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Women are twice as likely to suffer depression as men are, because on the average they think about problems in ways that amplify depression. Men tend… - Martin E P Seligman
" "Women are twice as likely to suffer depression as men are, because on the average they think about problems in ways that amplify depression. Men tend to act rather than reflect, but women tend to contemplate their depression, mulling it over and over, trying to analyze it and determine its source. Psychologists call this process of obsessive analysis rumination, a word whose first meaning is “chewing the cud.” Ruminant animals, such as cattle, sheep, and goats, chew a cud composed of regurgitated, partially digested food — not a very appealing image of what people who ruminate do with their thoughts, but an exceedingly apt one. Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression. This ends the bad news. The good news is that both pessimistic explanatory style and rumination can be changed, and changed permanently. Cognitive therapy can create optimistic explanatory style and curtail rumination. It prevents new depressions by teaching the skills needed to bounce back from defeat. You will see how it works on others, and then you will learn how to use its techniques on yourself.
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Additional quotes by Martin E P Seligman
The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.
For the first time in history — because of technology and mass production and distribution, and for other reasons — large numbers of people are able to have a significant measure of choice and therefore of personal control over their lives. Not the least of these choices concerns our own habits of thinking. By and large, people have welcomed that control. We belong to a society that grants to its individual members powers they have never had before, a society that takes individuals’ pleasures and pains very seriously, that exalts the self and deems personal fulfillment a legitimate goal, an almost sacred right.
After a heated dispute, we each undertook an assignment for the next class: to engage in one pleasurable activity and one philanthropic activity, and write about both. The results were life-changing. The afterglow of the “pleasurable” activity (hanging out with friends, or watching a movie, or eating a hot fudge sundae) paled in comparison with the effects of the kind action. When our philanthropic acts were spontaneous and called upon personal strengths, the whole day went better. One junior told about her nephew phoning for help with his third-grade arithmetic. After an hour of tutoring him, she was astonished to discover that “for the rest of the day, I could listen better, I was mellower, and people liked me much more than usual.” The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self-consciousness. Time stops.
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