JORDAN PETERSON – DEPRESSION

Peter Pan a Peter Pan is someone who won’t grow up right now the problem with Peter Pan is he gets to be king but it’s king of Neverland. Neverland doesn’t exist, so being king of nothing isn’t that helpful.

Well one of the things that you often, see with people who suffer from depression and I’m not making a blanket statement about the cause of depression, because there’s lots of them is that people who don’t have enough order in their life tend to get overwhelmed.

So for example, if someone comes into me and sees to see me and they say they’re depressed I always ask them a very standard set of questions:

1. Do you have a job?

If you don’t have a job, you’re really in trouble in our society,

1. first of all you your biological rhythms tend to go off the rails right away because there’s no reason to go to bed at any particular time and there’s no reason to get up: and for many people if they don’t get up at the same time they follow up the functioning of their circadian rhythms and that’s enough to make them depressed right off the bed, especially if they start napping during the afternoon they don’t also don’t have a purpose people aren’t good without a purpose and and this isn’t hypothesizing

We absolutely understand, the circuitry that underlies positive emotion we know how it works, almost all the positive emotion that any of you are likely to experience in your life will not be a consequence of attaining things it will be a consequence of seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal

If they enjoyed it pursuing the thing as long as it was working out, they get a lot of enthusiasm and excitement over that because that’s how our nervous systems work most of your; positive emotion is dual pursuit emotion.

If you take drugs like cocaine or amphetamine the reason they’re enjoyable, is because they turn on the systems that help you pursue goals that’s why people like them. So if you don’t have a job you got no structure that’s not good plus you tend not to have a point. So you’re overwhelmed by chaotic lack of structure and you don’t have any positive emotion.

2. You have any friends?

So sometimes you see people who are depressed, they have no job they have

no friends, they have no intimate relationship, they have an additional health problem and they have a drug and alcohol problem.

My experience has been if you have three of those problems, it’s almost impossible to help you. You’re so deeply mired in chaos that you can’t get out because you make progress on one front and one of the other problems pulls you down.

So one of the things I tell people who are depressed is like don’t sacrifice your stability get a job even if it’s not the job you exactly want…

1. Get a damn job you need a job.
2. Find some friends get out in the dating.

Circuit, see if you can establish an intimate relationship put together some of the foundational items that that are like pillars that your life rests on well, that’s the practical thing to do so that’s one example with regards to depression well the thing is you don’t just launch it on them, you know, you you’ve got to negotiate with the person and you also got to teach them to negotiate with themselves.

And then this is something that’s very useful to know.

You know, I’d like to have kind of an interesting day, so you’ve got to fulfill my responsibilities and I want to you know enjoy the day then you can ask yourself

well okay, “What would I have to do in order for that to happen?”

That I would do and the probability, if you practice this for three or four days is your brain, will just tell you it’ll say well.

You know, there’s that piece of homework that, “Yeah I’m done for like three weeks, you should knock that sucker off because it would only take you ten minutes and you’ve been avoiding it and torturing yourself to death, like 72 hours straight and if you do that here’s a little interesting thing you can do”

And you know, maybe this is a little obligations you should clean up and so what what you do in a situation like that is you teach the person to negotiate with themselves, say well let’s figure out what your aims are you got to have some aims whatever they are and they might?!

Say, well I’m so depressed I don’t have any aims and then I say well pick the least objectionable of the aims and act it out for a while and see what happens because sometimes your emotions, your emotional systems are so fouled up, that you have to pretend you have to act the thing out, before you can start.

To believe it, I mean people always assume they have to believe in, then act but that’s sometimes that’s true and lots of times.

It isn’t so the trick if you’re doing therapeutic work with someone and you’re helping them establish a structure is to find out what they’ll do now, if they want to get better which is not a given because there are often payoffs for not getting better that’s basically the payoffs of being a martyr.

Or maybe the payoffs of doing what you’re entirely pathological family members want you to do! Because they actually want you to fail, assuming you want to get better, there’s usually something you can figure out… that would constitute a step towards some sort of concrete goal!

And my presumption it’s a behavioral presumptions, fundamentally is that small accruing gains that repeat unbelievably, powerful.

So, you know… This is another thing to know about in your own life it’s, something I learned in part from reading the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great Russian philosopher a novelist, said “You can look at your life and you can see what isn’t right about it”

I mean all you have to do is look and then you can start to fix that and the way you fix it is by noticing what you could, in fact fix that.

You know, people are often trying to fix things, they can’t fix… which I would not recommend because if you try to fix something you can’t fix, you’ll just ruin it.

Your environments telling you, because your environment is not made out of objects that’s just wrong your environment is basically made out of something like tools and obstacles. You’re a tool using creature, you’re a tool perceiving creature, the things you like.

I’ve noticed about people, because I’ve wondered once I started studying these mythological stories and I got this idea about the fact that life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering.

I thought god that’s such a good idea, because it’s not optimistic exactly you know some people will tell you, what you can be happy it’s like those people are idiots. I’m telling you, they’re idiots there’s gonna be things that come along that flatten you so hard, you won’t believe it.

So why the hell don’t they do meaningful things? all the time it seems obvious you

could do it I mean it’s hard, it’s a struggle but everything’s a struggle.