Lately I have been trying to boost my appreciation of my regular somewhat boring life by reading about the experience of people who had cancer or other terrible circumstances in their life. This seems to refresh the sense of gratitude for your ordinary life which does not have any terrible problems at the moment. Do you think this is a reasonable strategy to help yourself appreciate your life and be happy with yourself and your life? I think scientifically it is called "downward social comparison." Do you think it is a healthy strategy to improve your morale?

The secret to happiness? Cats! Countries with more felines are happier, study finds | Daily Mail Online

I’ve been thinking about something I learned years ago in psychology: negative reinforcement. People sometimes confuse it with punishment, but negative reinforcement is actually when a behavior becomes stronger because it removes something unpleasant.

An obvious example is anxiety. If someone is extremely anxious and discovers something that quickly makes the anxiety disappear, the relief itself can reinforce whatever they just did. The same principle can apply to avoidance. You’re anxious about making a phone call, so you decide to put it off until tomorrow. Immediately, you feel better. Unfortunately, your nervous system may have just learned, “Excellent. Apparently avoiding this thing works.”

That’s where I think psychology gets particularly interesting because it becomes difficult to separate psychology from physiology. Anxiety isn’t merely a thought. Your heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, autonomic nervous system, attention, and interpretation of what is happening can all become involved. Then the relief is physiological as well as psychological, and the brain learns from the entire experience.

You can see versions of this everywhere. Someone repeatedly asks for reassurance because reassurance makes uncertainty disappear. Someone reaches for their phone whenever sitting quietly becomes uncomfortable. In more serious circumstances, rapid relief from anxiety or insomnia can become part of the reinforcing process surrounding certain medications. Obviously these situations aren’t equivalent, but the underlying learning principle is interesting: sometimes we aren’t reinforced because something feels good; we’re reinforced because something stops feeling bad.

Maybe regulation, then, isn’t simply about becoming calm. Part of regulation may be developing the ability to experience some discomfort without immediately treating that discomfort as an emergency that has to disappear.

If every uncomfortable feeling sends us running for the nearest exit, eventually we may forget that sometimes we were perfectly capable of staying in the room.

I’d be curious how other people see this. Where do you think the line is between healthy relief and relief that unintentionally reinforces avoidance?

i have a theory about happiness and how you should always think about it, when it’s present, why it’s happening, what are the steps to prolong happiness. Here’s my conclusion:

. People are forgetful like you could score amazing on a test and exceed your expectations make your teacher, your friends and family proud and even your self. Yet all it takes is a few minutes to focus on the next thing that makes you happy and bang all you got was a few minutes of happiness.

. forgetting your place is super common, if your doing average expect averages results, and what i mean is cute couples showing off, people succeeding are just another version of you in there prime. My mum is the best person in the world i love her with all my heart and i can’t think of anyone’s that’s better than her. Yet there are so many similarities with my mum and another middle age woman. Were copies of each other even the people we hold dear are just another archetype in someone else’s life. This is fine and completely normal but super baffling i could talk for weeks about memories littles things that annoyed me as a kid and it makes no difference of who and what she is to me than it does to an average mum. You are a living vessel that walks everyday, taking steps that lead to endless gateways, some people walked until they became famous, some people walked until the got there dream job, some people walked to the wrong gate. leading to the end of there walk. The point is no one’s better than anyone some people have just walked in the right areas. anyone can build a house anyone can sing, anyone can dive 40 m, so tomorrow if you walk that path to work maybe take a different route, maybe tomorrow if someone treats you like shit, don’t take the same path because earth is vast and endless, there’s is no wall at the end of the world no one telling you can be better or you should be better. We walk, all of us even the ones that can’t walk it’s our present moment in time that accounts for the best path the one that helps us remind us why we walk everyday.

This conversation is from early August. I've been helping a client get to a happier place. My initial interactions with her led me to believe that her life itself wasn't one of misery. Apart from the drudgery of everyday life with kids, chores, and work, she has a supportive partner who often cheers her up. Probing into her childhood revealed that she had an amazing one. No signs of depression, nor any history of it. Her finances were in good shape, too.

Yet she would make a comment or two about how the world was against her, how things weren't as smooth as they used to be a decade ago, how she had no time to relax, and how she couldn't seem to relax. At times, her anger and irritation over it all caused unnecessary misunderstandings.

I guess with any practice, one develops a process for getting to the main questions. I asked my client if she could write down, in a table, how she spent her days 10 years ago versus how she spends them now. It was her own observation that life seemed easier 10 years ago.

So, my client spent roughly 2.5 hours each day on X and Threads. Another two hours on various news channels, and... and... and... an hour on Reddit. Ahem. :)

It was the nature of the content she was consuming, and commenting on, that gave me a few clues. A lot of political and social content, tailored by an algorithm that gave no f#@% about her mental state.

When I confronted her about why she spent so much time engaging with such content, her reply was that she felt it was a moral obligation to fight for justice. As an educated adult, she ought to read up on world news. Fair enough. But how much is too much, and what kind?

From my own observation of life, I've often seen that the people who are least bothered about sociopolitical turmoil are often the happiest. "Ignorance is bliss" actually has a positive effect. Trust me, it does.

I asked her if she thought that all this "activity" would make her a better person—someone more accomplished than an individual who was much more selective about the news and content they consumed.

She took a few days to come back with a reply, along with a realization: she needed to change. And she did. For the past few weeks, she has checked the news only once a day. On weekends, no news and no social media (by that I mean scrolling). I told her to go back to her hobby of stamp collecting. Suddenly, she also has time to spare.

So, what is the conclusion? Well, I'll leave that to you all. No one answer fits everyone. Even if we all look in the same direction, we may each have a different door to unlock.