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In Dante’s Inferno, the Roman writer Virgil leads the story’s narrator down through the circles of hell. Each circle is more grotesque and frightening than the last, until finally the pair reach the ninth circle, where Satan himself resides. Contrary to what you (or Dante) might expect, the Prince of Darkness is not found laughing maniacally, poking condemned sinners with his pitchfork. Rather, he is stuck up to his waist in a block of solid ice, weeping bitterly.
Satan is so absorbed in his misery that he doesn’t even notice the narrator and his guide when they intrude. It is a picture not of wicked glee, but of the darkest depression. Dante’s portrait is a very humanly recognizable condition, and inspires pity, not hatred.
If you haven’t experienced serious depression, you almost certainly know someone who has. According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who have been diagnosed with clinical depression at some point in their lifetime reached an all-time high last year, at 29 percent. People describe such a spell as involving a suffocating sadness, an inability to feel pleasure, and a lethargy that makes the smallest tasks seem insurmountable.
But as Dante suggests, another common characteristic might be the most miserable of all. Someone I knew and loved for many years, who lived with disabling depression, told me that what bothered her most was that it made life terribly boring. “All I think about is myself,” she told me. Her depression, she said, was like living with a person who won’t stop talking, droning on and on about the most tedious topics in the world and making it impossible to concentrate on anything else. This is a phenomenon known as maladaptive self-focus, which does indeed characterize—and perpetuate—major depression.
This symptom contains valuable information for all of us. Even if, mercifully, you are not depressed, you would nonetheless probably like to be happier. You think about yourself a great deal, as we all do, but this almost certainly hurts your happiness, even if your self-preoccupation is not maladaptive. Fortunately, you can learn to think about yourself less—and reap benefits for your well-being.
No reliable scientific data exist for how much of our time we spend focusing on ourselves, but we know it is a lot. To begin with, consider what we talk about. One study revealed that when one man talked with another man, about 53 percent of the conversation, on average, was spent discussing his own experiences or relationships. When a woman spoke with another woman, she talked about herself and her relationships or experiences about 39 percent of the time. But that is just the beginning; typically when we aren’t talking to others, or are not otherwise engaged, our brains switch to the default mode network—at which point our thinking becomes almost entirely self-referential. Even while we sleep, we are inevitably the star in our dreams. We basically think and talk about ourselves all day and all night.
This intense self-focus makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. As an adult human, you are primarily responsible for your own survival and success, and the very fact that you are alive today means that your prehistoric ancestors also thought sufficiently about these matters—because if they’d failed to, they would have been unlikely to pass on their genes. In that respect, self-referential thinking is a necessary way of staying focused on life’s core tasks.
This observation is not just an anachronism from the Pleistocene period; researchers today have shown that people who think about themselves a lot tend to get along well with others and get ahead in life (provided that their thoughts are not excessively negative). Even when such self-focus is pathological, as it is with narcissists, it can still confer benefits. As two psychologists argued in 2015, and other studies have largely confirmed, narcissists tend to do well in short-term mating and dominance hierarchies. In other words, they find it easy to get dates and are initially persuasive as leaders.
That’s the upside, but the downside is very significant. Constant self-absorption generally makes you feel terrible. One 2002 meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found a marked positive correlation between self-focused attention and negative affect (bad feelings). Excessive self-referential thinking appears to be especially misery-making for anxious people.
In addition, highly self-focused people tend to struggle to maintain emotional stability. The reason for this is that thinking about yourself causes your worries and afflictions to intrude more into your thinking, and that tends to induce such harmful emotions as anger and jealousy. Arguably worst of all, self-referential thinking can make relationships harder. I noted above that narcissists do well in short-term dating, a finding long-observed by researchers. That is one kind of success, but not something associated with the deep satisfaction of an enduring relationship. Notably, casual sex lowers happiness for most people. That is particularly true for women, who are 21 percent more likely than men to say that a hookup ultimately makes them feel lonely, 19 percent more likely to say that it makes them unhappy, and 14 percent more likely to say that it makes them feel regret.
As I have previously written, studies across the span of people’s lives show that secure, long-term relationships are key to the highest levels of life satisfaction. This requires thinking a lot about your partner, and thus less about yourself, which leads to higher, more stable well-being.
Most of life is made up of experiences and impulses we need to keep in balance. We must eat in order to survive and thrive—but not too much and not the wrong things! Exercise is good, but if you get too obsessed with it, you can harm your physical and mental health. So it is with thinking about yourself. You can’t stop entirely, nor would you want to if you care about staying alive and well. But I am confident that most of us could cut back a bit on the self-referential thinking and gain substantial happiness benefits.
The problem is that willpower alone doesn’t work because, ironically, “I won’t think about myself” is an entirely self-referential intention. The solution is constructive distraction.
1. Bring happiness to others.
A number of researchers over the years have undertaken experiments in which participants are assigned activities and behaviors that they enjoy, as opposed to actions that elevate others (such as making a point of expressing gratitude). You might think that the pleasure principle would win out, but the scholars have consistently found that doing something for another person confers a significant happiness advantage over having a good time for yourself. Two effects are surely at work here: First, when you are looking for ways to help another, you are distracted from your own preoccupations and problems; second, by bringing happiness to someone else, you can “catch” that happiness through what behavioral scientists call emotional contagion.
2. Serve the world.
An act of kindness toward another person works well—but, as four psychologists showed in 2016, so does an act of kindness to the world in general. The researchers compared acts of generosity directed at specific individuals with general good deeds toward the broader world. This didn’t entail Nobel Peace Prize–winning actions, but simply such small-scale generous, considerate behavior as picking up litter or donating to a charity. The researchers found that these good deeds were similar in their beneficial effect on well-being as those aimed at a particular individual.
3. Be more mindful.
One of the most common characteristics of self-referential thinking is that it is both retrospective and prospective, about what I’ve done and what I plan to do. So it makes sense that greater discipline about paying attention to the present might help to displace the self-focused thinking that ruminates on the past and the future. One way to improve that present-focused discipline is through mindfulness training, and this comes in at least two basic varieties: focused attention (such as single-point meditation) and open monitoring (such as training to observe the moment without reaction or judgment). Practicing these techniques has been shown by researchers to lower self-referential thinking and—not coincidentally—reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. These days, any number of mindfulness methods and apps are widely available to help you learn these skills.
An ultimate solution to excessive self-referential thinking is to turn one’s focus outward to the metaphysical aspects of life. Early Christian writers, such as Saint Augustine in the fourth century, are credited with the concept of homo incurvatus en se, a state of being that involves being curved in on oneself, or ingrown, leading to a restless discomfort with life. Augustine’s famous answer for this, in the first paragraph of his Confessions, was “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”
Whether centered on God or not, spiritual traditions teach the paradoxical truth that only by looking outside ourselves can we find ourselves. In the words of the 13th-century Zen Buddhist master Dōgen Zenji:
To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
This is precisely what Dante’s weeping, self-absorbed Satan missed. We don’t have to make this error.