My question isn’t really related – it was triggered by the New Yorker/Time pieces and hearing your interview with Rob on the 80,000 Hours podcast (which I thought was really charming; the chemistry between you two comes across clearly). Disregard if it’s not relevant or too personal or if you’ve already answered elsewhere online.
How did you get so dang happy?
Like, in the podcast you mention being one of the happiest people you know. But you also talk about your struggles with depression and mental ill-health, so you’ve had some challenges to overcome.
Is the answer really as simple as making mental health your top priority, or is there more to it? Becoming 5–10x happier doesn’t strike me as typical (or even feasible) for most depressives[1]; do you think you’re a hyper-responder in some regard? Or is it just that people tend to underindex on how important mental health is and how much time they should spend working at it (e.g. finding meds that are kinda okay and then stopping the search there instead of persisting)?
I think it’s a combination of multiplicative factors. Very, very roughly:
Prescribed medication and supplements: 2x improvement
Understanding my own mind and adapting my life around that (including meditation, CBT, etc): 1.5x improvement
Work and personal life improvements (not stressed about getting an academic job, doing rewarding work, having great friends and a great relationship): 2x improvement
To illustrate quantitatively (with normal weekly wellbeing on a +10 to −10 scale) with pretty made-up numbers, it feels like an average week used to be like: 1 days: +4; 4 days: +1; 1 day: −1; 1 day: −6.
Now it feels like I’m much more stable, around +2 to +7. Negative days are pretty rare; removing them from my life makes a huge difference to my wellbeing.
I agree this isn’t the typical outcome for someone with depressive symptoms. I was lucky that I would continue to have high “self-efficacy” even when my mood was low, so I was able to put in effort to make my mood better. I’ve also been very lucky in other ways: I’ve been responsive to medication, and my personal and work life have both gone very well.
Rob Wiblin: …How have you ended up five or 10 times happier? It sounds like a large multiple.
Will MacAskill: One part of it is being still positive, but somewhat close to zero back then...There’s the classics, like learning to sleep well and meditate and get the right medication and exercise. There’s also been an awful lot of just understanding your own mind and having good responses. For me, the thing that often happens is I start to beat myself up for not being productive enough or not being smart enough or just otherwise failing or something. And having a trigger action plan where, when that starts happening, I’m like, “OK, suddenly the top priority on my to-do list again is looking after my mental health.” Often that just means taking some time off, working out, meditating, and perhaps also journaling as well to recognize that I’m being a little bit crazy.
Aside from starting from a low baseline and adopting good mental health habits, I’d be interested to know how much of the 5–10x happiness multiplier Will would attribute to his professional success and the growth of the EA movement. Is that stuff all counteracted by the hedonic treadmill?
Huge congratulations on the book!
My question isn’t really related – it was triggered by the New Yorker/Time pieces and hearing your interview with Rob on the 80,000 Hours podcast (which I thought was really charming; the chemistry between you two comes across clearly). Disregard if it’s not relevant or too personal or if you’ve already answered elsewhere online.
How did you get so dang happy?
Like, in the podcast you mention being one of the happiest people you know. But you also talk about your struggles with depression and mental ill-health, so you’ve had some challenges to overcome.
Is the answer really as simple as making mental health your top priority, or is there more to it? Becoming 5–10x happier doesn’t strike me as typical (or even feasible) for most depressives[1]; do you think you’re a hyper-responder in some regard? Or is it just that people tend to underindex on how important mental health is and how much time they should spend working at it (e.g. finding meds that are kinda okay and then stopping the search there instead of persisting)?
Counterpoint from Nick Cammarata
I think it’s a combination of multiplicative factors. Very, very roughly:
Prescribed medication and supplements: 2x improvement
Understanding my own mind and adapting my life around that (including meditation, CBT, etc): 1.5x improvement
Work and personal life improvements (not stressed about getting an academic job, doing rewarding work, having great friends and a great relationship): 2x improvement
To illustrate quantitatively (with normal weekly wellbeing on a +10 to −10 scale) with pretty made-up numbers, it feels like an average week used to be like: 1 days: +4; 4 days: +1; 1 day: −1; 1 day: −6.
Now it feels like I’m much more stable, around +2 to +7. Negative days are pretty rare; removing them from my life makes a huge difference to my wellbeing.
I agree this isn’t the typical outcome for someone with depressive symptoms. I was lucky that I would continue to have high “self-efficacy” even when my mood was low, so I was able to put in effort to make my mood better. I’ve also been very lucky in other ways: I’ve been responsive to medication, and my personal and work life have both gone very well.
Relevant excerpt from his prior 80k interview:
Aside from starting from a low baseline and adopting good mental health habits, I’d be interested to know how much of the 5–10x happiness multiplier Will would attribute to his professional success and the growth of the EA movement. Is that stuff all counteracted by the hedonic treadmill?
(I ask not just for selfish reasons as a fellow depressive, but also because making EAs happier probably has instrumental benefits)