The One You Feed - Jonathan Rottenberg: Depression and Evolution

Episode Date: September 23, 2014

This week we talk to Jonathan Rottenberg Jonathan Rottenberg is a leading researcher in the area of emotion and psychopathology, where he has focused on major depression. He is author of the  book, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. The book is a new look at depression. Depression is discussed as an evolutionary adaptation that has gone wrong in our current culture. Depression is not thought of as a deficiency, or a lack of something. Instead he looks at depression through the lens of mood. He edited Emotion and Psychopathology: Bridging Affective and Clinical Science, published by the American Psychological Association. Since receiving his PhD degree from Stanford University, he has been at the University of South Florida, where he is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Mood and Emotion Laboratory. His work has been generously funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and he has authored over 35 scientific publications, including many in the top journals in psychology and psychiatry. His work has received national and international media coverage, reported in outlets such as Science News, Scientific American, and the The New York Times.  In This Interview Jonathan and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable. Depression as an evolutionary adaptation. Mood theory versus the defect theory of depression. That in our society incidence of depression is growing. The evidence for an evolutionary view of depression. How the purpose of depression is to help us disengage from activities that are not fruitful. How the defect theory of depression has no way to account for the growth of depression. How key human tendencies such as language and goal setting can exacerbate depression. The human tendency to make meaning out of everything and the role this can play in depression. The role of rumination in depression. Persistence of low mood is a key indicator in long term depression. His personal battle with depression. The three things that seed low mood: Events, Temperaments and Routines. The emotional set point theory. How living in a culture so obsessed with happiness is partially responsible for the epidemic of depression. Social media and the role it plays in depression. The inability to tolerate a little bit of depression can create a crisis where someone comes to question the whole path of their life. The goal of evolution is survival, not happinesss. Using medicine for depression as a step on the path. Having higher standards for depression sufferers. Using depression as a bridge to a better life. Three useful approaches to depression: meditation, cognitive therapy and acceptance. How these approaches all turn down the volume on the meaning making machine. Emotional context insensitivity. Depressed people react less to negative stimulus than non-depressed people. Anger can be a useful tool in getting out of depression. Depression can be caused by over attachment to goals, not under attachment. Jonathan Rottenberg Links Jonathan Rottenberg Home Page Buy The Depths on Amazon Came Out of the Dark Campaign Jonathan Rotttenberg on Twitter Jonathan Rottenberg on Facebook    Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy: Kino MacGregor Strand of Oaks Mike Scott of the Waterboys Todd Henry- author of Die Empty Randy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When the bunny eats a carrot, it feels good for a minute, but if it felt good forever, it wouldn't hop along and try to find more carrots, and that would be the end of the bunny. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Jonathan Rottenberg, a leading researcher in the area of emotion and psychopathology, focusing on major depression. He's the author of the book The Depths, The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. John has authored over 35 scientific publications, including Scientific American and The New York Times.

Here's the interview. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I am really excited to get you on. I enjoyed your book, The Depths, a lot. I thought there was a lot of really interesting points about depression that some of which I think are relatively common thinking, and then there were some that were very different. So I'd like to kind of get into that. But to start, we'll start like we always do, which is with the parable of two wolves. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on that parable, which goes something like, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,

and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a minute, and he asks his grandfather, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I think that the parable speaks to the ambivalence. It's a parable about ambivalence, that we have the possibility for two kinds of reactions, for two kinds of behaviors. And depressed people, for so many, produce such an ambivalent reaction. On the one hand, people want to help.

They want to love. They want to empathize. But on the other hand, depressed people, for many, are scary. Illness, mental health conditions are unfamiliar to many people. And often what people do is pull back from depressed people, withdraw, judge. And I think that it's a great challenge for us to feed our good wolf and overcome the age-old stigma and fear that surrounds this condition. So let's talk a little bit about your book, The Depths. Can you sort of give us a walkthrough of your core theory, which to me, it basically sounds like what you're saying is that depression is

an evolutionary adaptation that has gone wrong in certain cases, and that our current model of only looking at depression as a deficit in someone is an incomplete way of looking at it? Yeah, that's exactly right. The dominant paradigm, so the dominant way of thinking about depression, both in research and in treatment, is to think of depressed people as lacking something fundamental, whether that's a neurotransmitter in their brain or an ability to control their emotions or a fault in their cognition or some deficit in how they relate to other people. And that has really brought us to a terrible past where, despite all the incredible resources that are being poured into research and treatment, the problem of depression is actually getting

worse. It now affects about one in five people in the United States. The World Health Organization and other groups project that depression is actually going to be a growing problem in the future with a more negative impact than things like cancer or in accidents. So in the book, I really criticize the defect models, I'm calling it, and say that we're going to make a lot more progress. We're going to understand depression a lot better if we think of it as a mood, as a mood state, and that our ability to be very depressed,

our ability to have clinical depression, which can be a dangerous thing, is actually connected to this very useful adaptation for mood, which helps us approach opportunities, grab rewards that are in our environment, and withdraw from threats and stop our behavior when we're getting into trouble. And so what drives you to arrive at the position that it's more of a evolutionary adaptation than it is a deficit? What are some of the things that led you to believe that? Sure. I mean, I think that we have to see that we have kind of a unique resistance to seeing depression as connected to evolution and adaptation. We really have no problem seeing that for other aversive and unpleasant kind of emotional states. So we have no problem seeing that anxiety is protective.

It keeps us vigilant against threats. We have no problem seeing that pain is a good defense against damage to our bodies. But for some reason, many people have come to the view that sadness and low mood are completely useless. But clearly, we see that across humans and other species, when they're put in situations where there is really nothing that a person or an animal can do, whether that's a famine, whether that's an environment where there are no rewards, or the organism's facing constant punishment, that what you see is that the animal will stop behaving, will cease pursuing rewards, will sort of stay in place. And what we have in human low mood is basically an elaboration on that basic, very primitive animal capacity. So you say that depression's purpose that you think is to help us, its evolutionary purpose is to help us disengage.

Absolutely. So if you're a bear and you're fishing for salmon and you're spending all day in the same spot and you're being very active in pursuing that reward and there are no rewards available, the fact that the bear has a stop mechanism to say, there are no rewards here, to get it to cease behaving is incredibly useful. So, you know, you think of all kinds of situations where it's useful to pause behavior. It's not a good idea for a person or an animal to head out in a new direction during a blizzard.

That's a time for hunkering down. And there are a variety of situations where pausing behavior is the best option. And there are a variety of situations, both with humans and with animals. The one that comes to mind the quickest is the death of a close relationship where there's a situation that cries out to stop what you're doing, to pause, to analyze what's going on, what does this mean for the future. And it's not a pleasant state, but if we didn't have it, we really would be in a far worse position. And so you're saying that its basic purpose is to help us disengage and so that in situations where more activity might not be the right idea, and it does that by the purposes it

lowers your mood and a lower mood is going to sort of naturally slow you down. But you say, so with depression, with animals, it seems pretty straightforward. And then you go on to say that with humans, part of the reason you think that it's gotten out of control would be certain particular positive human tendencies that we have. Yeah, that's a great point. So the defect model doesn't have a very smart account for why there would be more depression now than there was in the past. The idea would be, if you hold that view, that humans suddenly became more defective. And I don't think that's true. And I don't see anyone really making a strong argument that that's true. But if you take the perspective of mood and the idea that low mood is an adaptation, you don't need humans to be more defective. In fact, some of the things

that human beings do very well are the things that can get people into a lot of trouble with their mood. So, for example, humans have elaborate language that other animals don't have. And so we can elaborate upon a mood. Humans can have a very elaborate conceptual self. So a chimpanzee can feel bad, but only a human being can feel bad about feeling bad. can feel bad, but only a human being can feel bad about feeling bad and spin that thought over and over, I'm a terrible mother, in their head. And that will deepen the depression. Only humans can set very high goals.

For example, a goal to be famous, goals that are very far in the future. Animals tend to have more short-term goals, and humans can set any kind of goal. I mean, what language and planning and our unbelievable frontal lobes enables is us in some ways to get depressed about a greater variety of things. But these are the things that enabled us to dominate the planet, many of these capacities. And these same capacities are really a big component of why there is so much depression now.

And you talk about humans as being meaning-making machines, as in we make meaning out of things, and that depression in some cases is that meaning-making machine, I like to say that, it's kind of fun, in overdrive, in an ability to turn off. And you talk about the last couple shows that I've done, I do some shows where I just talk for a little bit, and I've talked a lot about rumination, which is something that you also talk about in your book a fair amount. Can you talk about that meaning-making machine and rumination and the role that plays? Sure. So, it's really interesting. So, our mood system is responding to inputs like language that are in our consciousness, and it's also responding to a lot of things that are outside of our consciousness, like light levels and how much sleep we're getting and things like that.

Our ability to think about our moods, the significance of our moods is often useful because it enables us to solve problems. Sometimes people get stuck and they are literally spinning the very same thought over in their head for days, months, weeks, and sometimes longer than that. And these are often very negative thoughts about why can't I fill in the blank, make friends? Why can't I get a job? Why can't I get over this depression. And those are the kind of thoughts that tend to deepen depression and make it last longer and make a person feel very hopeless. So language and the ability to think about things is a double-edged sword in that we have the ability to connect with others through language, to tell stories

that might help us solve a problem, overcome a problem, understand a depression, but also this ability to ruminate, which you're talking about, which really is a kind of spinning one's wheels. Do you believe that low mood, I'm circling back to our previous topic, do you believe that low mood is an adaptation and depression is the extension of that beyond when it's useful? Or is depression itself part of that adaptation? Or am I just being semantic at this point? No, I think it's an important distinction. So, low mood comes in degrees. So, it can be really mild, barely noticeable. I'm sure you've noticed times you felt a little bit down. Virtually everyone has experienced mild or moderate

low mood where you'll be thinking some negative thoughts and be feeling less vigorous and kind of behaving less. But it goes all the way to very severe incapacitating low mood where a person can't get out of bed and they've ceased eating and they really have ceased behaving to the point where someone might be in the hospital. So, that's all on a continuum. And I think that all the things that might explain why someone is in a mild or moderate low mood are the very same things that explain more severe depression. We don't need separate explanations,

but severe depression, clinically significant depression, is just a more intense form of low mood. And yes, I think that low mood can become dangerous. It's probably not helpful when people are stuck in a low mood for a long time, but there's always the possibility that someone will be able to work their way out of low mood and understand what that low mood was signifying or what it was all about. One of the points that you make, though, is that consistent, persistent low mood is a likely indicator of future and more severe depression? That you call it persistence, this sort of ongoing? Right. I mean, one of the big themes of the book is why do some people get trapped in long, punishing depressions? And there's often many reasons that are pushing a person. I mean, I should say,

in the spirit of disclosure, I was one of those people. I was depressed for about four years. And a number of the things that I would talk about in the book is the motors of depression, book as the motors of depression, such as rumination, such as being stuck on goals that you cannot reach and making no progress towards those goals. But by the same token, not being willing to relinquish or give up those goals, that was me. But different people have different motors. So, this mood system is open to many different inputs. So, it's open to environmental inputs. So, many people have a severe event that happens to them that triggers the depression. They might have a divorce. They might have a loss of a job. They might have, God forbid, the loss of a significant other that triggers the depression. And then layered on top

of that is often how people react to the depression. So, things like how do they cope with the depression? Are they able to control their thoughts or do they get into this kind of spiral? Are they able to connect with other people or do they become more isolated? So, what often happens is that most everyone faces adversity, but for some, that adversity will turn into a more sustained, more long-lasting depression. And the book is an exploration, particularly of cases where the depression does sustain itself and kind of take a life of its own. You talk about three things that seed low mood. You talk about events, temperaments, and... Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all

the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really, No Really, no, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Routines. Can you maybe just spend a minute or so on each of those and talk about the role they're playing? This depression epidemic that we're having in the United States and in the world is happening because the breeding grounds for low mood are so fertile. And that's because there is a combination. So, the combination of people who are predisposed by their genes to have certain kinds of moods. So, some people tend towards being a bit more anxious than others, more fearful towards having more periods of low mood than others. But then on top of that are routines. So, we don't, many people, unfortunately, don't get enough sleep.

They don't get enough light. And this, too, is one of the big seeds. So for why so many people are already walking around in a low mood state, and they're kind of just primed, so now if you're walking around in your low mood state for days and weeks or months, and then something bad happens to you on top of that, you're more vulnerable to having a really serious and sustained depression. We can have events that happen, we have routines, and we have a

temperament. And you talk about, it's the idea of the emotional set point, right? That some of us are more inclined to, our base is a little bit different. But one of the things that you also talk about is that in a culture that is so obsessed with happiness, that those of us who might have a lower set point are sort of always striving towards something that may not be really possible or ideal for us. That's exactly right. So you can look at this as a sad thing or as a potentially positive thing, because I've identified some things that are, you know, pretty hard to control. It's pretty hard to control your temperament. You know, you come into the world with a certain predisposition to have certain kinds of moods, and you can't always control events. Sometimes people get laid off because the plant closes. But you can control, I think to a large degree, how you react to moods and you can control what your expectations are for mood.

On the one hand, it makes sense. The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. It's as American as apple pie. But on the other, people have developed extraordinary expectations for how happy they ought to feel. I think it's how happy they ought to or they think they should feel. Some of this is driven by how happy they think other people are. We're very social creatures, and things like social media can create a false sense that other people are happy all the time. And this may sound innocuous, but it's actually pretty problematic because what happens is that people notice I'm not feeling all that happy. I'm actually feeling a little bit unhappy. And I should be feeling much happier. And so what's wrong with me? And it sets in motion this question which begins the whole cycle of rumination.

What's wrong with me? Why am I not happier? Why can't I get over this? And so the inability to tolerate a little bit of depression, a little bit of low mood, can create actually a crisis where someone comes to question the whole path of their life. Right. I think that there is an idea that we should always be happy. And that's the picture that's painted by a variety of things. And then when we're not, it does, it raises a lot of questions and it starts to feel like failure. And it starts to, it does breed much more, it turns the meaning making machine on. You know, if you, again, look at it from the perspective of evolution,

the end of evolution, most certainly, is not happiness. I mean, I'm sad to say that. I'm sad to break that news. If it's news, the end of evolution is survival. Happiness is actually a useful, certain kinds of positive mood states are a useful means towards that end. So feeling a shot of adrenaline, of excitement after your date to the prom says yes, that is incredibly adaptive. When you get a raise, feeling that shot of adrenaline and that positive feeling, it's a signal that you're moving towards

an important goal and you're getting closer to that goal. But what happens is that those feelings inevitably fade. And you think that's cruel. You think that's not useful, but it actually is useful because what evolution wants us to do is to strive and not to stand pat. It would be great if that feeling of adrenaline and that great excitement lasted, but when the bunny eats a carrot, it feels good for a minute, but if it felt good forever, it wouldn't hop along and try to find more carrots, and that would be the end of the bunny. One of the things that you say is that, and we'll talk, I think it'd be, I'd like to turn the conversation here more towards, okay, what do we do with this? So I guess the first question I would ask is, do you believe that, you know, there's a lot of medicines out there, there's a lot of therapies that intervene and we'll get into more of the, I'll call them mental

therapies, but there are physical therapies that intervene with some degree of success, medication, you know, brain stimulation, different things. And so how does the fact that those sometimes work line up with what you're saying? Because I know that you are critical of the way that we treat depression in this country as being hopelessly incomplete, and I would agree 100% with that. But what is the role you think some of those more physical treatments play? I think they have a role, and it makes sense that you would be able to move the mood system with a drug. We try to do that crudely all the time by drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs. I think that we're handicapping ourselves by not using all the levers that we can pull to move mood.

So we put a lot of eggs in the basket of medications. And it's not that they have no utility whatsoever. They're very useful for about a third of the people who take medications get a real substantial benefit. And that's actually not that different a number than the people who would undergo an accepted psychotherapy for depression. But it leaves a lot of room, I think, for the individual to experiment and find their own route out of depression. And I think that's what we need to do is to encourage people to become more literate about where their moods come from and to take more control if they're having a serious problem like depression of finding their way out of depression.

It doesn't mean refuse treatment. Absolutely not. It actually means get in treatment, but don't expect that to be your salvation. Use that as a tool. Ask tough questions to the doctor and push them to help you as much as they can. And then through your knowledge about yourself and your mood, you can get yourself the last mile. Because in the end, it's really not enough. I think that we need to have higher standards. So a lot of times we call a drug successful if it makes people less depressed.

I mean, that's nice. It's nice to be less depressed, but I think the goal should be that people are actually flourishing, that they're leading meaningful lives, that they really put the depression completely behind them. And so the drugs are not going to do that. Yeah. You posted something on your Facebook page, and I have no idea what to call it, but it was basically a vase that had been put back together with gold. And I think that the underlying idea there is that, and we talk about it on this show a lot, that these problems or these challenges can actually, you can do more than simply get back to where you were. more than simply get back to where you were, they can be bridges to much better lives. You know, it's true. And the defect model has no place to put that. Because if you're looking at a

person who had depression, and you're always seeing them as someone who has a problem in their brain, and they always have this problem problem and they always should take medication even if they're feeling okay because this underlying problem. But there really is the reality that some people, we don't actually have as much research on these people as we should, but a substantial minority, maybe 40% of people who experience a significant depression never have another episode. And then a subgroup of those people not only no longer have an episode, but as you say, they go on to lead richer, more meaningful lives. The depression may be part of their armor, may be part of what enables them to be actually wiser. In my own case, I think that I made a number of mistakes in my life.

And depression was, I'm not saying it was a just dessert. I certainly would not wish depression on my worst enemy. Certainly not a depression that lasts for years. But I do think that gave me some valuable lessons that I take away and that I use every single day. And it's not just the cliche, the cliche about, you know, enjoy the little things, though that is true. If you've been flat on your back depressed, normal mood feels kind of good. It feels better than it did before. But in my own case, and I think for many people who experience depression, it was a call to rebalance my life, to look for meaning in different places than I did before, and maybe not get as bent out of shape by certain

kinds of everyday hassles and concerns. You mentioned a couple of three different sort of therapies or approaches that seem to have some, besides medicine, that have some detectable and known effects on low mood. And those would be acceptance, mindfulness, and cognitive behavior therapy. And you say that the thing they all have in common is they turn down the volume on that meaning making machine. Can you explain how those fit together? Sure. So we all have these awful voices in our head at some time. When you're depressed, and if you had depression, and those voices start to come back, they're very threatening. They can really cause people to spiral downwards. cause people to spiral downwards.

Because what happens is that people take these often very critical voices and these bad feelings as the sole reality. And what techniques like mindfulness, acceptance, and cognitive behavioral therapy allow people to do is not block out, not refuse to recognize that these voices exist. It gives them their space, but it also allows people to kind of question and also to have a certain distance from their own thoughts and feelings. And that enables people a kind of breathing space and an ability to say, well, it's a mood.

It's a terrible mood right now, but I know actually it probably will pass. And it gives them a kind of patience that is incredibly useful and can make the difference between a bad mood lasting a day and a bad mood lasting a week. One of the things you talk about in the book that I think is really, really interesting and you talk about the fact that the general theory is... I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way

to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is that, you know, if you're a psychologist and you're treating depressed people, you ought to have more Kleenex in the office because depressed people are likely to cry more. Which I've always found to be, that's never resonated with me. I mean,

I don't think that's true. But you've got, you talk about studies that show that depressed people actually react less to negative stimulus than people who are not depressed, as well as reacting less to positive stimulus. The overall thing is that there is very little response to stimulus that varies. And I think you call this emotional context insensitivity. Yeah. I mean, how I see depression fundamentally is when a person is in such a strong mood state that they actually start to disengage from their environment. And it's not that they're not feeling anything. Depressed people tend to feel horrible.

I mean, they feel absolutely horrible, but they feel that horrible all the time, whether they're looking at a sunset or whether they're watching a sad movie. And so you as the external observer looking at a depressed person say, wow, they reacted pretty much the same way to the beautiful sunset as they did to this terrible tearjerker film. And the depressed person says, yeah, it was pretty much all the same to me. It was all pretty much horrible. And so that's emotion, context, and sensitivity in a nutshell. It's this kind of shutdown of our normal, flexible engagement with the world and kind of replacing it with this horrible gray monotone.

Which is also responsible for my legendary poker face. So there's one other thing that you say in there, and I think we're nearing the end of our time. of our time, but you say that a person who's able to get agitated still or angry or feel a stronger response is more likely to climb out of depression. Yeah, it does seem that as depressions grind on for months or years that people have a much harder time having this typical emotion flexibility and ability to be cheered up by the occasional good thing that might happen and the occasional ability to, uh, react to even bad things that are going on. I mean, it's sort of ironic, I think, think, when I was depressed and I'm thinking of times when I would watch terrible things on the television, like, you know, there's a famine going on and you see pictures of swollen bellies and flies on little children, that that,

to me, wasn't especially upsetting. It wasn't nearly as upsetting as what was going on inside. And so, I noticed, and I think this is borne out in the research, that when I started to actually react to that again, that that was actually a sign that I was getting better. And so, there are variations. Not all depressions are cracked up to be the same. Some last only a little while and some last a long time. And so this kind of deadening of response doesn't seem to be a very positive prognosticator or predictor. But these are the kinds of things that you would try to change. You try to change in therapy and try to change, you know, on your own over time. And so if, if we were to, if the, if the conversation were to change, um, on a, on a broader level and we were to say, okay, let's say everybody woke up tomorrow and, and,

and read your stuff and said, oh, I think that's right. The deficit model, that's no good. This is a mood disorder. What changes? How do we deal with this differently? And I'm less interested in a national response, although that has a role, but also what does an individual do with that information? I think it's huge, actually, because you're not thinking of your mood as something other than you. As right now with our current view of depression, depression is basically an imposition of a foreign body. It's like a foreign invader. And there's really nothing to learn from it and there's nothing to do.

it, and there's nothing to do. You know, in the classic biomedical model of a serotonin deficit, you take the pill, and there's nothing for the patient to do. We're listening to Prozac, but in my view, we should always be listening to our moods, And we don't have to wait until we get severely depressed. In fact, we can be acting on this information and trying to put ourselves in a better place well before mood gets out of control. And I don't see the goal at all that we should aspire to a society that doesn't have any depression. I think that's an absurd goal, completely impossible goal. But rather a society where we are able to talk about our moods, we're able to understand our moods, and we're better able to contain them. Because right now, what's happening is that millions of people are in these terrible mood states. They don't understand them. They're

tremendously frustrated. And it's a big public health issue in that they're not getting supported. They're having a lot of trouble finding help. And that's really the recipe for this depression epidemic. book is one first step, but you have to interpret this in terms of your own life. So, what are the events that matter to you? What are the purposes that matter to you? Follow those purposes. Learn how to tolerate the low moods. Learn how to adjust your goals so that you're not constantly finding yourself pursuing goals that are unreachable. And I'm actually very optimistic, maybe more optimistic in some ways than this defect model, which says that if you've had depression, you should think of yourself as broken, that you need to be helped basically for the rest of your life. I think that we can have a much more proactive view and that people can be much, much healthier and the outcomes can be so much better than they are

today. Great. So one of the things about your model, and now I'm sort of just filtering it through my own lens, is it is felt to me very much like depression is cyclical, like it sort of just comes and it goes and I have no real ability to tie it to life events and then it just sort of passes. And the way I've started to deal with it to a certain extent is to – and I guess this is turning down the meaning-making machine as I go. Well, I treat it like the emotional flu. I'm like, all right, I just don't feel that great right now. You know what? I'll take care of myself and I'll come out the other side. This is not the time to be reevaluating every aspect of my – because I get into that spot and you suddenly start going, does my life mean anything?

But is there anything in your model that sort of accounts for that cyclical nature or the – it just feels – it's an odd thing. It feels very physical to me. Of course it has a physical component. I mean, moods are so powerful because they harness the mind and they harness the body. And moods are very open to physical inputs. So if you don't get sleep, your mood suffers immediately. And that's the physical effects of the lack of restoration. If you're living in the northern hemisphere and it's the dead of winter, many people experience low mood, and that's because of the lack of light, lack of sunlight.

And so there are many physical, both physical influences on mood that are not tied to specific events. And also mood has physical effects upon us. How else could it get us to stop behaving unless it affected our muscles and our hormones that are circulating? How else could it get us to think certain thoughts unless it was changing what was going on in our brain? So, you know, moods are not this phantom state. They're this powerful integrative force that gets us to do things or not do things. And so, I think that what's exciting about my book, one of the things that I think is exciting is that I offer and I talk about a multitude of levers that people can pull in order to change their mood and also to try to understand their mood. Because not all moods are as simple as, I had a breakup with my girlfriend

and now I feel down about it, or I did bad on an exam and now I feel bad about it. Often people have a lot of trouble understanding what are the sources. And sometimes they'll never fully understand what are the sources because some of the sources are outside of your conscious awareness. But that's research on mood. Part of what we know is that things like light, things like sleep, things like our physical activity level affect our mood as much as events and the people around us. Well, thank you very much for your time. I did enjoy the book. It got me thinking about a lot of different things,

and I really like the work you're doing on trying to broaden the conversation on depression because I've benefited greatly from medicine, but I also recognize that that is only a piece of a much bigger puzzle, and I like that that's what you're bringing to the table is that you just giving somebody a pill and sending them home is not really a treatment for the whole picture. Well, thank you very much. All right. Well, take care, Jonathan, and we'll talk again soon. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on the show.

Okay. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. To learn more about Jonathan Rottenberg and this podcast, go to oneufeed.net slash Rottenberg.