Repetitive Negative Thinking Associated with Cognitive Decline in Older Adults

> Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.

Perhaps an obvious statement but our experience with any type of practice varies in infinite ways from moment to moment. At times things just click or maybe we've built up enough momentum that it could feel effortless, but on just as many occasions it can feel like wading through sludge. When it's the latter I have to ask myself just how am I showing up for the activity. How mindful am I? What's my intention? Perhaps most importantly, is the sense of gratitude actually being felt in my body?

If you don't mind self-help type books, 'Hardwiring Happiness' by Rick Hanson is a fairly accessible resource that stresses the importance of the somatic side of this type of work. The tl;dr is that if more parts of the mind pay _sustained_ attention to the embodied experience of gratitude, compassion, joy etc. then we're increasing the chances of training our minds. So if I find myself enumerating things in a journal that I believe I'm grateful for but the exercise feels contrived or flat then that's a sign I should either tune even more into large parts of the body (can be anywhere but for me it's usually my face, chest, and arms) or just attempt to evoke warm feelings in those areas. That last part can feel fake at times but there's probably value in learning how to encourage more mind processes to sign up for the practice. The OP alluded to this bit with "sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile". If the body remembers what gratitude feels like then chances are that's going to influence the mind for the next few moments.

'Awakening Joy' by James Baraz is another book in this vein. In it the author makes the case that learning how to shift our baseline towards one coloured with joy and gratitude usually requires someone repeatedly and genuinely appreciating seemingly trivial things over the course of each day (food, shelter, mobility, pet, access to nature, etc.). Whereas shifts occurring solely due to significant positive life events are potentially less common.

You are touching on a few things that sound familiar. I _struggle_ with repetition. Tasks like emptying a dishwasher or taking out the trash, to me, are like pure torture. No idea why. Now you can probably imagine what gratitude journaling feels like for me as well ;)

Another commenter mentioned the mantra as a technique (even espoused by various religions, though I'm not religious at all). The mantra is a way to simply take up space / time / focus. As I also mentioned, gratitude journaling simply doesn't allow you to think anything else for a moment and that, in and of itself, can be a relief.

I tend to play around with how I write these things down. Prose takes more effort. Changing the wording, and writing it from different perspectives can be a way to dedicate more mind-resources to it and also make it less boring.

Crucially, however, my ability to do this is supported by the other things I do. I have found that another concept comes in handy here, something I've come to call "avoiding zero-days". A zero-day is a day where I have not done a single thing that contributes to my health. E.g. I have not eaten healthy, I have not learned anything, I have done no exercise, I have done no work and I have ALSO not relaxed (see, the thing with my depression is that I won't really do anything. The tell-tale sign for me is when I stop enjoying video games. That's when I know I'm in deep. So literally getting myself to even play a video game is a win which contributes to a non-zero-day).

The reason I try to avoid zero-days is because ANY of the aforementioned things can give me that tiny positive push to accomplish another thing. Eventually, that can lead to a cascade of me achieving 2-3 positive things I'd like to achieve. And that can be the beginning of crawling out of depression for a while.

Another tendency of mine is to retreat into repetition (ironically, despite hating it) for comfort / safety / convenience / efficiency. So my mind kind of goes "I can score non-zero days by just doing one thing over and over". Take gratitude journaling. I'll be really tempted to not put effort in. To the point where I'll just write single words "exercise, training, sunshine" and be done with it. I start to try to cheat my own system.

So, I then have to remind myself to mix up the activities and see if I can pivot away from the obsessive component locking me in.

It's a never-ending cat and mouse game. That's all I can add from my perspective, not sure if that's of any use to you.

We used to think stress caused ulcers, based on a correlation. We now know the actual cause is a bacterium.

Bodies do not "benefit" from fever. A fever is a signal that pathogens have recently entered the body, and the body is desperately at work trying to kick them out again. If it fails, you die. The fever is a direct mirror of the inflammation caused by that fight.

So, yes, the current administration certainly caused a fever. And the only thing the US benefits from are the antibodies fighting that pathogen.

Do a mental experiment. Suppose that the US disappeared. What would Europe do differently?

I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40485608

I also observed things only getting worse in my life. So I really don't buy this narrative that things keep getting better. IMO, the only people who think things got better are billionaires and multi-millionaires; of course it got better for them but it didn't get better for the average-luck person. For the average ambitious person who worked hard to improve their situation, things got MUCH worse; there are all these artificial barriers preventing them from succeeding, depriving them of opportunities and then constant gaslighting to blame them for systemic issues (including their own failure to thrive). Low birth rates, high rates of depression, high rates of homelessness, high suicide rates speak for themselves.

The fact that it all gets covered up by social media echo chambers to the extent that some people think life got better, makes it MUCH, MUCH worse, not better. People just don't seem to notice the tent cities, the increased immigration (due to worsening conditions in poor countries), the political division (again, driven by poverty).

Obviously a starving, stressed out person is going to have a much lower IQ score then someone who is happy and well fed. You think because that obvious fact is true it completely eliminates genetics? No.

This is what I'm talking about. The mass delusion. The positive cognitive bias. You grasp for evidence that supports the conclusion you want.

Correlation does not equal causation. Variation in genetics in a group can realistically be a factor as well. Three probable possibilities here: Only environment, Only genetics, both genetics and environment. Common sense says it's both genetics and environment.

>It may be true that some racial backgrounds offer an advantage; but there is no evidence to suggest that this advantage is materially large relative to many of the social structural drivers that are obvious.

I never commented how large this advantage was relative to the social driver. I agree with you... the social structure likely the greater driver. But the genetic driver is not insignificant.

>The subtext of the claim is not that a statistically significant effect exists. It’s that there is a big important difference in intelligence across races intrinsically derived from genetics. And there’s no compelling evidence to support that.

There is evidence. But there is huge political debate and attacks around the evidence. There are many studies that study IQ among races independent of environment and many of those studies show there is a statistically significant difference. Those studies suffer from the replication crisis, but so do all conflicting studies within psychology as well.