Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Physical condition can affect one's interpretation of present circumstances. We have all had the experience of suffering a setback when tired, but after a rest later realizing that we had overestimated the damage and the seriousness. And this is logical, because a tired person is less able to deal with a problem, and hence the setback is more serious and more negative relative to a desired or accustomed state of affairs than when one is fresh. Too much mental stimulation may have a similar effect by overloading and tiring the nervous system. (The role of too little stimulation in depression might be interesting, too.)

A crucial issue in depression is whether you interpret contemporary events accurately, or instead distort them in such manner as to make them seem more negative than they "really" are. We are here talking only of negatively-perceived current events.

The choice of whom to compare yourself with is one of the important ways that you structure your view of your life. Some choices lead to frequent negative comparisons and consequent unhappiness. This chapter discusses various mechanisms that can operate to cause one to view one's situation in a fashion that produces negative self-comparisons.

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