Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

I am an example of a person with an unwise set of standards. I treat myself the way an engineer treats a factory: the goal is perfect deployment and allocation of resources, and the criterion is whether the maximum output is achieved. For example, when I wake at 8:30 a.m. on weekdays, I feel like a time thief until I have hit my desk and started work. On a weekend day I may wake at nine--and then I think "Am I cheating the children by sleeping too much?" Maximum productivity may be a reasonable goal for a factory. But one's life cannot be satisfactorily reduced to a striving to meet a single criterion. A person is more complex than is a factory, and a person is also an end in himself or herself, whereas a factory is only a means to an end.

How We Distort Reality and Cause Negative Self-Comparisons

One may manipulate current reality in still other ways that produce frequent negative self-comparisons. For example, one may convince oneself that other people perform better than they really do, or are better off than they are. A young girl may believe that other girls really are prettier than she is, or that others have many more dates than she has, when this is not true. An employee may be wrongly convinced that other employees are being paid more than she is. A child may refuse to believe that other children share her difficulty in making friends. A person may think that all others have argument-free marriages, and never fail to cope with the demands of their children.

Another way that you may generate more negative self- comparisons than a "normal" person is by inaccurately interpreting a single event as something other than what it really is. If you receive a reprimand from the boss, you may immediately leap to the conclusion that you will be fired, and if you are warned that you may be fired you may conclude that the boss surely intends to fire you, even when these conclusions are not warranted. A person who suffers a temporary physical disability may conclude that he is disabled for life when that is medically most improbable.

Still another way a person can produce many negative self- comparisons is by putting disproportionate weight on single negative instances. A non-depressive girl will react to the information that she has failed an exam or received a reprimand from the boss by combining this instance with her entire past record. And if this is the first failed test in her school history, or the first reprimand on this job, the non-depressive girl will see this instance as being somewhat exceptional and therefore not deserving of great attention. But some people (all of us do it sometimes) will, on the basis of this one instance, make a faulty generalization about their present conditions with respect to this dimension of the person's life. Or, one may make an inaccurate generalization about one's whole life on this dimension based on this one instance. The depressive carpenter who loses a job once may generalize, "I can't hold onto a job," and the depressive basketball player may generalize, "I'm a lousy athlete" after one poor game on the basketball court.

A person's judgment may also be inaccurate because he or she puts too little emphasis on a present event. A woman who has learned athletics late in life may continue to think of herself as unathletic, though her present achievements make the past irrelevant in this respect.

The Causes of Distortion

Why should some people's interpretations of their present conditions and life experiences be inaccurate or distorted in such manner that depression is brought on? There are several possible factors acting singly or together, including early training in thinking, extent of education, fears caused by present and past experience, and physical condition. These will now be discussed in turn.

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