Avoid misinterpreting your emotions

This is pretty much cognitive behavioral therapy (the empirically best-supported type of psychotherapy). The basic premise: events happen, we interpret those events to mean something, and we have feelings based on our thinking. So by changing the thoughts you have about events, you can change the feelings.

So when an event happens (e.g. I argue with a relative), I get very different emotional yields from different starting thoughts: "She's such an idiot" vs. "I'm a horrible person" vs. "I guess we were both probably stressed about other things, because we don't normally argue like that." CBT is the process of noticing what your irrational or unhelpful starting thoughts are and intentionally substituting more rational or helpful ones until it becomes habitual.

The tragedy of depressive realism is that if you get better, you write off all the insights you gained as just part of the disease.

This is exactly the type of thing I want to see more of on Less Wrong. In fact, my primary side project at the moment is generating some content with a similar purpose to this article.

A key factor that you address here, which is vitally important, is that your art as a rationalist is most needed when it is hardest to use. Viewed from another angle, crises are the occasions where it is most useful to practice careful rationality, where your rationality stands to grow the most, and where rationality should lead you to perform better than others would - but these are also the times when you are least able to think clearly.

I view the discipline of rationality as the art of taking control of this unwieldy instrument called the mind.

I've learned a lot about the transience of moods by keeping track of them via Moodscope. I almost never have a similar mood two days in a row. Mood is weather, not climate. You are not one single person -- different people pass through your brain, many times a day. Being aware of this hasn't kept me from having bad moods, but it has made me stop believing in them, if that makes any sense. I don't take them literally. I think "Oh, there's that thought again. It feels true now, but it'll feel false tomorrow, and true again next Wednesday."

Being realistic about the brain means making your peace with flux.

Good article; Reminds me of the following scene from Lawrence of Arabia:

[Lawrence has just extinguished a match between his thumb and forefinger. William Potter surreptitiously attempts the same]

William Potter: Ooh! It damn well 'urts!

T.E. Lawrence: Certainly it hurts.

Officer: What's the trick then?

T.E. Lawrence: The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

addendum: (5 Months later, I see that James "I'm King of the World!" Cameron used this scene in Prometheus; quite ruins it for me.)

I have (had to) become acutely aware of the vagaries of my emotional states since becoming a teacher, as personal emotional stolidity is a prerequisite for effective control and guidance of my typically unreflective charges. Most interesting has been the revelation that my moods are almost entirely determined by the quality of my previous night's sleep and the nature of the stimulation that my brain had to endure prior to plunging into the abyss, with watching football on a bright screen in a dark room worst - certain to unleash the black dog - and empty-headed relaxation with the curtains drawn and nothing on best. Even better is to force myself to retire before I feel it absolutely necessary: I awake the next day full of nothing less than the 'joy of being alive' - perhaps the body reveling in its own health. Despite knowing this, and of discounting too, I still rarely manage to impose an early curfew.

I now take my moods to be primarily physiological phenomena, making the drawn-out, angst-ridden interpretations to which I was once wont seem utterly ludicrous, and find that, should I fail to be sufficiently rested, a reminder that 'nothing is what it seems' suffices to prevent me from rash decision-making. I take my original confusion to lie in the fact that whereas physical pain typically causes emotional hurt, it is difficult to notice this when the locations of both coincide - after all, a stubbed toe would never occasion a midlife crisis.

I wonder if being able to get into a dissociative-like state at will, where you didn't actually feel like being yourself, but rather like an external spectator to your own feelings, would help with being able to take a more objective, far view on your own feelings. Are there drugs that can help achieve that safely anyway?

I seem to recall Michael Vassar summarizing Robert Greene as essentially "repetitively associate yourself with positive feelings in other people's head regardless of whether those feelings have anything to do about you."

Brains can't compartmentalize such feelings well. Given enough time and repetitions, even being aware of it, I suspect you'd come to like or dislike someone if you consistently had good or bad feelings when you met, regardless of whether those had anything to do with that person.

Great article. Emotions can be useful sources of information, but can also be dangerously misleading. Rather than try to be unemotional or coldly rational, one must simply know when to listen to the advice, and the consideration laid out in this post is an important one (make sure the emotion at hand is on topic, and not actually appraising something else entirely).

Mr. or Ms. Kaj Sotala,

How do you know that your reinterpretation of emotional responses accurately reflects the impetus of that feeling, and is not just a means of justifying blind ideological faith in your current objectives? For instance, in your example

So here was my mistake. I had been feeling frustrated about my inability to sleep, and my thoughts had wandered to other subjects, such as my life in general. And then I had automatically assumed that because I was feeling frustrated while thinking about my life, my life wasn't going well, so I should reconsider my plans.

I follow the logic that my negative feelings are the product of a lack of sleep not ideological misguidance; but I would take it a step further to suggest that the lack of sleep is a byproduct of the path you have chosen to walk in your life plans would you disagree?

Please do not take this as an attack on your idea. Honestly I think it is a much needed tool in the current human topography. However, that does not remove a potential for abuse. I think in addition to this essay there should be a significant warning to the ramifications of overreliance on this tool (namely ignoring forewarnings of potentially detrimental beliefs and plans).

I found the article helpful. The part which I considered the introduction contained a summary of emotions and their function that would be easy to use to explain to people who are less self-aware.

I'm increasingly cynical. of the way the term depression is thrown about.

Some people could be experiencing normal variation in emotions or mood, then catastrophizing it out of fear of returning to depression and it becomes an anxious self fulfilling prophecy That is, according to a hypothesis a public educator I recently chatter with had.

Everyday wisdom! Recognise your worry triggers and don’t approach them

Something important people who want an acurate model of the world should know: all the terms used to describe emotions are only valid as anthropological descriptions - they correlate very badly with anything physiological. In fact, emotions are unstructured collection of distinct beings and therefore fail to capture our foundations about the similarities and differences of emotions. A dimensional view of emotions is not incompatible with a categorical view. Interrelations among emotions are not new. In 1896 it was proposed that we can dissolve emotions into a three dimensional structure and in 1941 experiments began a series of investigations into the structural interrelations among emotions.

Pleasantness and level of activation (or arousal) are the only dimensions that have been found consistently to define emotions across studies.

Every other attribution made to emotions, across the 'cultural universals', are merely social constructs - from joy to anger to yes, homestatic emotions like hunger. When we are hungry it is instead senses that alert us to it, and we simply have bad target location. That's that - emotions are best decribed as just degrees of pleasures - the counterpart to feelings of pain but for even cognitive things.

This is why sensory information is more meaningul. This is why empiricism is true for all human beings, regardless of weather they believe in it.

"The mechanisms which would usually kick in when you were doing something wrong will be engaged even when you're doing nothing wrong, and they will be in overdrive, taking apart everything in your life in order to find ways by which you are screwing up."

Sounds like a good observation to me. You can have problems in life that have NOTHING to do with your actions. For example, to be hit by the car and think that it is your responsibility that you underestimated driver's stupidness while optimizing some other, more important decision while walking across the street.

There's one question I'm thinking about: does feeling responsible for something (i.e. finding a way to do better job, logically forward and backward in time) always play a key role in such a depression, or not?

Good post and a good lesson. Paying attention to your feelings and reasons for them is an indespensible ingredient to good mental health.

Try my pin-wheel of emotions to familiarise yourself and others with your and their emotions!

I find that it's rather difficult to take the outside view while in such an emotional state, as I feel it is rather compromised. Perhaps you would only selectively choose data to support your state. I would rather take notes and data on the situation when neutral and check up on that when I am compromised.

I don't think it would be adaptive that our emotions could have such a simple and immediate functioning. They are complex, structured and often have a lot more to do with high level events in your life then with a slight scent of morning glories before meeting some one (I’m exaggerating your hypotheses a little, I know). Emotions play a fundamental role in human decision making and it would be very unadaptive if evolution made then so uniforming about ours lives long-term prospects. You may reject evolution's work, but you have to deal with the fact that you are her work. It's seems to me that you only made your process of ignoring your emotions a little more resistant to some kinds of criticisms, but you are still ignoring them. If you get insomnia and start thinking about your life, odds are that there is in fact some kind of problem with your life. Why did you get insomnia in the first place? Why did you start thinking about how your various projects would fail instead of how your breakfast tasted so awful?

I try to treat my emotions in the following way: Emotions just ''are'' and as such carry information only about emotions themselves. They have meaning only in relation to other emotions, both mine and those of others. I've found that the most effective way to consistently take the outside view. Once I made that leap, it became much easier to apply rationality in mastering them for my own benefit. I can collect empirical data about my emotions and make predictions about my emotions. I can devise strategies to change my emotions and then assess whether they work. If you feel sad and it's raining today, you might infer that rain leads to an increased probability of sadness. If you feel excited about a job opportunity, you might infer that you will generally be happy on a day to day basis. If I meet someone and feel comfortable talking to them, that's only an indication that I will feel comfortable talking to them in the future. And if you pay attention for long enough, you realize that many emotions are ultimately harmless. If you stop feeding them, they drift away, they pass.

It is partly a dissociative approach, being a spectator to your own emotions (as mentioned by EE43026F). But at the same time, it's like treating your emotions as you treat your toes. They are a part of you, but they're only mildly informative about whether you should change careers.

Looking back on what I just wrote, I should also say that dealing with emotions is a skill. I don't mean to suggest that one little insight outweighs practice. About two years and a half years ago I made a commitment to not be some completely oblivious to emotions and it's taken a while to develop the skills. The simplest skill is just identifying emotions. At various points of the day, ask yourself how you are feeling. When I started, I literally could not give a verbal response, I could not produce a word describing how I felt.

Positive emotions, too, can be correct or mistaken.

it's lines like this that make me a little uneasy about your essay. If you say that sometimes emotions are worth listening too and sometimes not, doesn't this imply that they are quite worthless as an advisor? If they are wrong roughly the same amount as they are right, that does not mean that they are "half good" it means they totally fail, as a coinflip would give you the same result. Shouldn't it then be the conclusion that one should just ignore emotion all together and rethink issues from scratch if they are somehow relevant? In other words: if you are forced to reconsider all the data given by emotional input anyway, what good is it in the first place?