Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Colorado have observed that people who wake up earlier tend to be less depressed.
Though the study has only been among European descendants, the study shows that going to sleep early and waking up an hour or two early lowers the risk of depression by 23-40% respectively.

Earlier Mornings for Reducing Depression

The early bird catches the worm and is way less melancholy about worm availability and options.

Researchers analyzed genetic data on 850,000 people through the company 23andMe, 38% of whom had worn sleep trackers or filled out sleep questionnaires.


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Health

mentalhealth

Mental Health

Harvard study: Want to be less depressed? Wake up earlier

More and more psychologists are realizing that people can score highly on one or more psychopathic personality traits without having criminal or violent tendencies, such as:
<ul>
<li>Self-centered impulsivity (how selfish you are)</li>
<li>Cold heartedness (who switched off you are from other people's suffering)</li>
<li>Fearless dominance (being less susceptible to fear, stress, and anxiety)</li>
</ul>

Psychopathic Traits

Men tend to score higher than women on psychopathic traits (self-centered impulsivity, cold-heartedness, and fearless dominance).
In addition to this, people who are in managerial positions also score higher in general along with those who hold far-right beliefs or racist views.

Statistical Summary of the Population That Score High

Fearless dominance (being less susceptible to fear, stress, or anxiety) is incredibly useful in certain lines of work from surgeons, special forces, elite sports, or political leadership.
Psychologists call these successful psychopaths.

Successful Psychopaths

Could I be a psychopath and not know it? Absolutely! With the help of an expert psychologist, find out why that might not be a bad thing.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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Personal Development

Could I be a psychopath and not know it?

Even if they don’t make sense to anyone.Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated.”― Jill Bolte Taylor

Let’s Normalize Validating Our Own Feelings

The first time my emotions were heard and validated was in therapy. Before that, I walked around with a fake mask of false positivity pretending everything was normal. For months I had been bottling…

In our professional and personal lives, we all face numerous uncertain situations, which are usually out of our control. We may overestimate the likelihood or the effect of our fears and anxieties. This expectation of the worst is known as Catastrophizing.
Example: A wrong email sent to your boss can trigger a panic attack about being fired, or a failed test could make one imagine dropping out of school.

Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing is natural in young adults as our lives are usually uncertain and unsettled till the age of 35. 
Also, when we are in our 20s, our brain region of solving problems and handling uncertain situations, the prefrontal cortex, is still developing.

The Age Of Uncertainty

<ol>
<li>Stop worrying about the future, or dwelling on the past too much, and stay in the present, as it is the only reality there is.</li>
<li>Focus on the facts, not on the imaginative speculation in your head.</li>
<li>Go through the worst-case scenario in your mind and try to play out the thing that you fear, and what your next action would be. </li>
<li>Try to play out the best-case scenario in your head, understanding that it is just a child-like fantasy, just like the worst-case scenario.</li>
</ol>

Minimize The Catastrophizing

<ol>
<li>Understand that life is not black or white and lies somewhere in the middle, the grey area.</li>
<li>Get comfortable with things not being perfect all the time.</li>
<li>Get more data or more experience about the thing you fear. The more you know something, the less fearful it becomes.</li>
</ol>

Fears Aren’t Facts

problemsolving

Problem Solving

What to Do When Your Mind (Always) Dwells on the Worst-Case Scenario

1.Exercise.2.Relax Your Muscles.3.Deep Breathing.4.Eat Well.5.Slow Down.6.Take a Break.7.Make Time for Hobbies.8.Talk About Your Problems.

Relief from your stress....

Stress can be bad for your mental and physical health. Learn ways to manage and reduce stress in your everyday life.

Stress: How to Manage and Reduce It

<ol><li>How you think (your ability to concentrate or make decisions)</li><li>What you think about (thoughts of failure or pessimism about the future)</li><li>Your body and behaviour (lack of energy or poor sleep)</li><li>Your lifestyle (sleeping routine)</li><li>Lack of yoga in your life </li><li>Tons of stress about small things</li></ol>

Depression is equal to death.....

Experts give advice about steps people can take to help ease their depression.

Help Yourself out of Depression

Worry is an attempt to solve an issue that has an uncertain, and possibly negative, outcome.An important point here is that worry is a combination of cognition and affect, a process that engages both our intelligence and our emotions — and the problem with trying to interrupt it is twofold.

What Worry Is

<ul><li>Intellectually, worry causes us to involuntarily repeat unpleasant and unproductive thoughts, thoughts that do not contribute to effective problem-solving but cyclically feed on themselves. And trying to silence a recurring thought is a lost cause, thanks to a cognitive glitch known as the "thought suppression paradox."</li><li>Emotionally, worry is most directly related to fear; more specifically, what affect theorists define as the "affect" of fear, an evolved set of automatic psychological and physical functions that emerge to guide our behavior when we are confronted with anxiety. Unfortunately, affect is not always appropriate or helpful.</li></ul>

Cognitive And Emotional Elements Of Worry

An argument with a worry is an argument you can't win: when you tell yourself not to worry, you aren't going to silence it — you're engaging the worry in conversation, inviting it to explain itself further. Worry causes anxious, repetitive thoughts — but if you concentrate on stopping those thoughts, you are actually directly contributing to them. Worry develops from and perpetuates a state of fear — but forcing yourself to suppress a negative emotion can instead magnify it, or activate other negative affects like anger or despair.

Telling Yourself Not To Worry

Since we cannot stop worrying through conscious effort, the best course of action is to concentrate on working around it. <ul><li>Accept worry, acknowledge the stressors and limitations it has imposed on us, and focus pragmatically on achieving the best possible outcomes under the circumstances. </li><li>Instead of trying to stop worry, treat it like a headache, or a sprained ankle: it may hurt, and it's going to mess up your day, but no matter what you do, it's not going away immediately, and fixating on it will probably make it worse.</li></ul>

Working Around Worry

An argument with a worry is an argument you can't win.

Why Telling Yourself "Not to Worry" Doesn't Work

This is the behavior that makes it difficult to stay positive around negative people. It's where we tend to overreact negatively to normal situations due to stress, exhaustion, or an emotional disorder.
Just as how we offend other people because we feel offended and both sides of the dynamic think that they're merely reacting to the other. It happens in any relationship, familial or social.

Emotional Reactivity

This is the extreme form of emotional reactivity. What happens is that:
<ul>
<li>We tend to recall past disputes with revised dialogues (when they said this, I should've said that);</li>
<li>We imagine arguments that haven't taken place yet; and</li>
<li>We feel that other people make us angry and are trying to get on our nerves.</li>
</ul>
Emotional reactivity spreads as quickly as lightning due to the salience of negative emotions and their vast contagion.

Reactaholics

Negative emotions like anger and anxiety are processed much quicker than rational judgment. We are filled with confirmation bias that makes us overlook contradicting evidence.
Most of the thought process during this behavior is about justifying what we're feeling rather than testing the reality of its perceptual influence.

Feelings Vs Accurate Perception

Whenever we realize that the conversation is going downhill, it is important to ask ourselves these questions:
<ol>
<li>What is this person reacting to? Are they perceiving me to be disrespectful, biased, or narcissistic?</li>
<li>Am I acting like the kind of person I want to be?</li>
</ol>
We must remember to act according to our deeper values instead of blindly reacting to situations and always ask the other person to do the same.

Breaking The Reactive Dynamic

When dynamic reactivity is high, we become what we despise.

communication

Communication

How Emotional Reactivity Causes Conflict

<ul>
<li>According to the International Classification of Diseases, burnout is not a medical condition, while depression is.</li>
<li>Burnout is a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense accomplishment specifically related to the workplace.</li>
<li>Burnout is a stepping stone to, but itself distinct from, depression.</li>
</ul>

Burnout ≠ Depression

Someone who's burnt out might not need an <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/ssris">antidepressant</a>. In contrast to someone with depression, someone who's burnt out might not even need to see a mental health professional; they might instead need time away from work or to address their work schedule or have some help managing some stuff in the workplace.However, <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/therapy">therapy</a> can help most people, so it can help those with burnout, too.

Burnout And Depression: Different Interventions

They are separate conditions with distinct causes and symptoms.

Burnout Is Not Depression

Create <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article/39/2/324/1797092">psychological distance</a> from self-criticism by personifying it. For example, choose a silly name or a character from a movie or a book and have that person criticise you.

Name your inner critic

Don't try to generalise your faliures. Be specific about what went wrong while narrating it to a 3rd party.

Avoid generalization

Use your ability to contemplate what-if scenarios to visualise good events.

Flip the “what if” narrative

Have a time frame for self criticism. Snap out of it once it is over.

Set a timer and a goal

Try focussing on the small wins and doing the processes well.

Expand your definition of success

Your inner critic is a terrible motivator.

Stop Being So Hard on Yourself

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