A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more "relaxing" than happy music. They’re wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you’d expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won’t do it.
I prefer Millgram’s explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives).
Why should this be?
Let’s review control theory, ie the theory of homeostasis and bodily set points.
Many of your body systems have set points. For example, your temperature set point is usually around 98.6 degrees F. If you’re out in the snow and get colder than 98.6, your body will kick in various heating mechanisms (like shivering) until it’s back at the set point. If you’re out in the desert and get hotter than 98.6, it will kick in cooling mechanisms (like sweating) until it’s back.
Your inner thermostat acts through both conscious and unconscious processes. The examples above - shivering and sweating - are mostly unconscious. The conscious process is that when your body goes too far below 98.6, it makes “your conscious mind” “feel” “cold”. That “incentivizes” “you”, the “conscious” “actor”, to do things like go indoors, or put on a jacket, or turn on your space heater. You can think of the feeling of coldness as the conscious projection of the wider homeostatic drive to become warmer.
Although specific set points (eg 98.6) are set by evolution, they’re not hard-coded. Master regulatory systems can change set points in response to changing demands. For example, when you get infected by a heat-sensitive pathogen, your immune system might choose to boil it away, and increase your inner thermostat to (let’s say) 102 (instead of 98.6). Now you have a fever.
The funny thing about fevers is that you feel cold. Someone with a fever shivers. They demand to cover themselves in blankets. All of this makes sense, right? Your inner thermostat notices you’re at 98.6, and that’s colder than the desired temperature of 102. So it activates unconscious regulatory processes (like shivering) and conscious regulatory processes (like making you feel cold). Since you consciously feel cold, you engage in heat-seeking behaviors. You cover yourself in blankets, or turn up the space heater. This seems paradoxical (why does someone with a fever, ie someone who is too hot, feel cold?!) but it’s perfectly logical from the control theory perspective. (...)
Now let’s take it all the way:
In depression, you are dangerously sad, but instead of trying to cheer up, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even sadder. (...)
Depression is often precipitated by some psychosocial event (like loss of a job, or the death of a loved one). It’s natural to feel sad for a little while after this. But instead of correctly activating regulatory processes to get mood back to normal, the body accepts the new level as its new set point, and tries to defend it.
By “defend it”, I mean that healthy people have a variety of mechanisms to stop being sad and get their mood back to a normal level. In depression, the patient appears to fight very hard to prevent mood getting back to a normal level. They stay in a dark room and avoid their friends. They even deliberately listen to sad music!
The feverish person feels too cold, and the anorexic person feels too fat, so we might expect the depressed person to feel too happy. I think something like this is true, if we put strong emphasis on the “too”. One of the official DSM symptoms of depression is “feelings of guilt/worthlessness”. A depressed person will frequently think things like “I don’t deserve my friends / job / money / talents.” In other words, they believe they’re too happy! They think they deserve to be sadder! (...)
Psychologists already suspect the existence of a happiness set point (thymostat?); this is the principle behind ideas like the "hedonic treadmill". So my theory here is that at least some cases of depression involve recalibrated happiness set points. A set point can either recalibrate randomly (ie for poorly understood biological reasons) or after a specific shock (ie interpreting a prolonged period of sadness as "the new normal"). Once a patient has a new, lower, happiness set point, their control system works to defend it. It enlists both biological systems (possibly changing the levels of various neurotransmitters?) and behavioral systems to defend the new set point. If it "succeeds", the person maintains an abnormally low mood.
by Scott Alexander, ACX | Read more:
Video: Tony Joe White/YouTube
[ed. Here's Tony feeling better: Undercover Agent for the Blues.]
