Confessions of a Body in Revolt : Part 1 - The Spark

"The Day My Body Said No"

So... I am back after 7 years with a new post. A new series actually. A lot has happened in the last 7 years but the last 1.5 years have been nothing but cruel physical and been very transformative mentally. I have become a very private person over the years but this journey of the last 1.5 years is one that needs to be told and shared. And no it is not a fun one whatsoever.

For those who have never read any of my silly posts before, I was grew up in India and moved to the US when I was 23. For the most part physically I lived a pretty healthy life and other than recurring headaches that I had since I was 7 years old and no one could really solve and that learned to live with I never had any serious ailments not even many fevers and such growing up.

At 26 I got misdiagnosed in the US as being clinically depressed and turns out I had bipolar disorder which was correctly identified at 27. It is a long story but one of success which I never really documented but one I truly am proud of how far I have come. Years went by, even COVID era came and went by but I was still fairly healthy. And then in 2023 I started noticing that I never could empty out my bladder completely and trying to find out answers led me to a OB-GYN who figured out I had several fibroids outside my uterine wall that needed to be removed.

It all started with a very innocent myomectomy(fibroid removal surgery) that I had in India in Jan 2024. Although I live in the US, I had the surgery in India so I could rest at home in India after the surgery. Now I had an infection (fever, cold etc.) in India prior to the surgery and then a bacterial infection right after the surgery and I had to fight with the hospital doctors to be prescribed antibiotics which I got a few days after up and down of heavy fever in the hospital. I sincerely had no clue my life would turn upside down few months post the surgery. I was telling myself that 2024 was going to be my year. Perhaps it was because I was 39 at the time and I thought turning 40 was a big deal. Who knows, I was just deluding myself taking myself seriously. But my body had other plans. Post surgery, I started having health issues. I had several gastric issues which I wasn’t necessarily understanding and had never had all my life but I decided to just focus on recovery from surgery. Come April of 2024, I started having joint pains in almost every joint and it kept getting worse. It really started with pain in my fingers, I still cannot really make a fist till date and the pain then started spreading to all my joints. Then started a downhill journey of endless doctor visits. Mind you these are not simple pains that would go away when you move or take rest, these are pains that persist throughout the day hurting every joint and often debilitating enough to keep me lying in bed all day. Oh and the joy of having ever been diagnosed with something to do with mental health always prompts the question of perhaps you are just feeling low…well I was not. My body all day would be in pain and feel like it was beaten up by several people.

So towards mid of April, 2024 I first went to my primary care physician and told them about my pains and my gastric issues. They thought may be I had a viral infection and gave me Tamiflu and also gave me docusate sodium but warned that I might need to see a gastroenterologist. Surprise, surprise, neither did nothing. Then the doctor did some blood work, I don't even remember for what anymore and it showed nothing wrong. Then I ended up going to a different primary care doctor who also did some other blood work and the blood work again showed nothing. See, the funny thing that I found in my journey is that when tests don't show anything obvious or anything blatantly off, doctors often tend to lose interest. This doctor referred me to a rheumatologist and a gastroenterologist.

The pains kept getting worse. But just like for a million other people in the US, it is not easy to get an actual appointment with these specialists whenever you want. You first need to manage to get a referral and then wait weeks before you see an actual specialist. And in the meantime the burden of putting up with pain or dealing with your illness is on you, or you have the option of going to the emergency room and hope you will be taken seriously enough. In my case, I managed to see the Rheumatologist in June and didn’t get to see the gastroenterologist until August. I really didn’t expect what was to come after this. And no it was not a simple diagnosis of something even fatal, although months later I would often pray for something fatal atleast. But instead it was a series of appointments with some doctors simply dismissing me, my body completely rejecting anything and everything being put into it and my body basically just saying NO. I never did want to learn about it because who wants to deal with constant joint pains or weird gastric symptoms like constipation and when you try to relieve the constipation, you end up vomiting; but I learnt about it the hard way. What I learnt was that while you suffer with pains and symptoms and loads of bloodwork would be done on you and if you are one of the unlucky ones like me, you will be taken even less seriously than someone whose bloodwork clearly shows something is wrong. My bloodwork for ESR (Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate) to detect inflammation, CRP (C-reactive protein) to detect inflammation, Complete Blood Count etc. which keep getting repeated till date didn’t show anything off.

Just when my rheumatologist was about to dismiss my pain and me, I had to tell him that my father has rheumatoid arthritis, which he indeed has but on a much smaller scale but his pains started with the fingers as well. That got me some attention from the doctor who was about to throw me out of the office. Now my rheumatologist said he suspected something called Seronegative spondyloarthritis (arthritis of the spine) but pending several X-rays and MRSs that he said I should get done, he initially given a painkiller called Celebrex and also told I should see a gastroenterologist as soon as I am able to get an appointment. I was asked to come back in about a month. What I am about to say warrants a whole book written on it but if you happen to have fairly shitty insurance coverage which many smaller companies end up giving out because I like to think people like me are exceptions and not the rule (but who knows), then you can be assured you can meet your out of pocket maximum easily, I have met it for 2024 and 2025 considering the million tests, X Rays, MRIs and other tests I get done mostly to find out very little. So in addition to the physical pains you can pile up the stress of medical bills too. With all the pains and no answers and my body not really responding to the initial painkillers, I decided to take a trip to India, thinking I will turn 40 at home and find magical healthcare in India. That didn’t quite happen how I expected. I mean I did still turn 40. And I realized turning 40 is no big deal. It is as lame as turning any age and in my case I found it lamer than usual considering all my joint pains but more on that separately sometime. I met a couple of rheumatologists in India. One of them being my dad’s rheumatologist and the other one who would later become my mother’s rheumatologist.

The rheumatologists in India looked at my X-rays and one of them said I might have seronegative rheumatoid arthritis and suggested I might benefit from a DMARD (disease-modifying antirheumatic drug) called Sulfasalazine, but that I should pursue treatment with my rheumatologist in the US as I might need long term care. Not bad at all. I then went to the next rheumatologist in India who took me for a ride a little bit and this kind of happened with me over and over with some doctors later in coming months. The next rheumatologist tried various meds on me and first said I might have fibromyalgia and then said I might have rheumatoid arthritis and then since his meds were being rejected by my body then told me my least favorite but most common thing I have heard over the years - this is just something related to your bipolar and something related to stress. I mean are you kidding me? The amount of pain I still have is in no way triggered purely by a mental health condition or stress. More on all the dismissals I have had to endure over the last several months in a separate post. But anyway defeated with all this and feeling purely dismissed, around July 8th or so I just decided to come back to US with a short stopover at Dubai. Dubai trip is significant because from here starts my nausea, vomiting, and the gradual beginning of my body starting to reject food. I reach the US and my body starts saying no to just everything. It gets pathetic after this as for months there is no reprieve and starts a journey of endless chronic pain, doctor visits, no clear diagnoses, my body rejecting food, my body rejecting meds and injections and feeling hopeless about getting anywhere with the pain and what is happening to me.

In my next post that I will publish in a couple of days, Confessions of a Body in Revolt - Part 2: Medical Maze, I will continue my journey and talk about what continued happening you will get a view into how rapidly I started becoming half my size and continued in pain while playing musical chairs with doctors.

Be thankful and mean it too!

Gratitude is associated with wellbeing and happiness. If you don’t believe me, there is an entire field in psychology dedicated just to positive psychology and look up Sonja Lyubomirsky, who is one of the pioneers in happiness research and may be check this one article. If you are like me with high intellectual curiosity (LOL) or simply love reading, there is a lot more work and research out there indicating a positive correlation between gratitude and well-being.  

Well, the point of me writing this is not simply to repeat what research and google are already yelling at you, but to share something that I have come to realize. I have been maintaining a gratitude journal for over a year at this point. Every morning (that is days I don’t feel out of control crazy) I would journal 4 things that I am thankful for. It can be anything from being thankful for no snow and having sunshine to something bigger that I am thankful for all my education and my job etc. When I am good and in a great mood already, I have plenty of energy and writing in the gratitude journal would feel amazing because I would be able to find more than 4 things to be thankful for everyday. The challenge though is journaling when I feel low and slightly more on the depressed side. During these times, writing in the gratitude journal becomes way harder. I have come to realize two things. Firstly, it is more important to journal your gratitude when you feel low than when you feel high. Secondly, just simply writing about things you are thankful for does not give you as much benefit as writing about things you are thankful for and truly feeling thankful for those things.

"gratitude" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by sean808080

The first thing I said I think is quite obvious and common sense (or may be not). When you feel depressed or low, you need to count your blessings and be glad that even though you feel like you are losing your shit, but shit hasn’t hit the fan yet. This would help you get a perspective and feel better that life doesn’t suck as much as you think it does. Now I am not asking you to sugarcoat reality, but there is always some little thing you can be thankful for because in this giant world with 7 billion people, surely there would be atleast one person who is yearning for something you have.

"Reiki: the Power of Gratitude" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Rlei_ki

Now the second thing, being grateful and meaning it – this is really important. There have been days when I have felt low and would just write in my gratitude journal just for the heck of it and feeling lame about writing on it because I would feel like my life sucks anyway I am not really thankful for any of the things I am writing about. Feeling truly grateful is easier (obviously only if you make the effort in the first place) when things are going well for you and when you are in a happy and positive mood. But the challenge and the true benefit is in doing this when you feel low and depressed. It takes a little extra effort to push your brain to truly open its eyes to something that you are thankful for. But trust me, this is worth the effort. We take most things in life for granted but it is when you are depressed that it is easy to take things even more for granted or to not even notice things in the first place. Be thankful for the simple pleasures in life, life is too short to be spent whining or complaining

Up in the Air!

I watched a movie called 'Up in the Air' yesterday. Aside from a few things, I learnt that heartfelt, romantic and feel good movies are not just called chick flicks but they are also called guy-cry films. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people, when did all of this become about men and women. Why are emotions such a bad thing or something people so scared of? Personally, I respect men who can truly feel and exhibit emotions as opposed to pretend stoic men. And why are emotions only associated with women? Because being ballsy enough to own up to your emotions makes you a pussy? Whatever, don't take my cursing too seriously. I do swear a lot though.

Anyway...let's talk about more serious things. There are 3 main characters in the movie -

Photo Credit: bangdoll@flickr

1) Ryan (played by George Clooney), the commitment-phobic, always working-always traveling guy who wants more miles on his cards than the breaths he takes for living. He fires people for a living and always tries to tell people why life should be light and drama free.

2) Alex (played by Vera Farmiga), the female equivalent of Ryan, an older single woman, well atleast she makes you feel so for a while but she is actually a traveling salesman (LOL) who is married and has kids but is trying to live a fake imaginary life when she travels where she is single and having casual fun.

3) Natalie (played by Anna Kendrick, the Pitch Perfect girl), the young, fresh out of college, nerdy top of class well educated girl who is ambitious yet so emotionally invested in concepts like love, settling, marriage, commitment etc. In other words she still has respect for emotions.

Why am I writing about these people? Well, as I watched the movie, I just realized I could relate to 2 out of these 3 characters and was able to relate to a lot to the 3rd character only because I encounter a lot of them everyday. I started out like Natalie, naive and believing romance, love, true love, commitment, and how love can change the whole world, even when my brain told me to go fuck myself. Then after a few breakups (crappy ones) at one point I began to become Ryan. Ryan is the older but frustrated version of Natalie who could never find or give commitment, who convinced himself that life sucks but it would sound cooler if you say you are single by choice and begins to run and hide from emotions (even though deep in he still is a Natalie). Don't get me wrong, love is not bad, but lovers can be bad.

And then there is Alex. There are so many fakers out there who are married (or in a relationship) and yet truly deep inside want to be single, unhappily married (and chances are their spouses don't even know that) and just want to get out of their mundane lives and don't have the guts to do that, so they try to live a fake second parallel life where they are single. They may or may not try to screw you (Ryan or Natalie) over completely, but they always have a ready get out of jail free card that says, hey this was supposed to be casual, I can't be in a relationship with anyone, I am married, I love you but I can't leave my spouse, in another lifetime we would be together...blah blah blah and oh my favorite one is - I am still trying to find myself...are you fucking kidding me? I don't blame the Alex's of the world, they are screwed up and delusional and can even break up with over phone and still ask you if they can be friends with you. I blame all the Ryan's and Natalie's out there who think they have to settle either too soon in the game or too late in the game and think they have to settle and compromise for no real reason. There are tons of people like Alex who are never going to leave their partners but would be more than happy to drag you and drown you into their low, full-of-self-pity lives. Oh and by the way, there are a lot of single Alex's too who are never ever going to commit to you or take you too seriously and are still 'finding themselves' because they like the idea of being your bf or gf or partner or whatever but without the actual responsibilities. 'Casual' is often the equivalent of bullshit in my opinion.

Reality is that emotional vulnerability is a very risky thing. This is especially the case when you have had bitter experiences in relationships - romantic or platonic or even family related. But without it, you can never truly experience anything. If you cannot open yourselves up to enjoy something, you won't have a fully mindful experience. After all, mindfulness is not telling you to go become a monk (though that is not a bad option at all, I still consider it often, but no point, if you are doing that to escape emotions), but rather to accept yourself, others and the world in general and look at things as they are. Love is the most beautiful feeling but is also capable of throwing immense pain and suffering. Love is about giving and not taking and is not a source that is going to be extinguished and non-replenishable. So you if you truly love to love then there is no stopping you, just accept that it can lead to pain and joy at the same time and each failed relationship comes with a lot of lessons and will teach you when to back off and when to invest emotional energy and when to completely walk away and never look back. And since we are talking about giving love to others, what you need to realize is that you must give a lot of that love to yourself. If you accept yourself, nourish yourself and be kind to yourself, good things will automatically get attracted to you and screw it if they don't, you have yourself to love you. Be happy with yourself and by yourself if need be but do that before trying to share your love with others. Moral of the story - Don't let the Natalie inside you die a premature death by feeding yourself bullshit stories even if they come from a place of self preservation, life is too short to live like a stone.

Break the monotony - Let there be life!!

I have been having a bit of confusion and doubts about life in general (trust me, I have a lot of that). I set myself some goals too far in the future. Now, mind you, these are not bad goals and having a vision in general is not bad at all. But sometimes I have these emotional outbursts where I get too excited about things or lose passion altogether for things (blame the goddamned disorder). Lately I have been kind of having a mid-life crisis, even though I am not sure I am old enough for a mid life crisis yet, but you get the point. I was confused, and heck I may still be a little confused, because I want to go back to school (for a PhD, already have my two trophy Masters), but I also want to travel, get a new job, move to a new sunny city, live a fairly luxurious life, and about my single status - I am perpetually confused about that.

With all this said, I had been spending the last few weeks just completely stressed out, confused and basically feeling like a loser and feeling very unhappy. I had stressed myself out to the point where I started getting persistent headaches, and the goals I set for myself suddenly began to feel like giant icebergs increasing the stress all the more. The result, I couldn't enjoy the simple things I normally enjoy doing. I lost 37 lbs in the last year and now I am in a good shape that I should be proud of, but guess what I haven't even gone shopping to buy some clothes that now will fit me or take selfies and post them (so childish). Similarly, I have hardly been going out, having fun or doing anything which makes me even remotely happy. And thanks to the east coast weather (I know it is an excuse) I haven't been traveling much either and life pretty much has been feeling claustrophobic. I just realized that all I really want is to break the monotony. A special mention here to a friend who made me reconsider my stress by simply stating some of the obvious. I give too many fucks about things which don't necessarily matter (got this from the subtle art of not giving a fuck). I get bored easily, I need constant intellectual stimulation and communing with nature. So I decided to list down a few little really simple things that make me happy and change my mood. Here are a few random things for example.I think everyone of us should do this little exercise every now, just to bring ourselves back to reality. These are just simple things, not your grand death goals -

1) Go to a beach, stare the water.
2) Go hiking up a mountain and stare at the ground below.
3) Go shopping, throw money on clothes and shoes and makeup (which I almost never wear).
4) Read a nice book.
5) Paint something.

Having been caught up with all my thoughts, confusions and doubts, I forgot that all I needed to do was to break the monotony of just going to work and coming back home and to simply stop being overwhelmed and worrying about how hard some of my goals are, how well or poorly planned my steps towards my goals are and even getting confused if the goals I have set for myself are truly things I want. All I needed to do was to just stop thinking and do one of the few silly things that would make me happy.

"Break the Monotony, Do something strange" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by MAXTACY®

I am not saying you should stop working towards your goals. Sometimes all you need to do is to take a break from your own self. Mindfully appreciating the simple pleasures of life does wonders and helps us enjoy the journey towards our goals instead of postponing our happiness until we achieve something, which, trust me is a recipe for failure and psychology will back me up on that. Instead we get caught up in the vicious circle of perpetual overthinking and getting nowhere. Even a car needs servicing every now and then, why then we as humans think we are exempt from breaks and re-servicing at times? You don't have to become the next Zuckerberg or Mother Teresa overnight. Just go start working out, take a new class, get a new hair cut, go to your building roof top and shout at the top of your voice, whatever it is, just break the monotony, do it today, do it now. Go do something and don't let yourself drown in your own dead sea of overthinking, stress, anxiety and monotony. Just break the cycle and go do something silly.

A simple restart!

Sometimes the simplest solution to your computer problems is to just restart the computer. Well, in essence that is just what I am doing to this blog. The last time I published something on here was over about 5 years ago and of course I looked through the drafts in here, there were several of them created subsequently but just not published.

A great deal has happened in the last 5 years, I have grown 5 years older (duh!), I was almost unemployed twice, had to sleep in a car for a while, got cheated on, changed a couple of apartments, moved closer to the river (as I always wanted to), traveled to several places including even a Euro-trip and so on. These last 5 years just like the few years before that have seen a lot of ups and downs.

If the last decade has taught me anything, it is that sometimes life is just a bitch and at other times it is not, but you have to just keep going on, accept yourself and stop giving into inhibitions and self limiting beliefs (and stalkers too). I am going to resume my journey of writing random crap on here and hell, I might even publish some of the drafts in here. Don't let anyone or anything take the light away from you, keep on shining!! 

When in doubt - Do the right thing!

Someone I respect a lot used to always tell me - " When in doubt, do the right thing!" If only everything were so easy in life....

I recently had a discussion with a friend for a while about two approaches to decision making, judgments and handling doubts. First of the approaches was to trust your instincts and in other words 'doing what your heart says', which this friend of mine said that he follows for the most part. The second approach is the what I would call the researcher approach, look for data (to support or deny hypothesis) and make a decision after all data, all options have been carefully analyzed and what not. I do personally feel that over time I have slowly started falling into the second category. Blame it on academics, research, psychology or life experiences. But I definitely was the other way around too and at times I still follow my instincts.

So what do you do when you for instance have to choose a new candidate for a job, have to choose your life partner, make an investment etc etc etc? Would you rely on your instincts or would you take a rational approach to things in life? According to David Myers, a social psychologist whose textbook on Social Psychology is one of my favorites - intuitions have both merits and demerits. To define intuition as he discusses, intuition is something which develops over time with time and expertise, it is a form of automatic processing, a quick easy way of responding to things, more like an 'unreasoned' thought. Consider cooking, driving or even doing math, what begins as an effortful task in the beginning using all of your concentration then slowly becomes automatic. Your mom after ages of cooking might keep looking into your eyes and talking while she is effortlessly chopping the vegetables without even looking at them. Driving is another example of a form of automatic processing where as you become a more experienced driver, the less you feel the need to seriously concentrate on the act of driving. Intuition is a form of reflex action, you don't have to consciously sit and think to jerk your finger away when it touches fire. Intuition is more like heuristic, which you use for your convenience to put less time into thinking. I am not arguing that intuition is bad. In fact intuition works pretty well in many cases. And as mentioned here, intuition could develop over time as you become better at something. Speaking about intuition this way, I guess we think that intuition can be something that can probably be learned.

Researchers Nalini Ambady and Bob Rosenthal, showed students clips as short as few seconds and asked them to make judgments about a teacher's abilities and as they found in several studies later as well, that often we make our judgments in real thin slices of time as short as a few seconds without even thinking much and a lot of times we are right too. But...Would you totally rely just on those thin slice snap judgments? Would you want to give others benefit of doubt or would you decide then and there at the very first second for instance that your boyfriend is cheating on you without thinking more rationally about it? We overestimate our ability to predict behaviors of us as well as others. As Myers says we are more 'confident' in some of our responses than 'correct'.  Affective forecasting which I have written about in the past in one of my posts, is a classic example of how much we can err when it comes to predicting our feelings and emotions at a future time. Similarly we try to predict our future behavior too often failing miserably. We tell ourselves that we will work on reducing our weight and then try to predict that we will be working on weight loss (as if that is the only thing you have to do in life), buy all sorts of fruits, vegetables, healthy stuff and what not and ultimately actually end up eating at a restaurant instead of eating at home because of lack of time. Not that this is the case with everyone but we often we try to even postpone our 'predicted' future behavior (I will start my diet from Monday..or I will start going to gym starting next week) and in the end probably never behave the way we had predicted we would. With us not really doing a great job with predictions, would it not be smart to wait and think for a second than just deciding something based on gut feeling?

Intuitions or gut instinct should perhaps not be ignored altogether but at the same should be taken more with a pinch of salt at times. An intuition could often be a mere assumption or snap judgment or just a cynical view that we now unknowingly have, based on our past experiences. Intuition could also be some part of our mind trying to tell us something is good or bad. I guess the point is, intuition should probably be a starting point for further inquiry as Myers puts it. In case of fight or flight situations, intuitions probably help you better than careful analysis. If someone is a feet away from you with a knife in their hand to stab you, of course, the easier option is to use your mental heuristic or intuition to save yourself right away than to sit and perform analysis. Life situations unfortunately are not always black and white as someone directly coming with a knife to stab you. There are so many gray areas and it depends on what is at stake. . That said - when in doubt, do the right thing. Intuition is perhaps a starting point for further analysis. On the surface something may seem right or wrong in a second but often times a little critical evaluation of our intuitions could really save us. Data doesn't lie, at least for the most part. So it is not a bad idea to sit and evaluate things. I agree it takes more cognitive energy and resources compared to just going by your gut feeling, but I think it is worth it in many cases. For instance, I would rather hire one or two good employees after careful analysis and consideration than hire ten useless employees purely based on intuition.

But the friend I mentioned in the very first paragraph also mentioned that if you keep analyzing everything you are going to lose out on simple happiness from small things. True, very true. But whether trusting your intuitions alone without much analysis is associated with long term happiness  is something that is still not very clear to me.

What is love?

Is love giving or taking? 

Is love talking or listening?

Is love physical or emotional? 

Is love a pain or a gain?

Is love explaining or understanding?

Is love happiness or sadness?

Is love acceptance or denial?

Is love finding faults with others or accepting people with their flaws?

Sometimes or rather most of the time I have no idea what love is. In my opinion love is something that would make your life beautiful, something that would make you better and bring the best in you. Love is something that would make share your joys and sorrows with someone.  But if all this is true, why is love such a pain? Love is probably just a mirage, a perception which is more deceiving than true. 

On the spur of the moment!

I think creativity atleast with respect to writing down or speaking your thoughts has a lot to do with doing it on the spur of the moment. More often than not creative thoughts and ideas for me come out best when I just do them on the spur of the moment. For instance consider blogging - I get these random ideas and thoughts which I want to blog about. If I don't blog about it right away or atleast ASAP, the chain of thoughts loses the original charm. I have even tried to quickly put down some bullet points and save the blogpost to come back and finish 

it later, but it has not helped me much. This just reminds me of a Sanskrit line, the translation of which goes like this -
"जिस बात को कहना चाहते हो उसे सही समय पर सही तरह से कह दो, नहीं तो स मय उस बात का रस पीजाता है!" 
I think I am trying to tell myself not to delay expressing what I want to express - that is what twitter, gplus and blog are for (sorry I don't have a FB account ;). 

Affective Forecasting!

After trying to finish this since the mid of the past semester (thanks to my really busy schedule) I have decided to finally finish this post.

Affective forecasting is one of the most interesting topics that I studied about in this past semester. This could also be called one form of cognitive dissonance. To explain this, lets go to the fox and grapes story when the fox keeps trying to reach the grapes and eventually tells itself that the grapes are sour and moves on. Perhaps all our lives, we keep developing such little theories to help ourselves move on in life.

Research suggests that we are not the best at predicting our future emotional states. We are guided by our present feelings in deciding how we might feel in the future. These are best explained with examples. Ever since I learnt about this topic, every now and then I am reminded about how affective forecasting has affected me in life.

Take for instance, a romantic relationship. In my opinion more often than not romantic 'love' is a great example of affective forecasting. Perhaps when you fall head over heels in 'love' with someone you tend to overestimate your emotional feelings for that person. There are impact biases of such feelings. Or in other words we wrongly estimate our levels of future happiness. When in love, the first kind of impact bias is when you tend to feel that being with that person will bring you all the happiness you ever wanted in your life and that life without them would be impossible to imagine. A second bias is that when you break up with that person, you tend to underestimate your capability of resilience or in other words capability to get over the broken relationship. Research suggests that the first bias could lead to depression when you affectively forecast your future emotions and your expectations of the other unconsciously keeps increasing and there is a high probability that you might eventually feel that your ever growing expectations are not being met. While the second bias surprisingly works the other way around where you underestimate your capabilities and surprise yourself with respect to how you handled your break up. Of course there are exceptions to this.

These biases and affective forecasting are not limited to love, but love just in my opinion is an awesome example of affective forecasting. Other examples could include spending a lot on something that you think would give you pleasure but that you end up rarely using it. Even running after money or other hedonic pleasures are often a case of affective forecasting.

Affective forecasting can influence your life both negatively and positively. It could both help us move on in life by helping or depress us. Nevertheless, I believe affective forecasting offers an opportunity for companies to marketing their products better. I guess I would update this post after researching a little bit further about this.

The side effects of studying psychology!

Ever since I became a psych grad student, I think several times before I write anything. I guess this is because I have begun to look at statistical significance of everything I wish to write about. After spending close to a semester reading articles on various topics in psychology, now, when I look through archives of my old blog posts, I feel that I have just made some claims in my posts merely based on my past experiences. However a psychologist would look at my posts and say that my claims are probably not generalizable to a larger population and that my sample size is too small, considering that my sample includes just me. Now when I think of writing about anything, I start to think if I have data to back up what I say. The results of this post indicate that this is a side effect of studying psychology. Future research in this regard should focus on keeping a personal blog and scientific research separate. In essence the abstract of this post is just that studying psychology has some serious side effects including appearing weird and crazy, thinking several times before writing or saying anything, getting excited for awkward things, questioning anything and everything! 

Memories and Experience

Our memories can ruin our experience or make them better. Inspired by Kahneman's TED talk which I heard a year and a half back and again couple of days back, I can say, I have so many examples in my life where my experience of an event has been completely ruined by my memories. As Kahneman points out - the experiencing self and the remembering self are two different ways we may be thinking of ourselves. The experiencing self is all about the present, the current experience which is going on, but the remembering self is how the mind forms memories about our current experience. What happens in present may feel great at the moment, but a little unpleasant memory of the current experience can ruin the entire experience when we recall it later. For instance, in psychology, when we do research work, we always have to take into account a possible limitation in experiments - the recall bias. The recall bias is when we ask participants of our research to recall an old incident. The remembering self is very much likely to affect the way they talk about the incident.

If we make conscious attempts to cut negative associations that the remembering self makes with an experience and make positive associations like remembering the better moments of an experience, our lives would be so much happier. I often hear from people about living this moment as is, enjoying each minute etc. Truth is, our experiencing self does this by itself anyways, but what we could play with is our remembering self. Why not give it a shot?

The Love Delusion!

What would you call falling in love with somebody - a delusion, illusion, hallucination, assumption or imagination? 

Just like the whole god delusion, I feel there is something called love delusion. If you really think about it, romantic love is everything mentioned above. Consider a one - sided love affair. At various points since meeting someone till you supposedly decide that these grapes are sour, I guess you go through phases of delusion, illusion, hallucination, assumption and imagination. 

The story begins with seeing someone and getting a liking for them for some god forsaken reason. Our minds are trained to be vulnerable to emotions for the most part. I would call this 'love at first sight' sort of thing as an illusion as, in most cases it really is an optical illusion and your eyes get tricked.  By some way we get to talk to them and then start the remaining tricky things. 

We begin assuming that they like us based on their responses and reactions to us and conveniently begin to overlook the possibilities that the other person is just being normal and being nice to you and is not necessarily into you. This is a classic example of what we call 'confirmation bias' in psychology. We create a mental hypothesis that we and the other person are actually in love and are going to end up together. We tend to seek out evidence to prove this hypothesis of ours, sometimes so much that we ignore that in actuality; there could be evidence to totally disprove our hypothesis. 

Then we go to the next step, where we start further fooling ourselves. We begin imagining the other person thinking about us or calling out to us or looking at us even when in reality they might not really be doing it with any particular romantic interest  in us. Who knows they might be staring at us, thinking how funny we look. From there we begin justifying every stupid thing that they do to fit our perceptions about their feelings for us. This leads to sweet hallucinations, where everything seems to be the best in the world, because we slowly begin to drift into a beautiful world which is full of love and happiness. 

Then comes the worst part, the love delusion. We begin to totally believe that the other person is into us and loves us and would do everything to be with us. The whole justifying every action of theirs goes higher and higher. We now have a firm belief that the other person is in love with us and that's when we begin to look to refute any evidence which others point out to us, or we ourselves subconsciously begin to note that probably is disproving our hypothesis i.e. which nicely shows us that the other person is not really into us. This is what is called 'disconfirmation bias' in psychology, wherein our outlooks are based more on our beliefs than actual data. Having gone through all this, one fine day, we wake up to harsh reality that our hypothesis was completely wrong and that everything was just a mirage and nothing even close to reality. This happens both when we assume that the other person likes us and also when we allow the other person to exploit us and fool us with false indications. 

I can't help saying that in most cases, unless it happens mutually, the whole vague concept of love is nothing but something misleading and does more bad than good. As much as it is advised to use intuition as compared to scientific methods to find out if a person is into you, or is cheating on you or whatever; sometimes, it is not foolish to consider data being easily available to decide. Though you do need to strike a firm balance between both. Paradoxically, love just 'happens'. But if it is not mutual, it just nicely 'breaks'. I am the last person who should talking about this, but then as much as our reality is distorted by our idealism, imagination and perception, at the end reality is what really matters.

Don't you forget about me!

I still am in my creative void phase, but nevertheless here is a song which has always touched my heart. I love Enrique.


They say love is just a game
They say time can heal the pain
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose
And I guess I?m just a fool, I keep holding on to you


I told you once you were the one
You know that I?d die for you
Although it hurts to see you go
Oh, this time you should know, I won't try to stop you


Don?t you forget about me, baby
Don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?


So you try to fake a smile
You don?t wanna break my heart
I can see that you're afraid
[- From :http://www.elyrics.net/read/e/enrique-iglesias-lyrics/don_t-you-forget-about-me-lyrics.html -]
But baby it?s to late, ?coz I?m already dying


Don?t you forget about me, baby
Don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?


Don?t you forget about me, baby
Don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?
Why did I let you go?


Don?t you forget about me, baby
No, don?t you forget about me now
Some day you'll turn around and ask me
Why did I let you go?
Why did I let you go?


Wherever I go, I won?t forget about you, no, no, no
Wherever you go, don?t you forget about me

Girl, are you old enough to get married?

          I happened to see a really old friend of mine. Well technically this girl is like 4 years younger to me. So she must be what around 21-22 now. I was shocked to learn last year that she had gotten married, because left to me, I would call it a child marriage. ha... This year I am even more shocked to learn that she is expecting soon. I don't know why but I am still shocked and not able to go meet her in person, partly because I might laugh at her and partly because who knows she might laugh at me. In India there is this whole stigma about age of marriage. I do know it is getting better nowadays. But I have to mention the changes are not way too much to get excited about. That said, some people in India typically very old people tell me that I am going to be 27 and that I am getting late by each my moment in getting married. Personally if you ask me, I would say that is pretty much BS. But respecting what elders say, I just asked some of these people who mentioned about age as to what do they think the right age for marriage for a girl should be. And they tell me, 24ish. What came out of my mouth right away was, how can you ruin some precious years of life in marriage so soon. :P. Not sure if I was right or wrong, but I said it nevertheless. Part of the reason why they were mentioning this age was that they really thought that it is an ideal age and also partly because they wanted to convince me saying that I am already late. Either way, I am not completely convinced. If you tell me that for health reasons a girl should try to get married pretty much by her early 30's it would make a little sense. Though if you see females in the US for example, so many get married much later. 

          All this said, the thought about this girl came back to my mind. She probably just finished a 3 year Bachelor's degree and right away got married as soon her final exams were done. I was surprised to learn about several other girls, including couple of own cousins think the same way, even though their parents are very well educated. But from parents' side they think they have to get over with their responsibility of getting their daughter married, because their idea of settling down is getting married, which I am not completely blaming. From the daughters' side, some of them like the ones I mentioned above typically have their mind set for marriage right after they are done with a basic Bachelors degree. Some of these girls would have even completed their Engineering and might still think the same. I would not be too surprised if these girls supposedly fell in love with a great guy and got married. But most of these get married to some guy through an arranged marriage, some guy who is most likely to be atleast 4-5 years elder to them. These girls are more than happy to get married and be home or just go work in some company. I think it is their idea of settling down in life. Again, I am no one to blame them or appreciate them. There is also another extreme of girls in India. Girls who raise their expectations about marriage and guys really high and keep pushing their marriage talks away and care more about their career, which again I think is fair enough. Again I am no one to blame or appreciate them. 

          In an ideal scenario, we would be allowed to date and find our right guy and we could get married whenever we want to. But of course, considering that this is India, for the most part this may or may not be possible. I don't want to really talk about moving in together etc here because this post is more about age of marriage for women than anything else. In my personal opinion, if you would let me decide, which in my case, I do get to decide, more than age, I believe a goodness of fit between me and my potential partner matters more than my age when I would get married. But also contradicting my own statement, I am giving a shot to all this marriage stuff only for a while. After which I would completely focus on what I wish to do than on marriage, mostly because even otherwise, marriage has never been a top priority for me. Either ways, in general as well, if one is not convinced that their marriage would be a happy extension of their life, and that it would be able to accommodate most of their aspirations with some adjustments here and there; getting married would be utterly foolish. Most of all, a girl who is not financially independent or not educated enough to be financially independent should think twice before getting married. It is totally upto an individual to decide on all this. Yet, the idea is to not regret later in life that you just got married, had kids and raised them and lived a very usual and kind of boring life where you didn't really achieve much (though some women would claim that they success in getting married, raising kids and making them successful). I do agree there are always tradeoffs when it comes to goals and marriage life. Having goals and trying to see if marriage would support or affect them, is one thing, but not having a goal at all, except the goal of living a very ordinary life ( I mean an ordinary life in my opinion, where you depend on your husband for each and everything) is in my honest opinion pretty stupid. All said, marriage is a big risk anyways, why not take the risk carefully. 

Counseling centers in colleges in India

The term counseling is often very confusing. It majorly is a guidance to cope up with a situation or to make choices, an advice system which could help you make decisions or take a certain course of action. So I was reading in a local newspaper about the attempts to set up counseling centers, in Indian universities.According the universities in India, the whole point of doing this is the typical reason for helping out college students deal with their transition from high school to college and to help them deal with various kinds of stresses that they could face.

I completely agree with setting up counseling centers in universities. But in a country like India, counseling, depression, therapy and even psychology are all seen more as a social stigma than as something helpful. That said, anyone going for therapy or taking something as much as an anti depressant is looked upon with eyes of pity, or eyes of curiosity about their inability to handle their problems. As long as there is going to be this sort of social stigma, chances of children coming forward with their problems to the counselors are going to be really sleek. Several people cope with their issues and come out strong after struggles, but the whole awareness of setting up counseling centers has come about after college students have committed suicides.

Let me give a simple example. Again, this is purely based on my understanding. When Indian parents do eventually take a step of sending their kid to a shrink, they have all sorts of anxieties and apprehensions. Firstly they want an objective answer as to how long a therapy would continue. They are of the constant fear that a simple counseling and therapy could become a big problem in the future. Part of the fear is about any occurrence of future psychological issues, but the bigger part of the fear is concerned with the social stamping their kid might get on them, which could hinder relationships like marriages etc in the future. Note that there is a difference between a psychological fear and a social fear here.

All this said, setting up of counseling centers in Indian universities is definitely a positive step, but how effective it would be is still is big unanswered question. People need to be made aware that a therapy or medications for psychological disorders and several of the psychological disorders themselves are not really a social stigma, but are just like other genuine issues which could be solved. As long as psychological problems are seen as social disgrace, or as hardcore mental health issues, psychological treatments or counseling centers etc are going to be difficult to be made useful for people.

Somewhere I belong!

          Feeling of belonging is a very important concept. Consider being in a relationship, where you feel like an alien most of the time or working a job which makes you feel all the time that it is just not what you want to do or, living in a place where you feel you are a stranger and are hardly able to relate yourself with anyone or anything there. These were a few examples of what I feel are the feeling of 'not belonging'. Some associated concepts are cultural shock, which is essentially a feeling of not belonging to a certain culture and place; identity crisis which is essentially a feeling of not belonging anywhere in life among peers, among elders etc etc.

          It is convenient to say that all this lies in our mind. If you were a proponent of humanistic psychology, you would notice Maslow's theory of Needs (Please use google to study the theory :P), which specifies as one of the needs - the feeling of belonging and acceptance, love etc. Feeling of belonging is a very fundamental need at various stages of life and not just during childhood and young adulthood. In my opinion there is a paradox here. At first you don't have a feeling of belonging and you tend to be on the quest for somewhere to belong and try to reach out to sources which offered you sense of belonging atleast during childhood. On the contrary, there are people who just adapt themselves to situations and bring in a sense of belonging for themselves, which can probably be summed up as being a Roman in Rome. As we have evolved as humans, we have adapted ourselves to the environment and learnt to improve our lives. Even though it is hard to say how the need for belonging was fulfilled, in my opinion the need for belonging was superimposed by a more important need which was of mere survival.

          For me a sense of belonging is extremely important. The point I am trying to make here is that at any point, implicitly or explicitly a feeling of belonging is inevitable. If you are trying to connect with people on very professional level, sometimes you do that only for the sake of getting your work done or for so-called networking. But even then, your comfort level with people increases when there is a mutual effort to make conversations slightly on a personal level of course within certain bounds. As an example, in my opinion when you address people with their names more often during conversations, it makes the other person more comfortable. Similarly on a personal level, when a person individually tries to adapt to the society, the culture, the place he lives in, the people around him, a sense of belonging becomes a supreme need, the lack of which affects the day to day life of the person.

          Overall, summing the whole thing up, there is a quest in people to find out where they belong, until which nothing really makes them feel satisfied in life. As for me, I am still searching where I really belong and hoping that there is somewhere I do belong and that I would find it soon.

Myths about therapy!

This post talks about the myths and misconceptions about therapy. In places like India where therapy is still not very popular, anyone who goes for a therapy is looked upon slightly with eyes of suspicion that the person could be crazy atleast to some extent. Nevertheless, things are improving. I want to put a link here to a part of a research conducted by Cornell University, USA. Although the myths and misconceptions are mentioned here as being suitable for self injurious behavior, but in my opinion several of the myths and misconceptions mentioned here are applicable for anyone going for therapy and others in general.


http://www.crpsib.com/userfiles/file/factsheet_therapy_myths.pdf


Let me know if the link doesn't work.

The Ugly Truth 3 - Tears for people who don't care about you are worthless!

" No one is worth your tears and the one who is won't make you cry "

          A very true line for the most part. Someone who loves you will almost never be able to make you cry and even if they do by any chance, their heart would ache to see you shedding even a single tear. Several of us would feel bad when we see someone crying in front of us, except if we are sadists or a nut cases. However what I am referring to over here, is seeing a loved one cry. There have been people in my life whose tears that I have witnessed still hurt me when I think of them. If by any chance it is my mom, I go completely paranoid, though she almost never cries. 

          Of course there is this other side to tears - False tears. Some people will shed false tears and get whatever they need. In my opinion the biggest betrayal is by someone who comes and sheds false tears in front of you, makes you emotionally vulnerable and gets whatever they want. Ideally when you see a loved one crying, you will feel really really sad and will want to do everything you can to console the other person. But it is ridiculous when someone exploits you with tears. 

          Now coming to cry for others. While it is common for people to cry over breakups or friends not talking to them or any such thing and people eventually do move on, but someone who is directly responsible for making you cry isn't a great person to have in your life. Some strong people try to control showing out their tears, but deep inside there is someone who is crying in their head. I have seen people who have made me cry and never bothered to do anything about it. It just made me shed more tears in the beginning and  then realize eventually that such people are just not worth my tears. However I also have some people who totally shower me with their love and affection and can never ever see me shed a single tear. It is these people, I have realized are the ones who really care. Bottom line is when you give someone more importance than what they deserve, you are bound to cry externally or internally, which is just not worth it. Shedding tears for someone who really cares for you and who is in extreme pain means something. I used to be of the opinion that when you truly love someone, irrespective of how they treat you, seeing them in pain should bring tears on to your eyes. May be it is still true, may be somewhere in my heart I still feel so. But sometimes it is just totally pointless and worthless. Essentially I try not make anyone cry even by mistake, and try to make sure people don't really make me cry and eventually if I do shed tears for people I love and care about, I have learnt to try my best to forget those tears. 

How good is good?

          What is the definition of good? There are as many as 44 definitions of the word 'good' in dictionary. But one of the most common definition of the word good is to do with something desirable, suitable etc. Talking of 'good' in this context leads me to think that the idea of good is highly relative in most cases and is often based on perceptions than on real facts. Even if we find something to be supposedly good, something better always shows up. In my opinion even something best doesn't remain best forever. For example, iPhone 2G was 'good' and soon was replaced by iPhone 3G then by 3GS and then iPhone 4. This is typically based on mass opinion, the sales of the product etc that it was easy to conclude the goodness of the product. 

          But talking about people - If there are some presidential candidates, each one of them are going to be good in their own way. But it is based on their actions that people are going to perceive them as good or bad. Something looks good till something better comes along. As a matter of fact when something better comes along even the 'good' looks close to ordinary. All this is fine as long as you are talking about a celebrity being good or better or even best. But when you are talking about interpersonal relationships. Good is often not good enough. Most people don't have a definition of good, which in my opinion would be highly idealistic; though I feel a fair idea of what one considers good makes sense. But there are additional factors which affect definition of good - previous experiences, situations, moods etc. So it is very human to overlook good and keep looking for better and best. When you fail to see 'good' how do you think you will find better and leave alone best. It is like - kissing several frogs to find a prince who probably doesn't even exist or who you just missed out constantly looking for better. Good is good enough as long as you are able to see through the goodness. 

          But coming back to how good is good. Well it completely depends on the person, their perception and opinion. Someone or something may look good to me, but may look really bad to you. So good has to do completely with how you look at something. Forget axiomatic and absolute stuff, they don't exist all the time. But 'good' is a very relative term and there is no correct definition of the word in my opinion. I want to finish by saying that since 'good' is more of an opinion/perception, don't get carried away when someone calls you bad. You are good as long as you consider yourself good. Since for some people nothing is good enough, its ok for products to be constantly redesigned and remodeled for people to like them, but for humans, it is completely worthless to constantly change yourself to please someone who themselves are not good enough but consider you as being 'not good enough.' So it is completely sensible to be yourself and not giving importance to someone who doesn't deserve it. 

Audacity of being Yourself!

          Do you have the audacity to be yourself? Even if we really want to be ourselves, how many times are we actually able to do it? There is no denying the fact that often we have to wear a social mask in order to mingle with the society. But I have come to realize that a lot of times it is really the social mask that the society appreciates and cares about. The 'real' you, a 'frank' you is most likely to be rejected or mocked at. Most people fall in love with a perception of you and find it hard to replace the perception with reality when they do not match. Though this is not the case with everyone, I have come across a lot of people of this kind.

            Many of us do things we don’t want to do, act the way we don’t want to due to societal pressures and the fear of what others might think of us.  I think as long as it doesn’t intentionally hurt anyone, there is just nothing wrong in being yourself and doing what you like. What is the point in studying something or working a dissatisfactory job (exceptions are there of course) because it will make you look successful in the society? What is the point in marrying someone who is supposedly successful in the society or in their career but treat you like an object? What is the point in doing things which you hate but do only because it will make you look good in the society or amidst your family and friends? What is the point in following rituals and traditions which you hardly believe in, but do so to look like the perfect person who doesn’t give up their traditional values? You can always come up with excuses for these and some of these excuses could be genuinely issues. But for the most part these are mere excuses and you are not being true to yourself. I have always avoided being ashamed of any bad relationship that I have had or any mistake of mine, because I have learnt through experience that it is not really worth feeling bad about yourself based on other’s perspectives about you. A good friend used to say, don’t let someone run you through a guilt trip. Nobody is perfect and very few people have the audacity to accept that. Obviously you are bound to make mistakes, but isn’t that how life is, you make mistakes and learn from them. But of course being yourself does not mean that you never attempt to change anything about yourself. It is just that you don’t need to change yourself based on your assumptions about how people think of you. In my opinion I have learnt this from experience as well, that it is better to portray your true self to people than to later surprise them.

             But of course there is the flip side to this as well. Being myself has not done me good all the time. It has gotten me a lot of haters as well.  I have been called an egomaniac, arrogant, selfish etc etc. Not that I care about it. As a matter of fact, who is not selfish or don’t bother about their egos? How many of us are saints? And of course I don’t mean to say that I am completely perfect, but, atleast most of the time I have the satisfaction of having been myself. I have never gone around and intentionally attempted to hurt people or anything, in fact I have always showered people I really like with unconditional affection. However, I have my own limitations, my problems, my attitudes etc. And similarly I know what I am doing, what my responsibilities are, how I behave and my intentions as well. What is the point in trying to prove to people that you are not someone others have perceived you to be? If people cannot accept the person I am; I have learnt this over years in my life that it really is their problem not mine. You can please others only so much. In the name of love or affection or respect, we could attempt to please others, not that it is wrong, but in the end who are you trying to fool? Yourself, isn’t it? Truth is whether you like it or not, society and people around you love only the social masks and those who actually like the 'real' you, never make you feel that you need a social mask. Have the audacity to be yourself, even if many do not want to face the real ‘you’ most of the time.