Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Therapists and medical doctors faced with depressed (and also anxious) patients have often advised the person to lower or change her goals, even though it has not been part of their theory. For example, psychoanalyst Rubin reports:

My depressed patient eventually learned that her depression was always linked to personal dissatisfaction with herself, to seeming "failures." ... She eventually also learned that her self-hate was connected to impossible standards, which required considerable reduction to realistic human levels and possibilities...She became aware that to block depression successfully she must realize first that she was depressing and putting down angry feelings and thoughts about herself and others.2

The tactic of changing one's standards derives directly from the view of depression embodied in the self-comparisons Mood Ratio: Sadness and depression result from an unfavorable comparison between a person's actual and hypothetical states. The theory and the practice fit perfectly with each other.

Arbitrary Goals

Goals that obviously that are obviously arbitrary are the easiest to change, whereas those that are involved with basic values and philosophy of life are hardest to change. If I set a goal of forty sit-ups a day for this week, that number obviously was selected for what I thought to be my own good, a number that would gradually increase my strength and improve my health, as well as perhaps giving me satisfaction in attaining it. If I cannot nearly achieve that goal and feel helpless to do better -- which makes me sad --or if I achieve the forty sit-ups only with painful effort, then the goal is clearly a poor choice; instead, the goal chosen for my own good is bad for me. Of course I might argue to myself that the gain in strength is more important than the pain of sadness. But if I at least get this argument into the open, and if I recognize that goals are intellectual tools, and in this case the purpose of the goal is my own welfare, then I'm likely to revise the sit-up goal downwards.

Another example of how one arbitrarily chooses a goal--and with it the prospects of failure and sadness--is in a game such as tennis. As a sports psychologist says,

If you compete with players of ability equal to yours, you are setting yourself up for disappointment about fifty percent of the time. If you compete with players who are more capable than yourself, you set yourself up for an even greater percentage of unsatisfactory games. If you seek out less skilled competitors, you could win all the time, but you wouldn't feel like a winner.3

If you are willing to struggle a bit for wisdom, alone or with a therapist, you should find it relatively easy to improve your choice of arbitrary goals of this sort, and hence reduce negative self-comparisons and sadness.

Let's work out a specific exercise, for convenience returning to Nancy in Chapter 12 who told herself "I'm a bad mother." And let's say that for one reason and another, Nancy is not convinced by the analysis of her numerator given there. And she now says, "Eleanor is the kind of mother I should be".

You respond to Nancy as follows: "Is Eleanor an average mother? Does she have an outside job or do volunteer work? "

Nancy: "She devotes herself entirely to her children".

You: "Is that ordinary behavior?"

Nancy: "No, she's an unusually good mother, the best one I know."

You: " Why do you compare yourself to her?"

Nancy: "Because I should be as good as I can be, and she shows how good a mother can be."

(Notice how skilled a depressive like Nancy can be in making her comparisons seem logical.)

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