Thinking and feeling are important to human existence. However, do critical thinking and feeling skills lead to depression? What do we need to know? Let’s find out.
Since childhood, I have seen many children who were interested in playing and spending time with friends. I was a similar kind of child with simple desires who wanted to play and be with my friends.
Some of them were a little different from us. They were highly analytical with excellent thinking skills. However, they remained aloof and seemed depressed and anxious all the time.
I never judged them and their thinking skills. Besides, I was too naive to understand the way they thought about things and their outlook on life.
Now, after meeting them again, I realized that they were still the same. Only more depressed and anxious than before. This time after seeing them, I realized that they have so much going on inside their minds.
So, “How do thinking tendencies affect our psychology?”
Well, it is better to say that thinking about many things and dissecting them to their core leads to mental fatigue and delusion. Also, the more they think through things, the more it stresses them out.
But, “Do critical thinking and feeling skills lead to depression?”
Let’s find out.
How do critical thinking and feeling skills affect our psychology?
We know about critical thinking, but what about critical feeling? What is it? Well, the critical feeling is the ability to understand emotions with deep intrapersonal analysis and introspection.
But, it is important to know how our thinking and feeling skills affect our mindset. We might be aware of our thoughts and feelings. Though pondering over them is not easy and takes time and resources.
Critical thinking and feeling utilize a significant part of brainpower, which consumes a lot of energy. Moreover, utilizing thoughts and emotions takes concentration and perception, which is not easy to live with.
So, “How do critical thinking and feeling skills affect our psychology?”
Let’s find out.
Critical thinking and feeling skills:
1. Need a storehouse of experiences to process them:
For instance, let us imagine a young athletic child with a high appetite. He eats a lot and utilizes most of the food resources at home. Likewise, both critical thinking and feeling skills utilize a lot of raw information that is hard to get.
Stimulation is the most essential aspect of thinking and feeling skills. Without them, processing and adopting knowledge is almost impossible. However, gaining little experience, or information is not enough. To utilize them, we need a vast experience along with sincerity.
Therefore, the significance of a storehouse of experiences is due to our dual skills and helps shape our psychology.
2. Help us dissect information to its granular level:
Dissecting information to its basic source is the prime characteristic of critical thinking and feeling skills. The more complex the information is, the more processing of thoughts and information is required.
But, there is a unique thing about it. Instead of only understanding its basic source, it also favors the type of information which is beneficial. The complexity of critical thinking and feeling skills also impart wisdom and knowledge.
Hence, by dissecting information to its granular level, both skills refine our psychological processes.
3. Identify the patterns and read between the lines:
Both critical thinking and feeling skills help us identify patterns in our surroundings. Now, this is not the type of pattern we notice through our intuition.
Rather, it comes with natural reasoning tendencies that help us read between the lines. Although it is largely an intuitive process, critical thinking and feeling skills have a decent role in reasoning out the intuitive process.
Identifying patterns and reading between lines is a good example of thinking and feeling skills at their finest.
Now, we have discussed some pretty good ways in which both skills help refine our psychology.
But, the important thing is, “Do critical thinking and feeling skills lead to depression?”
Let’s take a look at it in the next section.
Do critical thinking and feeling skills ultimately lead to depression?
I think even after all this descriptive analysis, it still isn’t clear whether both critical thinking and feeling skills are the source of depression or not. I also believe that the source of most of our psychological problems might be both of the above.
However, I do not have anything to support my arguments on them. But, thinking and feeling skills have a certain influence on our depression and sad state, which is important to address here.
Depression is one of the ultimate outcomes of critical thinking and feeling skills. The consumption of information on a consistent note is tiring and mentally stressful, which leads to problems in concentration on real-life tasks.
But, “Do critical thinking and feeling skills lead to depression?”
Here, are 5 surprising reasons why it is so.
Critical thinking and feeling:
1. Make us a one-dimensional thinker and feeler:
Feeling and thinking skills focus on the depth of a single piece of information. The continuous analysis of information does not help us in processing things from different perspectives.
Moreover, it also makes us one-dimensional thinkers focusing only on certain issues that make sense to us. Most importantly, it is like a funnel trying to limit things to a single conclusion.
Hence, one-dimensional thinking makes us sadder and even more depressed realizing only a certain analysis of things.
2. Absorbs the duality of the information:
Human minds are amazingly diverse and perceptive than we believe. Especially, when you consider the perspective of absorbing a piece of information.
But, one thing that we don’t realize is that using both skills can be prone to the duality of the information. In other words, both the positive and negative sides of things can make us delusional and confused.
Therefore, absorbing the duality and limiting ourselves to it is another reason why we get depressed.
3. Makes us obsessed over simple things:
Obsession is unhealthy, especially when it is limited to self-interests. But, obsessing over simple things that require no further analysis results in a waste of time and resources.
Getting addicted to insignificant facts and information will make us ignorant of its simplicity and true nature. What we think can be irrational and what we feel can be deceptive, which can only drive us away from its true nature.
Hence, obsessing over simple things is not at all healthy and is a pretty good reason why we get depressed.
4. Do not allow us to accept things as they are:
I think we can all agree on this. Critical thinking and feeling seldom make us satisfied with things as they are. The incessant need to find things and discover some hidden things behind them is sometimes ridiculous.
Also, complicating things beyond their nature gives us wrong conclusions about them, and we ultimately end up with dissatisfaction and futile attempts of rationalizing things with thoughts and emotions.
As a result, we experience repeated episodes of depression from time to time due to critical thinking and feeling.
5. Tend to project our thoughts and emotions towards other things:
There is a difference between knowing things and having a vague idea about them. Especially, when you are trying to project your feelings and emotions on things around you.
As I said before, what you feel and what you think differed from the true nature of things. Trying to project your feelings and thoughts on things is as irrational as it can get.
Therefore, the way we feel and think has nothing to do with reality, which gives us another reason why we get depressed.
Final Words:
To sum up, critical thinking and feeling processes bring us many benefits of high intelligence and increased analytical strength. However, it can be very stressful and depressing at the same time.
Nevertheless, by balancing our analysis with simplicity and constant improvement we can get out of our depression and anxiety.