Take a look at stoicism. Not the pop modern version but the ancient roman and greek traditions of Seneca, Epictitus, and Marcus Aurelius.
Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.
It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) are effective at reducing negative thinking, although they don't come in pill form.
Have children. Hard not to endlessly smile when you see their smiles for you doing nothing more than being there for them. Then, uhh I guess the plan is to have more children once they enter their teen years?
Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
> Weight lifting also helps with mentality in a million different ways.
This isn‘t really limited to weight lifting as to any kind of working out in general. Moving your body instead of only sitting at a desk constantly turns out to be healthy
having a kid had triggered an constant existential crisis for me. the moments are nice, but overall life is more confusing then ever, and not in a good way.
I had largely the opposite experience, perhaps because I started having children relatively later in life but was fortunately able to do so nonetheless.
In particular I'm not especially religious, but also think that the contemporary efforts of people to deny their mortality (singularity, consciousness transfer, medical immortality, etc) are irrational coping mechanisms, religion for atheists, that I refuse to adopt. So that leaves one in a rather uncomfortable existential place.
But since having children, it feels like every day I can see more of myself in them, and it provides an immense amount of comfort, like I've never had before in my life. This is about as close as I think we'll ever get to realistically transferring our consciousnesses, and I'm more than okay with that, and now hope to have many many grandchildren before my final day.
There's always going to be people who things don't work out well for, even if they're a good idea for the overwhelming majority of people. If you want studies on this parents have substantially lower rates of 'psychological distress' [1], it's associated with lower rates of psychiatric morbidity, and partnered parents have substantially lower rates of all common mental disorders, with an especially pronounced effect for men. [2] The same affect was not observed for non-parent couples.
The first study makes no conclusion that parenthood is the causative effect. It actually speculates if this is because people with higher rates of psychological distress are less likely to become parents.
I couldn't read the full text of the second, but likewise the conclusion does not imply causation.
I'm a parent, and have experienced significant 'psychological distress' as a result of having children. Every time I read a comment from someone advising people to have children for happiness reasons, it triggers me.
You're right. Not only did the first paper not imply causation, they literally did not even consider it. They didn't consider that fulfilling our most critical and primal instinct, in an activity that [generally] creates psycho-emotional bonds like no other, might have positive psychological benefits. Does not not strike you as odd?
There's a practical issue with social science. Very near to 100% of researchers (from the US at least) share a common ideology, frequently to a fairly radical degree, and it regularly leaks into their research. You can even see this in the abstract of the paper. They show data indicating that parents have dramatically lower rates of mental illness than the general population and their conclusion? "Serious psychological distress is fairly prevalent among parenting adults." So for these sort of papers, I generally find their discussion and conclusions quite irrelevant, but the data is generally sound, so long as it's not overtly cherry picked.
I'd also add that the fact that positive psychological effects (in the second study) were not observed in childless couples seems to largely falsify the hypothesis that the psychological benefits of parenting were simply an observation of people with psychological issues being unable to have children in the first place.
---
And yeah, having a child can be terrifying at times. My youngest recently went through roseola and we spent days in the hospital with him after his fever briefly spiked just under 107F/41.6C. That is sheer terror - holding your child who's running so hot that he's literally uncomfortable to hold against your body. Yet they have also changed my life, worldview, and overall psychological state in an unbelievably positive way on the whole, and I would (and do) wholeheartedly recommend them to any and every person who can provide a reasonably stable household with two loving parents.
Yes, there is medicine for negative thinking that helps to various degrees (SSRIs do work), but they have issues and unfortunately we don't have any magic bullets.
Essentially letting go of controlling our lives in ways that cause suffering. Accepting that bad things can and do happen. Realising that life is temporary and we should focus ourselves on things in our power that make us a person of better character. Everything else is out of our control and should be accepted without judgement.
It's brought a lot of comfort to me over the years.