The Cycle of Negative Thinking

There’s nothing easier than getting stuck in a rut. We can feel trapped in almost anything: our parents’ house, a school or university, a job, a marriage… Given that humans are social creatures, every day we are enmeshed deeper and deeper in a tangled web of social, familial, professional, and other relationships and obligations. From there, it is easy to think: “This is terrible. I’ll never be able to do anything with this. If only…” And then we think: “If only X were different, if only Y weren’t there, then I’d be happy!”

There are objectively bad situations. If it really is impossible, the solution may be to break free (to leave the family home, to quit a job, to break up with someone…). This is sometimes the best course of action. But, truth be told, imperfect relationships and situations are simply part of our human life as social creatures. And you’re quite unlikely to thrive as a human being if you spend your entire life breaking off one significant relationship after another.

On the other hand, perhaps the worst thing you can do is “accept” your circumstances by living passively, subir, and just waiting it out. Whether you change the situation or decide to stick with it, you should really engage with your circumstances and make the most of whatever happens.

Depression and the Cycle of Negative of Thinking

I am convinced that much depression—a phenomenon with no apparent biological utility—is the side effect of three normally positive human capacities: feeling, reason, and imagination.¹ We all experience how these capacities influence each other. Imagine a positive, annoying, or erotic image, and you will feel accordingly. Feeling, for its part, influences our reasoning, more so than we often realize: the words we say and the arguments we express, however rational they might seem, are often mere rationalizations of our mental states. If we feel awful, we’ll tend spot and magnify the bad things in our life, or even of society in general.

And that seems to me to be the basic, very simple, and self-reinforcing mechanism of so much depression: bad feelings (“I feel awkward at this party.”) get rationalized into a negative narrative (“I’m no good at parties.”) which leads to upsetting imagery and more bad feelings (“I’m dreading tomorrow’s party.”), thus worsening our reactions to actual situations (“I’m so awkward at this party, I must seem so lame.”).

The cycle of negative thinking.

The party is just an example but you can easily extrapolate to any other situation. If you really think things will go badly, they probably will. If you are convinced you will be too nervous to give the presentation, that you will be embarrassingly awkward on the first date, or that other people dislike you and you should just avoid them, there’s a strong chance these prophecies will be self-fulfilling. As the dreaded disaster then actually happens, you may even take a perverse pride in feeling justified in your original prediction: I am may be absolutely miserable, but at least I am right!

If negative thinking becomes generalized—that is, is not limited to specific situations (say, your job or a difficult family member) but spreads to most parts of your life—then you may feel crippling depression and enter a catastrophic spiral as you become more and more personally and socially dysfunctional:

[U]ntreated depression can adversely affect the lives of individuals and informal caregivers, for example family members, whose careers and aspirations can be limited by their responsibilities. Problems compound over time, leading to complex webs of additional health care issues, social isolation and premature deaths.

Source: Politico

Depression can turn what are, objectively, perfectly normal, healthy, and safe material conditions into a subjectively experienced personal hell. A totally unnecessary one!

I am not saying bad or unpleasant things don’t happen. But with negative narratives, we make things worse, potentially much worse, than they would otherwise be. Beyond immediate actual negative situations, our life becomes entrapped in negative narratives, torturing ourselves and locking ourselves in a prison that is largely the product of our own mind. Il ne faut pas en rajouter.

When trapped in a depressive spiral, we naturally find scapegoats to save our own tender egos: our family members, certain friends, our school, our boss, the country, whatever! You can always finds reasons to blame just about anyone! But does the scapegoating help us cope with our situation? Does it help you solve the problems, which are likely very real, you face in these relationships? Highly unlikely.²

Stoicism and Buddhism: two traditional answers to suffering, and their modern limitations

How then can we break free from such self-inflicted suffering and paralysis? I am struck that traditional philosophies often have much to say on precisely these issues, perhaps not surprisingly given that human nature has not changed much over the past thousands of years.

Stoicism, the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, emphasized the power of narratives and world-view in caring for the soul (or, as we moderns would say, in promoting mental health). Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, was keenly aware of the power of imagination and thoughts to cause joy or distress. He reminded himself in different entries of his spiritual diary, the Meditations:

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

You have the power to rid yourself of many superfluous troubles which exist only in your own imagination.

When you want to gladden your heart, think of the good qualities of those around you.³

Stoicism offers a comprehensive world-view and spiritual exercises that seek to reconcile us with the facts of the universe and human nature, detach ourselves from the adversities of life, and help us fulfil our role as rational social creatures. The philosophy has experienced a remarkable revival in recent years with the works of popular neo-Stoics like Massimo Pigliucci and Ryan Holiday.

Another major tradition is Buddhism, which pays extraordinary attention to the cultivation of mental states and the life of the mind. A major aspect of modern mindfulness meditation—which is strongly influenced by Buddhist practices—is precisely to stop being attached to our thoughts and narratives, to stop projecting our interpretations, and especially value judgments, upon the world and our subjective flow of experience.

During seated meditation, one simply observes the flow of thoughts, that insane parade of obsessions, concerns, and cogitations constantly bubbling up from our subconscious, neither suppressing nor judging them.⁴ Instead, one simply watches thoughts pass and dissolve, like clouds in the sky. This psychological exercise, essentially training in non-judgmental non-reactivity, can then carry forth beyond the practice into our day-to-day. Hopefully this makes us less reflexive and less judgmental in our response to the various situations, challenges, and frustrations of our daily life, thus making us see things more clearly and behave more wisely.

There is much value in Stoic philosophy and Buddhist meditation. However, one area in which they have been lacking for me is in not providing much of a positive, forward-looking narrative for life in the modern world. They help you to cope, not necessarily to build.

Traditional philosophies and religions were created in a premodern world of, by our standards, grinding poverty, mortal uncertainty (for example, very high mortality during infancy and plagues, perpetual risk of famine), and apparent stasis (living conditions would fluctuate but not really rise, ~95% of people would in any case have an existence of subsistence farming). As such, traditional philosophy and religion have generally advised detachment from the vagaries and inevitable disappointments of this world. They tend to be remarkably fatalistic.

While we should always be aware of the real limitations of human life—in particular, day-to-day uncertainty and inevitable death—fatalism is not particularly helpful for navigating modern life in a proactive way. Endurance may fit the soldier facing down death, detachment may fit the monk, but neither on their own or in combination are enough for a working family man or woman. Someone who lives solely out of duty will gradually become a worn-out empty husk: you have to love life, to live with relish!

In follow-up posts, I will discuss how to utterly smash the cycle of negative thinking. This will entail not just deemphasizing negative narratives, but replacing them with “positive” ones—which I define as open, constructive, and truthful narratives—that can help us break free from the cycle of negative thinking and regain our natural capacities for personal agency and interpersonal cooperation.

1. If depression is a negative side effect of feeling, reason, and imagination, quite possibly the “highs” of bipolar disorder are an evolved means of punching through depression through a periodic “forced” massive elevation of mood.

2. I am convinced such counterproductive scapegoating is also a major factor in politics. In this sense, entrapment in negative thinking can afflict not simply individuals, but also families, organizations, and whole nations.

3. I usually use Marcus Aurelius (trans. Robin Hard), Meditations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), which as usual for Oxford World’s Classics has a very enlightening introduction and endnotes.

4. Zen seated meditation, with its solemn ritual, length, and rigor, is basically “hardcore mindfulness.”