geo wrote:
It's no surprise to me that I'm more of a withdrawer than an approacher. So in the little survey, I picked Set B. What did you guys pick?

I don't fit wholly in A or B. I am 1/2 A + 1/2 B = An anxious optimist.

Does anyone here have experience with meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy?

geo wrote:Does anyone here have experience with meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy?

I'm an amateur meditator. I'll let you know the results in 10 years. I think it is slow progress for me.

I've also done quite a bit of reading on the subject, and became interested in Buddhism as well. I think that tradition has very powerful insights about the nature of the mind, how we attach to our thoughts and our notion of self, and how that creates suffering.

Another link from Sam Harris if you're interested, he's coming out with his next book on the topic:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-meditate

Thanks for Sam Harris' link. I'm going to read that later.

Karen Armstrong's book on the Buddha had an impact on me. My own (probably naive) impression of letting go of the self seems a change in perspective, seeing your self as a part of a bigger whole. Sagan's view that "we are starstuff" seems Buddhist-esque to me.

I've tried cognitive behavioral therapy to deal with anxiety. I went to two or three sessions with a therapist, but it felt like a waste of time and I didn't really connect with the therapist. To some extent I think I already use CBT techniques, challenging my own thoughts when I realize that it's not doing any good. For example, if I find myself worrying about financial matters, I'll take a moment to acknowledge that I am worrying, and to recognize that constant (neurotic) worrying isn't going to help the situation. So I give myself permission to stop worrying about it. To help, I might envision my worry as an object on a conveyor belt and when it comes around I'll flag it. And when it comes around again, I can see it's already been flagged, so I can stop worrying. Sounds stupid, but it does work. Maybe the most important part of CBT is simply being aware that you are worrying or obsessing about something and deciding to do something about it.

I've only tried to meditate a few times, but I do find that kayaking or hiking is a meditative thing for me. Maybe it's not the same thing, but it seems to do me a lot of good. The problem is that you can't always go hiking or kayaking. Meditation sounds empowering. I'd like to try it.

geo wrote:For example, if I find myself worrying about financial matters, I'll take a moment to acknowledge that I am worrying, and to recognize that constant (neurotic) worrying isn't going to help the situation. So I give myself permission to stop worrying about it. To help, I might envision my worry as an object on a conveyor belt and when it comes around I'll flag it. And when it comes around again, I can see it's already been flagged, so I can stop worrying. Sounds stupid, but it does work. Maybe the most important part of CBT is simply being aware that you are worrying or obsessing about something and deciding to do something about it.

I'm not really familiar with CBT, but I've seen those kinds of techniques talked about in some of the literature on mindfulness and meditation. Being aware of your thoughts is pretty much the name of the game. We are often not even aware of the endless chatter in our mind. When you sit down to meditate, you become aware of what Buddhists call "monkey mind."

I might envision my worry as an object on a conveyor belt and when it comes around I'll flag it. And when it comes around again, I can see it's already been flagged, so I can stop worrying.

That's similar to what I do when my brain won't stop. I chunk thinks up, work/wife/money/kids/house. A little worry is helpful to plan the future and solve lingering issues. But sometimes the worry is all in one department, or you go over the same problems / plans to a neurotic degree. At a certain point you need to close the door on a subject and leave it for the following day.

Speaking of which, this course is starting tomorrow:

Buddhism and Modern Psychology
https://www.coursera.org/course/psychbuddhism

I doubt I'll be able to keep up with it on schedule, but I'm planning to at least watch the lectures at some point.

I don't have any experience with CBT as a client of therapy, have only studied it somewhat superficially. I do think that studying what it's about can probably work pretty well, maybe as well as going to a therapist. Even though I'm sort of connected with the therapy field, I have conflicting feelings about therapy as a service to access. But I will say that for a while I was enthusiastic about Philosophical Counseling and even thought that I wanted to become such a therapist. Philosophical counseling is actually related to Beck's CBT.

Another thing CBT has in common with meditation is that it's a practice and only continues to be effective if the practice is kept up. I don't believe that any therapy can really change what we're like; there are only tools that can help us to adjust better. With psychoanalysis, I think the claim was that by "exorcising our demons" we could actually become different people. I believe it didn't work.

PS--I tried meditation long ago as a college student. My expectations were that it would rearrange my brain somehow, but I found that apparently you have to work hard at it. So then I lost some motivation and stopped. I signed up for the Coursera course, which may reinspire me.

Each chapter features a great idea (usually from antiquity), and Ch. 2 opens with this epigraph:

"The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it." —MARCUS AURELIUS

I would translate this to mean, "(try to) keep a positive outlook!" or “(try to) keep your chin up!”

I add the parentheses because I don't think all the prozac, meditation, and CBT in the world is going to transform a full blown pessimist into an optimist. But maybe it will take some of the edge off.

I almost think Haidt's three methods for taming the elephant apply to people who are already fairly well off in terms of circumstances and the cortical lottery. I'm thinking of the mother who recently tried to drive her little kids and herself into the ocean. Also, my wife works with a lot of kids who lost the cortical lottery big time; they need "prozac" just to stop hearing voices in their heads.

But I do think that keeping a positive outlook is something to shoot for. Finding humor in the mundane or even the tragic is a great coping mechanism. But I guess I find Haidt's conclusion here a tad simplistic or reductive and possibly overly-reliant on pseudo-science:

The epigraphs that opened this chapter are true. Life is what we deem it, and our lives are the creations of our minds. But these claims are not helpful until augmented by a theory of the divided self (such as the rider and the elephant) and an understanding of negativity bias and affective style. Once you know why change is so hard, you can drop the brute force method and take a more psychologically sophisticated approach to self-improvement. Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually.

I don’t want to come across as being overly critical of Haidt. I’m actually enjoying the book quite a lot. But the pessimist in me perhaps wants to play Devil’s advocate. Isn’t Haidt just replacing Marcus Aurelius’s words with more scientific-sounding words? Is there an element of psychobabble here? Is our understanding of “affective style” a great advancement over the theory of humors in the medieval world (the idea that an excess or deficiency of any of four distinct bodily fluids — black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood — in a person directly influences their temperament and health)?

Hi geo. Someday I need to learn how to post great graphics. I said in a post about JH's introduction that I had some doubts, too, about whether the modern experimenting and newfangled lingo really does add to what was already known about being happy. Does it just verify empirically what was pat of the common wisdom? I'm less impressed by the experimental data and coinages such as "affective style" than I am with the humanists like Marcus Aurelius who gave us guides for getting over the bumps or earthquakes of life. I might differ from you in that I don't see stoicism as enforcing optimism, really. Stoicism is even a bit of a downer in its view that we should lower our expectations for happiness and settle for a kind of mental peace instead. Joy seems a little unreasonable to stoics, I think.