Why Do Negative Self-Comparisons Cause A Bad Mood?

But why do negative self-comparisons and a Rotten Ratio produce a bad mood?

There is a biological connection between negative self- comparisons and physically-induced pain. Psychological trauma such as a loss of a loved one induces some of the same bodily changes as does the pain from a migraine headache, say. When people refer to the death of a loved one as "painful", they are speaking about a biological reality and not just a metaphor. It is reasonable that more ordinary "losses" -- of status, income, career, and of a mother's attention or smile in the case of a child -- have the same sorts of effects, even if milder. And children learn that they lose love when they are bad, unsuccessful, and clumsy, as compared to when they are good, successful, and graceful. Hence negative self-comparisons indicating that one is "bad" in some way are likely to be coupled to the biological connections to loss and pain. It also makes sense that the human's need for love is connected to the infant's need for food and being nursed and held by its mother, the loss of which must be felt in the body.(4)

Indeed, research cited later shows a statistical link between the death of a parent and the propensity to be depressed, in both animals and humans. And much careful laboratory work shows that separation of adults and their young produces the signs of depression in dogs and monkeys(5). Hence lack of love hurts and makes one sad, just as lack of food makes one hungry.

Research shows chemical differences between depressed and undepressed persons. Similar chemical effects are found in animals which have learned that they are helpless to avoid painful shocks6. Taken as a whole, then, the evidence suggests that negative self-comparisons, together with a sense of helplessness, produce chemical effects linked to painful bodily sensations, all of which results in a sad mood.

A physically-caused pain may seem more "objective" than a negative self-comparison because the jab of a pin, say, is an absolute objective fact, and does not depend upon a relative comparison for you to have a painful perception of it. The bridge is that neg-comps are connected to pain through learning during your entire lifetime. You learn to be sad about a lost job or an examination failure; a person who has never seen an exam or a modern occupational society could not be made sad by those events. Learned knowledge of this sort always is relative, a matter of comparisons, rather than involving only one absolute physical stimulus.

All this represents therapeutic opportunity: It is because the causes of sadness and depression are largely learned that we can hope to remove the pain of depression by managing our minds properly. This is why we can conquer psychologically-induced pain with mental management more easily than we can banish the sensation of pain from arthritis or from freezing feet. With respect to a stimulus that we have learned to experience as painful--lack of professional success, for example--we can relearn a new meaning for it. That is, we can change the frame of reference, for example, by altering the comparison states that we choose as benchmarks. But it is impossible (except perhaps for a yogi) to change the frame of reference for physical pain so as to remove the pain, though one can certainly reduce the pain by quieting the mind with breathing techniques and other relaxation devices, and by teaching ourselves to take a detached view of the discomfort and pain.

To put the matter in different words: Pain and sadness which are associated with mental events can be prevented because the meaning of the mental events was originally learned; relearning can remove the pain. But the impact of physically- caused painful events depends much less on learning, and hence re-learning has less capacity to reduce or remove the pain.

The Nature of Comparisons

Comparison and evaluation of the present state of affairs relative to other states of affairs is fundamental in all planning and businesslike thinking. The relevant cost in a business decision is the "opportunity cost"-- that is, the cost of what else you might do rather instead of the opportunity being considered. Comparison is also part of judgments in all other endeavors. As the book's front note says: "Life is hard". But compared to what?

Indeed, comparison-making is central to all our information processing, scientific as well as personal:

Basic to scientific evidence (and to all knowledge-diagnostic processes including the retina of the eye) is the process of comparison of recording differences, or of contrast. Any appearance of absolute knowledge, or intrinsic knowledge about singular isolated objects, is found to be illusory upon analysis. Securing scientific evidence involves making at least one comparison.8

A classic remark illuminates the centrality of comparisons in understanding the world: A fish would be the last to discover the nature of water.

Just about every evaluation you make boils down to a comparison. "I'm tall" must be with reference to some group of people; a Japanese who would say "I'm tall" in Japan might not say that in the U. S. If you say "I'm good at tennis", the hearer will ask, "Whom do you play with, and whom do you beat?" in order to understand what you mean. Similarly, "I never do anything right" , or "I'm a terrible mother" is hardly meaningful without some standard of comparison.