Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Everyone knows the old saw about seeing the glass half empty or half full. Even truer is that you often can choose which glass to look at, a glass which is full or one which is empty. Sadness and depression usually are optional. That is, in most situations you can choose to be happy or you can choose to be miserable.

An enormous variety of stimuli bombard us. We pick-and- choose which of these stimuli to focus on. Some of the stimuli are more insistent than others -- a stomach ache, for example, or a last-second defeat of our favorite basketball team. But we are free to choose among the majority of stimuli around us.

The healthy-minded person picks out characteristics -- let's call them "dimensions" -- on which she rates well, and then argues to herself and to others that those are the most important dimensions on which to judge a person. A slightly exaggerated example: University faculty members who teach well but do no research argue that teaching should be weighted most heavily in salary and promotion evaluations; those who do much research and teach poorly argue instead that research should be most influential in evaluations; people who are rather good but not outstanding on both dimensions argue the virtues of well- roundedness. (Those who are very good on both dimensions don't waste their time on arguments like this one.)

As Collingwood put it, "The tailless fox preached taillessness."1 If a person cannot find some external objective dimension of performance by which she rates well, one can always fall back on piety and prayer-saying, in which any person can excel without talent or training.

All this sounds amoral or even immoral, and sometimes it is. Morality and intellectual honesty must constrain a decent person in valuing various dimensions. And I certainly do not advise ignoring all higher standards and proceeding solely on the basis of what is good for you alone, which would be most cynical. But let us put aside that thorny issue aside for now.

This, then, is how most people fight sadness and depression by skillfully choosing the dimensions by which they judge themselves, together with wisely selecting the standards on particular dimensions against which they measure themselves.

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