All of the advice in this thread is good.
Here is some more, maybe you will find it useful:
We have dedicated winner and loser circuits in our heads. I don't know to what degree we are or can be taught to control them but I can turn mine off and on. It's hard to tell, but I have started to recognize a dominance fight between the two circuits, meaning that if one circuit gets lazy the other starts to dominate my pre-frontal cortex and vice versa I can tell when the they exchange the dominant position. There are times when the world feels like it is caving in and I can feel that I can turn on the winner circuit and within seconds it starts to dominate again and I am back to what I consider normal.
Some people here have asked questions about this forcing me to try and think about why, if they do actually exist, what would their evolutionary benefit be? Because I have been in business for a while I understand risk in real terms. Basically, if you compare starting a business vs having a job, having a job is 99% of the time way way way better for you because it is low risk, steady income and if you shave off 10% to 25% ofyour income and invest over your lifetime into something that that returns dividends you will be way richer than a business owner. Starting a business is a high risk activity and it rehouldn't really be wasting resources but saving them. Engaging the winner circuitry probably forces us to engage in highly risky behaviour and most risky behaviour most of the time just wastes all of your resources and you fail. Only a small percentage of those that engage the winnner circuitry win, but when they win they win big. From an evolutionary perspective, it pays for most of the tribe members to engage the loser circuitry instead of the winner circuitry buecause you only want a few members of the tribe to go out on risky behaviours because most of them won't come back but those that do they will come with huge wins that everyone benefits from.quires a specific set of skills to deal with those risks, most business owners fail or if they succeed it is so marginal that they barely bought them selves a job, so a business is far more risky notion. Along those lines of thinking, if I tried to explain why most people engage the loser circuitry is because from an evolutionary perspective it is a way to force you to conserve energy and stop doing risky behaviour in difficult times or in any time you shouldn't really be wasting resources but saving them. Engaging the winner circuitry probably forces us to engage in highly risky behaviour and most risky behaviour most of the time just wastes all of your resources and you fail. Only a small percentage of those that engage the winnner circuitry win, but when they win they win big. From an evolutionary perspective, it pays for most of the tribe members to engage the loser circuitry instead of the winner circuitry buecause you only want a few members of the tribe to go out on risky behaviours because most of them won't come back but those that do they will come with huge wins that everyone benefits from.
What I am trying to get at, it is normal to feel depressed. It is your body telling you to hunker down and store your resources because it senses rainy days now and in the future.
Now, I do know how to tickle the winner circuitry without engaging it so that you don't end up in a spiral: You need to temporarily remove all negative people from your sensory access (no seeing, hearing, feeling, being even close to any of these people) and instead surround your self with those that have their winner circuits engaged.
The way this works is that you, the personality with the firstname lastname label is just a piece of software sitting in your pre-frontal cortex. You and I don't control very much of what goes on in our brain. Our brains absorb information from the world around us through osmosis bypassing the pre-frontal cortex (us). This means that, while you cannot control much of what your brain absorbs you CAN control what stimuli your brain is surrounded by. Surround your self with those whose winner circuitry is engaged and your brain will absorb that and your mirror neurons will start to mirror their frame of mind.
Anyway, those are the mechanics of how all of this works in my experience.
If anyone is ever super depressed, message me, happy to chat. Depression is normal, but, we cannot afford to lose a single one of you.
(post is archived)