> it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-good/202503/... explicitly discusses the arrow of causality here

> and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.

There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.

Yes. "not just a symptom" would have been more accurate.

I'm glad I'm not alone in this. They tried to say it was my " engineer brain" making me miserable.... But as a super autistic adult...the only comfort in this world is objective math and scientific truths.

Wait down payments? Is that metaphorical? How much does that cost?

Several comments already seem to assume that already though

I think they need to use a different word than associated. That's what's causing the confusion?

You can’t make someone change, if they don’t want to.

This can be very sad. The person you love just fades away.

I don't have any hard evidence but being fed polarizing, click bait-y headlines that drive engagement through emotion certainly don't help. Fear is drummed up in a relative of mine from the headlines for articles (that they doom scroll past and don't read).

The kids call it brainrot for a reason.

Its like saying "Just say no" to drugs once you are deep down some freebase crack addiction. Effin' clueless spit in the face

I wonder if this is how daydreaming helps, especially as a kid. I think that being taught not to dream as much as an adult and being in the moment kind of removes this random focus in our brains

I don‘t think negativity necessarily has something to do with trauma. Negativity bias is very widespread, regardless of previous trauma. Basically everybody flies at negativity.

Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.

I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers

This is likely a byproduct of us being too comfortable now. Not in the "you've got nothing real to worry about!" boomer rethoric kind of way, but in the sense that our baseline for reward has shifted a bit higher. So trauma can still present a very strong negative RL signal, while positive RL signals of similar magnitude become rarer.

> People forget that nature only optimizes for sexual reproduction and that’s pretty much it

Common misunderstanding.

Evolution optimizes for system success. Not individual gene propagation. Genomes are not agents with individual goals.

Many species, but especially social animals, have numerous behaviors and traits designed to prompt communal success rather than individual survival and reproduction

There are studies on separated Black twins that ended up in different socioeconomic situations. They limit the genetic difference in variation of IQ between races to just a few points.

And to be clear, IQ itself is very much inheritable. But the _variation_ in IQ in a population is not explained by genetics.

There’s not much evidence of rigorous differences in intelligence across racial groups that could not be explained by environmental and cultural differences. Statistical analysis generally suggests that if there is one, the effect size is small.

The current observed gap is much smaller than gains than have been observed within racial communities over time as a result of environmental changes.

So… no. You don’t have a lot of credible evidence for what you claim is a delusion to doubt. And even the observed effect size disregarding confounding effects is less than individual variation.

Take a look at stoicism. Not the pop modern version but the ancient roman and greek traditions of Seneca, Epictitus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.

It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) are effective at reducing negative thinking, although they don't come in pill form.

Have children. Hard not to endlessly smile when you see their smiles for you doing nothing more than being there for them. Then, uhh I guess the plan is to have more children once they enter their teen years?

Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.

Loss, humility, service. And the most important: community.

https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-therapy-linked-to-lasting...

https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2025.00461

Dark chocolate.

Yes, there is medicine for negative thinking that helps to various degrees (SSRIs do work), but they have issues and unfortunately we don't have any magic bullets.

Pretty much any antidepressant or anxiolytic

meditation.

A gramme a day…

Disco

Prozac

Quite hard these days to be positive:/

> Yet if you want to set your threshold for evidence so high that nothing short of a large scale RCT will answer the question you can ignore all of this, because such an RCT will never be produced for obvious ethical reasons.

Yes, but this means existing studies can't be relied on to justify a conclusion that would have required the impossible study. Saying that a study isn't practical can't be used to justify making a policy decision based on circumstantial evidence.

My use of marijuana studies is meant only to show how bad science steers public policy, not to advocate for its use. There are other, better reasons to avoid that drug.

> This pattern is common in topics where people simple don’t want to believe a casual relationship might exist.

This is why science exists. But if the science cannot be carried out, then we have no right to draw conclusions that would require actual science to be legitimate.

This is moving away from the original topic, which is the kind of sloppy science common in modern psychology, where people wave their hands instead of their scientific results.

> I knew a guy who ...

A red herring, but I think you knew that.

My personal belief is that we can’t control every thought, but we can make sure we’re in a positive feedback loop instead of a negative one. For example, when I am getting negative, I’ve learned to take a step back and try to figure out why. If I can’t get myself in a better mood, I go to bed early and generally wake up happier. I also try to structure my days to make time for the things that make me happier (exercise, eating well, friends, family, hobbies) and cut out things that make me feel more negative (social media, news, sugar, etc). Not perfect, but it helps.

Hard not to be negative when you're 22 and have firsthand knowledge of how emotionally and intellectually stunted the coming generation is, and how much you've lost out on.

+100 million people died in war in the 20th century. Not to mention preventable famines, etc.

Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.

IMO… You need to detach yourself from the big data straw you’re gagging on.

Go outside and interact with people.

There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.

Teach yourself how to choose

I don't think its getting especially dumber and crazier now, but more like we let dumb and crazy fester and let the problems keep building for decades while we used technological progress as a distraction from it all and an excuse to do as little as possible. People started believing technological progress will fix everything and that 30 years down the live they will be living like the Jetsons with personal butler robots so that the problems of today don't matter, except it didn't happen, and will continue to not happen, and problems continue to mount.

And here I am in camp "it's always been this way".

All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.

> I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff.

At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.

Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.

I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.

The bad guys might seem to have won but the story isn't over yet!

The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.

Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.

Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.

The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.

The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.

It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.

There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.

However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.

Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.

For many nations, DJT has been the best thing that has ever happened, by a wide indisputable margin. Not all nations, but some.

If you're well off economically, then maybe.

But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.

edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse

If you have a lot of money, sure. But coming back to reality, prices for everything has risen and lots of people are living harder lives than a few years ago.

There is no meaningful 'best time to be alive' distinct from psychological reality. If people are not adapted to their environment and either don't value it or aren't valued by it, it doesn't matter how much material comfort is available. There is a reason the suicide rate jumps during industrial revolutions.

Yes, it's an absurd situation for so many to be so unhappy when, by all measurements, this is "the best time to be alive. But do you really think that Americans are simply that spoiled and stupid? When an entire nation sinks into a despair, surely there must be a better answer than "ignorance"? So I am positing that there must be some underlying problem, something that is difficult to quantify, dare I say it, some kind of mass psychological-spiritual disfunction at play.

Most would agree the 21st century is better than the 16th century, but is 2025 better than 2019 or even 2010?

If you ignore future developments that seem impossible to avoid, I’m talking demographics mostly, then you might have an argument.

I can't.

I have a go to list of positive things to think about.

I have physical tactile things (a small rock I carry around) that brings me joy when I touch it because it reminds me of good times.

It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative thought loops, and no matter how many things I see / feel / hear / ... it doesn't get better (at least in the short term).

The question your asking to me is akin to "can't people control what they see" thinking it's like a movie you can choose to go and attend, when instead it's like "A Clockwork Orange" where in fact I do not get to control what I see.

I think this question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how depression works for a lot of people. You're asking "why don't they replace negative signals with positive signals" when the problem often is that the positive signaling mechanism itself is broken. It's like trying to balance a bike that only goes left.

It's like how you can't really help but automatically read text you look at in a language you know well.

It's very hard to control, over the years I've worked on reigning in my negative thinking, but every once in a while I still end up in a spiral of increasingly negative thoughts that don't just go away by focusing on positive things.

It's not quite as simple as that, but what you describe has some relation to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Part of CBT involves recognizing when you're ruminating/spiraling in thought patterns that you want to avoid, and strategies to redirect and break that loop.

Don’t some religious seekers spend a lifetime trying to control what they think about (or don’t)?

No, but you can think less by reducing your cognitive ability through say drugs and alcohol. Notice how the happiest boomers guzzle the wine and don’t have as many (negative) thoughts.

/r/thanksiamcured

Short answer: no, you can't just "think positive" your way out of mental illness.

Also: Correlation is not causation; we don't know that avoiding these RNTs changes anything in the brain chemistry.