Author: trevorharley

I am Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee, Scotland. I am the author of several books, including the best selling texts "The psychology of language" (now in its fourth edition) and "Talking the talk: Language, psychology and science". I am currently also writing books on the science of consciousness and on the philosophy of science as applied to psychology (the latter with Richard Wilton), with both due to be published in 2017. Several other books are in the pipeline. My research interests are varied and I have published widely in some of the leading peer-reviewed psychology journals. My interests include language production, how we represent meaning, computer models of the mind, sleep and dreams, consciousness, mental illness, personality and motivation, the effects of brain damage on behaviour, and how the weather influences behaviour. I believe passionately that scientists, particularly those paid from the public purse, have a duty to explain what they do to that public. I also believe that we can reach a wide audience by the use of social media and new ways of explaining what we do. In my spare time I use stand-up comedy to talk about my research; a few years ago I appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe. One of the strangest things about being a comic is that I am often severely depressed (as well as anxious and obsessive). I have been on many types of medication, with varying degrees of success. When depressed I am always struck by how pointless everything seems: nothing seems worthwhile, and those things that I usually enjoy (playing the piano - even if not very well, looking at the natural world, reading, watching movies) no longer entice. My interest in things is a very accurate barometer of how well I am. I have realised that some mental illnesses, particularly severe mood disorders, are in part a loss of purpose and meaning in life. Becoming well involves recovering this purpose. I am also very keen to help remove the stigma that still surrounds mental illness. All of my life I have been puzzled by the question of what is the best way to spend my time. This blog is my search for answer to that question. In it I talk about my life, psychology, mental illness, purpose, living a better life, time management, existential despair, death (making me a death blogger I suppose), being creative, writing, and trying to write when depressed. I try and blog once a week or so; long silences usually mean I'm too depressed to write. For more information about me, see the home page of my website at www.trevorharley.com. I welcome comments on my blog, or if you prefer you can email me at trevor.harley@mac.com. You can follow me on Twitter at @trevharley.

Nulla dies sine linea

 

sun rays

 

I have to finish the first draft of my book on consciousness by the start of November. I want to leave about two months for rewriting, clarifying, and improving the style. That means. 1339 words a day every day before 1 September to reach my target 160,000 words. (My writing software of choice, Scrivener, will automatically calculate the daily target based on your deadline and target length, and keep track of your daily writing total against the daily target.) There are probably going to be some days when something goes wrong and I can’t write, so I should be aiming for about 1500 words a day. I don’t know whether that sounds a lot or little to you; most days I have to read and think to be able to write those words, and I have to keep track of citations (not included in the total) as I go.

It would be easier if I didn’t have a day job too. Fitting writing in spare moments is difficult and stressful. Whoever thought that a writer has an easy life? At the very least it requires great discipline and great dedication.

When writing like this it is difficult to fit much else in to life. The mundane tasks are piling up. I really should wash the car, clear the vegetable patch, and change my energy suppliers, but such things always come last.

But the end is in sight. I finish the day job on 31 July. As of today that’s exactly 100 days.

Hopefully then things will be easier. But then there are these things called “holidays”. No wonder holidays can be among the most stressful of life events! Holidays for the writer and depressed person are interesting things. Words don’t get written unless you’re at the computer (or typewriter, or even with a notepad and pencil), and totals don’t wait for holidays. I suppose all self-employed people have the same problem – can we afford to take a break? It is though I think more challenging for writers facing a deadline. My current plan is never to stop writing, and write even in holidays and on Christmas day.

I suppose there is with every task a point at which it sometime becomes a chore, no matter how important the job and no matter how enjoyable it usually is. We just have to push on through.

A long time ago, Apelles the painter said:

Nulla dies sine linea.

Not a day without a line. The same applies to writers too. Even depressed writers. And setting some task for the day ahead, however small, and if possible doing it is of great help to depressed people in general.

Removing the stigma of mental illness

 

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My planned post can wait: last week was UK Depression Awareness Week.

I used to be sceptical about these special days and weeks, but now I think there is a great deal of benefit to having a concerted surge of activity because at the very least it generates publicity.

There used to be a great deal of stigma and shame associated with any kind of mental illness. People felt forced to hide their suffering. They were discriminated against, made fun of, and even bullied – things that of course just made people even worse. At our school, many years ago, boys who were slightly odd were given nicknames based on the local mental hospital. People found it more difficult to get and keep jobs. I remember an employee, a long time ago and in a place far away from here, feeling forced to tell me that he had been off work for some weeks with a “very bad cold in the head” – whereas there were rumours that he had had a “nervous breakdown”. There was very little advice available in the NHS, and there was a much more restricted choice of drugs. Prozac only became widely available in 1988.

Things are by no means perfect even now, but every time a celebrity “comes out” as mad, there’s another step forward. Every time someone is honest at work or with their friends all of us are a little more liberated. Those of us who can owe it to the others to stand up and say we’re GLAD TO BE MAD. Well, maybe not glad, but we are, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Stop the stigma now.

 

Making big changes the small way

NW Scotland

 

If you want to change yourself for ever, make the change in tiny steps. We’re all familiar with people who make big resolutions at New Year (I’m just as guilty as anyone else), who then take out gym membership on 1 January but who have stopped going by the 10th. When I reflect I’m ashamed by the number of times I have resolved to eat less, drink less, exercise more, work more, travel more, go out more, and so on, and so on, and so on.
A few years ago the book Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (2009) was very popular; apparently politicians were taking it on holiday as beach reading. I see that there is a forthcoming book (2015) by David Halpern called Inside the Nudge Unit; its Amazon description starts:

“Behavioural scientist Dr David Halpern heads up Number 10’s ‘Nudge Unit’, the world’s first government institution that uses behavioural economics to examine and influence human behaviour, to ‘nudge’ us into making better decisions. Seemingly small and subtle solutions have led to huge improvements across tax, healthcare, pensions, employment, crime reduction, energy conservation and economic growth.”
The much debated “sugar tax” is presumably a recent application of the nudge principle: a small increase in the price of sugar-containing goods will (or might) change behaviour by stopping some people eating quite as much sugar as they have, leading to a reduction in obesity levels. With millions of people you don’t need to make a big change to make a big difference.

Nudging means changing behaviour by making small changes. We know dramatic diets are often ineffective; indeed people often end up weighing more than they before dieting. When people fall off the diet wagon they think “what the heck”, and binge. Small changes to lifestyles are more likely to persist and have long-lasting effects than dramatic resolutions.

So I am reducing my medication, and doing it gradually. (A caveat: always discuss it with your healthcare professional before you change medication in any way. I did with mine, and they’re monitoring me in case I go downhill without appreciating it.) I’ve cut quetiapine from four to one a day, very gradually. I don’t feel so good after going down to just one but I’m hoping it’s just a blip.

And of course only change one thing at once, and give that change a chance to bed in and observe its effects. There are still many more things I want to change about my life so that I can find more time for writing, reading, and thinking, but this change is the big one for now. It will mean I need to sleep less and am more alert in the day.

This technique should work for everyone – including depressed non-writers and non-depressed writers and even non-depressed non-writers. Look at your life. Decide what is the most important thing you have to change. Decide upon a small step towards that change. Implement the change. Give it time until what you’ve changed is now habit, then repeat. The technique is good for diet, exercise, working more, working less, and so on.

One thing I am not so sure about is whether gradual change is better for making a permanent change in areas such as smoking and alcohol and drug addiction. In these areas many people appear to have success with going cold turkey. Whether nudging would be even more successful for these sorts of things I don’t know, and I don’t know of any figures either way.

So vow to make one small change today.

 

 

The daily schedule of a depressed writer

 

wood pigeon

It’s not easy being depressed, and it’s not easy being a writer. Being a depressed writer is worse than the sum of the parts. I often wonder why I bother; why not just go for the easy life of staying in bed all day long, which is often what I most often most want to do? Instead I struggle to make time for my writing.
It does mean that for depressed writers there is the question of how can we best arrange our time to facilitate writing? Of course it’s a problem all writers and creative people share. One of the best books I have read recently is Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work by Mason Currey (2013). Unusual creativity comes from unusual people living unusual lives. It is quite difficult to discern a pattern in the most creative lives. Have a look at this nice graphical representation of the daily routines of a sample of creative people (including creative scientists):

https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

With all sorts of caveats, and with many exceptions, the pattern seems to be get started early, exercise, relax. I’m not being prescriptive: until I cut down my quetiapine medication I was incapable of getting started early. And when I was Dean I had countless 8.30 and 9.00 am meetings, which really got in the way of getting deep work done (see my earlier blog on “Deep work”). There is robust evidence that some people are morning types and some evening, and if I were going to be prescriptive about anything, it would be to work out when you have most energy and feel best, and do your most creative work then. So of course there are many exceptions to this general pattern of writing first thing: some writers can only really get going at night after a few martinis. (Amazingly though Ernest Hemingway always started writing at six in the morning, even if he had been up late the night before with hard drinking, and worked until about noon.)
For me it ‘s good though to get the writing out of the way. I can never relax until I’ve completed my writing goal for the day. Another problem with starting late is that I never know how a writing task is going to take until I’ve done it. I’m writing a book on consciousness at the moment and I’ve set myself the target of a thousand words a day. It preys on my mind until the target bar in Scrivener (my currently preferred book writing software) reaches 100% for the day.
It is worth spending time on working out what is the perfect day for living the perfect life, in the sense of maximising quality time to get what we want to get done, done. It’s obvious that routine is important; routine crystallised to the point of ritual in many cases, as the title of Currey’s book suggests. Routine does bring its own problems for living – routine is the enemy of spontaneity, unless we schedule some hours in which to be spontaneous, which almost defies the purpose. But when on a creative burst, writing a book with a deadline, I need routine. A rigid routine or else I will not get it done. This routine means being tough on myself as well as other people. No exceptions.
I do wonder how some people manage to get so much more than me. I struggle at the moment with work, let alone writing. I try and free up as much quality time (for reading, writing, and thinking) as possible by outsourcing things like cleaning and mowing the lawn. I’m lucky that I can. How do people with children manage? But there are some days when I am so depressed that I just want to sit and cry and stare into space. Fortunately these days are much rarer when I’m writing; perhaps the sense of purpose writing provides helps us lift my mood. But one of the most depressing things about being depressed is how much time is lost to being ill. It is tragic.

Changing my life

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In my last blog I described how I had decided to take the leap from being employed to self-employed, and become a full-time writer. I’ve done this in part because of course I want to spend more time writing, and in part because I think being wholly responsible for my life will help my battle with depression and anxiety. So far – and I’m aware that it’s very early days – I’m optimistic; mostly, at the moment, I feel remarkably happy and anxiety free. Taking complete control of my life has almost been an instant cure. I still have some bad days when I feel a bit depressed, but the bad is now nowhere near as bad as it has been. Of course the days are getting longer as well, and the perpetual gloom of the Scottish winter has started to lift; I’m sure that helps, but I don’t think the weather is the main reason for my improvement. Being free is I think the major factor. I’m sure the feeling won’t last for ever – people soon adapt to changes in their circumstances – but I think it’s a good and important change.
So I have decided to reduce my medication. I have gone down to only two quetiapine a day. Quetiapine is an atypical anti-anxiety drug that is very effective against anxiety. It worked great for me, but made me extremely sleepy. I was worried that this reduction in dosage might interfere with my ability to sleep: I love the instant unconsciousness quetiapine gives you at night; I like the way I put my head on the pillow and I am asleep. In the morning I don’t even remember switching the light out the night before. I was afraid that I would lose this instantaneity of falling asleep, but I haven’t (so far). I don’t sleep quite as deeply later in the night, but I do find it easier to wake up in the morning. I hate the way quetiapine makes it so difficult for me to wake, and leaves me feeling like I just need to go back to sleep for the first couple of hours of the day. Reducing the dose has greatly reduced this zoned out feeling. So far, so good. And I’ve had no rebound in anxiety levels, which I also feared might happen.
I’ve decided I need to make other changes too. Now the general advice when changing your medication and life when mentally ill is only to change one thing at a time. So I’ll give the reduction in quetiapine some time to bed down. My previous “big change” was to try to get fit and go to the gym. This change has more or less worked out, and I’m now fitter than I have ever been. I still can’t say I particularly enjoy the gym or exercise though; I find cardio painful – literally and metaphorically. I hope to reduce the dose of quetiapine to one a day soon.
But it is also time to rethink my daily schedule to see how I can maximise writing time. The research shows that many great writers start early in the morning and get going with those words. I would need at least a cup of tea before I could do anything, but I could make writing the number one priority of the morning. No checking of email or Facebook until those thousand or whatever the target number of words are out. At the moment I go to the gym some mornings, and as the anxiety builds up, take quetiapine. Although it calms me down I feel a bit sedated as well, and I don’t like that feeling. Often (and of course it’s not always possible to do so) I fall asleep. I then feel good and perky for the later afternoon, evening, and early night. Of course at the moment the writing time is naturally heavily constrained by the day job; I won’t be able to change my life fully until I actually finish. At this time of the academic year student project work and marking more than fills the day. For now though, work comes first. The writer’s life is not an easy one. And being depressed is not easy. Being an employed depressed writer is very difficult indeed.

 

Taking the leap

Morning cirrus

Last week I took the plunge and decided to “retire” from my full-time job as an academic and go free-lance as a writer from 1 August.

Some call me brave, some lucky, and I worry I’m being stupid. I’ve been fortunate in life so far in being able to do the two things I wanted to do when I was young: be a professor and to write. After spending most of my time doing the first and only a little of the second, I now want to devote my life to writing, reading, and thinking. (And going to the gym building the perfect male body.) I realise I’m lucky to be able to pursue my dreams, but it is something I have been working towards; it’s just a bit earlier than I originally planned.
I’ve had twenty wonderful years at the University of Dundee. I love the place, and I’m proud of the Psychology group I managed and built up there. I love teaching, particularly those huge first-year lectures with an appreciative audience. But the times they are a-changing, and I’m starting to feel just a bit out of touch with academic life and the young of today. So it’s time for a change and a new challenge. Mainly I want to be free and I want to write. It remains to see what sort of living I can make.
I’ve never taken well to following orders – I remember I particularly hated PE at school not because I disliked sport or exercise, but because I hated the regimentation that went with it. And the cadet force at school was also most unpleasant: what was the point of shiny buckles and marching up and down just for the sake of it? In any job, however good, where you’re not the boss, you have to do what others tell you, to some extent at least – it’s hardly unreasonable if you’re getting paid, and particularly if you’re getting paid by the tax payer. But I have found that having to do things seems to make me anxious. My psychopathology again. So, non serviam.
I have several projects on the go that aren’t too far away from being completed. There’s the second edition of my beginner’s guide to the psychology of language, Talking the talk. I’m proud of that because I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. There’s a student guide to the philosophy of science and psychology on the way. And then there’s a book on consciousness. That should take me to the end of this year. And there’s my book on depression, anxiety, and me, for which my agent is currently trying to find an editor. Publishers and editors interested in the definitive book on the experience and science of depression, contact us (trevor.harley@mac.com).
And the effect of making the decision and signing the deal has been enormously beneficial to my mood and anxiety levels. I feel HAPPY (I do want to shout here) and my anxiety has virtually disappeared. So I’ve decided to reduce my medication.
So I am taking big steps to taking control of my life and trying to cure myself of depression and anxiety: in the last few months I’ve started working out with a personal trainer, and changed the job. And so far it seems to be working. But I know many battles lie ahead.

Internet resources on depression

Mar 15 eclipse 11

I’m a little short of time this week, so for inspiration I decided just to Google “meaning of life depression” and see what came up. The first hit was this page:

Depression and the meaning of life

That’s a very interesting page but the whole site is full of useful ideas and information. As the page points out, there are no easy answers. The authors view depression as a challenge for us to make meaning: that “Some people think that the pain of depression can be seen as a kind of ‘signal’ to ourselves to take stock and reassess our lives. At the very least, we may need to recognise and change unhelpful habits like depressed thinking. It may also be the opportunity to think more deeply about how to make our lives more meaningful.”
Spot on! I wish I’d written that myself. But the main theme of my blog is HOW do we make our lives more meaningful? I’ve considered so far that there is a distinction between meaning in life and passing one’s time in a fulfilling way. It’s relatively easy to do the latter, but in the absence of religion, there is no meaning in life. We have to make our way as best we can in what we have to accept is a meaningless world.

One of the few good things about being depressed is that there are a lot of web sites, such as this one, and resources out there for us. It must have been awful to be alone and depressed twenty years ago. (Actually I remember what it was like.) At least we need not feel quite so isolated right now. There are quite a few forums for depressed people and in forthcoming weeks and months I hope to try some.

The cycle of consumerism

Newtyle house 6 Jan 14 15 – Version 2

 

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love my stuff. I love the latest gadgets, particularly if they’re from Apple. I like my car and big TV. I like my stereo and home cinema. I love buying books and music.
And yet, I know there’s a hollowness at the heart of all this consumerism. I know stuff shouldn’t make me happy (but it does, a bit, at least, and at least for a while). I think in addition to all my other problems, including OCD, I have a slight shopping disorder. If I see something I want I get it; waiting is not a word I know. It’s not bad enough to ruin me, and I don’t have a cupboard full of shoes (books maybe), but it’s at the boundary of normal and pathological. In part there’s this completeness obsession – the idea that I might be missing something. Or even worse, that one book in a series might have a different kind of cover.
Yet in the end, totally predictably, stuff doesn’t make me happy (well, just a bit). Shopping doesn’t make me happy. Owning stuff doesn’t make me happy. Or if it does, I only feel happy for a short while. In the end, it makes no difference. If anything I feel a little encumbered by all this stuff.
But not encumbered enough to do anything. Money can’t buy you love, but I’m sure it helps. All the research shows that if you give someone a lot of money, eventually their happiness reverts to the previous level. I’m sure that most people who struggle with debt or to pay the mortgage or even just who want to live in a better house will find that very difficult to believe. I do. I’m sure that if I just had a bit more of everything, I would be much happier for ever. Really happy. If I won the lottery my depression would lift at once and permanently. But surely everyone knows this joke:

“There is this guy who’s always been poor, and one day he decides to pray to God that he could win the lottery. He prays and prays, but doesn’t win. Every day, he prays to God that he could win the lottery, and it never happens.
One day, when he’s very old and frustrated, he gets on his knees and says, “Look, God. This is the last time I’m going to pray. PLEASE let me win the lottery, or at least tell me why you aren’t letting me win.”
Suddenly, an angel appears before the man and says, “Look, sir, could you do God a favour and at least BUY A LOTTERY TICKET???!!!”

Let me finish with some quotes from that master of pith, Tyler Durden in Fight Club.
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”

The afterlife

Brandon marsh frost

I would love to be able to believe in God. I can see the advantages of the promise of an afterlife, the lure of goodies for ever as long as I obey a few simple rules in this life, we provided a way of living without having to think about myself, and meaning on a plate. I envy the faithful.
It is of course more difficult trying to live a good life if you have to work out what good is yourself from scratch. The Bible tells us what is good, and we just have to follow the good book. To be fair the Ten Commandments largely provide a short cut for a moral system, as stripped of their religiosity they are good sound ways of being good to others, or at least not harming them, based on the golden rule do unto others as you would like to be done by.
But it’s the meaning I envy religious people most. Meaning on a plate; ready meal meaning. The rest of us have to make do with having no meaning. But because I think there is no ultimate meaning, it doesn’t follow I think that there is no purpose. We could, for example, give ourselves maximum pleasure in life. The Greek philosopher Epicurus advocated finding pleasure in life, although his pleasures were rather more modest than stuffing ourselves with champagne and caviar; he sought the pleasures of friendship, freedom from fear, and peace. And we have to titrate short-term gain with long-term pain: I could rob a bank tomorrow, and in the unlikely event that I succeeded in coming away with a few pounds, blow them on a first-class flight to Sydney. Any pleasure gained from this escapade would be more than outweighed by the grimness of the inevitable twenty years or whatever in prison afterwards. In any case robbing a bank would violate my ethical system of trying to do unto others as I would be done by; if we all robbed banks we would soon be in a pretty pickle (and all in prison).
I often think psychopaths have been dealt a lucky hand in life. The ability to put themselves first and not worry about must be pretty wonderful. I on the other hand fret about every action and how it’s going to affect others. I’m still a pretty selfish person, but I worry. And how I worry about retribution.
The loss of God (to many of us) has of course led to some well known consequences. The existentialists in particular have thought and written about how we should think and live in a godless world where the only certainty is death, sooner or later. Like many other depressed and anxious people I am obsessed with death. If you have no hope of an afterlife then what we experience now and in our remaining days is all we can hope for. The philosopher Kierkegaard said that anxiety, angst, comes from within us, and our dread at the existential choices we have to make in the face of our fear of death. He said that confronting this fear expands the soul and fulfils the self – assuming we can resolve the fear and accept the ultimate meaninglessness of life.
“Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it.” – Kierkegaard.
We have to accept that we will die, and that will be it. I find that idea very hard to accept. It’s unfair, but it seems that there’s nothing I can do about it. And although the idea of not existing is so incredibly painful, perhaps it’s only when I feel that pain that I feel truly alive.

 

Giving up

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Surely everyone who has ever been seriously depressed has felt at some time like just giving up. I don’t just mean committing suicide, although that is often not far from the backs of our minds; I merely mean throwing our hands up in despair and sitting on the ground, like rebellious toddlers, and refusing to take part in life anymore. Sometimes this feeling comes from some silly event. The other day I knocked over a glass of white wine. It wasn’t simply that I couldn’t face clearing it up, but the event was imbued with some great significance. I am reminded of the scene at the end of the movie 2001, when the ageing Bowman eats his solitary dinner and then knocks over the glass on his table with his cuff; that clearly means something (although I have never been quite sure what). My broken glass signified for me that everything is pointless; all things come to an end, usually rather quickly. I just wanted to sit down and cry. I had had enough.
Sometimes I do some mundane repetitive task and think there must be more to life than this. I know I’m thinking a cliché, and that in fact my life is relatively comfortable, interesting, and good, but that knowledge doesn’t help. Doing the rubbish, collecting the trash, can often bring me to total despair. Looking at the toilet thinking I should clean it again. It’s the again bit that gets me most. Emptying the dishwasher. Washing the bedding. I feel despair wash over myself as I think, not again. This daily routine is killing me. On a good day I will wonder how many more times I will have to empty the dishwasher or clean the toilet before I die; on a bad day I think I can’t face doing it one more time. It is all ultimately so pointless.
The final words in the great Kenneth Williams’ diaries were “Oh, what is the bloody point?”. It is still debated whether his death was suicide or an accidental overdose, but for me that last entry can have only one meaning.
When the world ends I will have a cold, so I won’t be able to treat even Armageddon with the concentration and focus it deserves. Big Things always happen when I feel unwell. The rest of the time it’s the accumulation of little things, the endless repetition of life, that gets me down. Doesn’t everyone worry that at the very best, when they brush their teeth they’re just going to have to do it again a few hours later, and at worst, this time might be the last that we ever do it? Or does everyday life just pass most people by?
When you’re depressed, every day seems the same. There’s no colour. There’s nothing to look forward to. What is the bloody point?