Another way to shut off self-comparisons is to care about other people's welfare, and to involve yourself in helping them. This old-fashioned remedy against depression-- altruism--has been the salvation of many. In a book reporting more than three decades of the life histories of a hundred Harvard students starting before World War II, George Vaillant documents how turning to altruistic activities saved several of these men from adulthood hells. Perhaps this is a fair translation of what Jesus meant when he said that in order to save one's life one must lose it--that is, by giving it to others.

How may one become altruistic? All I can suggest is that you may decide to do so, either because you come to realize that it is one of your most important values to be altruistic, or because you are so anxious to cease being depressed that you are willing to give part of your time and strength and thought to others, or some combination of both.

Meditation is the traditional Eastern method of banishing negative self-comparisons. The essence of meditation is to shift to that special mode of concentrated thinking in which one does not evaluate or compare, but rather simply experiences the outer and inner sensory events as full of interest but without emotion.

Making comparisons is the most basic element in any evaluation or judgment. Comparing is a process of developing and using abstract concepts to deal with the sensations that your mind receives from inside and outside your body. The various forms of meditations, and of Eastern religious practices generally, are devices to orient you away from abstraction, judgment, comparison, and evaluation, and toward the primitive sensations themselves. Meditation also points you toward the judgment-free perceptions of the sensory world, and perhaps toward cosmic imaginations that often arise from the elementary experience in meditation.

Some Eastern religious practitioners seek the deepest and most continuous meditation in order to banish physical suffering, while others do so for purely religious purposes. But the same mechanism may be used as a very effective weapon against negative self- comparisons and depression while participating in everyday life. When, while walking the dog or driving to work or trying to sleep, a negative self-comparison comes into your mind--"What an immoral louse I am," or "I just can't do anything right"--then you can turn off the comparing mode and turn on the experiencing mode by this well-known device: Breathe in with your diaphragm so that your belly inflates deeply and slowly, and then deflate slowly; then continue to repeat the cycle. At the same time focus your attention on your breathing, or on a leaf, or on some other unemotional stimulus, perhaps saying to yourself, "Don't criticize," or "I don't need to compare." Soon you may find yourself smiling--just as I now am smiling as I am breathing in accord with the instructions I've just written. (It is difficult to believe how powerful and exciting such breathing is until you have taught yourself to do it. Someday I'll write a piece entitled "Confessions of a sensual breather"). There are many excellent books on meditation by Easterners and Westerners that go into much more depth and detail, and describe varied approaches; a good paperback on this topic is The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson and Miriam Z. Klipper.

Getting Back Hope

Negative self-comparisons by themselves do not make you sad. Instead, you may get angry, or you may mobilize yourself to change your life situation. But a helpless, hopeless attitude along with negative self-comparisons leads to sadness and depression. This has even been shown in rat experiments. Rats that have experienced a series of electric shocks which they cannot avoid, later behave with less fight and more depression with respect to electric shocks that they can avoid, than do rats that did not earlier experience unavoidable shocks. The rats that experienced unavoidable shocks also show chemical changes like those associated with depression in humans.

It behooves us, then, to consider how to avoid feeling helpless. One obvious answer in some situations is to realize that you are not helpless and you can change your actual state of affairs so that the comparison will be less negative. Sometimes this requires gradual relearning through a graded series of tasks that show you that you can be successful, eventually leading to success in tasks that at the beginning seemed overwhelmingly difficult to you. This is the rationale of many behavioral-therapy programs that teach people to overcome their fears of elevators, heights, going out in public, and various social situations.

Indeed, the rats mentioned in the paragraph above, which learned to be helpless when given inescapable shocks, were later taught by experimenters to learn that they could escape the later shocks. They then showed diminished chemical changes associated with depression after they had "unlearned" their original experiences.

Something Else: Values Therapy

You're at the end of your rope, let's say. You believe that your numerator is accurate, and you see no appealing way to change your denominator or your dimensions of comparison. Putting aside all comparisons, or reducing them radically, does not attract you or does not seem feasible for you. You'd rather stay away from anti-depression drugs and shock treatment. Is there still any hope for you?

Values Therapy may be able to rescue you from your end-of-the-rope desperation. And it can also help people who are not at the end of their ropes, in preference to other approaches to depression. The central element of Values Therapy is discovering within the depressed person a latent conflicting value or belief that causes the person to modify or constrain or oppose the belief (or value) that leads to the negative self-comparisons. Russell describes his passage from a sad childhood to happy maturity in this fashion:

Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire--such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other--as essentially unattainable. (Russell, l930, p. l5, italics added.)

The discovered value may be (as it was for me) the value that says directly that life should be happy rather than sad. Or it may be a value that leads indirectly to a reduction in sadness, such as the value (which also acted in me) that one's children should have a life-loving parent to imitate.