For example, CBT applied to body dysmorphic syndrome proceeds by challenging the beliefs that patients have about their own attractiveness. But what if you are, as you believe, truly unattractive (as most men seem to be)? And what if lack of physical attractiveness has a major impact on most aspects of your life (as seems to be the case for both sexes)?
Assuming both of those are true, CBT isn’t be about denying that. The next step would be to ask “why is that bad?” and “exactly how bad is it?” Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you’ll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
The act of writing it down and following a structured approach is also really important. Even if you know a thought is irrational, it helps to write down all of the reasons it’s irrational. I don’t know why, but the act of writing it down seems to be important even for things you already “know” in order to believe them on a gut level and actually start to feel better.
All of this is described in the Feeling Good Handbook, which you should be able to find a free pdf of if you can’t afford it.
Assuming both of those are true, CBT isn’t be about denying that. The next step would be to ask “why is that bad?” and “exactly how bad is it?” Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you’ll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse? People who are deceived about themselves typically suffer from illusory superiority, overestimating their positive qualities. So why think that a therapy that proceeds by correcting these false perceptions will make people feel better about themselves?
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
All of this is described in the Feeling Good Handbook, which you should be able to find a free pdf of if you can’t afford it.
Thanks, I have a pdf of that book, which I intend to read partly on the basis of your recommendation (even though I don’t suffer from depression).
But why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse?
I think it’s not that an honest answer will make you feel better. It’s that a detailed honest answer is more likely to help you find tools for improving your situation, while a generic honest answer will make you feel bad and very little else. It’s really just general steps for solving any problem.
Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners.
Much harder doesn’t mean impossible! How much harder is it? How many people that look [a certain way] have partners and how many don’t? Where did the ones that do have partners find their partner? Maybe you could look there. What other personality traits did they develop that helped them succeed at dating while looking [that way]? Maybe you could work on those!
And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive.
This statement really requires data. Unattractive to whom? Probably not to them.
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse?
It’s not an assumption; four weeks of bibliotherapy in the form of reading Feeling Good and doing the exercises has been shown in experiments to be superior to a placebo book for treating depression (75% of patients no longer qualified for DSM criteria of major depressive disorder afterwards), and the improvements were sustained at 3-month and 3-year followup.
Of course, you could then argue that the book doesn’t actually make you evaluate your situation honestly and is just mindless positive thinking, but I don’t think that’d be a fair assessment of the book.
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
Sure, but my example was “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” not ” “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll have a much harder time finding romantic love.”
Sometimes depressed people think they’re too smart for everything and everyone and that’s why they’re depressed. And because they’re too smart to ever be happy, then there’s nothing out there that can help them. Brains get pretty warped sometimes. =[
Yes, definitely! But if they’re smart, then they’re really good at arguing, which means they’re really good at explaining why you’re wrong. So it’s really really hard. =[
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse? People who are deceived about themselves typically suffer from illusory superiority, overestimating their positive qualities. So why think that a therapy that proceeds by correcting these false perceptions will make people feel better about themselves?
If I want to believe that I’m beautiful when I’m not beautiful, then I won’t put myself in situation that might challenge my belief about my own beauty. This creates psychological stress.
People don’t suffer because they have nothing but they suffer because they want something that they don’t get.
It’s not really about having an honest answer and thereby feeling better as it is about having tools or steps you can take to improve your situation rather than being preoccupied with how bad it is or flinching away from it as a possibility.
Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners.
This is true! But that doesn’t mean it is impossible to find romantic partners. Similarly, what is attractive to most people is not necessarily attractive to everyone. And there are a lot of humans in the world! So what’s unattractive to most people might be attractive to several thousand people—which is a lot of potential romantic partners. The other convenient thing is these groups are much better indexed by Google than they used to be a few decades ago. So the thing you can do is Google! And date online, etc.
So yes, it is harder. And it’s frustrating when one group of people has something easier than you do. But easier for them doesn’t mean impossible for you. That’s kind of the idea of CBT. There are things you can do!
This review of the Feeling Good Handbook, which I just found, makes essentially the same point:
It really disturbs me that an entire school of thought has developed around the idea that nobody needs to be depressed, and that if they are, it is simply because they are not being “rational”. For many people this is true. [...] But for many of the rest of us, being depressed is simply being realistic. [...]
It is almost a scientific fact that people need to be acknowledged. When a baby is ignored by its mother, very often it will get sick and die, even if it gets plenty of food and water. I believe that there is a biological need for love, no matter how old we are. Humans also have a variety of other needs, as discovered by Abraham Maslow in his heirarchy of needs. People who are mentally or biologically inferior have more difficulty in getting these needs met, and to me it is a mistake to label these people as “irrational”. We are, indeed, not created equal, nor are we equally capable of being happy. In many cases it will be possible to feel “better”, but it may never be possible to feel “good”.
That’s not quite how it works. Sometimes rational people get depressed and they can tell that their thinking is distorted and un-distorting it doesn’t make them feel better. They just feel bad. Meanwhile, some depressed people contribute to their depression through cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing that PECOS-9 pointed out, and CBT can help (though not necessarily cure) that subset of people.
But for many of the rest of us, being depressed is simply being realistic.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can’t completely fix a problem, then once you’ve done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn’t feel bad anymore.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can’t completely fix a problem, then once you’ve done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn’t feel bad anymore.
This is true, but not always helpful. People aren’t necessarily at liberty to decide whether to feel bad or not.
Pain is extremely valuable as a motivator to address problems with our bodies, but when we’re unable to address those problems, we can’t simply decide to stop feeling pain, no matter how unhelpful the pain might be.
I should have phrased that differently. What I want to say is: once you’ve done everything you can about a problem, and you still feel bad, then feeling bad becomes your new problem. It becomes the new thing to work on! Which is how depression manifests itself sometimes. Which is why you should seek treatment for depression!
I was addressing the review’s claim because it sounds like it’s saying that feeling bad about something is a rational response to reality for some people. For some people, the only response to reality is to be depressed.
Pain is extremely valuable as a motivator to address problems with our bodies, but when we’re unable to address those problems, we can’t simply decide to stop feeling pain, no matter how unhelpful the pain might be.
Can you decide to fall asleep? I can’t. I can’t do it consioucsly but I still fall asleep every night. I just lie in bed and sooner or later my brain decides to switch to sleeping mode.
Switching pain off is similar. Human’s are quite capable of switching it off. At the same time few people can just do it because they want the pain to stop.
Hypnosis allow people to switch off pain signals from their body completely.
If a human mind understands on a deep level that feeling the pain has no use, than it stops.
Switching pain off is similar. Human’s are quite capable of switching it off. At the same time few people can just do it because they want the pain to stop. Hypnosis allow people to switch off pain signals from their body completely.
I’ve heard claims to this effect, but the results of the research I’ve found along those lines are rather less impressive. Bad Science has a short section on it, the gist of which is that most of the claims which are bandied about with respect to hypnotism are exaggerations of the findings of actual research, in which people have demonstrated an ability to tolerate levels of pain which we normally avoid subjecting people to in ordinary medical procedures, but which are not, in fact, greater than people have already been found able to tolerate without hypnotism.
Some people are better at dealing with pain than others, and it’s an ability that can be improved with practice, but if it were possible for humans in general to block out the experience of pain entirely through hypnotism, the military would probably be utilizing that in the training of commandos to resist torture. The influence of the First Earth Battalion is such that this is the sort of prospect the military is very receptive to.
Bad Science has a short section on it, the gist of which is that most of the claims which are bandied about with respect to hypnotism are exaggerations of the findings of actual research, in which people have demonstrated an ability to tolerate levels of pain which we normally avoid subjecting people to in ordinary medical procedures, but which are not, in fact, greater than people have already been found able to tolerate without hypnotism.
I’m not claiming that formal hypnosis is the only way that people can switch off pain perception. People can tolerate a lot if they have no other choice.
I grant that the guy isn’t an average patient but had years of training in going into trance. The example still shows that the human mind is in principle capable of disassocing such pains.
Some people are better at dealing with pain than others, and it’s an ability that can be improved with practice, but if it were possible for humans in general to block out the experience of pain entirely through hypnotism, the military would probably be utilizing that in the training of commandos to resist torture.
I think you have a misconception about how torture works. It’s not about inflicting a maximum of pain in the shortest amount of time.
A soldier that went through good military training shouldn’t break after 5 minutes of maximum pain. The soldier is taught to make up plausible lies to his torturers.
The US used waterboarding to torture. Waterboarding has the advantage of not only inflicting pain but also triggering a feeling of being drowed. Even if the victim would be able to deal with the pain they still feel the reflex of wanting to avoid drowning.
There are many human drives besides the desire to avoid pain that a torturer can use to coerce his victim. Teaching soldiers to buy time by telling the tortures lies seems to be the best strategy for the military.
The influence of the First Earth Battalion is such that this is the sort of prospect the military is very receptive to.
There nothing inherently New Agey about hypnosis. Mid 20st-century The US made hypnosis for medicial purposes by people without a medical degree illegal. Midwives were allowed to give their patients pain killers but weren’t allowed to use hypnosis to reduce pain. Hypnosis would have a different standing today when it wouldn’t have been effectively prosecuted.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid, I’d take its reports with a hearty dose of salt.
I think you have a misconception about how torture works. It’s not about inflicting a maximum of pain in the shortest amount of time.
A soldier that went through good military training shouldn’t break after 5 minutes of maximum pain. The soldier is taught to make up plausible lies to his torturers.
The military does have courses in enduring torture, beyond simply making up plausible lies, as part of commando training, but it doesn’t entail hypnosis.
There nothing inherently New Agey about hypnosis. Mid 20st-century The US made hypnosis for medicial purposes by people without a medical degree illegal. Midwives were allowed to give their patients pain killers but weren’t allowed to use hypnosis to reduce pain. Hypnosis would have a different standing today when it wouldn’t have been effectively prosecuted.
Not everything that spun out of the New Earth Battalion’s influences is “inherently new-agey.” Some of it is grounded thoroughly in hard science, and works quite well for its intended purposes. The influence of the New Earth Battalion has brought about a lot of investigation into outside-the-box, non-mainstream methods and technology for warfare, including but not limited to a lot of stuff that isn’t well supported by evidence.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid, I’d take its reports with a hearty dose of salt.
For most people who don’t want to show off there little reason to use hypnosis without also using other anesthetica at the same time. Especially if you have to get past an ethic board. I wouldn’t expect many scientific papers to exist that investigate the issue.
Most trials that do exist use hypnosis in addition to other anesthetica and find that as a result you need less anesthetica. A meta-analysis says about them: Meta-analysis of 18 studies revealed a moderate to large hypnoanalgesic effect, supporting the efficacy of hypnotic techniques for pain management.
The military does have courses in enduring torture, beyond simply making up plausible lies, as part of commando training, but it doesn’t entail hypnosis.
I don’t want to argue that making up plausible lies is the only feature of those courses but as far as I understand it’s a crucial part of them. The soldier is trained to reach a state where he can tell those lies. He’s not trained to simply shut off.
I’m not sure that the kind of pain reduction that I think is possible through hypnosis would be of high use for training soldiers to resist torture in a cost effective way.
For most people who don’t want to show off there little reason to use hypnosis without also using other anesthetica at the same time. Especially if you have to get past an ethic board. I wouldn’t expect many scientific papers to exist that investigate the issue.
On the flipside, those who ask to use self hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia will tend to be those who want to show off. A news article like the one in the Daily Mail (which has a well established history of not investigating its reports thoroughly, particularly in the areas of health and science, to ensure that they’re actually true) is tremendously good business for a hypnotherapist. If the reality were that it hurt like a motherfucker, but he was able to tough it out, if he could arrange to get an article like the above into print it would still be much to his benefit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if hypnotic techniques can mitigate pain; it’s a mental coping mechanism. You can also get quite good at dealing with physical pain simply by practice. It may be possible for a person to block out the experience of pain entirely through the use of mental techniques, some mental techniques do have very significant effect, but the degree of evidence I’ve found available isn’t enough to disabuse my skepticism. If I were a hypnotherapist who wanted to convince people that my abilities were much more profound than they really were, I would start looking for ways I could trick people into giving a favorable report. If I were a hypnotherapist who really did have abilities which were that profound, I would want to prove it in as high profile and fireproof a manner as I could manage.
I don’t want to argue that making up plausible lies is the only feature of those courses but as far as I understand it’s a crucial part of them. The soldier is trained to reach a state where he can tell those lies. He’s not trained to simply shut off.
I’m not sure that the kind of pain reduction that I think is possible through hypnosis would be of high use for training soldiers to resist torture in a cost effective way.
Training in self hypnotic techniques was one of the initiatives that came out of the New Earth Battalion; many of the techniques investigated (such as the ability to kill animals by staring at them for extended periods) were not realistically practical for military applications even if they had turned out to work. But it does not seem that soldiers capable of entirely blocking out pain ever materialized.
It may be possible for a person to block out the experience of pain entirely through the use of mental techniques, some mental techniques do have very significant effect, but the degree of evidence I’ve found available isn’t enough to disabuse my skepticism.
It’s difficult to know what another person really feels when you don’t trust them to tell you. I know quite a few people who allowed needles to get sticked into their hands and didn’t feel any pain because of hypnosis.
If I were a hypnotherapist who really did have abilities which were that profound, I would want to prove it in as high profile and fireproof a manner as I could manage.
You assume that it’s a good business strategy for a hypotherapist to try to convince skeptics. In reality, there are many people who aren’t skeptics out there. For a hypnotherapist it’s much more effective to focus on winning those people as customers.
A lot of skeptics also have low hypnothic suggestibility in the first place with doesn’t make them the best clients for a hypnotherapist.
You also shouldn’t underrate the difficulty of finding a doctor that’s willing to operate a patient without real anesthetics. A hypnotherapist who wants to demonstrate profound hypnotic power has a much easier time doing stage hypnosis. If you want an example of stage hypnosis producing such an effect, take a look at http://youtu.be/oC9J6O6soHA?t=11m35s .
You assume that it’s a good business strategy for a hypotherapist to try to convince skeptics. In reality, there are many people who aren’t skeptics out there. For a hypnotherapist it’s much more effective to focus on winning those people as customers.
I assume it’s a good business strategy for a hypnotherapist to try to convince many customers. Getting in a tabloid with high circulation is a good start, getting on television is better.
You don’t need to wait for occasions where you need surgery, having an ability to render yourself impervious to pain is begging for “Okay, prove it” challenges.
For pain beyond the ability of ordinary people to tolerate which won’t produce lasting injury, I’d go for challenges involving capsaicin or an Active Denial System.
Finding skeptics willing to challenge your ability to do this under rigorous conditions would be a good way to get publicity, and if you’re willing to place bets on it, a lot of money.
I assume it’s a good business strategy for a hypnotherapist to try to convince many customers. Getting in a tabloid with high circulation is a good start, getting on television is better.
I think you overrate the effect of being on TV. I was involved with a few Quantified Self TV productions in Germany and in general they didn’t brought more than a few new people to the QS meetups. Personal referrals do much more than mainstream media.
I also know a hypnotherapist who was on TV in a session where he cured a women of a phobia of taking pictures. It was nice for him but it didn’t bring him hundreds of new clients.
For pain beyond the ability of ordinary people to tolerate which won’t produce lasting injury, I’d go for challenges involving capsaicin or an Active Denial System.
Capsaicin sounds nice in principle. The problem is that most people don’t know what a specific amount of capsaicin would do to a person. What kind of dose would you propose? Both that the dose isn’t so high to deal real damage but at the same time that skeptics are convinced that the dose is high enough?
Finding skeptics willing to challenge your ability to do this under rigorous conditions would be a good way to get publicity, and if you’re willing to place bets on it, a lot of money.
Do you really think that a skeptic would be willing to bet a lot of money on this? It’s not like you are demonstrating telekinesis.
Capsaicin sounds nice in principle. The problem is that most people don’t know what a specific amount of capsaicin would do to a person. What kind of dose would you propose? Both that the dose isn’t so high to deal real damage but at the same time that skeptics are convinced that the dose is high enough?
Well, it takes a hell of a lot more capsaicin to do lasting damage to someone than it does to cause fairly intolerable pain. If I wanted to demonstrate that I was impervious to pain, I would probably get some Sixteen Million Reserve, and dissolve it in front of an audience at, say, a 1:10 solution. Then I’d split that into two vessels, and dilute one of them a further ten times, and have a panel of other people willing to take the challenge insert swabs into that, and stick them up their noses. Let the audience see what it does to them. Then do the same myself, with the ten times more concentrated solution. Let them see that regardless of what inflammation occurs, I show no signs of pain.
I’d sooner use the Active Denial System though. Once you’ve subjected yourself to a dose of capsaicin, there’s pretty much nothing you can do but bear it, regardless of how stoic you may or may not be. But an Active Denial System will send people running in seconds. If I could stand blithely in front of one while a whole crowd of people was dropping everything to get away, that would be a pretty compelling demonstration.
Do you really think that a skeptic would be willing to bet a lot of money on this? It’s not like you are demonstrating telekinesis.
Shop around for one who will. I’d look up someone high profile like James Randi and ask “do you believe I could do this? Are you willing to bet I can’t?” If you can get enough skeptics admitting they do believe you can do it, it’s good publicity to capitalize on.
Let them see that regardless of what inflammation occurs, I show no signs of pain.
I think it would be likely that inflammation would also be reduced.
I’d sooner use the Active Denial System though. Once you’ve subjected yourself to a dose of capsaicin, there’s pretty much nothing you can do but bear it, regardless of how stoic you may or may not be.
Basically you would do it because you aren’t confident that you could eliminate the pain. I don’t think that someone who would go into an experiment like this would have that concern.
On the other hand it would make it hard to recruit the people in the audience who are supposed to test the diluted version if they will feel intolerable pain for half an hour. It would also make it hard to get ethics approval if you want to get published.
As far as the Active Denial System goes, it’s expensive equipment. That means it will be hard to test the conditions of the experiment before you run the actual experiment.
I have never heared of the technology before. This means you would have to explain it. That explanation adds complexity to the whole story that’s not good for PR purposes.
I also wouldn’t want to do a public promotion of the Active Denial System.
I’d look up someone high profile like James Randi and ask “do you believe I could do this?
I don’t think that the experiment fulfills Randi’s criteria’s of paranormal phenomena. Randi also doesn’t take challenges anymore from people who aren’t noteworthy to begin with.
There is sufcient evidence, of sufcient quality, for a number of high-quality review
studies to have concluded that hypnosis has demonstrable efcacy in the treatment of pain.
A study like that might not be enough to convince a skeptic that you can do major surgery under hypnosis. When looking at something like your capsaicin example or the Active Denial System I’m not sure that you can convience people that those produce enough pain to make a profound impression that would warrent decent bets and PR.
Basically you would do it because you aren’t confident that you could eliminate the pain. I don’t think that someone who would go into an experiment like this would have that concern.
On the other hand it would make it hard to recruit the people in the audience who are supposed to test the diluted version if they will feel intolerable pain for half an hour. It would also make it hard to get ethics approval if you want to get published.
I would go up on stage and stick a capsaicin swab up my nose, outside the hypothetical where I have the ability to eliminate pain through self hypnosis. I don’t think it would be that hard to find other people who’d do it. It’ll be the same sort of demographic who eats food that’s spicy enough that you get your picture up on a wall of fame if you finish it.
Getting published isn’t really a concern at all. I wouldn’t care about whether I was getting into research journals, just whether I was convincing as much of the population as I could of what I was capable of.
As far as the Active Denial System goes, it’s expensive equipment. That means it will be hard to test the conditions of the experiment before you run the actual experiment. I have never heared of the technology before. This means you would have to explain it. That explanation adds complexity to the whole story that’s not good for PR purposes. I also wouldn’t want to do a public promotion of the Active Denial System.
You don’t need to explain anything beyond “this thing shoots beams that hurt like hell.” Get a big enough crowd, and there are always going to be a few tough guys or suckers for punishment who’ll volunteer to subject themselves to it. The important thing is not that the crowd knows how it works, but that they get a sense of how much it hurts.
Considering nobody has yet managed to stand for over five seconds in the beam of an Active Denial System, I think it would be sufficient to make a profound impression on anyone who witnesses a demonstration.
I don’t think that the experiment fulfills Randi’s criteria’s of paranormal phenomena. Randi also doesn’t take challenges anymore from people who aren’t noteworthy to begin with.
He used to until relatively recently. If I wanted his stamp of approval these days, I’d work my way up from lower profile figures until I reached a point where he would have to either test me or openly admit that he didn’t doubt my ability.
Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you’ll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
This seems to be predicated on the assumption that none of the things that cause you distress will be things that are actually just as bad as you think they are.
A person might only value attractiveness instrumentally as a means of attaining love, and over-weight its instrumental value for such, but what about a person who believes that they’ll never be able to attain some major life goal due to reasons that actually preclude attainment of that life goal?
CBT may work better than placebo (although the state of the research on this is controversial, see section four here,) but that doesn’t mean that people suffering distress from some life circumstance always, or even usually, are evaluating those circumstances irrationally. Placebo therapy is pretty effective, a great deal of the effectiveness of CBT is likely due to the same qualities which make placebo therapy useful.
Having engaged in CBT, I felt that it was a worthwhile experience, but the benefits in my case had far more to do with being able to discuss the matters I was concerned with openly and in depth with another person, because I’m better at resolving problems when I feel accountable to someone other than only myself, rather than addressing particular irrationalities in my outlook (to the extent that my tendency to be less able to resolve problems without being accountable to other people is an irrationality, it’s not one that CBT has been able to address.)
he next step would be to ask “why is that bad?” and “exactly how bad is it?”
Yes. Face the loss. What is the cost? We worry that if X, then Y, and fret all day over the uncertainty of X, instead of facing the loss of Y as a done deal, and knowing that we’ll survive and life won’t be so horrible.
Assuming both of those are true, CBT isn’t be about denying that. The next step would be to ask “why is that bad?” and “exactly how bad is it?” Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you’ll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
The act of writing it down and following a structured approach is also really important. Even if you know a thought is irrational, it helps to write down all of the reasons it’s irrational. I don’t know why, but the act of writing it down seems to be important even for things you already “know” in order to believe them on a gut level and actually start to feel better.
All of this is described in the Feeling Good Handbook, which you should be able to find a free pdf of if you can’t afford it.
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse? People who are deceived about themselves typically suffer from illusory superiority, overestimating their positive qualities. So why think that a therapy that proceeds by correcting these false perceptions will make people feel better about themselves?
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
Thanks, I have a pdf of that book, which I intend to read partly on the basis of your recommendation (even though I don’t suffer from depression).
I think it’s not that an honest answer will make you feel better. It’s that a detailed honest answer is more likely to help you find tools for improving your situation, while a generic honest answer will make you feel bad and very little else. It’s really just general steps for solving any problem.
Much harder doesn’t mean impossible! How much harder is it? How many people that look [a certain way] have partners and how many don’t? Where did the ones that do have partners find their partner? Maybe you could look there. What other personality traits did they develop that helped them succeed at dating while looking [that way]? Maybe you could work on those!
This statement really requires data. Unattractive to whom? Probably not to them.
It’s not an assumption; four weeks of bibliotherapy in the form of reading Feeling Good and doing the exercises has been shown in experiments to be superior to a placebo book for treating depression (75% of patients no longer qualified for DSM criteria of major depressive disorder afterwards), and the improvements were sustained at 3-month and 3-year followup.
Of course, you could then argue that the book doesn’t actually make you evaluate your situation honestly and is just mindless positive thinking, but I don’t think that’d be a fair assessment of the book.
Sure, but my example was “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” not ” “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll have a much harder time finding romantic love.”
Yes, typically. Not always.
If you’re suffering from illusory superiority, are you likely to be pursuing CBT to counter depression?
Almost everyone suffers from illusory superiority. If CBT doesn’t work for people in this category, that is in itself a strong argument against CBT.
It seems like you are saying that depressed people suffer from illusory superiority—overoptimism—in respect to the foci of their depression.
This doesn’t seem right.
Sometimes depressed people think they’re too smart for everything and everyone and that’s why they’re depressed. And because they’re too smart to ever be happy, then there’s nothing out there that can help them. Brains get pretty warped sometimes. =[
But wouldn’t bursting their bubble on this matter then help them in the medium and long runs?
Yes, definitely! But if they’re smart, then they’re really good at arguing, which means they’re really good at explaining why you’re wrong. So it’s really really hard. =[
If I want to believe that I’m beautiful when I’m not beautiful, then I won’t put myself in situation that might challenge my belief about my own beauty. This creates psychological stress.
People don’t suffer because they have nothing but they suffer because they want something that they don’t get.
It’s not really about having an honest answer and thereby feeling better as it is about having tools or steps you can take to improve your situation rather than being preoccupied with how bad it is or flinching away from it as a possibility.
This is true! But that doesn’t mean it is impossible to find romantic partners. Similarly, what is attractive to most people is not necessarily attractive to everyone. And there are a lot of humans in the world! So what’s unattractive to most people might be attractive to several thousand people—which is a lot of potential romantic partners. The other convenient thing is these groups are much better indexed by Google than they used to be a few decades ago. So the thing you can do is Google! And date online, etc.
So yes, it is harder. And it’s frustrating when one group of people has something easier than you do. But easier for them doesn’t mean impossible for you. That’s kind of the idea of CBT. There are things you can do!
This review of the Feeling Good Handbook, which I just found, makes essentially the same point:
That’s not quite how it works. Sometimes rational people get depressed and they can tell that their thinking is distorted and un-distorting it doesn’t make them feel better. They just feel bad. Meanwhile, some depressed people contribute to their depression through cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing that PECOS-9 pointed out, and CBT can help (though not necessarily cure) that subset of people.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can’t completely fix a problem, then once you’ve done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn’t feel bad anymore.
This is true, but not always helpful. People aren’t necessarily at liberty to decide whether to feel bad or not.
Pain is extremely valuable as a motivator to address problems with our bodies, but when we’re unable to address those problems, we can’t simply decide to stop feeling pain, no matter how unhelpful the pain might be.
I should have phrased that differently. What I want to say is: once you’ve done everything you can about a problem, and you still feel bad, then feeling bad becomes your new problem. It becomes the new thing to work on! Which is how depression manifests itself sometimes. Which is why you should seek treatment for depression!
I was addressing the review’s claim because it sounds like it’s saying that feeling bad about something is a rational response to reality for some people. For some people, the only response to reality is to be depressed.
Does that address your comment?
Yes, but then, the acknowledgment that feeling bad despite it not being useful is your problem doesn’t always make the problem easy to solve.
Can you decide to fall asleep? I can’t. I can’t do it consioucsly but I still fall asleep every night. I just lie in bed and sooner or later my brain decides to switch to sleeping mode.
Switching pain off is similar. Human’s are quite capable of switching it off. At the same time few people can just do it because they want the pain to stop. Hypnosis allow people to switch off pain signals from their body completely.
If a human mind understands on a deep level that feeling the pain has no use, than it stops.
I’ve heard claims to this effect, but the results of the research I’ve found along those lines are rather less impressive. Bad Science has a short section on it, the gist of which is that most of the claims which are bandied about with respect to hypnotism are exaggerations of the findings of actual research, in which people have demonstrated an ability to tolerate levels of pain which we normally avoid subjecting people to in ordinary medical procedures, but which are not, in fact, greater than people have already been found able to tolerate without hypnotism.
Some people are better at dealing with pain than others, and it’s an ability that can be improved with practice, but if it were possible for humans in general to block out the experience of pain entirely through hypnotism, the military would probably be utilizing that in the training of commandos to resist torture. The influence of the First Earth Battalion is such that this is the sort of prospect the military is very receptive to.
I’m not claiming that formal hypnosis is the only way that people can switch off pain perception. People can tolerate a lot if they have no other choice.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-560534/The-hypnotist-snubbed-anaesthetic-sent-trance-painful-bone-cutting-surgery.html would be an example of a hypnotherapist who went for a 83 minute operation without anesthetic and said that he felt no pain as the doctors chiselled out a walnut- sized chunk of bone from his wrist.
I grant that the guy isn’t an average patient but had years of training in going into trance. The example still shows that the human mind is in principle capable of disassocing such pains.
I think you have a misconception about how torture works. It’s not about inflicting a maximum of pain in the shortest amount of time.
A soldier that went through good military training shouldn’t break after 5 minutes of maximum pain. The soldier is taught to make up plausible lies to his torturers.
The US used waterboarding to torture. Waterboarding has the advantage of not only inflicting pain but also triggering a feeling of being drowed. Even if the victim would be able to deal with the pain they still feel the reflex of wanting to avoid drowning.
There are many human drives besides the desire to avoid pain that a torturer can use to coerce his victim. Teaching soldiers to buy time by telling the tortures lies seems to be the best strategy for the military.
There nothing inherently New Agey about hypnosis. Mid 20st-century The US made hypnosis for medicial purposes by people without a medical degree illegal. Midwives were allowed to give their patients pain killers but weren’t allowed to use hypnosis to reduce pain. Hypnosis would have a different standing today when it wouldn’t have been effectively prosecuted.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid, I’d take its reports with a hearty dose of salt.
The military does have courses in enduring torture, beyond simply making up plausible lies, as part of commando training, but it doesn’t entail hypnosis.
Not everything that spun out of the New Earth Battalion’s influences is “inherently new-agey.” Some of it is grounded thoroughly in hard science, and works quite well for its intended purposes. The influence of the New Earth Battalion has brought about a lot of investigation into outside-the-box, non-mainstream methods and technology for warfare, including but not limited to a lot of stuff that isn’t well supported by evidence.
For most people who don’t want to show off there little reason to use hypnosis without also using other anesthetica at the same time. Especially if you have to get past an ethic board. I wouldn’t expect many scientific papers to exist that investigate the issue.
Self-induced hypnosis for bilateral ankle arthroscopy would be one case report with describes a patient who got 3 orthopedic intervention without conventional anaesthetic.
Most trials that do exist use hypnosis in addition to other anesthetica and find that as a result you need less anesthetica. A meta-analysis says about them: Meta-analysis of 18 studies revealed a moderate to large hypnoanalgesic effect, supporting the efficacy of hypnotic techniques for pain management.
I don’t want to argue that making up plausible lies is the only feature of those courses but as far as I understand it’s a crucial part of them. The soldier is trained to reach a state where he can tell those lies. He’s not trained to simply shut off.
I’m not sure that the kind of pain reduction that I think is possible through hypnosis would be of high use for training soldiers to resist torture in a cost effective way.
On the flipside, those who ask to use self hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia will tend to be those who want to show off. A news article like the one in the Daily Mail (which has a well established history of not investigating its reports thoroughly, particularly in the areas of health and science, to ensure that they’re actually true) is tremendously good business for a hypnotherapist. If the reality were that it hurt like a motherfucker, but he was able to tough it out, if he could arrange to get an article like the above into print it would still be much to his benefit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if hypnotic techniques can mitigate pain; it’s a mental coping mechanism. You can also get quite good at dealing with physical pain simply by practice. It may be possible for a person to block out the experience of pain entirely through the use of mental techniques, some mental techniques do have very significant effect, but the degree of evidence I’ve found available isn’t enough to disabuse my skepticism. If I were a hypnotherapist who wanted to convince people that my abilities were much more profound than they really were, I would start looking for ways I could trick people into giving a favorable report. If I were a hypnotherapist who really did have abilities which were that profound, I would want to prove it in as high profile and fireproof a manner as I could manage.
Training in self hypnotic techniques was one of the initiatives that came out of the New Earth Battalion; many of the techniques investigated (such as the ability to kill animals by staring at them for extended periods) were not realistically practical for military applications even if they had turned out to work. But it does not seem that soldiers capable of entirely blocking out pain ever materialized.
It’s difficult to know what another person really feels when you don’t trust them to tell you. I know quite a few people who allowed needles to get sticked into their hands and didn’t feel any pain because of hypnosis.
You assume that it’s a good business strategy for a hypotherapist to try to convince skeptics. In reality, there are many people who aren’t skeptics out there. For a hypnotherapist it’s much more effective to focus on winning those people as customers.
A lot of skeptics also have low hypnothic suggestibility in the first place with doesn’t make them the best clients for a hypnotherapist.
You also shouldn’t underrate the difficulty of finding a doctor that’s willing to operate a patient without real anesthetics. A hypnotherapist who wants to demonstrate profound hypnotic power has a much easier time doing stage hypnosis. If you want an example of stage hypnosis producing such an effect, take a look at http://youtu.be/oC9J6O6soHA?t=11m35s .
I assume it’s a good business strategy for a hypnotherapist to try to convince many customers. Getting in a tabloid with high circulation is a good start, getting on television is better.
You don’t need to wait for occasions where you need surgery, having an ability to render yourself impervious to pain is begging for “Okay, prove it” challenges.
For pain beyond the ability of ordinary people to tolerate which won’t produce lasting injury, I’d go for challenges involving capsaicin or an Active Denial System.
Finding skeptics willing to challenge your ability to do this under rigorous conditions would be a good way to get publicity, and if you’re willing to place bets on it, a lot of money.
I think you overrate the effect of being on TV. I was involved with a few Quantified Self TV productions in Germany and in general they didn’t brought more than a few new people to the QS meetups. Personal referrals do much more than mainstream media.
I also know a hypnotherapist who was on TV in a session where he cured a women of a phobia of taking pictures. It was nice for him but it didn’t bring him hundreds of new clients.
Capsaicin sounds nice in principle. The problem is that most people don’t know what a specific amount of capsaicin would do to a person. What kind of dose would you propose? Both that the dose isn’t so high to deal real damage but at the same time that skeptics are convinced that the dose is high enough?
Do you really think that a skeptic would be willing to bet a lot of money on this? It’s not like you are demonstrating telekinesis.
Well, it takes a hell of a lot more capsaicin to do lasting damage to someone than it does to cause fairly intolerable pain. If I wanted to demonstrate that I was impervious to pain, I would probably get some Sixteen Million Reserve, and dissolve it in front of an audience at, say, a 1:10 solution. Then I’d split that into two vessels, and dilute one of them a further ten times, and have a panel of other people willing to take the challenge insert swabs into that, and stick them up their noses. Let the audience see what it does to them. Then do the same myself, with the ten times more concentrated solution. Let them see that regardless of what inflammation occurs, I show no signs of pain.
I’d sooner use the Active Denial System though. Once you’ve subjected yourself to a dose of capsaicin, there’s pretty much nothing you can do but bear it, regardless of how stoic you may or may not be. But an Active Denial System will send people running in seconds. If I could stand blithely in front of one while a whole crowd of people was dropping everything to get away, that would be a pretty compelling demonstration.
Shop around for one who will. I’d look up someone high profile like James Randi and ask “do you believe I could do this? Are you willing to bet I can’t?” If you can get enough skeptics admitting they do believe you can do it, it’s good publicity to capitalize on.
I think it would be likely that inflammation would also be reduced.
Basically you would do it because you aren’t confident that you could eliminate the pain. I don’t think that someone who would go into an experiment like this would have that concern.
On the other hand it would make it hard to recruit the people in the audience who are supposed to test the diluted version if they will feel intolerable pain for half an hour. It would also make it hard to get ethics approval if you want to get published.
As far as the Active Denial System goes, it’s expensive equipment. That means it will be hard to test the conditions of the experiment before you run the actual experiment. I have never heared of the technology before. This means you would have to explain it. That explanation adds complexity to the whole story that’s not good for PR purposes. I also wouldn’t want to do a public promotion of the Active Denial System.
I don’t think that the experiment fulfills Randi’s criteria’s of paranormal phenomena. Randi also doesn’t take challenges anymore from people who aren’t noteworthy to begin with.
Before betting decent money I would guess that a skeptic would read the literature and papers like “A systematic meta-review of hypnosis as an empirically supported treatment for pain by Russell MF Hawkins” which conclude:
A study like that might not be enough to convince a skeptic that you can do major surgery under hypnosis. When looking at something like your capsaicin example or the Active Denial System I’m not sure that you can convience people that those produce enough pain to make a profound impression that would warrent decent bets and PR.
I would go up on stage and stick a capsaicin swab up my nose, outside the hypothetical where I have the ability to eliminate pain through self hypnosis. I don’t think it would be that hard to find other people who’d do it. It’ll be the same sort of demographic who eats food that’s spicy enough that you get your picture up on a wall of fame if you finish it.
Getting published isn’t really a concern at all. I wouldn’t care about whether I was getting into research journals, just whether I was convincing as much of the population as I could of what I was capable of.
You don’t need to explain anything beyond “this thing shoots beams that hurt like hell.” Get a big enough crowd, and there are always going to be a few tough guys or suckers for punishment who’ll volunteer to subject themselves to it. The important thing is not that the crowd knows how it works, but that they get a sense of how much it hurts.
Considering nobody has yet managed to stand for over five seconds in the beam of an Active Denial System, I think it would be sufficient to make a profound impression on anyone who witnesses a demonstration.
He used to until relatively recently. If I wanted his stamp of approval these days, I’d work my way up from lower profile figures until I reached a point where he would have to either test me or openly admit that he didn’t doubt my ability.
This seems to be predicated on the assumption that none of the things that cause you distress will be things that are actually just as bad as you think they are.
A person might only value attractiveness instrumentally as a means of attaining love, and over-weight its instrumental value for such, but what about a person who believes that they’ll never be able to attain some major life goal due to reasons that actually preclude attainment of that life goal?
Then they’d probably find a different irrational thought somewhere, such as “Nothing else is worth anything if I don’t achieve this goal.”
Why is that?
CBT may work better than placebo (although the state of the research on this is controversial, see section four here,) but that doesn’t mean that people suffering distress from some life circumstance always, or even usually, are evaluating those circumstances irrationally. Placebo therapy is pretty effective, a great deal of the effectiveness of CBT is likely due to the same qualities which make placebo therapy useful.
Having engaged in CBT, I felt that it was a worthwhile experience, but the benefits in my case had far more to do with being able to discuss the matters I was concerned with openly and in depth with another person, because I’m better at resolving problems when I feel accountable to someone other than only myself, rather than addressing particular irrationalities in my outlook (to the extent that my tendency to be less able to resolve problems without being accountable to other people is an irrationality, it’s not one that CBT has been able to address.)
Yes. Face the loss. What is the cost? We worry that if X, then Y, and fret all day over the uncertainty of X, instead of facing the loss of Y as a done deal, and knowing that we’ll survive and life won’t be so horrible.
Maybe they got married when they were younger, and more attractive. :rolleyes: