Being in a low mood is a common situation in life. But if it lasts for too long, it also needs our attention, especially when it starts to affect our lives, as if we have fallen into a state of depression, and we need to make some adjustments and changes consciously.
The friends we invited this time are, first of all, a movie "Inside Out" , and two books: one is "Demon at Noon" which I recommended to you during the New Year book opening session, and the other is "Seven Philosophical Lessons on Pain" . Let’s take a look at what insights and ideas these friends bring to us.
Contents
Part 1 Listen to the information conveyed by emotions
Recognize the five basic emotions
Complex emotions derived from basic emotions
Part 2 The Importance of "Little Things"
"Past" and "Resolved"
Identifying Signals from the Brain
Part 3 What kind of comfort is needed to make sadness disappear? This movie should have been released when I was a graduate student in the United States. Our cognitive teacher at that time especially recommended this movie because it shows the entire process of our emotions and thoughts in a very intuitive and vivid form. It is a very good teaching material, so we all went to the cinema to watch it together.
and I highly recommend it to everyone. If you may never understand emotions, this movie can be used as an introduction. There are two story lines in the movie, one is an experience of a 12-year-old girl, Riley, and the other is the five emotional characters of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust that represent her inner emotions. How do they manage Riley's inner world.
It is not just a simple cute movie, it also contains a lot of professional psychological knowledge. The director of this movie is also the director of and , which was recommended to me by many Tangwan children at the beginning of the year. I discovered at that time that this director particularly likes to integrate the truly professional knowledge of psychology into his movies. It is not the casual psychology like chicken soup, but really integrates the very core and wonderful core of psychology into his movies.
Therefore, these two movies are particularly worth watching as our psychological enlightenment. For example, the choice of these five emotional characters in the movie is also supported by professional theory. After a lot of research, psychologists have found that happiness, sadness, fear, anger and disgust are the five most primitive human emotions.
These five emotions are not randomly selected, but are five emotions that all people will have and share regardless of different eras or different cultures. It can also be said that these five emotions have always existed in our primitive brains.
For example, more complex emotions such as anxiety, inferiority, guilt, etc. that we often say are the products of our evolution after the various five primitive emotions are mixed together in the process of continuous development of our brains. They are not primitive emotions. So we can understand these five most primitive emotions, which is equivalent to us getting the most basic hard core.
Riley’s experience in the story is also similar to that described by Tangwaner. Previously, Riley’s life was simple and happy, and joy was mainly responsible for her emotions and memories. However, with a move, everything changed. Sadness appeared more and more, dyeing some ordinary little things with sad colors and feelings. Even the happy memories at school and home in the past have turned into sad and sad memory balls because Riley has moved away.
was originally a happy emotion, but later because she encountered a sad emotion, she turned the previous happy memories into sad memories.
Obviously, Happy didn't like sadness at first and didn't want sadness to affect Riley's brain, but after a series of events, she discovered the importance of sadness. Riley's happiness was often comforted and supported by friends and family when she was sad. With their company, she became happy and had happy memories, so there is a very relevant connection between them.
Sadness is a signal and reminder we express when we face loss and loss in life. Just like when we were babies, we cried to tell our parents that we needed attention and care. And if this sadness has not been taken care of, the brain will repeatedly remind us of sadness.
So even if it seems to be a small thing and not a big deal, you need to pay attention to it. Because behind these little things, there are always some needs and expectations that have not been met, so it constantly uses this method to remind you, give you a signal, and convey a message.
If we have been ignoring this signal and not sharing it with anyone to get understanding and help from others, it may be like a small black hole, sucking away our energy unknowingly and leaving us in a state of continuous sadness and depression.
You think, if it reminds you to pay attention to it once, and reminds you twice or three times without attracting your attention, it will become more and more powerful , hoping that through enough obvious information, it will show that something is wrong now. For example, Riley didn't realize the meaning and impact of the sadness in the process of moving, and tried to ignore it, thinking that he should just move. How could he be so sad and sad?
So she used happiness to suppress her sadness , but instead her emotions became more and more numb. When the numbness reached an extreme, she would lose control. Finally, it was not until Riley finally expressed her sadness to her parents, and then the family hugged each other, understood and supported her, that happiness reappeared in Riley's memory experience.
2. The importance of "little things"
This Tang Wan'er mentioned that what makes him sad are some of the little things in life, and he may not understand why small things can make him so sad. I think the "small" here means that the incident itself does not seem to have an earth-shattering impact on life, and the past has passed. But I think it is necessary to distinguish whether the "passed" of this matter has been passed over, or whether it has been truly resolved.
The difference between the two lies in how we participate in this matter. "Past" and "past" are a passive way. A small thing happens to us, which makes people sad, but it may not be that uncomfortable, and it is still within the bearable range, so it will be over with patience.
But what "solved" is that we took the initiative to do something, used some methods, and used some new thinking to let it pass . These two kinds of strokes are completely different from taking the initiative to solve it.
If occasionally there are one or two such things in life, we can use some methods to resolve and digest them. It doesn’t matter. There is no need to treat any thing particularly harshly, no need to dig it out, and no need to deliberately solve it. We can’t “turn it into a big deal or a small matter”. Everything is just a matter, which is another extreme. It doesn’t matter.
But if we are in this state frequently for a long time, we cannot let it continue like this, because over time we will develop "learned helplessness" , which is treating passive patience as a way of life and turning it into a habit of dealing with problems. I just can bear it, so I don’t have to think of any other way. I just need to bear it for a while and it will be over. But you will find that in the rest of your life, you have to endure more and more times, and the time you have to endure is getting longer and longer.
In last year's year-end summary, I recommended a book that I particularly liked, "The Noonday Demon". It is a book that explains depression thoroughly. The author does not regard depression as just an emotion. Sadness and depression are the overall state of a person. It is related to physical health, the environment, and the people you interact with. It is a discrete tone of life.
In one chapter, the author mentioned poverty. Everyone thinks that it is natural for people to be sad because of lack of resources, so they will not pay attention to the spiritual emotions of the poor. Some people will believe that countries with good welfare have provided sufficient welfare, resources, and treatment for the poor. It is because they are too lazy.
However, the benefits provided to them will not make people starve to death, but their mental state is gradually defeated by this state where they have no way to actively create anything and perform their functions in society , and their energy is slowly drained away.
Poor people like these who receive so-called good welfare often experience sexual harassment, domestic violence, and alcoholism around them. Family and friends may suddenly run away from home or go to jail. Young girls cannot continue to go to school because of pregnancy. They see these things happening every day, so they continue to experience these helplessness and difficulties in life, and they have completely lost hope in life.
Even if they are provided with the best social welfare and treatment, they are still passive in their lives. They still feel that the world has abandoned them, and they cannot get back on their feet, or even give up on themselves. passively bear life. Even if the hospital provides them with free psychological treatment or drug treatment, they will not take the initiative to sign up or go to the hospital to get the medicine.
This is when we lose this kind of active control and active adjustment of life, and you can only passively accept and endure. In fact, our psychological energy will be slowly consumed, and then our entire mental state will actually feel a bit like a walking zombie.
Looking back, I don’t seem to have the energy to deal with big setbacks or big things. They may not be so dangerous or harmful. But water drops can cut through rocks. Just small water droplets, drip, drip, drip, they can carve out a hole.
So if you always deal with the little things we accumulate in a passive and patient way, then if you want to live by yourself for more than 20 or 30 years, the things you have accumulated for such a long time will always be in your heart.
Although they are those trivial things that you think are not worth mentioning, if you imagine the things that have an emotional impact on you as droplets of water, dripping, dripping, dripping in your heart every day, do you think your heart can avoid being dug into a hole? Then your emotional state must be unstable, fluctuating, sensitive, and easily affected.
So this sugar pill mentioned that he thinks of these little things every morning. It is also the brain reminding us, What can we do for ourselves? has these signals today, what can we do proactively? Is there anything we can do but ignore it and forget about it?
3. What kind of comfort is needed for sadness to disappear?
I would like to ask everyone, for example, when you have some small things, would you share it with the people around you and complain about it? Or maybe you didn’t say it because you were worried that you might think too much, be too sensitive or pretentious. Because behind these comments, there seems to be no way to solve these things. What happens happens, and if there is no way to solve it, what is the use of sharing?
is so useful. Even if there is no way to do these things, even if there is nothing we can do for the time being, sharing this matter is equivalent to expressing this emotion. Then some people think that if I stop thinking about it and feeling it, I can let it go and just let it go. Wouldn’t that be a very efficient way to solve the problem? I've let it go, does that mean it won't affect me anymore?
The book I just mentioned "Seven Philosophical Lessons on Pain" , it mainly talks about Different philosophers’ understanding and views on pain . The first lecture is about the philosophy utilitarianism . It believes that meaningless pain should be ignored and instead deal with meaningful and solvable problems, so as to ultimately achieve the maximum happiness and happiness of human beings.
But it is very ironic that the philosopher John Mill, who held this view, himself fell into depression. He was very good and practiced practical utilitarianism very well. He was proficient in ancient Greek at the age of 5, and could read Latin fluently at the age of 9. He understood the most difficult algebra. At the age of 11, he wrote an article detailing the history of Roman law.
Such a smart person should become a particularly successful person as he develops, but when he was 20 years old, he suddenly suffered a mental breakdown because he felt like a machine without emotions and spiritual life. What saved him in the end? Instead, poetry, which he felt was useless, saved him.
He felt the emotions expressed in the poems, and also used the poems to express his own emotions. Finally, he released all the emotions that had been suppressed and ignored by utilitarianism in his heart..
So the emotion will not really be suppressed by you, , and really disappear in your mind. No, it will only be hidden in a certain place in your mind that you cannot easily detect. Compared with the sadness itself, the sadness of not being understood and being completely alone is more terrifying. If you feel that there is no one around you who can empathize with you, then we ourselves must strive to be this person and understand ourselves.
Although our emotions are transmitted to us as a signal, the brain is what wants you to know, is what it wants you to see. After it sees you, we need to respond to it and understand it. If your brain keeps sending you signals, but you keep blocking them, and then don't receive them, and you have to ignore them and get rid of them, then the distance between you and yourself will become farther and farther.
The part of our brain that recognizes and feels emotions should have a communication in the middle. The brain sends you a signal, such as For example, if you are tired, you should take a rest, or if you are feeling sad now, you should comfort yourself. However, many times we do not respond to our emotions, but suppress them, suppress them, and deny their existence. In this case, we will create a gap between ourselves and ourselves.
Many times we say "I don't know who I am anymore", "I can't even feel what I am like", "I can't even feel my emotions", "I hate myself", which are all caused by poor communication between ourselves and ourselves. Because you block and ignore many important signals sent to you by your brain, you do not respond to it.
Let’s really respond to certain signals sent to us by our brains . For example, what emotions have you had recently that you want to get rid of, suppress, drive away, deny, and reject? Can we use this opportunity to respond to it now, because this is the process of truly understanding ourselves.
[Comfort Notes Psychological Store , a psychological convenience store with many practical methods and tools, welcome to visit. 】
with the same name public account: Comfort Notes Psychological Shop
times rabbit hole Experience free psychological tree hole
times parallel world participate in psychological ability training
times tool kit Get the free psychological self-help toolkit
