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Is Your Mood a Result of Where You Live?
Ed writes "Apparently, the Centers for Disease Control released a study indicating that geography can have a significant impact on mood. You may not be surprised to learn that Kentucky is more depressing than Hawaii. However, ranking up there with Hawaii are Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin. Frustratingly, they have not yet published the study on the web, so it is left as an exercise for the reader to find the original study and post a link for the rest of us."
Live in a crappy neighborhood makes for crappy moods? Lemme be the first to tell the CDC: DUUUH!
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1891465,00.html
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
As soon as I hear a fucking moron with 5000W of "boom-boom-boom" noise coming my way, my blood pressure goes up.
We got laws against noisy car exhausts but no laws against braindead, anti-social psychopaths who annoy everyone in a 3 miles radius with their loud so-called music.
I'm getting my gun.
and I'm in a shitty mood. Whats your point?
It's here.
...not in post natal PMS Hells-ville, so I don't think the article quite holds.
If you're reading this honey, just kidding! Love you! Let's go shopping for an eternity ring... ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I moved FROM Wisconsin to Oregon 5 years ago and I have to say my life is far more diverse now, far more cheery. When I deal with people from "back home" they don't seem to be happy so much as living in willful ignorance.
I guess what I'm saying is my anecdotal experience is that people in the "more depressed" regions are more aware of their true mood and perhaps answer more honestly because of it?
No sig for you!!
Then we get to that ambiguous science, social science, where measurements are never what they seen. In this case there were no measurements, merely self reported data. This is not like an obesity survey in which on can measure a weight, a height, a gender, etc, and use a well know, if controversial, metric to determine a rate of obesity. No, in this case people self reported their state of happiness.
WebMD> which has a report with a list of states clearly indicates the problem with this strategy. The listed quote Participants were asked by phone how many of the previous 30 days their mental health -- including stress, depression, and emotional problems -- was "not good.", clearly indicates the issue.
Imagine being asked "do you feel sad" and you live in Hawaii. Is the peer pressure to say yes or no? If you live in a state that is portrayed negatively in the media, and is always compared negatively with such wonderful places such as Hawaii, is there any incentive to say no. You live in a depressing place, you are told, so you have a right to be depressed.
This of course is why social science is called fake. I am sure the actual report has all the proper caveats, and the report is useful in terms of it indicates where the US might put services to help depressed people, but taking it too seriously, in my mind, would be a mistake. OTOH, I could see using it start a PSA campaign in Hawaii to help people who are depressed, but don't feel empowered to get help.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Way to ommit what happened in the intervening years between the two surveys.
So people were happier before the 2 wars, 9/11, and dot-com bubble bursting than after 9/11, Iraq & Afghanistan, & 5 years of Bush deviciveness. What a shocker. Let me guess, these numbers are further down in surveys taken between 2H'08 & now (particularly in places like NY, Detroit, etc).
I live in Southern California. A few years ago I went to stay with some family in Milwaukee. I was there for about a week and one of the things that I noticed was how much more relaxed everyone was. The pace of life was really different. People seemed to take their time getting places and nobody really seemed to be in a big hurry to get anywhere. When waiting in line at places, there wasn't an urgency to get to the front. People took the time to talk to each other. It seemed like for the most part nobody had anything else better to do, and they were all living in the moment.
I had an interesting experience when I got back to LA. After I got off of the plane, I was walking through the airport at Wisconson speed and seemed like people were hurrying by me. None the less, my mind was still in vacation mode and I was enjoying the tranquil feeling that was still with me. I got my car out of the parking lot and proceeded to drive home. As soon as I had to merge onto the freeway, I felt the rush of the rest of the world catch up with me. All of a sudden my brain kicked into high gear. It was like a survival mechanism. There was no way I could deal with the 405 freeway while in the Wisconson mindset.
Conversely, I know people who have grown up in Southern California who then leave and hate where they end up. Almost universally, those who leave and miss California all say almost the same thing. "Everything here is too slow. There isn't enough to do." Personally, I can't wait to get out of here. I think the pace of life here sucks.
I'm from the Internet. How do I fare in this survey?
If you live in your parents's basement you will have a crappy mood.
I am from Seattle and it is common knowledge here that weather has a relation to feelings. At one point the city was #1 for depression and it has been shown that this is because of the constant overcast weather. People have taken to sticking their heads in light boxes to relieve the depression.
Anyway, the point of all this is that the article was poorly written and is common sense. Also, it is sunny in Seattle right now and there are probably people who still have their head in a box.
Utinam me logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant.
"Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face...that searching look...then it's gone.
We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true..."
Tweet, tweet.
The Appalachian Mountains may look pretty, but a large survey from the Centers for Disease Control found those who live around them tend to be more prone to emotional problems.
Looks aren't everything. You know why Nebraska is the happiest state? It isn't because you can throw a rock and hit an ear of corn, or drive outside of the Omaha/Lincoln areas and see nothing but flat fields for miles on end. This place is uglier than sin for the most part (save for a few choice spots like the Black Elk-Neihardt Park on top of the hill in Blair, for example), and the weather ranges from stupidly hot in July to inhospitably cold in January.
But you know what? The economy is stable. Nobody's given up their football tickets. Companies are gonna need call centers. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg to live in the city. The most crime-ridden spots in Omaha are a fucking day care center compared to other cities. It doesn't surprise me at all when TFA says that Midwestern states are ranked up there with Hawaii.
The Three R's of Portland
or
Why Portland Sucks
"Latte Town" was coined a few years back and is the most appropriate term for the City of Portland that I have ever heard. A Latte town consists of mostly white, educated baby boomers and young single people. The inhabitants of the town are usually newcomers who have priced out all the original inhabitants. These towns are usually expensive, pretentious, abound in natural fibers and are laid back on the surface. Latte towns like Portland pride themselves on their most cherished concepts of diversity and inclusiveness. Most Portlanders accept this myth as Gospel but upon close examination Portland's dirty little secret is revealed. Portland is an overwhelmingly white, non-ethnic city. It is as vanilla as it gets so it makes one wonder what all the celebrating of diversity is all about. Drive through any neighborhood surrounding the downtown area and the impression that you get is that Portland is nothing more than a series of elitist ghettos compromised of rich white homosexuals, rich white yuppies, rich white hippies, rich white trust funders, and rich white kids from the suburbs pretending to be street people. Where's the diversity? Well it doesn't exist but the average Portlander likes the concept and in their eyes the different shades of rich whites all constituent diversity. In a series of articles I will attempt to breakdown and explain these subtle distinctions between the various factions of lily white, latte people that make Portland what it is.
The Artist-Intellectual
The visitor or newcomer to Portland is bound to be struck by the sheer numbers that belong to this group. They seem to be everywhere and are in fact everywhere. They are the reason that all the coffee shops have tables and chairs. The artist-intellectual fancies himself as a poet, a writer, a musician, a filmmaker, etc. You get the drift. They spend most of their days idling around the coffee establishments that one finds every 10 feet. They are usually equipped with a notebook that they use for their poems, journals or their artwork. No one ever gets to see the contents of these notebooks. More often than not they have a beaten and weathered paper back copy of some book authored by Kafka or William S. Boroughs. They love to discuss their favorite subject, themselves. Given the opportunity they will prattle on for hours about their poems, art work or the film they are making. You never get to actually see any of their work but you do get to hear about it. Their lives are like one never ending semester in grad school. Initially I believed these losers but then got to thinking. What would an aspiring actor, artist, musician, filmmaker being doing in Portland Oregon, a latte town? Why wouldn't they be in NYC or LA? Because they're phonies, that's why. Here's how it works with these clowns. They flunk out of college in New Jersey so their parents send them to Reed College in Portland in hopes that they will get their act together. They drop out of Reed but stay in Portland while still on Daddy's tab or some trust find. One Saturday Josh or Seth drifts down to one of the hundreds of hippie craft markets downtown. Some hippie is selling didgeridoos that he made I between bong reps. Josh buy one and takes it home where he proceeds to get baked after which he blows a few sour notes into the didgeridoo. The next day he's a musician. Not really but that's what he's telling everyone at the coffee house and pretending is good enough for a Portland artist-intellectual, in fact it's everything. In three months he will switch his designation from musician to filmmaker and then onto to something else 3 months later. As long as it sounds cool he will keep this charade up and no one in his circles will call him on it because they are doing the same thing.
The Activist
This group is usually comprised of people that used to be part of the artist-intellectual group in Portland. They have gotten a little older and may have finally, after 12 years, obtained a liberal arts degree from Portlan
I guess its not just 'where', but who you live with. A lot of posters have said that living in picture-perfect, tranquil, warm, less-populated places would give them better moods. Living with a bitchy/unreasonable spouse and noisy kids, like what a poster said a few comments up will make all the difference regardless of where you live. Given a choice between an unpleasant place with nice people and the other way around, I'd almost certainly choose the latter.
I've lived in Minnesota, South Dakota (western & eastern), and Arizona, and it never ceases to amaze me how different lifestyles are from place to place. I think a lot of people's happiness issues could be solved by moving to a culture more suited to their personality.
I have SAD, and in MN/eastern SD I had horrible winter time depression. Just moving to western SD where the sun shines through most of the winter made an incredible difference!!! I really liked the winter time there, at least as compared to Minnesota. The culture there also suited my tastes better. SD has a very low population density, which makes a difference, and like another poster mentioned earlier about Wisconsin, the pace of life is much slower and more relaxed. People there were always friendly, you could easily strike up a conversation with the guy next to you in line, and random folks would look out for you if you were in a bind. That's amazing.
However, even though SD is sunny, my ancestry is from the middle-east and I am physically designed for a warm climate. Moving to Arizona was the ultimate realization of my American-continent destiny. :) I have never been happier.
In the end, what I'm trying to say is, listen to what your body and mind are telling you. If you don't like where you're at, think hard about WHY you don't like it, and try to find a place that suits you better. If you don't like it, you can always go back.
Exercise too. I moved from Denver (300+ days of sunshine per year) to just up the road from you in London. I think the first winter we had three months of grey overcast skies, which I found very tough. The second winter was still, but not so bad. Then I moved a little further up to Toronto which wasn't as grey. I've always found the winters there far easier though, which I think is more to do with me cycling and running all year around. If you get out in the winter properly, the winter isn't as bad. And those occasional days of low wind but brilliant sunshine when you can run by the lake with light reflecting of white snow and blue water, in light clothing even if it's below -10, are really really uplifting.
I spent a week there one day
The roots of this correlation likely have little to do with literal geography and more to do with socio-economic groupings, local prices, and so on.
A related article is from Forbes: America's Most Livable Cities. They rate the Portland, Maine metropolitan statistical area as the most livable city based on income growth, cost of living, crime, leisure, and unemployment.
That "secondary America" you're talking about is the sort of place that produced Sarah Palin. I'd be very careful about romanticizing it - it's a quite dangerous place, and not suitable for decent people.
Palin is likely one of the most benign things to come from that "secondary america"
Wow, bigoted much? "If you're from out in the country, or not from a big, dense, liberal city, you're an undeducated redneck barbarian?"
"Palin is from a rural area, and she's a bitch. Therefore, everyone from such places is as bad as she is".
I don't like the woman either. But what the hell does she have to do with the subject at hand, and how the hell do you generalize from her lone (poor) example to all the rest of us who aren't from your big "primary America" cities?
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Small psychic distance between people has its problems as well as benefits, I think that's true. But I also think the idea that the secondary America fits the political stereotypical rural-urban dichotomy is problematic, and while Palin was able to manipulate a certain identity, I especially think that the idea that Sarah Palin accurately represents it is false. For one thing, there were no shortage of people from Wasilla who were ready to criticize her. That may be different from how the rest of the country responded to their idea with her, but the responses through the rest of the country were as much an artifact of the primary America media filters as anything else. There's also considerable indication that Palin had been living herself inside the primary America narrative herself for a while -- accounts of her run for mayor strongly suggest that she abandoned local policy-focused politics and instead brought in the national culture war narratives.
Tweet, tweet.