This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells the winding story of the triumph and folly of forever trying to better yourself. This letter is from the chapter on "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Hi Charlotte,
This week has been really bad. I don't think I've done a single productive thing. My sense of day-night cycles is all messed up again because of my media-consumption binges. The other day, I decided to watch all the Kubrick films I hadn't seen yet, including Psycho, The Shining, 2001, and Full Metal Jacket. I watched them on one computer monitor, while on the other monitor I played video games. Drowning myself in this multimedia bonanza is pretty much the only soothing thing I can do to cope with my otherwise debilitating neuroses. It's either that or spending the whole day thinking about my lack of direction in life and my seemingly endless stretch of being single.
But I haven't given up hope. You remember my New Year's Resolution to quash my neuroses, right? Here's what I've done since the start of the year:
Spiritual practices:
- reading The Purpose-Driven Life and getting all religious
- daily prayer
- meditation
- Kava Kava
- St. John's Wort
- Valerian Root
- 5-HTP
- Distracting myself from over-thinking by using the radio
It seems counter-intuitive the way I'm explaining this. You'd think I'd actually be more depressed considering that I've tried so many things that clearly haven't worked. But this list proves to me how determined I am to fix my issues. When I hear a minor suggestion like, "Prayer has been proven to increase happiness levels," rather than writing it off, I look for the original study, I find cross-referencing articles, and I develop a plan to self-experiment. I then keep a log tracking my day-to-day well-being in response to the treatment. After I feel satisfied that I've truly understood something about myself and the treatment, I put it in one of these four categories:
- Things I've tried that had a major impact
- Things I've tried that had some impact
- Things I've tried that are not fine
- Things I've tried that are questionable
I recently bumped into a meta-analysis1 on cognitive therapy, which concludes that cognitive therapy is that it is just as effective as Lexapro in reducing levels of anxiety, decreasing depression, etc. And the best part is that it has no physical side effects.
The premise of cognitive therapy is simple. It's that depression is caused primarily by negative distorted thoughts. For example, you might think, "I'm going to get fired." But that's a very black-or-white perspective, and so in cognitive therapy, you would try to "gray" it up. You would ask yourself, "When, exactly, will I get fired? Will I get fired today? Will I get fired in a week? Or is it more like something that will happen in two months? What if I don't even get fired, but rather transferred?"
Even just talking about cognitive therapy makes me feel better. I have plenty of dire thoughts about myself like, "I'm going to be broke," "I've been a failure since college," or "I'm doing nothing with my life." If cognitive therapy is as good as the meta-analysis says it is, then then this could be my ticket to achieving peace-of-mind without destroying my liver or getting other nasty side-effects from a drug like Lexapro.
Or maybe this thought process, this search to free myself is all part of the problem :-) I wonder some times.
1 A meta-analysis is a survey of surveys to see if there is conclusive evidence that a treatment works or not.
