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Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

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Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#61

Post by eric4smith »

ooobit2 wrote: post #42
eric4smith wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, here are just a few. 1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older. 2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp. 3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm to…

Alright. Because this personally applies for me, what about creating missions of past decisions made without missions? (This sounds naive, but I could use some insight.) For ex. I did my undergrad in IT Security. I did an MSDA. I ended up in professional sales. I don't know what to do with all this. I've been good at tackling hard subjects my entire life, but how do you craft a mission from a hodgepodge of difficult…

Don't think of it as one overriding mission. That's very rare. But think of it as a small series of missions ofter overlapping concurrently.

You completed your mission of IT Security. But then you realized you love professional sales. Now you can aim to be the best in that.

For example, I'm a really good programmer for the past 30 years. But now I found i absolutely love online marketing -- so much more than writing Ruby, Erlang and Elixir it's not even close!

Now my mission is to do things related marketing. And I'm putting projects together that will keep me busy doing it. Loving it is not enough, so I force myself to practice it every day by marketing for real customers and products.

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#62

Post by sfgweilr4f »

eric4smith wrote: post #39
andi999 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you explained what are not missions, can you give examples for missions?

Sure, here are just a few. 1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older. 2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp. 3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm to…

Interesting examples.

These all form their own funnels. Take number 3, marriage and building something. That one alone if pursued means your dating preferences are very different from if you have a different purpose/goals. You filter out people differently. Potential actually matters. Idiosyncrasies matter. Lust is interpreted differently.

Your lens would be very different from someone who just marries for "love". Or casual hookups. Or even just marriage by itself.

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#63

Post by eric4smith »

Trasmatta wrote: post #51
abootstrapper wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Hol up. A little off topic, but a better goal is to be a supportive and loving parent. Don't have kids with a goal to have them do X by Y. Children are there own person. Guide them, direct them, support them, teach them, but their goals should be their own.

Yeah...your "mission" outcome shouldn't be tied to the performance of your child is some sort of task. Especially an extremely difficult one, like getting a kid to learn calculus by the time they're 10. That's a good way to foster resentment between you and children. A better mission might be to help your kids explore their own interests, find what they're passionate about, and then do whatever you can to foster and…

No, you misunderstand.

I have a kid who I taught to read by 2 years old. That was a mission. She hated it and hated me for it at the time.

But I just came off a 2 hour session with her teaching her SEO. She was jumping to do it, because that early reading taught her how to be self-sufficient in learning things herself from the very beginning.

Another mission was to teach her how to find and learn anything she wants in a short period of time. I did that and now she complains to me that her friends want her to do everything for them.

I told her that's how she makes money. By doing the things that other people are too lazy to do.

The point is that your mission with your kids is to actually force generic life skills down your children's throats. It's not an option!!!

Teach them to read! Teach them basic life values! Teach them global techniques that they can apply to learn anything they want later. These things are not something you leave up to kids -- unless they are learning disabled somehow.

Now she is interested in art, music, computers -- none of which I taught her, because she was able to quickly learn it herself.

A lot of parents just hands-off the kids, particularly in the early stages, and then you end up with a kid that is socially stilted, or unable to do anything for themselves later.

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#64

Post by riffraff »

This doesn't seem to say what the title says. It reads more like "self motivation has inverse correlation with depression, anxiety".

I.e. it's not a matter of telling people to have a goal to avoid depression, but rather that people who are self motivated are also less prone to depression.

That seems almost obvious, and it causes less cognitive dissonance for me.

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#65

Post by eric4smith »

sfgweilr4f wrote: post #62
eric4smith wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, here are just a few. 1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older. 2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp. 3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm to…

Interesting examples. These all form their own funnels. Take number 3, marriage and building something. That one alone if pursued means your dating preferences are very different from if you have a different purpose/goals. You filter out people differently. Potential actually matters. Idiosyncrasies matter. Lust is interpreted differently. Your lens would be very different from someone who just marries for "love". Or…

Absolutely. Spot on. Because marrying for the sake of marriage in 2020, is far, far from enough and will lead to breakup.

Having a purpose to getting married from the time of selecting the mate, is going to be different and driven in a different way.

It makes all the difference in finding the best person suited for you.

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#66

Post by charliemil4 »

eric4smith wrote: post #39
andi999 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you explained what are not missions, can you give examples for missions?

Sure, here are just a few. 1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older. 2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp. 3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm to…

Hold on, these are all metric explicit, not values explicit...

By claiming mission, it implies you mean values based reasoning... completely different than 'logically justified'

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#67

Post by manmal »

eric4smith wrote: post #39
andi999 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you explained what are not missions, can you give examples for missions?

Sure, here are just a few. 1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older. 2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp. 3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm to…

Here are some I would like better:

1. Teach my kids how to become better at learning, and teach myself to minimize the urge to control them.

3. Marrying with the goal of supporting the spouse in their self-actualization, no matter what that might be. Buying things is seldom self-actualization, but a distraction from that.

6. Taking a degree which motivates you (love the process, not the goal - a degree takes too long to just push through)

I kind of, or absolutely agree, with the other ideas.

Some of parent‘s ideas rest on the idea of gaining control over the future or other people (not even little kids can or should be controlled perfectly), or goals that are so far off that it’s unclear that one would ever reach them. Goals that are far off AND specific are more influenced by external factors than one‘s own doing - which is the very definition of gambling.

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#68

Post by [deleted] »

eric4smith wrote: post #39
andi999 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you explained what are not missions, can you give examples for missions?

Sure, here are just a few. 1. Rearing children with the goal of making them read at 2 years old. Then with the goal of learning calculus at 10. Then others as they grow older. 2. Learning programming by writing a real system that actual people will use -- instead of code katas or reading programming books or attending a boot camp. 3. Marrying not only for love, but with the intention of building a business or farm to…

[deleted]

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#69

Post by aspenmayer »

cmehdy wrote: post #44

I couldn't find the actual paper with this press release, even when searching on the website itself (which ended up just returning blank pages to me for some reason). I found more info through another website[0]. At least this helps me, in principle, rule out the idea that they could have been mixing correlation and causation. The one thing that surprises me is that they quickly go on to conclude that therapies shoul…

I missed it on the first read too: it’s at the very top where it says

Read the journal article

Something about the format or style of that part of the page made my mind assume it was a link to a related page and my eyes just skipped right over it. I have included the link for you below.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/abn-abn0000428.pd...

Re: Perseverance Toward Life Goals Can Fend Off Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders

#70

Post by avindroth »

kerkeslager wrote: post #41
cc_ashby wrote: post #7

But what are you sacrificing in return for your “perseverance”? Very few people tend to look at the mind as a system, and also seem to ignore that depression, anxiety, panic disorders, etc. happen for a reason. The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life…

> But what are you sacrificing in return for your “perseverance”? Nothing that matters to you. If it mattered to you it would be a life goal. > The reason why modern humanity have increased risk of these symptoms is because they know, given their perhaps wrongly learned models of the world or otherwise, that even when they achieve their so-called life goals, that they wouldn’t achieve philosophical nor psychological…

The discussion at hand is about the effects of “Perseverance towards life goals” when somebody has depression, anxiety, or what have you. The article mentions it is useful, and I can no doubt agree with that. It can be meditative, having a mission and all (perhaps one that you do not 100% agree with). It is satisfying, and can keep life afloat.

But this “fake mission” trick should be just that — a trick. A placeholder in life for when things get real tough. A patch on your wound that helps the wound heal. The patch isn’t healing the wound, your body is.

But people (e.g. self-help aficionados) become thoroughly entranced with this idea (among other bad ideas like growth mindset) that they lose sight of the fact that a patch is a patch, a bandage a bandage. It has outlived its usefulness, but people keep treating it as a real solution.

Most often when people observe their mind they can dig up a lot of content. Depression, anxiety, and what have you are real things that you can explore and navigate. How to navigate and what to do with them is extremely difficult because we have never been taught how. We sort of induct what our parents and teachers do without explicitly categorizing/identifying what is going on in out minds. Most times we are running the same damn loop for the, what, millionth time in a row. The same situation, the same psychological response, the same result.

Without even going into replication crisis, there are a lot of psychological theories and therapies that are sold, to others and even to the theorizer him/herself. The mind is a value-seeking machine that will not deter itself from using fiction to understand the world and get what it wants.

Interestingly, the fiction of the mind acts as a patch itself, but it is never recognized by the self because the mind (most of the time) does it under the rug. So the patch sticks around and causes problems.

The solution is to recognize that the mind can employ fiction and slowly but surely the mind will start doing these things overtly visibly to you (simply because it doesn’t have to hide it anymore).

Stay on track with what the mind provides to you and be free about it (sometimes ignore it, hate it, listen to it, coddle it, be depressed, be anxious — to the mind emotions are generated and should be accepted without scores attached to them). Then the implicit goals will become explicit. But this hijacking of explicit goals without respecting implicit goals is pure whack.

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