Jordan Petersons Advice For People With Depression

the first thing i would say is that if

you’re dealing with someone who’s

depressed and they’re really depressed

you should try giving them

antidepressants because if they die

you can’t help them okay so if you’re

suffering

you are obligated in a sense to hold on

to whatever rope someone throws you

and one of the things i do with my

clients all the time especially if

they’re really in trouble is to tell

them look

i don’t know exactly what’s going to hap

help you but don’t arbitrarily throw out

any possibilities because you might not

have that luxury

antidepressants help a lot of people and

there are technical reasons why that’s

the case

so that’s a simple answer it’s not

relevant to what i already described

except that if you’re offered a gift by

your society and it works

try it i don’t care what your

presuppositions are

apart from that

lots of the lots of time lots of the

time you see people who are suffering

with depression for example there’s a

multitude of reasons but i’ll take one

common reason

um you could think about it as

associated with the story of peter pan

a peter pan is someone who won’t grow up

right now the problem with peter pan is

he gets to be king

but it’s king of neverland neverland

doesn’t exist

so being king of nothing isn’t that

helpful

well one of the things that you often

see with people who suffer from

depression

and and i’m not making a blanket

statement about the cause of depression

because there’s lots of them

is that people who don’t have enough

order in their life tend to get

overwhelmed

so for example if someone comes into me

and sees to see me

and they say they’re depressed i always

ask them a very standard set of

questions

do you have a job if you don’t have a

job you’re really in trouble in our

society

first of all you your biological rhythms

tend to go off the rails right away

because there’s no reason to go to bed

at any particular time and there’s no

reason to get up and

for many people if they don’t get up at

the same time

they follow up the functioning of their

circadian rhythms and that’s enough to

make them depressed right off the bat

especially if they start napping during

the afternoon

they don’t also don’t have a purpose

people aren’t good without a purpose and

this isn’t

this isn’t hypothesizing we absolutely

understand the circuitry that underlies

positive emotion

we know how it works almost all the

positive emotion that any of you are

likely to experience

in your life will not be a consequence

of attaining things

it will be a consequence of seeing that

things are working as you proceed

towards a goal you value

that’s completely different and you need

to know this because people are often

stunned for example they finish their

phd thesis

and their presupposition is that they’re

going to be elated for a month and

often instead they’re actually depressed

and they think what the hell i’ve been

working on this for seven years and

i handed it in and what do i do now and

that’s what depresses them right it’s

the what do i do now

well they’re fine if they enjoyed it

pursuing the thing as long as it was

working out they get a lot of enthusiasm

and excitement out of that because

that’s how our nervous systems work

most of your positive emotion is goal

pursuit emotion

if you take drugs like cocaine or

amphetamine the reason they’re enjoyable

is because they turn on the systems that

help you pursue goals

that’s why people like them so if you

don’t have a job you got no structure

that’s not good plus you tend not to

have a point

so you’re overwhelmed by chaotic lack of

structure and you don’t have any

positive emotion

well do you have any friends so

sometimes you see people who are

depressed they have no job

they have no friends they have no

intimate relationship they have an

additional health problem

and they have a drug and alcohol problem

my experience has been if you have

three of those problems it’s almost

impossible to help you

you’re so deeply mired in chaos that you

can’t get out because

you make progress on one front and one

of your other problems pulls you down

so one of the things i tell people who

are depressed is like don’t

sacrifice your stability get a job

even if it’s not the job you exactly

want get a damn job you need a job

find some friends get out in the dating

circuit

see if you can establish an intimate

relationship put together some of the

foundational items that

that are like pillars that your life

rests on well that’s the practical thing

to do

so that’s one example with regards to

depression

well the thing is you don’t just launch

it on them you know you’ve got to

negotiate with the person

and you also got to teach them to

negotiate with themselves and this is

something that’s very useful to know

you know um you can tyrannize yourself

into doing things but i wouldn’t

recommend it

what i would recommend instead is that

you ask yourself what you’re willing to

do

it’s a really effective technique it’s

like a meditative technique so for

example

you can get up in the morning and you

can think well you know i’d like to have

a good day today so i’d like to go to

bed tonight without feeling guilty

because i you know didn’t do some things

i said i was going to do and i you know

i’d like to have kind of an interesting

day so you got to fulfill my

responsibilities and i want to you know

enjoy the day

then you can ask yourself well okay what

would i have to do in order for that to

happen that i would do

and the probability if you practice this

for three or four days is your brain

will just tell you’ll say well you know

there’s that piece of homework that you

haven’t done for

like three weeks you should knock that

sucker off because it would only take

you 10 minutes and you’ve been avoiding

it and torturing yourself to death for

you know like like 72 hours straight and

if you do that here’s a little

interesting thing you can do and

you know maybe this is little

obligations you should clean up and

so what what you do in a situation like

that is you teach

the person to negotiate with themselves

say well let’s figure out what your aims

are you got to have some aims

whatever they are and they might say

well i’m so depressed i don’t have any

aims and then i say well pick the least

objectionable of the aims and act it out

for a while and see what happens because

sometimes your emotions

your emotional systems are so followed

up that you have to pretend

you have to act the thing out before you

can start to believe it i mean people

always assume they have to believe and

then act but

but that’s sometimes that’s true and

lots of times it isn’t

so the trick if you’re doing therapeutic

work with somebody and you’re helping

them establish a structure is to find

out what they’ll do

now if they want to get better which is

not a given

because there are often payoffs for not

getting better

that’s basically the payoffs of being a

martyr or maybe the payoffs of doing

what your

entirely pathological family members

want you to do because they actually

want you to fail assuming you want to

get better there’s usually

something you can figure out that would

constitute a step towards some sort of

concrete goal

and my presumption it’s a behavioral

presumption fundamentally is that

small accruing gains that repeat

are unbelievably powerful so you know

and this is another thing to know about

in your own life it’s something i

learned in part from reading the

writings of alexander solzhenitsyn who’s

a great

russian philosopher and novelist you

know he said you can look at your life

and you can see

what isn’t right about it i mean all you

have to do is look

and then you can start to fix that and

the way you fix it is by

noticing what you could in fact fix

you know people are often trying to fix

things they can’t fix which i would not

recommend because if you try to fix

something you can’t fix you’ll just ruin

it

like you can find all sorts of

undergraduates who are perfectly willing

to restructure the

uh you know the the international

economic system who cannot keep their

room clean

and there’s actually a gap there you

know which and it’s surprising that

people don’t actually notice

so i would say if you pay attention you

can see things that you could fix

they yell at you they really do we even

know how that happens

let me let me give you an example

because rooms are full of stories

and the stories have have effects on you

so here’s a classic experiment

so you take two groups undergraduates

you bring them into your lab

and you give one group on a multiple

choice test that has a bunch of words in

it that are associated with being old

and you give the other group the same

multiple choice test except the words

are associated with being young

this is independent of the content of

the test it’s just

descriptions and then you time the

undergraduates as they walk back to the

elevators

the ones who read the ones who completed

the multiple choice tests that had more

words associated with aging

walk slower back to the elevators and

they don’t know that

and they don’t know they’re doing it and

that that study has been replicated in

various forms

many many times you’re unbelievably

sensitive to the story that your

environment is telling you

because your environment is not made out

of objects that’s just wrong

your environment is basically made out

of something like tools and obstacles

you’re a tool-using creature

you’re a tool perceiving creature the

things you like if i take you out of

this room and i say well what was in the

room

you’re not going to say uh you know

random patterns in the carpet because

they’re

they’re real they’re just as good an

object as anything else you’re going to

see

chairs because you can sit on them and

you’re going to say hand rails because

you can hold them you’re going to say

stairs because

you can walk down them that’s what you

see and that’s what you interact with

and if you pay attention to your

environment

which is you by the way extend it all of

your experience is you

it will tell you all the time what you

should do all you have to do is do it

but then you have to decide if you want

to do

it one of the things i’ve noticed about

people because i’ve wondered once i

started studying these mythological

stories and i got this idea about

the the fact that life can be meaningful

enough to justify its suffering i

thought god that’s such a good idea

because it’s not optimistic exactly you

know some people tell you well you can

be happy it’s like those people are

idiots

i’m telling you they’re idiots there’s

going to be things that come along

that flatten you so hard you won’t

believe it and you’re not happy then and

so if life is to be happy well in those

situations

what are you doing why even live but

that isn’t life isn’t to be happy

if you’re happy you’re bloody fortunate

and you should enjoy it you should

because it’s the grace of god so to

speak

with regards to to meaning i thought

well

people know when they’re doing something

meaningful they can tell so why the hell

don’t they do meaningful things all the

time it seems obvious you could do it i

mean it’s hard

you know because other people want you

to do other things and it’s a struggle

but

everything’s a struggle and then i

thought well oh i get it i see why it

took me about 10 years to figure this

out

people have a choice choice number one

nothing you do means anything

well that’s kind of a drag right

meaninglessness of life and all that

existential angst

you know that’s kind of a pain but the

upside of nothing that you do be mean

is meaningful is you don’t have to do

anything you’ve got no responsibility

now you have to suffer because things

are meaningless but that’s a small price

to pay

for being able to be completely useless

the alternative the alternative is

everything you do matters

really if you make a mistake it’s a real

mistake

if you betray someone you tilt the world

a little more sharply towards evil

rather than good

it matters what you do well if you buy

that then you can have a meaningful life

but there’s no mucking around it means

responsibility

it means that the decisions you make are

important it means that when you

do something wrong it’s wrong

well do you want that

you