How to Deal With Sadness And Chaos In Your Life

0:00 i've watched many hours of your videos but i don't think i've ever heard you describe yourself on the big five model care to tell us how you rank on each trade yeah okay well there's a problem because i know the tests and so it's hard for me to take them without being well because i know the tests right so it's hard for me to take them without the the ever present threat of conscious manipulation um i've gone through them with my family you know to to see if we get a more accurate accurate judgment so i can tell you on the big ten scale which is the understand myself personality scale i'm pretty enthusiastic i think it's 75th 80th percentile something like that 99th percentile for assertiveness

0:46 so i'm pretty extroverted because those two together make extraversion and then with neuroticism that's a hard one because i've had this problem with chronic depression that looks like it's autoimmune related and so i felt a lot more negative emotion than the typical person does i would say by a substantial margin um withdrawal well i don't seem to shy away from things so you know apart from the fact that i do feel anticipatory anxiety which i think is secondary to this depression let's say i don't seem to shy away from things so i don't think that temperamentally i'm particularly high in withdrawal i am more um it's not irritable what's the what's the

1:33 next one volatile i'm higher in volatility than withdrawal by a substantial margin i can be quite irritable but again it's hard to dissociate that from the depression so anyways my levels of negative emotion are higher than i would prefer um agreeableness i'm pretty compassionate pretty high in compassion it's like 75 80th percentile so um you know and but i'm i'm relatively low in politeness so i think but not you know not fifth percentile something like 30th percentile 40 percent off i remember correctly so um that means that it means that i'm blunt enough to hurt people's feelings now and then and that i really don't like that because the

2:19 compassion thing gets me so um conscientiousness i'm moderately orderly 70 75th percentile and like 99th percentile for industriousness and then openness both of them intellect and 99th percentile for intellect and then it's like 95th something like that for openness or higher um so that's where i that's where i rank so my wife and i found out earlier in the year and we may not be able to have children then last month i was diagnosed with cancer oh man how do i combat depression well the first thing that we should

3:04 point out here i'm very sorry to hear about all that that's that's a lot of tragedy in a very short period of time man um and i'm not going to give you any casual advice because but i maybe i can make some things clearer the first is you're not depressed you've had terrible things happen to you that's not the same thing right i distinguish between them if a client comes to me and they say they're feeling very sad and down and anxious and worried about everything and so forth then i kind of walk through their life do they have friends do they have a family do they have a meaningful job is their educational background appropriate for their level of intelligence and ability are they taking care of themselves do they have something to look forward to do they use their time outside of work productively

3:51 and wisely etc so you think about those as the dimensions of a good life there's more or maybe there's fewer but that's not too bad for a for a quick and dirty first pass through let's say those are the dimensions by the way that you work on if you do the future authoring program in the self-authoring suite you're asked to think about all those dimensions and consider what your life might be like if you optimized along all of them and so if you if all of those things are going well for you and you feel terrible all the time then you're depressed because there's there's something wrong with your emotional regulation you know i mean maybe you're having an existential crisis that's a possibility but i mean let's assume we can't see

4:37 anything structurally wrong with your life but you're feeling terrible then i would say well you have depression there's something wrong maybe it's physiological and people like that in my experience those are the people who often really benefit from antidepressants but then there's the other sort of person who who is in trouble you know they they their educational attainment is not what it should be they don't have a job they have an alcohol or drug problem they have a family that's really not functioning well or they don't have a family their immediate relationship intimate relationship is non-existent or terrible their friends are non-existent or or or worthless and and destructive

5:25 um they don't get along with their relatives they're in poor mental and physical health you get the picture that's and they're not feeling good their their mood is low and they're anxious that's not depression like it might be you know but it's a terror but what that is is a terrible life and those are different things they needed to be they need to be conceptualized differently now even if you have a terrible life an antidepressant might be able to lift you up enough so that you can keep fighting let's say assuming that that's what you're doing but an antidepressant obviously isn't going to help isn't going to remove the facts of your terrible life now you you've got terrible things happening to you at the moment and

6:11 and there's no simple answer to that i would say you could you could take a look at chapter 12 in my book 12 rules for life it's it's called uh pet a cat when you encounter one on the street and in part it's a it's an autobiographical chapter about how my wife and i and my family my my son and daughter and my my extended family as well dealt with my daughter's extremely serious illness while she it still it still plagues her to some degree although not nearly as much as it did she was very seriously ill when she was a teenager and it was an ongoing crisis uh continual for years of crisis and

6:57 so the question is how do you cope with that and the answer is the first answer is you shrink your time frame you know you've had these especially with regards to your diagnosis it's like all of a sudden your future has been thrown completely into chaos and you don't know how to deal with that and and who would you do what you can to stabilize your medical treatment and to optimize your quality of life while that's happening a very complicated thing to do and then i would say you live for the day you know for the week maybe maybe a week's too much even but for the day it's like you get up in the morning you

7:43 think i need to do everything i can to make this day as meaningful and and rich as i possibly can and hopefully i will have had a full day by this evening and then i'll be able to sleep and then i'll be able to get up in the morning and say i'm going to try to make this day as useful and meaningful and engaging as it can be and then maybe when you're really sick you don't have a day you have hours and then you do the same thing for the hours and then maybe you do the same thing with the minutes i would also say you know you've been through a lot of shock and it's conceivable that you might need to talk to someone it's also conceivable

8:30 that an antidepressant could help you you know you've got a lot to deal with and you might need your nervous system might need some stabilization with all that stress and so that's something to consider antidepressants are also quite effective as pain medications especially a drug called symbol so that's also worth knowing because you need to know about effective pain medication it's very important in extreme situations of pain opiates of course are the drug of choice but you can use drugs like methylphenidate that riddle in the adhd drug you can use them as adjuncts to to pain medication and people need to know that because the the um they're basically amphetamines

9:17 amphetamines have analgesic properties but they also keep they also maintain alertness and so the problem with opiates is they can be sedating but an opiate amphetamine combination and this is for people who are in absolutely intractable pain by the way that can increase alertness and help cope with pain and it's really useful to know what you might need to cope with pain so i would say shrink your time horizon and then oh thank you okay thanks tim shrink your time horizon and then

10:03 concentrate on the concentrate on the moment whatever that moment happens to be it might be the next minute you know i don't know what else to do when you're in an extreme situation the other thing i guess the final thing i would say with regards to the we may not have be able to have children well you need a plan to address that to the best that that you can to the best way that you can and then you have to give yourself some time to reconceptualize your life and your future and i would say news like we may not be able to have children that probably takes about a year or a year and a half to digest so don't be too hard on yourself if you haven't figured it out yet it's any major life transformation like a really major life

10:49 transformation i would say takes a minimum of a year to really adapt to