Overthinking and Depression Are on the Rise
More and more people are getting fat.
From the growing waistlines and rates of cardiovascular disease it’s obvious.
We call it the obesity epidemic.
But there’s another epidemic that’s been spreading that’s just as bad.
Why is the rate of depression on the rise?
Why do we feel more stressed than ever before?
There’s an overthinking epidemic.
Less than 27% of people younger than 30 remain healthy!
Quick Fixes
Self-help articles promise that you can fix your troubles in five easy steps.
They’re lying. Unfortunately, they have little choice.
“Success will take you 40 hours spread out over 25 steps. Also, there’s a 50% chance of failure.”
Who would read that?
Quick fixes work.
- Want to be able to eat? Buy some food from your supermarket.
- Want to be able to travel to your supermarket without spending 4 hours walking? Buy a car.
- Want to be able to talk to people hundreds of miles away without writing a letter and waiting weeks for a reply? Buy a phone.
What makes the modern world different from that of a cavemen’s?
We have systems in place which mass produce quick fixes. Of course we expect our problems to be solved easily – most of the time they are..
Want sanitation? Use your toilet.
The problem is that we’ve overgeneralized the lesson. Yes quick fixes work, but most of the time, not all the time.
When a problem remains unsolved after a few days, we assume something must be wrong and start overthinking.
If we’re down or blue or upset, then there must be some quick fix.
Change your job,
Change your relationships,
Stop talking to your parents.
Sometimes these are the right choices, but if they are done as quick fixes for dissatisfaction,
They tend to accumulate into a string of failures that gives us more to overthink about.
https://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Think-Too-Much/dp/0805075259
We forget that as yet, we don’t have a quick fix for being sad.
Worse, the human mind is attracted to trouble.
Those areas where quick fixes exist we spend almost no time thinking about – when’s the last time you’ve thought about sanitation or electricity?
Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.
Thank you …Those areas where they don’t exist we spend the most time thinking about –your relationships, your boring work, and your desire for more happiness.
Our Lives Are Full of Chronic Stressors
When you feel unhappy, the explanations that come to mind are just the tip of the iceberg.
There are dozens of factors acting behind the scenes which influence your emotions.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Depths-Evolutionary-Depression-Epidemic/dp/0465022219
Skipping an hour of sleep once won’t have much of an impact. But skipping an hour of sleep every weekday, for weeks in a row?
That’s a low-level chronic stressor.
Because the effect is gradual people don’t notice.
For years you had a chronic headache and didn’t notice.
Because of your fibromyalgia, headache got worse by a small fraction of a percent every day for hundreds of days in a row. Too small a change to notice. You knew you were sleepier and grouchier than other people, but neither your doctors could figure out why.
Like your headache, there are many modern stressors which effect people so slowly that they aren’t noticed.
One hundred years ago the average American had a nutritious diet, spent hundreds of calories a day on physical activity and led a simple life. Now people eat junk all the time, don’t do much exercise and are often overwhelmed.
Eating junk will not make a person visibly less happy, but over the long-term it will.
These hidden stressors create and amplify negative emotions.
A rude comment from your romantic partner which would have been forgiven now triggers overthinking, leading to unmanageable anger and sadness and causing a fight.
Worse, most chronic stressors are invisible to introspection.
No matter how long you spend thinking about the anger and sadness, you attention will keep coming back to the fight – to problems with your partner or perhaps to problems with you.
The idea that the anger and sadness was caused by a poor diet or your three cups of coffee a day never comes to mind.
Want to add word or two?
Dreaming Comes with a Cost
I encourage others to think more positively.
Yes, I do encourage people to think more positively about the things in their life that they already have, but when it comes to strengths, abilities and future opportunities, I encourage brutal realism.
In American culture we respect and encourage wild dreaming, “You can become a millionaire! You can land a great job! You’ll be promoted! You can write a best seller!” Children are encouraged to imagine being superheroes and fairy princesses.
They play games where with little effort they obtain power and save the world.
They read novels where handsome, funny, and romantic men compete with each other to capture the affection of the so normal protagonist that the reader can almost imagine being them.
They watch tens of thousands of advertisements which promise them the world for just $10.
And then they encounter the real world: 9 to 5 boring desk jobs, romantic partners with problems, and unchanging normality
Your comment ….?
When the gap between expectations and reality grows too large, they become unhappy.
Their subconscious tries to fix the problem.
In an ideal world their subconscious would say, “Your dreams are crazy, I’m going to adjust your expectations to where they should be.”
In a less than ideal world a person would start to overthink and temporarily feel even unhappy.
Feeling depressed, they would give up on their crazy dreams.
Now with more realistic expectations, they would bounce back and then lead a happy, overthinking free life.
As crazy as this scenario seems, this is probably how things went hundreds of years ago – depression and overthinking were useful for fixing unrealistic expectations.
One of the functions of depression is to receive support from others. For example, “I am in pain, help me.”Another function is to cause a person to abandon unrealistic goals.
For example, a person might want to become a billionaire. That’s unrealistic.
Aspiring to accomplish a nearly impossible goal isn’t healthy.
Obviously it would be better if a person could give up on that goal without becoming depressed.
But usually the adjustment process involves some degree of sadness.
A variety of studies show that happy people suffer from what’s known as the optimism bias.
They repeatedly overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen, and that they are better than others (e.g. at driving).
Becoming sad temporarily reduces the impact of the optimism bias, allowing people to think more clearly in certain ways. I say in certain ways because being sad comes with its own set of thinking impairments.
In the even less ideal real world, we try to have more realistic expectations and cultivate appreciation for what we already have, but modern culture and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent every year on advertisements refuses to leave us satisfied.
Both have done such a good job of controlling our thoughts that not only do we desire things we can’t have, we feel entitled to them.
We feel entitled to have lots of money and a dream job, to have a consistently fulfilling relationship, to have our opinions listened to and respected by others, and to feel good most of the time.
Sometimes our ruminations focus on what is wrong with the world that it is not providing us with what we want, and sometimes our overthinking focuses on what is wrong with us that we can’t accomplish our goals…
The entitlement obsession can lead to abundant overthinking:
Why am I not progressing in my job?
Why am I not rich?
Why haven’t I benefited from the economic boom of the last ten years?