I like the high-arousal/positive quadrant best and the things that have improved my life most are putting in place systems/processes that *recurrently* create opportunities to get there.
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my experience of mood issues has mostly been high-arousal/negative (intense anger, fear, shame) rather than the "ugh, don't want to do anything" ennui some people describe.
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But tactics for changing high-arousal/negative into low-arousal/positive have never appealed to me or done much.
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Mostly what works for me is getting low-arousal/positive emotions directly with SSRIs and sleep, and fixing whatever’s left by finding more high-arousal/positive opportunities.
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Hypothesis: it’s people who feel ennui/boredom/jadedness/existential angst who benefit from the “calming” philosophical approaches of “nothing is Essentially wrong”. Low-neg -> low-pos.
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Those of us who are prone to high-neg emotionality need high-pos aspirations to get us out of there.
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But more importantly: “you seem mad. That suggests there is something you really want to DO that you are stopping yourself from doing, and getting frustrated that you don’t get to do it. Let’s figure out what it is & do it.”
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Replying to
So this makes me think it’s a mistake to think of contentment as a mood. It’s more of a sustained posture that extends across long periods, so also across your normal arousal and positive/negative range. There are high/low arousal varieties of contentment.

