The Dublin based artist Dan Walsh has quite a hit on his hands. A while back, he decided to reinterpret Garfield by simply cutting Garfield out of the comic which bears his name. Garfield Minus Garfield was the result. What your left with is a revealing picture of John Arbuckle, the American everyman.
In Real Life
In real life, John Arbuckle would be a single man who spends most of his time at home speaking to his cat. With Garfield missing, you get a good taste of how lonely John’s life is.
The ancient Greeks used to divide people into four temperaments: phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic, and choleric. We’ve come a long way since then. We no longer fit into little neat categories, and things are now decidedly more complicated. Genetics has now replaced the temperaments, and there are far more than four genes to contend with.
Everyone has a different genetic profile, and these profiles are a bit like canvases on which mental states are painted. The genetic qualities of the canvas determines how certain colors — like the dark hues of depression and anxiety, or the warm tones of happiness — are expressed in a person’s life. Some people have canvases that favor darker colors, other people have canvases which favor lighter colors.
Your personal biology, your unique blend of genes, provides you with the form and quality of your canvas. However, environmental factors will bend, twist, break, and mend this canvas into different shapes. It’s this combination of nurture and nature that will ultimately determine the quality of your experiences.
Depression will be painted differently depending on the canvas it finds itself on. There is no single image of depression. That’s one of the reasons why different drugs work differently on different people. Despite the symptomatic similarities that depressed people share, each case is unique, because each canvas is unique.
Let’s consider five factors that will help determine the nature of your depression. These five factors can also shed light on different mental states, like happiness, anxiety, and anger. Each of them twists your canvas in a different direction, leaving you with different experiences.
1. Genetic factors
The genes you inherit play a large role in determining the experiences you have. Some genes that may play a role in regulating depression are 5-HTT, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, and COMT. In time, we’ll have a fuller understanding of these genetic variables.
It will be years before we have an understanding of how our genes combine to create our human experiences. Despite the existence of genetic profiling services like 23andme.com, we are still a long way off to understanding the very building blocks which predispose us to conditions like depression. For this reason, though genetic factors are perhaps the most important in causing depression, they are also currently the least understood.
You’re more likely to spend money on expensive, high-status items after being reminded of a time in your life when someone had power over you. At least, that’s what a recent study suggests.
In three experiments, the authors asked participants to either describe a situation where they had power over another person or one in which someone had power over them. Then the researchers showed them items and asked how much they would be willing to pay.
After recalling situations where they were powerless, participants were willing to pay more for items that signal status, like silk ties and fur coats, but not products like minivans and dryers. They also agreed to pay more for a framed picture of their university if it was portrayed as rare and exclusive.
One lesson to gleam from these experiments is that our feelings are very much context dependent. The researchers were able to elicit a state of social insecurity in their subjects only through asking a few carefully designed questions.
Searching your way to better health: How I got rid of panic attacks.
Filed Under Overcome Depression, Personal Stories | Sep 2, MDT 12:37 pm
Years ago, I underwent a period of frequent and intense panic attacks. At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me. Eventually, after one particularly bad episode, I took a trip to the E.R room of a local hospital. It was late at night, and the doctor who saw me admitted that he wasn’t really equipped to deal with mental health issues. He tried to give me a diagnosis, but what he came up with was less than satisfying. He thought I might have been having a schizophrenic episode, and I knew that I most definitely wasn’t.
He asked me to wait until they could call in a psychiatrist. After several hours of dicking around the gloomy interiors of this rather decrepit hospital, a psychiatrist finally showed up — and she was absolutely, utterly, and completely terrible. She made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to be there, and after a few cursory questions she immediately asked me if I wanted any drugs. I told her no thank you, and then she basically kicked me out of her squalid little office.
Dr. Google Provides A Diagnosis
I decided that since these doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing, I’d have to diagnose myself. When I got back home, I went online and entered some of my symptoms into Google — shakiness, rapid heart beats, shortness of breath, and nausea. I started browsing through various conditions, and through a process of elimination I realized I was having panic attacks.
A holistic guide to dealing with emotional vampires
Filed Under Relating to People | Sep 1, MDT 12:43 pm
I paint emotional vampirism with big, broad brush strokes. Most folks place vampirism under very tight constraints. I prefer treating the issue holistically — the people who leave us feeling drained are part of a larger system, and to effectively deal with them, we have to deal with the system that they belong to. That we belong to, actually.
We’re all members of a shared reality; we’re all subject to the same physical, natural, and psychological laws. The emotional vampires we meet are nothing more than the emissaries of these laws. This might seem like a silly distinction, and yet recognizing it can be incredibly empowering. When you realize that it’s not the vampires that are the problem, but the laws of nature that allow them to exist, you’ll finally be in a position to really put an end to the energy leaks in your life.
It’s not enough to deal with the vampires — you got to deal with the circumstances that brought them into your life and the conditions that made you vulnerable to their presence.
Your vulnerability here is something that is uniquely your own. Different people have different impacts on each other. Someone that leaves me feeling weak might leave you feeling empowered — and there’s rarely a simple reason behind these different reactions. Not only that, but these personal reactions are easily modified by circumstances. Your diet, sleep schedule, personal hygiene, health, the environment your in, your recent personal history, all of these things can alter the way the people in your life make you feel.
Since no one has, as of yet, figured out all the rules and laws which govern our behavior and feelings, I can’t quite offer you a silver bullet for your problems. What I’d like to do, instead, is offer you a way of looking at them, a way that will let you avoid vampires and lure angels.
The key here is vulnerability. Knowing what you’re personally vulnerable to will allow you to make better decisions on how to live your life, on who you want in your life, and under what conditions you want to deal with the people you’ve let in.
Since we’re all vulnerable to different things under different circumstances, this will require a great deal of research and experimentation. Here are some tools and exercises that can help you map them out.
EXPERIMENT:
Steve Pavlina has pioneered the 30 day exercise. Basically, you spend thirty days trying something out to see how you react to it. It’s a methodical way of testing different lifestyle changes, and it can help you suss out what energizes you and what doesn’t. You might find that a better diet might ward off vampire attacks, or starting an exercise regimen, or saying no more often. Once again, different things work for different people.
The Zenhabits forum is an excellent place to share the progress of your experiment. They have forums dedicated to monthly challenges, where people post about new habits they’re trying to acquire. You don’t have to keep the habit at the end of it; after all, perhaps it just doesn’t suit you. Be open to failing.
- The Posts of 2008
- In 2009, I resolve to be…
- A diet of happy thoughts
- Misery Around The Web
- Daily meditation stops wandering thoughts
- Quackery, Pseudoscience, and You.
- Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
- Personal Stories and Interviews, a round-up
- The Power of Posture
- Beating Seasonal Affective Disorder
anti-depressants buddhism celexa childhood abuse citalopram depression drugs FKBP5 genes genetics lithium loneliness mania meditation misanthropy misery nlp pharmacogenetics relationships SLC6A4 studies suicide Treatments and Therapies for Better Health videos website