, but almost as many tried to explain the /ideas/ in the story that troubled them. What troubled them was cognitively complex and story-specific:
- Readers of "The Case of the Starry Night" concluded that the characters' flaws made the tragic outcome inevitable.
- Readers of "Burning Man Brony" said the futility of the main character's stubbornness and contempt made them re-evaluate their own attitudes.
- Readers of "Twenty Minutes" contemplated how society can suppress or corrupt good people.
- Readers of "Pony Play" wrote about the awful consequences of hiding from trouble and pain.
I also read a lot of responses to Quora.com questions asking why people listened to sad music or watched sad movies. The most-common responses were:
- to try to understand sadness, what causes it, and how others deal with it
- to feel understood by seeing that other people have gone through the same sort of thing
- because happy things seem fake, and so repel or anger them and make them feel more alone
- in order to process their emotions at a distance, through a fictional character, without being judged themselves
- in order to feel something, anything
So I don't think you should try to explain why sad people listen to sad music using nothing but physiology. The ideas in sad stories are the important thing. Music is not as cognitive as story, but most of it has lyrics, often very poetic. Pink Floyd's /The Wall/ is sure as hell cognitive, as are Wagner's operas. Even instrumental sad music sometimes seems to tell a story through its structure, like Beethoven's 5th. So don't leave out the ideational part of the mind.
Very interesting, thank you for these insights !
That's an interesting and rare perspective, thank you for sharing it!
> Only after you rewrite to prevent any possible catharsis, by blocking off all plot avenues by which the tragedy could have been avoided (while keeping the characters true to themselves), can you consistently make your readers cry.
Huh. The best definition of tragedy I've heard (I don't think I came up with it on my own) was something about how it flows inevitably from the characters and the situation, where at every step you can understand why each character acts the way they do, and could not act otherwise without becoming someone different, and the product of all the actions leads to disaster. I'd thought that was a Greek idea, but I can't seem to find it now. It sounds somewhat Christian or Buddhist, in that pride/ego is the thing preventing a better outcome. Have you ever run across this?
That definition sounds very similar to what I wrote. If there's a difference--as I think there is, since you say your definition sounds Christian or Buddhist--then I think you're supposing that "each character could not act otherwise without becoming someone different" really means "each character could not act otherwise without becoming someone better", whereas I think it means "each character could not act otherwise without becoming someone worse". That is, you think (agreeing with Aristotle) the characters fall because they have flaws or make mistakes, whereas I think the whole point of tragedy is that someone without flaws, like Hector, can still come to ruin.
I don't think I have heard others give my view of tragedy, because I've argued for my idea with quite a few people over the years, and none of them seemed familiar with my argument.
Consider these 3 views of ancient Athenian tragedy:
1. The one I'm using: Tragedy is when virtuous people suffer disaster despite doing everything right. I think this is the view the ancient Athenians held, for at least these reasons:
a) It fits best with the events in the ancient tragedies that I know. Even in the plays Aristotle used most as examples–Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and maybe the Orestia tho I forget right now–didn't have any characters making an obvious mistake. I don't accept that Oedipus or Antigone were "flawed" for being proud and stubborn; they acted as the Greeks thought great people should act. The Orestia very explicitly shows that it's impossible for Orestes to obey all the commands of either the gods or the duties agreed on by society. Euripides' Medea is a monster, but the play shows that it was Athenian patriarchy and sexism that made her a monster.
b) It fits with the way the Athenians used tragedy. Tragedy was introduced at about the same time as democracy, and all Athenian citizens were (eventually?) required to attend the tragedies at the Festival of Dionysius. Watching tragedy was supposed to get citizens used to pondering the kinds of moral dilemmas they would confront as jurors and voters. (I don't have an ancient source for this, but it's a widespread opinion.) So tragedies confronted them with situations where one duty or ethical value was pitted against another, and some judgement must be made despite the absence of any perfect or completely moral solution.
(I think that most of today's political conflicts are due entirely to the fact that people no longer believe dilemmas are possible. All political activists today--I don't think I'm exaggerating--believe that the thing they are active about has a clear moral answer, and that it's impossible for two good and intelligent people to remain in conflict if they just talk things over.)
c) The ancient Greeks were obsessed with the uncertainty and unjustness of fate. The Greek myths were quite clear on the point that there was no justice, not in life or afterwards. The gods were not just; neither were the Fates. This was the moral puzzle the Greeks kept returning to. Tragedies were about virtuous people who had much worse fates than they deserved.
d) Tragedy always went hand-in-hand with democracy, and was abandoned immediately when Athens lost its democracy, although they continued making comedies for centuries. As democracy became more-powerful over the course of the 5th century, tragedy more and more turned to social criticism, highlighting injustices or inconsistencies in Athenian ethics.
2. Aristotle's, from Poetics: Tragedy shows the fall of a noble person of high station and good but not perfect character, due to that person making a mistake (hamartia, missing the mark). This produces in the [presumably upper-class] viewer pity for the character, and fear for himself, thus [mysteriously] purging these emotions from the viewer.
Aristotle didn't even consider the idea that the purpose of tragedy was to highlight unsolved problems with ethics or with the nature of life. He was for oligarchy, and oligarchs thought most social problems would be solved by returning to oligarchy. Claiming Athens had always had some unsolved, let alone unsolvable, ethical problems, was something democrats did.
What's more, Aristotle got his view of the Good from Plato, and as far as I know went along with the idea that there was just one Good, and reason led one to be and do good; so a good person could never come to harm (as per Plato's "Crito"), two good people could never disagree, and the only reason anyone was not good was through ignorance. So, if the tragic hero actually comes to harm, /he must have made a mistake/, even if it is only the mistake of ignorance of some important fact.
3. The Christian interpretation of Aristotle: Tragedy shows the fall of a noble person due to a tragic flaw, which is the noble person's sin. The Christian interpretation /blames/ the tragic hero; his or her fall is presumed to be a just retribution. The Christian God does not allow injustice to prevail, so /tragedy is impossible in Christianity/. Instead, we get a story of a hero falling because he /sinned/.
This is basically the same as Aristotle's view, and this is because Platonism is basically the same thing as Christianity. To both Plato and Christians, a completely Good person can never really come to harm. Christians called the tragic flaw "sin" because the New Testament uses the same word for "sin" (hamartia) that Aristotle used for "missing the mark" – so to a Christian who learned New Testament Greek, Aristotle literally said that a tragic hero has sinned.
But this makes no sense, because the ancient Greek view of ethics was not Christian, Platonic, or Aristotelian. Virtue and ethics were different things. Virtues were good qualities for an individual to have--good for /themselves/, and secondarily for their allies. A strong body and a sense of humor /were/ virtues, despite having no moral valence. Honesty was not a virtue, because lying could sometimes be more useful (as with Odysseus). Honesty, and all altruistic or pro-social behavior, fell under ethics. Ethics said how you interacted with /your fellow citizens/, not with the world at large. Virtues provided a person with power; that person's ethics determined how they used that power.
I think the Christian concept of "sin" didn't really exist. There is no ancient Greek word for "sin". They had a concept of "anti-social", behavior which deprives one of honor and glory. The Greeks might judge Achilles harshly for refusing to fight. But this judgement had more of a transactional than a moral nature: You help us, and we'll honor you; you don't, and we won't. There was no "sin" involved. If a tragic hero fell due to a flaw, it wouldn't be a moral flaw, but a lack of virtue. And falling due to a lack of virtue was not a tragedy; it happened every time a smart person outwitted a dumb person, or a strong person beat up a weak person. So the idea of a "tragic flaw" would not have interested the Greeks: not if "flaw" meant a lack of virtue (because the virtuous /should/ defeat the less-virtuous), nor if it meant "sin" (which they didn't much care about).
Maybe there's something about experiencing extreme trauma that makes set points especially reprogrammable? Maybe terror causes the bayesian brain to ratchet all of its priors way up and you get stuck with whatever strategy you adopted in response to the trauma (e.g. "All I know is that the only way to make my mom happy is to be thin" or "the only way I can tolerate being conscious in the wake of my wife leaving me is to totally shut down the feeling parts of my brain" etc).
My general impression is that sad or angry music feels "true" when you're depressed, while happy, peppy music feels like a lie.
That was one of the 5 most-common explanations I found given on quora.com of why people listen to sad music. (See my comment made a few hours before yours.)
Hm. Seems plausible, but I kind of worry that it's stretching set-point theory a bit far. On the other hand, why not go all the way and apply it to [redacted], too?
My personal experience is that the negative-feedback cycle is like wallowing. It feels "right", somehow. Like I need to burn all the dead trees before the forest fire dies out. Like if I run with the wind, I'll be safe. Like there's some resolution just around the corner. And sometimes that pans out, but it's really hard on the rest of my life.
One of my theories about depression, both mild and severe, is that it's like an elimination diet crossed with a shit-test. Something bad happens in our life, and maybe it was caused by something we did. So we stop doing everything except the minimum to survive, and slowly add stuff back to see whether anything goes horribly wrong. Or at least, that's how it worked in the ancestral environment, when humans lived in small groups, and everyone's labor was essential, and most of that labor was stuff that had easily measured metrics of success. If you got too depressed to hunt or gather, and you were valuable to the tribe, someone (probably several someones) would make you do it anyway, nicely or otherwise. And if they did, you knew that you were valuable. (If they didn't, if they just left you in a ditch somewhere, that also provides a resolution.) But now we're in a complicated interconnected-yet-atomistic society, where the bonds that tie us together are things which our primate instincts don't recognize, which do not fill our emotional nutritional needs. (Internet parasociality is empty calories from junk food.)
Another random theory: melancholy music and art is like emotional BDSM, converting something normally-bad into something beautiful and transcendent. Some people don't see the point, others can take it or leave it, but some people try it once and get hooked for life.
Well written and thought out!
>"Some anorexic people, when told that a treatment will help them gain weight, often refuse out of fear of becoming fat (though others are happy to accept treatment). Depressed people, when told a treatment will make them happy, very occasionally refuse on grounds that "I don't deserve happiness", but this is pretty rare; most of them are glad to accept the treatment. Is this just a quirk of how each of these different drives is implemented, or is it a strike against the theory?"
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I don't think this is a strike against the theory, rather it points to there being additional nuances and wrinkles in the theory. One of the reasons why therapy works is convincing the patient that it will work if they do the things, and as you pointed out they have to be convinced that it's worth doing the things. To get to that point the patient often has to feel understood and affirmed, otherwise they won't do the things or won't do them too well.
For anorexic people refusing treatment because they're afraid of getting fat, maybe you have to affirm and validate their fears and concerns but why it's still worth it. So maybe something more akin to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy before trying to move onto more CBT practices?
I find applying siloed reductive rationalism to complex holistic systems like the human body rather dissatisfying. Perhaps best kept for philosophy where what one is mapping is largely made up so it doesn't need to accurately model an incredibly complex real system.
I think to have a meaningful discussion on any emotion or nervous system state one must begin by considering the evolutionary contexts in a holistic sense. The best psychologists I've read contend that emotions are evolutionary signals that drive us towards what we need. So rather than adopting some mind splitting modernistic reduction of life to "happiness is good, sadness is bad, then what's the point of sad? Must be broken thermostat", I think the question to ask is what is the evolutionary purpose of sadness? And an entirely different question altogether would be what is the evolutionary purpose of depression?
From this perspective many of these phenomena become easier to answer for. For instance, a large part of sadness is to release the nervous system energy of grief, which would otherwise get trapped in the body. The other reason, and the reason why sadness is often so visible on a person (tears, sobbing, a down demeanour) is that evolutionarily it's meant to solicit a response of empathy, compassion and support by those around us who can support us and form deeper bonds that will protect us in the wake of something threatening happening like a split from a sexual partner of the death of a loved one. The question of why people feel drawn to listen to sad music when they are sad comes to light as well: sad music helps us to excavate our sadness, which is serving an evolutionary purpose of energetic catharsis. Sometimes we want to cry until all the tears are gone and we feel much better. Also, evolutionarily, mourning with another (the empathy response) allows us to know that we aren't alone. We are seen, we are understood, and we won't be abandoned in the wild. So listening to music and lyrics that reflects our experience of sadness is like an empathetic mirror where we feel seen in the art of another. It's actually deeply evolutionary.
Depression on the other hand, firstly, is not well ontologically defined. It refers to many different conditions and they aren't all the same. But in the case of temporary depression - depressions lasting a few days, few weeks or few months, I'd say that depression serves an evolutionary purpose as well. Depression is somewhat linked to the nervous system freeze state. In my experience with depression, which I've experienced intermittently for most of my adult life (A few times a year, for most years), depression is signal to stop and rest. For me it usually happens from overexerting myself and ignoring and overriding my emotions towards some end. After a while this leads to burn out, or just flat out feeling tired, unmotivated and unwilling to do anything other than sit around and wait. Why would the body want us to sit around and wait? Many spiritual teachers point towards the birthplace of vision (motivation and desire for the future) being a space of deep stillness and reflection, sometimes prescribed in the form of a vision quest where one sits in the woods without shelter or food for several days with very little stimulation until meaning and vision 'comes'. Other times this can take several weeks or months of relative austerity and stillness in ones life in waiting for the next threads of meaning, purposes and motivation to emerge after wrapping up some previous purpose that no longer feels meaningful. So depression then, actually gives us the stillness to listen to our inner guidance system, IF we don't overide it by forcing ourselves to cease being depressed. For those who have become depressed because their nervous system has been through the ringer, or they have ignored and overidden their emotions and nervous system needs until their body has finally 'given up', it serves as a time where one is forced to listen to the quiet directions of one's own emotions and inner guidance, that will inevitably lead a person into living in a healthy, happy, social equilibrium again where they feel motivated and alive. In that sense, when I'm depressed, on a rational level I don't want to force myself out of depression. The depression has come for a reason. It's time for me to sit with it, make friends with it, and listen to it until it's said what needs to be said, and the small flourishes of desire and meaning begin to unveil themselves again.
I was really moved by the story of a director friend told to me onetime. He had become deeply depressed, but for the first time in his life he was doing well financially and coild afford to take time off work for as long as he wanted. So thats what he did. He just sat, alone in his apartment, and intermittently listened to Alan Watts lectures, for 3 weeks straight. He made no other attempt to make his way out of it or to change anything. 3 weeks laters, and his depression had lifted and completely left. Which was not his usual experienc with depression, that would tend to hang around and linger in times where he would try to push past it and keep going. As I began to learn about somatic therapies and polyvagal theory and the deeply evolutionary nature of our emotional system and its inherent purpose for bringing us into healthy equilibrium, I began to understand the profundity of his experience. So now it seems wholly rational to me as to why someone would take actions that would seemingly have them 'stay depressed', even if the impulse is not in itself rational. My disclaimer here would be that with compounding co-morbities like anxiety, ADHD or a more clinical form of depression, that people can get stuck in depression and not know how to find their way out. In which case I feel the assertion to do the opposite of what the depression says can be useful, in conjunction with SSRI's and other interventions where depression dodoesn't run it's usual evolutionary course. (Also disclaimer, I am not a doctor)
The thermostat idea is an interesting concept, and perhaps not totally unuseful, but I just want far far more than that when trying to understand the body and the complex tapestry of our emotions.
You blew my mind with this one. Going to have to think hard about this.
The argument I have seen, by a neurologist whose name I sadly forget, was that if you're sad hearing someone else being sad makes you feel less alone, which would explain the love of depressing music by depressed people, as well as the emo and goth genres and the Gothic genre.
>This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?
I have very vivid memories of being extremely sad after fleeing the war in Ukraine. It was a wonderful sunny day in Cascais (near Lisbon, Portugal), which made me mad. I needed stormy, rainy, "bad" weather and sad, melancholic music. Not because of the reasons you describe in the post. But because I wanted the conditions outside my mind and body to resemble the feelings inside myself. I didn't feel good about dissonance. So maybe it can be a good reason for sad music lovers or depressed and anorexic people. They are just looking for harmony.
Question for someone who knows about sound editing:
For a given identical volume setting on an audio device, are sad songs typically played at a higher decibel level than happy songs?
This is an interesting theory--I would like to offer an alternative one: There is evidence that sharing one's psychological pain and stress reduced the suffering. Perhaps listening to sad music reminds them that someone else made that music, and that makes them feel less alone?
As a father of two adult children that have long struggled with depression, I really, really appreciate this post. I’ve seen so much of what you’ve cited with both of them - ‘Whenever I feel good, I feel like I deserve it. I don’t feel like it’s the true me.’ This was always the hard part of depression for me to understand. Now it makes more sense. Thank you.
One 'good' reason I like listening to sad music when I'm down is that it gives a sense of community; the music makes you feel like other people have felt sad in similar ways. I'm never really depressed though, so maybe wanting that feeling is a sign of not having a 'set point' issue?
Setpoint disorders, which are well-understood, are rare occurrences. Engaging in activities like listening to sad music when feeling down is nearly universal. If such behavior were attributed to a setpoint disorder, it would imply that the setpoint is inherently disordered, which seems evolutionarily implausible.
Relying on a theory that leads healthcare professionals to advise patients to act contrary to their natural inclinations can be seen as medical hubris with a problematic history. Examples include the "rest cure" prescribed for "hysteria" and the coach's "walk-it-off" approach for sprained ankles.
It's essential to note a significant distinction between activities like eating and listening to music, as overlooked by Scott. Music, especially that with lyrics, involves cognitive processes, adding complexity to the comparison. idleofficetycoonapk.com
As many have pointed out, sad songs have both cognitive and emotional components. Arguably, listening to sad songs – even alone - is an indirect way to bond with other humans. It is a way to implicitly share the awareness that to live can be compared to falling off a high building. On the way down, we may say to ourselves as we pass floor after floor: “This is not as bad as I feared: I haven’t got a scratch yet!”
Someone who is uncomplicated “happy” in this situation is delusional, emotionally shallow, or a young child. Listening to sad songs is a way to bond based on the common knowledge that life is essentially tragic. The sadness accompanying such listening is not depression, rather a type of melancholia. Having said that, clinically depressed people may possibly also find comfort in sad songs (for the same reason), implying that the correlation between depression and listening to sad songs seizes to be puzzling. Whether it be Leonard Cohen’s many songs, Johnny Cash’ rendering of Hurt, or Randy Newman’s song at his father’s deathbed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVpUr5luo6k
What would be the equivalent of "set point is set to too happy" ? Does it exists ? Is it classified as a disorder ?
Curious about the claim on whether hypertension can be considered a re-calibration of a set point for blood pressure. I realize Scott's not really endorsing that view. In fact, I read him as just speculating that one might take the set point hypothesis in that direction. He's also expressing doubts (if I read him right) that that hypothesis won't work with blood pressure.
But I'd be curious if he, or anyone here, knows of credible sources that actually make or look into that hypothesis for blood pressure.
My own speculation is that hypertension isn't really a result of a set point, or it's not only a result of that. My understanding is that it's instead a result of arteries narrowing so as to require the same amount of blood to go through a less amount of space, meaning more "pressure." (Disclosure: I'm not an MD or anything, just someone who's concerned about hypertension.)
ETA: minor edits to typos.
“ they still “feel” fat on a gut level.” Pun intended I presume. Ugh.
How do antidepressants work under this model? Shift the balance point, somehow?
Contemporary behaviorism has a simpler explanation, based on Skinner's concept of verbal behavior, and advances in relational frame theory..
Making meaning is a very powerful generalized reinforcer (similar to money). The most common forms of meaning making accord with the correspondence theory of truth. That is, when a word can capture or reflect a meaning about some state of affairs, whether public or private, simple or complex, it reinforces both knowing and communicating about our experience.
Depressed people listen to sad music because that makes the most sense, and that is highly reinforcing.
Can't help but wonder what else is in some sense due to setpoints. Not straightforward chemical setpoints but neurological or social/behavioral ones.
"Not enough people are mad at me" setpoint -> disagreeableness.
"Things aren't bad enough, that's weird" setpoint -> neuroticism, anxiety.
I wouldn't be surprised if setpoints for status self- and other-perception governed a lot of interpersonal interactions. Consider something as simple as who feels entitled to take up space in a group conversation. There are implicitly setpoints governing how much each person should be talking.
Aside from the body weight setpoints (lipostat) there is also a myostat, a setpoint governing how much muscle mass your body wants to carry. Some people will carry much more muscle than others, even without exercising. Many people are capable of gaining muscle mass, but very quickly lose that muscle mass when not pushing very hard to train and consume excess protein, while some people will find it relatively easy to maintain the mass. Hormones obviously help with this, because hormones interact with (or perhaps directly define) this setpoint. There's a famous result that men taking extra testosterone and not exercising at all, gain more muscle than men who are doing mass-gain exercises and eating above-adequate protein.
I think once we figure out how to manipulate the myostat without causing permanent hormonal problems, this along with drugs like semaglutide are going to create a world of shredded, muscular desk jockeys.
Did the depression axis move from "confident belief evaluated to satisfaction or disappointment" to happiness vs. sadness because of predictability? Happiness and sadness are bundled with a kind of meta evaluation about whether the future is good for you or not I think. I am depressed and if I go for a walk rather than lie in bed all day, my prediction (I will lie in bed all day) evaluates as false, so I experience some kind of disappointment but it doesn't make me sad. My mother dying from a brain tumor happened as expected but I wouldn't say I was happy about it. I think the distinction is important because I believe that the feelings of disappointment and satisfaction are a component of your conscious experience that tells you whether your predictions are correct or not. Happiness and Sadness are the components where you factor the sensory experience you used to make that evaluation into your predictions about the future. Happy and Sad are louder because they're more important for producing future expectations.
Blues is to pain as a shower is to rain. Bernhard Lassahn. also: "Blues is a bathtub for the memories of pain. The pain did hurt. The bath I enjoy." German: https://www.matthiaskadar.com/blues-von-der-verhaltnismasigkeit-der-schmerzen-bernhard-lassahn/
Interesting take. Question, though: why wouldn't effective antidepressant drugs that provide relief for so many people who are depressed not alter the setpoint back to norm range?
My partner suffers from treatment-resistant depression, and while each new cocktail does do the trick, it doesn't seem to "stick" when the treatment's efficacy inevitably fades...
When I'm in a depressed state, listening to actively happy music can sometimes make me feel worse, in a way that's not necessarily related to the happy-sad emotional dimension. For example, "Happy" by Pharrell Williams would make me feel distinctly uncomfortable if I didn't actually feel happy when I listened to it. The particular feeling might be more related to disgust than anything else; the expression "sickeningly sweet" (as applied to media) comes to mind...
Listening to certain music does consistently help me feel better, though; the FFVI soundtrack almost always works. In general, it seems that what works for me when depressed are "sad but hopeful" stories with a Bittersweet Ending...
Maybe there's an exploration/exploitation set point (that shifts over the lifespan) and ADHD is when it's shifted "too" much towards exploration?
But that implies there should be an opposite set point shift, and I can't think of an obvious name/diagnosis for that. Something very introverted, extremely conscientious - like depressive personality disorder maybe?
I think many depressed people look at online media (like, ahem, this substack).
This would seem more to support a 'social junk food' theory than a broken thermostat ... your happiness thermostat is seeking more social interaction, but you'revtrying to obtain it online (which we're not evolved to deal with) and the online interaction fails to satisfy the craving.
Great piece, but I don't think music was the best example - there are too many subtle shades of sad/happy, especially when lyrics are involved. Is Everybody Hurts happy or sad? What about Sunny Afternoon by the Kinks? And so on. But I will look carefully for thoughts which have "I'm too happy" as the premise because I think there is something in this.
I'm too happy for my friends/too happy for my friends/that's how my mind wends...
I'm too happy for my bike/too happy for my bike/curse this dratted psych.
It's a good model, you know what I mean?
OK, new theory.
Humans generally like stuff that matches and resonates with their current mood and mindset. That includes music, art, political commentary, and most other stuff. It's just subliminal pattern matching by our bio-neural nets, just like if you could tell ChatGPT "play some music that goes with my current emotion".
On the other hand, given any theory about what would be optimal for humans to do, the optimal solution would for all humans to re-wire their brains both to prefer taking optimal actions and to actually take optimal actions. That is, assuming one doesn't care about such things as preferences and individuality and free will and non-coercion. All those things are irrelevant, to be burned away in the purifying fire of optimality (purgatory), leaving identical optimal drones who freely choose to have identical optimal musical preferences, political views, charitable inclinations, religions, child-raising habits, and taste in tea (clearly a puer of some sort).
Remember, if one enjoys something that is not specifically commanded in the Book of Optimality, that preference is non-optimal and will require an extended stay in purgatory (re-education) before one achieves optimal unity with the transcendent beating heart of Optimality (IT).
So if one happens to be sad, that is a non-optimal mood. If that sadness causes one to prefer sad music, that is a non-optimal preference that reinforces the non-optimal mood. If it is too difficult to directly rewire the mood or preference to be non-optimal, at least we have the ability to ignore the preference and use music to reset the mood. The "fake it 'til you make it" school of enlightenment. Keep that clown smile painted on, and never let the world see you feeling non-optimally.
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Real Zen story: The friend of a master died, and the master cried. The disciple asked the master, "Why are you crying? Isn't that a sign of attachment?" The master said, "You idiot! I'm crying because I want to cry!"
Much of depressed behaviour fits with the theory that depressives are trying to be depressed. How come?
I believe I mostly listen to sad music when I'm depressed because it fits with some slowly-updating social narrative that I have a myopic incentive to maintain. Depression gives me an excuse for things I've failed at. And because depression usually causes me to fail more things, I need to maintain the excuse.
Our self-view is a compromise between how we wish people would see us, and how people actually see us. Our feelings about ourselves are mostly determined by algorithms that have been optimised for giving us the kinds of feelings that we expect will make relevant others view us marginally more sympathetically.
The rest is implementation details. Quite important implementation details. :P
I had something-worth-being-sad-about happening to me a year ago and for various reasons I was often hidding / suppressing the sadness. Recently I started going to a psychotherapist and they recommended I dedicate some time to feeling sad, like walking in the rain and listening to sad music. It's hard to judge this things, but it felt like a good advice. How does it fit this narrative?
What you are describing is real but it is the opposite of blues, blues is about making light of the darkness, joining to sing with your community and seeing the beauty in the mundane. A great example of what you’re actually talking about is the band “have a nice life”. There’s also music that’s superficially similar to “have a nice life” that celebrates life instead of diminishing it (“different trains” by Steve Reich for example), it’s the undefinable essence of the music and the person making it that makes it pro or anti life. Anyways this was all completely unrelated but I felt like saying it.
Interesting, I also thought of Have A Nice Life while reading this article.
Any opinion on whether Beethoven Late Quartets are pro- or anti-life?
Not super familiar with Beethoven (mostly Bach and 20th century composers for me in the classical department) but almost all classical music is pro life in my experience
As a medium I just don’t think it works if it’s anti life whereas the modern “band” is much more suited to it
One behaviour I notice in myself during incipient depression is that I want my set point to recalibrate as quickly as possible. Depression only feels bad on the downhill part; once you’re in the deep end it feels like nothing at all. Like going into cold water, if you dither you’ll only draw out the discomfort so best to plunge in with whatever will get you used to your low mood the fastest (sad music, isolation, etc).
I especially avoid socializing or “fleeting” pleasures since they interrupt the recalibration, meaning more discomfort overall.
The omnipresence of sugar in American food is far more likely the reason for increasing rates of obesity than any "lipostat". Americans have had the financial means to be fat for generations and have not been heavy labor lifestyles for at least 2 generations, but obesity hasn't been an issue until this one.
For me personally - eating sugary foods causes me to be more hungry regardless of how much I have eaten. If this is indicative of general experience, this itself would cause obesity to increase. Nor is avoiding sugar in food very easy - you have to work at it because so much of the food Americans eat is processed, and a large percentage of the processing involving adding things like sugar.
As for depression: I have zero professional experience. My mother is bipolar, but she gets depressed because
1) She "likes" being manic. She says she feels like she's doing something in that state
2) She knows what sets it off: staying up all night, usually because of a slot machine
To me - she appears to be a speed freak. Her own body and genetics are such that she can stay up all night for 48 hours even at 80, meaning her body is producing some methamphetamine equivalent. But the inevitable outcome is burnout = depression.
I don't have her genetics but I have enough that I only sleep around 5 hours a night, and have done so since high school. But unlike her - staying up all night doesn't send me into a mania nor would I like that. I can, however, get by on only 1 or 2 hours of sleep for several weeks but then I have to sleep 6-9 hours for some time.
In other words: genetics is a framework but behavior builds the actual behavioral construct.
Interesting. I think there's very plausibly truth in the set points, but I'm not yet convinced that depression works like a set point.
My slightly different speculation (possibly inspired by you), might be that depression is a long sequence of bad things putting the body into a "look for threats, endure and don't take any risks" mode as might be a good strategy in the face on a long string of bad experiences resulting from living a currently hostile environment. So that depressed you tends to look for threats (hence reasons to worry) and avoid taking initiative or risk (bad in a dangerous situation until you get desperate, but hence avoiding any action to improve depression or improve life or improve anything).
I think both this theory and the set point theory involve behaviours that put you back in depression, but that the set point theory suggests that the further up you get from the low point in the short term, the BIGGER the pressure to lower your mood (until it lasts long enough to reset the set point). Whereas my theory suggests that the further up you get, the LESS the pressure to lower your mood again (even if still present). I feel like my theory fits my experience better, and I think other experiences agree, but I'm definitely not sure.
Interesting comment section to this post. A take-home point after reading through: a set point theory of depression & listening to songs (and probably everything else related to emotions and moods) comes across as too atomistic-individualistic a theory. The "social" in the biopsychosocial overarching frame of reference is neglected/missing. All behavior is signalling behavior. We are signalling something when we act, including lie still in a dark room and listening to sad songs. Where the implicit receiver may be someone that can be named, or something like "the generalised other", or something/someone equally abstract. Our selves are tied to communicating, to something about humans that is social in nature. Even when we are all alone.
This didn't sit quite right with me, and it took me a little while to figure out why, but what I came up with was: when I'm sad, I don't listen to sad music to reinforce my sadness; I do it to lend meaning to my sadness. Not sure what that says about the thesis here, if anything.
I can speak to this from a personal experience pov. If I were to regard myself as a single-person within-subject case study, I would say that my experience has been that I tend to prefer and choose (almost by default) to listen to slow rhythm songs when I'm deeply unhappy or depressed and the reverse is true when I'm in an upbeat mood. I do most of my difficult readings when my mood is down, and I'm more thoughtful and paradoxically more satisfied with myself when I'm able to functionally roll with my depression.
A client with dissociative experiences once told me that when he switches to his angry, dark, destructive alter self, the only form of activities that make him feel better are songs or books that are dark, destructive, and demonic. I didn't question this claim because I immediately related it to my own experience of feeling actually consoled by depressing stimuli when depressed.
One commenter already made a very accurate inference as to why internal feelings seek external correlates: alignment or convergence or confirmation or normalization is a more powerful motive or appeal than contrast or divergence. We'll consciously choose anything that normalizes our experience than anything that flags them as abnormal. And there's an illusion of "better" or "not that worse" that's created when our own experience or state is contrasted with that of someone or something that is worse: not unlike the illusion of a normal temp water feeling slightly warmer if you're just coming from a freezing zone.
I actually wonder if the music issue isn't a sort of false lead in this area, or simply too complex to be productive. Admitting that all this is subjective and anecdotal, I'm a long time blues fan, and if you watch blues musicians, they often smile broadly (and, so to speak, deeply) while playing, sometimes through a whole song. They absolutely love it, and I don't think that's in some sort of masochistic way. It's a genuine and deep joy. I'm not a musician, so I can't speak to that side of it--except, as I've just done, what I perceive from the outside--but listening to blues proper, dark ambient, and all sorts of sad music gives me great pleasure. I like to listen to it when I'm happy, doing the things I like to do, etc. I don't think I'm the only one (and apologies if I'm not the first to say this in the comments). I would add that when I'm depressed--as in, when I'm having thoughts like "I don't deserve anything and I think my friends all rightly hate me"--I don't want to listen to music at all (or read or watch something or do anything). Among other problems, all this seems to me to complicate what would fit into the category of "happy" music. I will say I find at least some music that many might consider happy--like "Who could ask for anything more" or "Good morning" from "Singing in the Rain"--manic and annoying rather than "happy."
At the risk of going on, I will add that many blues songs are, indeed, deeply sad. "Saint James Infirmary" is one of the most painful songs I know. And yet, there's a pleasure in it. I think it may be something about human bonding and fellow-feeling. But I've never even thought of listening to it when I'm dealing with a loss of my own. Perhaps the real issue is what makes music, or anything, beautiful--an issue possibly so huge and venerable as to swamp even the important problems under consideration here.
This post affected me deeply and positively and I’m still processing it. The concept of an anxiety setpoint has unlocked many new insights. I also propose that setpoints interact: there are whole internal systems built on these.
I’ve always been an anxious person who is unwilling to commit to lifelong medications. I also have consistently put myself into high pressure job roles and relationships. I’ve made progress from talk therapy, EMDR, and most recently ayahuasca therapy. I now realize that I’ve been expending effort to artificially raise my anxiety setpoint to avoid Bad Feelings from childhood trauma ever since they happened. I had thought that my anxiety was the result of all of the situations I found myself in - the AHA! moment was the realization that I was putting myself into high stress situations to keep my anxiety high.
Since then I’ve been consciously deciding to lower my anxiety without worrying about causes and it’s been working. I also see that I have artificial setpoints for keeping a brave face and keeping my breath steady (I had a rare breathing disorder as a kid) and I’m sure there are more. I feel unlocked.
The entire concept is worthy of a school of psychiatry. Thanks Scott!
I feel compelled to point out that, since fighting against your set points is hard, it's good to have systems that work WITH your natural desires to lower your mood and subvert the actions you take to lift your mood instead.
This is why our ancient depressed forbearers created the Goth scene to save us.
Goth uses the things depression wants you to do to greatly lower the activation energy needed to go to a Goth thing. The music? Sad. The lyrics? Angsty. The aesthetic? All black (maybe with some highlight colors, preferably red or white to invoke blood or pallid death). The make-up? Hides your true face a bit. The dancing? Freeform expression of your inner turmoil. The venue? Cramped and very dark.
But it tricks you into being at a place that increases your mood!
It gets you out of your room. It gets you around other humans. It gets you some exercise (dancing). It exposes you to some mood-lifting music (there is some mood-lifting goth music, and it often gets played at goth clubs cuz its more dancy). You see a LOT of natural beauty. You feel accepted. You may make some new friends over time.
Strongly recommended. https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/hacking-your-happiness-set-point
This makes me think about how helpful some people find psilocybin for depression. I wonder if the state of mind that hallucinogens put you in make it easier to move set points. Many anorexic people find cannabis helpful, obviously mostly because it gives you the munchies, but I wonder if there could be a similar pathway there. MDMA for PTSD is another example.
The general argument here makes sense to me, but does the specific point about listening to sad music not have a better explanation in the catharsis one gets from doing so? I feel depressed; I listen to a Joni Mitchell song; I have a good cry; I feel better, at least in the short term. This doesn't seem maladaptive in the way that other depressive behaviours (e.g. self-isolation) are. You could still be right about the overall phenomenon, but it strikes me as a poor example.
Trauma is possibly resetting the alarm-meter
The main point is: how can we move set points/priors intentionally? On psychedelics we can move them, but it is a big hit or miss
Im wondering if the reverse happens a lot more. There are people whose happiness set point is set higher, and even though they have friends, family, health, wealth, they keep looking to be more happy. More friends? Binge watching? Anybody knows anyone who exhibits this behaviour?
Reading Scott's older articles about predictive coding felt compelling back when I first read them, though in retrospect, my toy model of emotion had obvious structural flaws, not just those inherent to simplification. It'd be pretty annoying to specify them all right now, so I'll just go back to my intended point that my personal experience of depression feels intuitively linked to predictive coding (bias in emotions-as-predictions combined with a tendency to let them override my reason).
1. It "feels" like doing things will be much worse than actually doing the things almost inevitably turns out to be, including things I already know I enjoy.
2. Thinking about the future feels generally aversive.
3. Recursive thoughts feel especially bad.
I like the trapped prior frame too, where depression can be viewed as a selection effect, of specifically the people prone to mistaken ideas like sad music making them happy. Even after telling them it's not true, they still -feel- like it's true, they're not deliberately choosing to listen to it *because* it makes them sad.
I'm interested how attitudes to sad music varies between communities.
I'm a singer-songwriter and generally sing post-apocalyptic, sad and dark songs. I used to play at these cool open-mic nights with artsy Brits, and would get a good reaction and a decent number of compliments. Then I moved to a less artsy (I want to say "normie" in terms of music taste, but also with a bunch of EA/rationalist types) community, and while playing my first open mic, people were just looking at me with what seemed like barely concealed disgust, as if I'd just shat myself on stage.
I basically never played an open mic since then.
I agree with the general comparison between fever and depression here, but the more interesting question then, is: why is it adaptive for depression to keep the individual in said low-mood set point?