Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Inside versus outside
From the outside, the person has a great education, good health, and a good team around them. From inside, no matter which way they look, all they see is darkness. Told to move four feet forward, they answer that they are looking ahead and there is nothing there. That is what makes the state so scary.
What sets it off
It often comes down to a relationship that ended or a school or job that didn't come through. A friend looks at it and thinks the other person was a disaster anyway, and the one who got dumped cannot compute that. They are stuck, and it is a helpless feeling to watch.
Getting out of it
The solution to a problem is not found inside the problem. A person has to get out of it to look at it, assess how to solve it, and decide whether it needs solving at all. Detachment is the skill that makes that possible, and the person who gains it can look back and say that the other person was not who they thought, and move on.
Why does a low mood narrow what a person sees?
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory holds that positive emotions widen attention while negative emotions narrow it. In a 2005 experiment with Christine Branigan, volunteers watched film clips meant to evoke amusement, contentment, fear, or anger. Afterward, people who had watched the fear and anger clips listed fewer things they felt like doing than people who had watched the pleasant clips. The people who watched the amusing clips listed the most.
Why does a breakup feel like withdrawal?
In a 2010 brain-imaging study led by anthropologist Helen Fisher, fifteen people who had recently been rejected in love looked at photos of their former partners while lying in an fMRI scanner. Their scans showed activity in the ventral tegmental area and other reward regions linked to craving. Fisher's team concluded that romantic rejection engages some of the same brain systems involved in addiction.
Why is it easier to see a friend's way out?
Psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross call the gap Solomon's paradox, after the biblical king famed for wisdom about other people's affairs. In a 2014 study, people thought through a relationship problem that was either their own or a friend's. They showed more humility, more willingness to consider other perspectives, and more acceptance of compromise when reasoning about a friend's problem. In the same study, asking people to reason about their own problem from a third-person view closed the gap.
More from Andrew Huberman
