Repetitive negative thinking was a symptom of my undiagnosed ADHD. Getting diagnosed and medicated took away the repetitive negative thinking, or as I called it ruminating negative thought patterns.
Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
191–200 of 261 posts
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is unironically the best time to be alive. The problem is that most people are ignorant of real history and don't realize how much life used to suck. Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.
Most would agree the 21st century is better than the 16th century, but is 2025 better than 2019 or even 2010?
A bit like investing the graph looks straight when you zoom out but close examination shows many peaks and troughs.
It would be nice if our wellbeing increased monotonically but events (covid, the financial crisis, the war in Ukraine) get in the way.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#193> Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment. The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are act…
This can surely be corrected with the happiness laser.
Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of modern medicine is based on just correlations and an more or less educated guess. I do not think ignoring them makes sense, it is just that the reporting needs to be more clear and less sensationalist.
That is really because we don't actually understand the human body, and how it reacts to various stimuli. We used to think stress caused ulcers, based on a correlation. We now know the actual cause is a bacterium.
Yes, sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they need to use a different word than associated. That's what's causing the confusion?
Personally I think that reporting of correlations should be dropped altogether - they're very prevalent (reports on correlations) in every day news, and I think that they're damaging because they imply, or outright claim, that the discovery is that some causative effect has been observed. It's really clickbait territory sometimes (IMO)
> Personally I think that reporting of correlations should be dropped altogether…
It really should be a shared responsibility to report and understand the meaning of statistically significant correlation. Unfortunately, few journalists seem to have much interest in understanding it. And given that their readership likely has about average (i.e poor) numeracy and iffy understanding of probability, it’s a bad combination. The widespread misunderstanding about the iterative way that science converges on truth also contributes to this problem.
That said, I would rather know about interesting findings such as this if for no other reason than to start digging for the original paper.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#196Repetitive negative thinking associated WITH EVERYTHING.
Perhaps the author should think more positively about negative thinking.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#197I'm not seeing where they are coming up with RNT as a cause, other than a lot of theory. Wouldn't it be a symptom of cognitive decline instead? Dementia patients, particularly those with Alzheimers, tend to become depressed because of confusion and memory loss. Wouldn't it be more likely that these depression symptoms are being caused by deteriotating brain function rather than the other way around?
Gwern on correlation and causation: https://gwern.net/correlation
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#198> Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment. The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are act…
This can surely be corrected with the happiness laser. Jokes aside, it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
> it should be noted that CBT might confuse cause and effect
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-good/202503/... explicitly discusses the arrow of causality here
> and the goal is to mold the behavior of people into something socially wanted or expected or just learn to live with something that cannot reasonably be changed.
There are lots of crackpot approaches to psychotherapy, but I do believe that most therapists genuinely want to help patients/clients to recover, not just mold them into something socially accepted.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#199What about just talking gibberish in your mind? https://studyfinds.org/buddhist-meditation-christian-tongues...
Anecdotally: Happy people seem to like to talk about anything and everything. Unhappy people don't like to talk or only talk about one thing.
I just got inspired on an llm prompt, and got these three koans, that to me are the most amazing things I've been able to get out of llms so far: https://pastebin.com/tc9uMWuw
Thank you for the set up.
Re: Repetitive negative thinking associated with cognitive decline in older adults
#200Repetitive negative thinking was a symptom of my undiagnosed ADHD. Getting diagnosed and medicated took away the repetitive negative thinking, or as I called it ruminating negative thought patterns.
I really wish I could get diagnosed too. My psychiatrist refuses to even consider it because she says with my psych history as a kid they'd have identified it. But that's nonsense because thinking some adhd has changed hugely since the 80s. You needed to be rain man to be seen as autistic. And adhd was only diagnosed for loud obnoxious kids. My psychiatrist is also very old and kinda clings to those definitions.
But because of this I'm locked out of medication :'(
I'm very typical of both though. AuDHD.