If you’ve never experienced clinical depression, it is hard to understand what it is like. Well-intentioned people will say things like, “just think positive,” or “just snap out of it.” Though they may not say it out loud, some people think a person with depression is just being lazy, or just trying to get attention. However, major depressive disorder is a serious psychological condition.

Depression: Saying "Be Positive" Doesn't Help

<ul><li>Depression is the second most common mental health issue (behind anxiety) and affects almost all human beings on the planet.</li><li>Everyone has ups and downs, but clinical depression is debilitating, affecting the ability to do even the most simple daily tasks.</li><li>Serious depression literally changes your brain and how it perceives in three ways:</li><li>You develop a negative view of yourself (I am worthless)</li><li>A person with depression believes they are terrible people, they cannot do anything right, and they are inherently flawed. This is why suicide starts to become an attractive option.</li></ul>

Understanding Clinical Depression

<ul><li>Encourage them to seek professional help: Since depression makes people think things will never get better, they often don't bother to seek help.</li><li>Help them get moving: The most important thing in the treatment of depression is "behavioural activation," which basically means to get moving-both literally (as in exercising or just getting out of the house) and metaphorically (in moving toward something you value, like family, career, or spirituality).</li><li>Offer validation and encouragement: People with depression tend to think very negatively, so avoid the temptation to argue with them.</li></ul>

What You Can Do to Help

<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-5122-1_13">Numerous</a> <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2016-37833-001">studies</a> have shown that social support helps prevent and moderate the effects of depression. Since a big problem with depression is getting lost in the negative thoughts in your own mind, being around other people helps to refocus the mind on more important things, and can remind the person that they are so much more than their depression.

Foster Social Support

People with depression can be very challenging to be around, even for the most loving and well-intentioned person. Since these disorders hijack people’s thinking patterns, their ongoing negativity and pessimism can be hard to deal with. Progress can also be very slow for someone with depression. Even with professional help, it may take weeks or months to show improvement, so great patience is required.

Take Care Of Yourself

Knowing how depression works can help you better support loved ones who are struggling.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

health

Health

mentalhealth

Mental Health

Five Ways to Help Someone With Depression

When the future seems largely unpredictable, is there anything you can do to prepare for it?All you need to do is to tap into your imagination and envision all your potential futures - using "futures thinking."Futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.Make intentional choices about what you want to imagine in your future - you have to fill in the blanks.

Mental Time Travel

“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.If you’re having difficulty imagining life 10 years from now, write down a description of what you imagine. It can be easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

Episodic Future Thinking: Imagine

There are three major kinds of sense-making that happen when you engage in mental time travel to your future:<ul><li> First, your brain has to do what cognitive scientists call “scene construction” — mentally building the future world. </li><li>After scene construction, your brain starts to do what cognitive scientists call “opportunity detection.” Here, you look for ways to fulfil your needs and achieve your goals.</li><li>Finally, as your brain works to transport you to the future, feelings will kick in.</li></ul>

Making Sense

You’ve never been 10 years older than you are now, so your brain doesn’t know what to expect if you try to imagine. Plus, there’s so much opportunity for things to change in a decade — your body, relationships, life circumstances, physical environment.Your brain intuitively grasps this unknowability, so instead of confidently projecting one possibility, it opens up a blank space for you to consider multiple possibilities. You have to start making intentional choices about what you want to imagine in your future — you have to fill in the blanks.

The 10 Year Challenge

Crucially, these are real feelings. Studies show that the emotions you experience during EFT can be just as psychologically powerful as emotions experienced in the present. This is one reason why many of us prefer to imagine best-case-scenario futures and avoid imagining the futures that scare us.But there are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not think about, let alone actually experience, someday.

The Punchline: Those Feelings Are Real

Wouldn't you love to know what's going to happen to you in the future? Here's one way to do just that, from futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal.

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Mindfulness

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Motivation & Inspiration

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Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Mental time travel is a great decision-making tool — this is how to use it

<ol><li>If you're an employee or in a lifestyle business, your aim is not to get wealthy but to have a job, family and life.</li><li>However, the founder, who works very hard, aims for something different. They are working towards the gold medal and trying to build a multi-billion dollar company. They have to get everything right, have great judgement, find the right team.</li></ol>But working hard is only one of three parts. The other parts are what you work on, and who you work with. Shortchanging on any of these three will lead to difficulties.

Work as hard as you can have two meanings

Ensure that you work with the best people possible. Pick the people with the highest intelligence, energy and integrity. When you've set your bar, raise it.  People don't consistently work 80 to 120 hours a week. They sprint for that long when they feel inspired, then take long breaks, reassess, and try again.  That is because inspiration is short-lived. When inspiration strikes, use it.

Work with purpose

When you have to do something, get it done. Do them as quickly as you can and with full focus. Then, be patient with the results. You likely dealing with complex systems and a number of people. It takes time for people to get comfortable working together. When there is a problem, don't rest until a resolution has started.

Impatience with actions, patience with results

Networking is important early in your career. You'll desire to "do coffee" and build relationships. But later in your career, you have more things coming at you than what you have time for.  This makes it vital to ruthlessly cut meetings. First, see if a simple text would suffice. If a meeting is necessary, then keep it short. People will want to meet with you if you have something important or valuable to offer. When you meet people, it will be because you developed a reputation and a unique point of view.

Don't do meetings without an agenda

If you want to get paid, you want to be the best at whatever you do. It can be niche. For example, Oprah gets paid for being Oprah. Keep changing what you do until you can use your specific knowledge, skillset, position, capabilities and interests to be number one. Don't compete because you will compete over things that are not worth it. Instead, be authentic. Specialise in being you. Nobody can compete with you when you build or market things that's an extension of who you are and where you can find a product-market fit.

Working for the long-term

When you've applied your specific knowledge, judgment, accountability, and reading, you'll eventually get what you deserve.   Everyone wants to make money quickly. But it doesn't work. You have to put in the time. You have to put yourself in that position with your specific knowledge, accountability, beverage and skillset and enjoy it and keep on doing it. The outcome will be how much leverage you can apply to your specific knowledge, how you can improve, h many times your judgement is right, and how accountable you are for the outcome.

It takes time

Most advice is what other people find helpful for them, but it may not apply to you.  There is something you can learn, but you can't take their exact circumstance and apply it to yourself. If you get advice, decide if it is true in your context and figure out how you can apply it. The most dangerous part of receiving advice is that the person won't be around when the advice doesn't apply to you anymore.

Make up your own mind

Compilation of ideas from Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm on wealth creation in the modern era

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Startups

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

How To Get Rich Naval - Every Episode

Be authentic, work hard, decide where to spend your time, and you’ll get what you deserve

Introspection is blind to construction. This does not mean that our introspective guesses are never accurate, just as you might guess the correct answer to a multiple-choice question. 
When you don’t know the actual facts about yourself, your consciousness pieces together a compelling story, much in the same way it does when you’re trying to read the minds of other people to make sense of why they act as they do. 
Introspection makes us feel like we know what’s going on in our own heads, even when we don’t. We don't realize that we’re spinning a story rather than reporting the facts.

We Are Strangers To Ourselves

“Have you ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

<ul><li> Naïve realism: the intuitive sense that we see the world out there as it actually is, rather than as it appears from our own perspective. </li><li>When other people don’t share your views, the all-too-common sentiment that comes straight from naïve realism is “I’m right and you’re biased.” </li><li>Disengagement can come anytime there is a distance between two minds that needs to be bridged. </li><li>Minds are inferred rather than observed. They exist only as a theory each of us uses to explain both our own and other people’s behaviour.</li></ul>

Naive Realism – The Human Curse

When others’ minds are unknown, the mind you imagine is based heavily on your own. So, it is heavily distorted by your reality. Neural regions that are active when actually experiencing physical pain firsthand also being active when watching other people experiencing pain. It quite literally hurts to watch someone else being hurt.

Our Reality Vs Reality

Getting to know someone, even over a lifetime of marriage, creates an illusion of insight that far surpasses actual insight.
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups.

We Believe We Know People Better Than We Actually Do

Your sixth sense functions only when you engage it. When you do not, you may fail to recognize a fully human mind that is right before your eyes. Said differently, sometimes we are triggered to engage with the mind of another and other times we are not. When you can’t see a human in front of you, you fail to empathise.  When we fail to empathise we believe others have lesser minds. This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own.

Fighting The Other Person

By thinking that their employees have simplistic motives, bosses overlook the actual depth of their employees’ minds and therefore fail to offer their workers what really motivates them.

People Are Complex

By remaining disengaged from other minds in this way, we neglect a chief source of human happiness: engaging relationally with other people.

Social Disengagement

The language of intentions and motives and other mental states avoids this complication altogether by using the same set of concepts to explain all actions. We use the idea of consciousness and intent and prescribe it to everything.
This mentalistic language is both imprecise and inaccurate matters nothing for providing a functional explanation for almost any behavior, one that uses a language that everyone can easily understand.

The Mental Shortcut To Simplify Life

Religious beliefs are intuitively compelling because minds—in this case, the mind of a god—are intuitive explanations for the behavior of almost anything.Two very important things about when minds emerge in both humans and nonhumans.  <ul><li>First, they tend to emerge when someone has explaining to do.</li><li>Second, minds emerge from our attempts to explain a phenomenon when no other obvious explanation exists.</li></ul>

The Minds Ways

<ul><li>We give things a mind when we can’t truly understand why something has happened.</li><li>Studies reveal that people report that unpredictable gadgets seemed more mindful than predictable gadgets.</li><li>When geometrical figures assume personal characteristics, a unified structure emerges. Unpredictable objects get a mind because a mind makes sense of action. </li><li>When something needs to be explained, mind reading is engaged. We give things a mind to give them meaning. Otherwise, we can’t understand. </li></ul>

Giving Things A Mind Of Their Own

Nature is filled with fakes. Lithops are deliciously succulent plants that look like completely inedible rocks. The praying mantis is a perfectly deadly predator that can look like a completely harmless plant. You don’t need a PhD in evolutionary biology to understand fakery.

Don't Believe Anything

As a member of one of the planet’s most social species, you are hypersensitive to eyes because they offer a window into another person’s mind. 
Given the obvious benefits of attending to others’ eyes, it makes good sense that we would be hypersensitive to anything that even vaguely resembles them.

Observing The Eyes

The basic principles of perception described here are simple, based almost entirely on similarity: “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck.”

We Deduct Based On What We Have Seen

When we’re seeking to understand another’s mind, we rely on at least three strategies.  1. We project from our own mind. 2. Use stereotypes.  3. Infer a mind from a person’s actions.

Understanding The Mind Of The Other

As Galileo knew, to see the world accurately, you need to look in the right place and then view it through the right lens. These are two pieces of wisdom that you and I can easily forget.  A man on one side of a river shouts to a man standing on the other side, “Hey, how do I get to the other side of the river?” The other man responds, “You are on the other side of the river.”

Our Perspective Is Unique

Childhood instincts are not outgrown so much as they are overcome by more careful and reflective thinking.
As we grow up we learn nuances of a situation. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.
Becoming aware of the power of your own perspective is the very thing that enables a broader perspective. Relax. Others likely won’t notice, and if they do, they likely won’t mind.

We Are Not On The Spotlight

<ul><li>Distortions like this are easy to find. When your own views are one-sided, a balanced account will necessarily differ from your own perspective, and the errors in reporting will therefore seem to exist in them rather than in you. </li><li>The problem of expertise is one of many examples of mistakes that come from projecting our own minds onto others: assuming that others know, think, believe, or feel as we do ourselves. </li><li>The less willing or able others are to give you a piece of their minds, the more their minds become a blank slate onto which you project your own. </li></ul>

Beware of your own Biases

<ul><li>What you pay attention to</li><li>Your interpretation of what you are paying attention to</li></ul>The two different versions of egocentric biases, are produced by differences in attention (the neck problem) and the differences in interpretation (the lens problem).  Of these two, existing evidence suggests that the neck problem is easier to overcome than the lens problem.

The Two EgoCentric Biases

<ul><li>Anyone who’s ever spoken in front of a large audience or walked down a crowded city sidewalk can confirm this. Individuals within large groups are almost invisible. </li><li>What your brain extracts automatically from a group is an overall assessment, not its distinct individuals. </li><li>Our stereotypes go wrong, three wicked ways matter most: getting too little information, defining groups by their differences, and being unable to observe the true causes of group differences directly. </li></ul>

Group Stereotypes

You define yourself not by the attributes that make you the same as everyone else—has two arms, two legs, breathes air—but, rather, by the attributes that make you different from everyone else—spent 
A group defined by its similarity to others is, by definition, no group at all. Your social senses, just like your eyes, are difference detectors. 
When groups are defined by their differences, people think they have less in common with people of other races or faiths or genders than they actually do and, as a result, avoid even talking with them.

We Define by Differences not by Similarities

Stereotypes routinely stray beyond observation and into explanation. When groups differ, the easy answer is that the differences are due to something essential, internal, or stable about the group members, rather than to something external and therefore unstable, such as social norms and hair dye. We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

A World Of Differences

When a man looks into the camera and renounces his citizenship, you have every reason to assume that he means what he says. When that camera zooms out to show a jihadist holding a gun to the man’s head in one hand and a script in the other, you know his words are misleading. The problem is that life is viewed routinely through the zoom lens, narrowly focused on persons rather than on the broader contexts that influence a person’s actions.

The Context Matters

Much more effective for changing behaviour is targeting the broader context rather than individual minds, making it easier for people to do the things they already want to do. Statistics (the numbers) doesn’t reveal the context. Therefore the fundamental problem that plagues all statistics is an explanation. When a statistician moves beyond the data, problems ensue.

Changing The Behaviour

<ul>
<li>Human beings are more likely to do things that are easy rather than hard. They don’t have some deep desire to litter; they’re just more likely to do whatever is going on around them. </li>
<li>And so you do what social animals do when they’re unsure: you look to other people for information about how to behave, to see if others seem as concerned as you feel. </li>
<li>Failing to recognize an emergency makes someone human, not necessarily a callous jerk.</li>
</ul>

Social Influences

<ul><li>The relatively slow work of getting a person’s perspective is the way you understand them accurately, and the way you solve their problems most effectively. </li><li>The main barrier to getting perspective is that others won’t tell you what you’d like to know. They lie, mislead, misdirect, avoid, or simply refuse to divulge the truth. </li><li>The main reason people lie is to avoid being punished, and so enabling people to give you their perspective requires putting them in a context that diminishes the fear of punishment. </li></ul>

Get The Perspective Of The Other

We then developed a household policy of complete immunity as long as you tell the truth. This combination of delay and immunity has worked wonders for us. <ul><li>When the employee fears retribution and the boss isn’t open to hearing the truth, nobody speaks their mind and the event becomes pointless. </li><li>Interrogators often learn that they, as the interrogator, are the main barrier to truth telling.</li></ul>

The Role Is The Problem

one common laboratory technique for creating fast friends is to have two strangers disclose private thoughts or memories to each other. This is why shyness is one of social life’s biggest curses. Companies truly understand their customers better when they get their perspective directly through conversation, surveys, or face-to-face interaction, not when executives guess about them in the boardroom.

The Curse Of Shyness

Mindwise Book Summary explores why we see human motivations in inanimate objects, why we fight others and why we are strangers to ourselves. If you’re interested in human behaviour and why people separate others into groups, this is the book for you.

An exploration of the human mind's capacity for instinctive understanding about the feelings and desires of others explains how the ability or inability to understand the minds of those around us leads to connection or conflict.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

communication

Communication

books

Books

Winner of the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) Why are we sometimes blind to the minds of others, treating them like objects or animals instead? Why do we talk to our cars, or the stars, as if there is a mind that can hear us? Why do we so routinely believe that others think, feel, and want what we do when, in fact, they do not? And why do we think we understand our spouses, family, and friends so much better than we actually do?In this illuminating book, leading social psychologist Nicholas Epley introduces us to what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make. Mindwise will not turn others into open books, but it will give you the wisdom to revolutionize how you think about them—and yourself.

Nicholas Epley is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Nicholas Epley has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Nicholas Epley's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Five Ways to Help Someone With Depression

Mental time travel is a great decision-making tool — this is how to use it

Be authentic, work hard, decide where to spend your time, and you’ll get what you deserve

Mindwise

Joseph Carney