The origin of bad moods- and what to do about them

In general, happy moods have easy explanations – we know why we’re elated. But a bad mood often seems to arrive out of the blue, a gloomy weather pattern that settles in from everywhere all at once. All of a sudden, we find ourselves pissed off without a good reason, which only makes us more pissed off.

But what causes these bad moods? Why do we sometimes slip into angry fits and melancholy torpors? Have you ever wondered why you can make good choices for your health throughout most of the day only to crash and burn later by skipping the gym and having a second dessert? Or why you might be able to control your emotions and how you communicate them earlier in the day, but later feel more out of control or unable to express things as smoothly?

According to Jonah Lehrer, in an interesting article on “ where bad moods come from”, the standard theory of bad moods is rooted in a psychological quirk known as ego depletion or ED. I hesitate to use ED as an acronym mainly because to viewers of late night TV in the U.S, ED stands for erectile dysfunction- which of course leads to many a bad mood in its own right. No, we are talking about a different concept altogether.

The basic idea behind ego depletion seems to be that self-control and willpower are limited cognitive resources. As a result, when we overexert ourselves in one domain – say, when we’re on a strict diet, or focused on a difficult task for hours at work – we have fewer resources left over to exert self-control in other domains. This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of pizza. A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.

It seems that ego depletion wears out over time. According to the theory is that since we have a finite pool of resources (energy) that allows us to regulate our emotions, thoughts, choices, and behavior, and that like a muscle being used, it wears out with use. So if your bicep was your ability to self-regulate (make good decisions, keep your cool, etc), and you did a set of curls, the 12th curl would be more difficult than the first. Just like the first time passing up a cupcake is more difficult than the 12th in one day (if it would even take that long before you would just eat one). To make the picture even more bleak, there are a few things that start us off with even less of these resources to begin with, including lack of sleep in the preceding night, experiencing fatigue, being hungry, having some kind of negative emotions (anger, sadness, jealousy, etc), or just not being very motivated. So it is easier to drift into a bad mood.

When we push our mind too hard, asking it to refrain from carbs and cigarettes, we struggle to avoid the negative thoughts and emotions that lead to sour moods. Consider this 2007 study: The scientists told subjects to refrain from eating a tempting chocolate donut for a few minutes. Then, they insulted these poor (and probably hungry) experimental volunteers. Not surprisingly, those who had successfully resisted the donut were more likely to get aggressive in response to the insult. Or look at the medical literature, in which people on diets are typically “irritable and aggressive.” (This is the so-called cranky dieter effect.) Although we’d like to be happy and polite, those positive moods take cognitive work, and our brain is too tired to care. We lose our temper because we lack the willpower to swallow our angry words.

This theory offers a great explanation for why some things may be difficult to do later in the day than earlier. For example, most couples end up having their biggest fights at the end of the day. One explanation is that it is the only time they see each other, but it is often much more than that. Having a conflict later in the day means that each partner is likely in a state of ego depletion (they have made countless decisions over the day, may be fatigued, and are then experiencing negative emotions), making the chance of anything going well very small.

Second, it explains why sustaining efforts to make changes in our lives is difficult. When the task we are doing requires more effort, our resources are used up quicker. For example, if you are trying to make a very difficult and large change, it is like picking up a heavier weight to do your bicep curls. At your best you could do a few before you wore out.

Scientists believe they may have cracked the secret of why some people are always in a bad mood. They have found that people who are regularly grumpy have an overactive area in their brains. Scans of healthy people's brains show that those who report having been in a bad mood recently have increased activity in a region of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex which lies an inch or two behind the right eye in right-handed people and has been linked with emotions in other studies. Psychologist David Zald, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who led the study, said: "Such a connection does make sense because animal studies show that this region of the brain controls heart rate, breathing, stomach acidity levels, sweating and similar autonomous functions that have a close connection to mood."

There are, however, a few things we can do to help minimize the experience of ego depletion.

1. Get enough sleep. If you are starting off with less ability to self-regulate because you aren't sleeping enough, then this can be the best place to start.

2. Understand how it works in your life: Take a look at how ego depletion may occur with you and get a feel for how you can notice when you are experiencing it.

3. Prepare: If you are able to know that there are certain times of the day that you will need to be on your game, or that you will be entering a period of time of increased stress, then make a mental note of that ahead of time. This helps us "conserve" some of our resources.

4. HALT: This concept is nothing new to people involved in 12-step programs. For years, the acronym HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired) has been used to indicate being at risk for relapse. Stopping what you are doing when you recognize that you are about to make a poor decision takes some energy, but scraping some resources together at those moments can really help you avoid some big consequences.

5. Be Compassionate to Yourself: We sometimes have a tendency to compound our emotional strain when we become disappointed and angry with ourselves for falling into the ego depletion trap. If this is effective in getting you back on track then great, but for most of us it just makes us feel worse and makes it even harder.

Finally, confronting a bad mood, try letting yourself off the hook if this happens, you are human after all, and this is just a fact of normal human life.

Conquering insomnia

Lo and behold now there is a cure for insomnia ! And it does not involve any drugs or surgery. It only only involves common sense. After a good deal of research proving what does not work to cure sleep insomnia, researchers claim to have found the Shalimar of cures. The idea is to stick to a schedule that maximizes your “sleep efficiency” — the amount of time in bed you spend sleeping, instead of tossing and hoping that sleep will descend. That involves four rules: Reduce the time spent in bed. Get up at the same time every day. Don’t go to bed until you feel sleepy. Don’t stay in bed if you’re not sleeping

Author Paula Spahn argues that though this sounds way too good to be true: a quick, effective solution to the insomnia that plagues an estimated 15 to 30 percent of older adults — without drugs, without even needing to consult a physician, it has been tested and proved in field trials.

A University of Pittsburgh team, testing its method on 79 seniors with chronic insomnia (average age: 72), has reported very encouraging results. The treatment required just two explanatory sessions (the first lasts 45 to 60 minutes, the second about half an hour) with a nurse-practitioner, plus two brief follow-up phone calls, over the course of a month. Afterward, the researchers recently reported in The Archives of Internal Medicine, two-thirds of those treated reported a clearly measurable improvement in sleep, compared with 25 percent of those in a control group.

“Their total sleep time improved,” the lead author, Dr. Daniel Buysse, a psychiatry professor and sleep specialist, said in an interview. Indeed, 55 percent of those treated no longer had insomnia at all. And six months later, three-quarters of those tested had maintained or improved their better sleep patterns.

So what was this potential wonder nondrug? That’s the interesting part. The treatment was a “brief behavioral treatment intervention” known to be an effective antidote to insomnia, as documented by extensive research for over 30 years. It’s a change in what you do, not in what you ingest. Emphasis on brief.“If behavioral treatments are ever to become widespread, they have to be simple and quick and produce noticeable results,” Dr. Buysse explained. “If you don’t see substantial improvement in a month or so, patients’ motivation to persevere will diminish” — which often happens with behavioral treatments offered by clinical psychologists, which generally involve six to eight sessions. So the researchers distilled those principles into four simple rules, came up with a workbook and sleep diaries to help patients follow them, and trained a nurse-practitioner to explain the regimen and the physiology behind it.

Insomnia, like other sleep disorders, can take a serious toll on seniors’ health. It’s associated with depression, with falls and fractures, with higher mortality — and its prevalence increases with age. So doctors take insomnia seriously and prescribe medications to help patients sleep. But sedatives can create problems of their own. In older patients, sleep drugs can cause daytime drowsiness and impair memory, and they’re also associated with falls. A review of 24 studies of these “sedative hypnotics” in older people with insomnia, published in the British Medical Journal in 2005, concluded that while the drugs improved sleep, their effects were small and the hazards significant. “In people over 60, the benefits of these drugs may not justify the increased risk,” the researchers wrote.

An intervention not involving drugs would therefore be a great boon to seniors and their caregivers. “In an ideal health care system, one would expect behavioral treatment for insomnia to be widely disseminated because of the data showing efficacy,” not to mention the cost savings from reduced drug use and fewer side effects and injuries, Thomas C. Neylan, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.

So why isn’t this method commonly prescribed? Dr. Buysse’s hypothesis: “I believe the biggest barriers are that people think the interventions are complicated and costly. So we really tried to distill the proven techniques into the simplest possible form.” The method will need testing on a larger scale, and nurses or other professionals will need training before they can help patients use it — but not a lot of training. Dr. Buysse estimates that groups of instructors can be prepared with an eight-hour course.

The idea is to stick to a schedule that maximizes your “sleep efficiency” — the amount of time in bed you spend sleeping, instead of tossing and hoping that sleep will descend. That involves four rules: Reduce the time spent in bed. Get up at the same time every day. Don’t go to bed until you feel sleepy. Don’t stay in bed if you’re not sleeping.

The nurse instructing patients in the technique uses diagrams and examples, describes the physiology involved, cautions that people may feel tired and sleep-deprived for the first few weeks but usually go on to deeper, more restful sleep that comes more quickly. Still, that’s about all that needs to be said — not much. In the study, three brochures given to the control group contained a lot of the same information, but just reading about better sleep habits didn’t do the trick.

However obvious the strategy may sound, “the reality is, people gravitate toward the exact opposite behavior,” Dr. Buysse said. “It’s common to see older adults spend 10 or 12 hours in bed in order to get five hours of sleep. It’s very frustrating.”

But it’s also frustrating to think that a potentially safe and effective answer to a widespread problem might once more fail to make its way out of an academic journal and into physicians’ offices and people’s bedrooms. Maybe it needs a jazzier name than “brief behavioral treatment intervention” — something incorporating “Medicare” and “cost-cutting.”

The Rajat Gupta episode

Today I came across the actual recording of the phone call that Rajat Gupta made to Rajaratnam and which forms the basis of the SEC case against Rajat. I am posting it without comment and let the readers make their own judgements on what it tells about why and how Rajat was charged.

Just a small town girl...

She was a just small town girl. He was born and bred in a metropolitan city. She went to a vernacular school and knew no English. He was trained by the Jesuists and was fluent in Sanskrit and English. She was unaware of life beyond her little community. He lived in a metropolitan city with the latest in modern technology. She had never visited a major city or been on an aeroplane. He had never lived in a village and knew little of the hardships of rural life in the country. But she was wise in the ways of the world having observed her parents cope with the difficult life they led as they struggled to raise their five children. He was the top scholar of his class who hoped to study abroad to complete his education but knew little of economic struggle. But time was apassing and it was decided that he would marry. So here he was a citified and western educated man about to marry a small town girl with values as distant from his own as could be. They seemed to belong to two completely different cultures and value systems. How would they cope with these differences?

In a sense they captured perfectly the conflicts of values that were rising in India in the 1990's with rapid economic development. As Anand Giridardas observes in his excellent book, " India Calling", there are today two distinct visions of morality that are at war in India. The first vision sees compliance with the law, adherence to universal values and integrity, avoidance of corruption and a clean public service as ideals to be fought for. The second vision invites all to compete in the marketplace, using all the wiles and tricks that the law allows to amass wealth, which does not frown on corruption but rather uses it to enhance their path to success, that focuses on family’s progess rather than on social good as the prime objective of life.

“These two visions mingle and compete and combine in Indian life, but the first emphasis has echoes of Western Judeo-Christian tradition of thought, and the second emphasis is more rooted in in the Hindu world view.” AK Ramanujam argued in his brilliant essay “Is there an Indian way of thinking” that these different emphases define the fault line between the Indian and Western minds. “ He writes of the ancient Indian sage and law giver Manu, whose teachings form the basis of much of the context sensitive morality in the emerging India. Manu has no clear notion of a universal human nature from which one can deduce ethical decrees like “Man shall not kill” or “Man shall not tell an untruth. There seems to be no notion of a state, no unitary law of all men.” Ramanujan contrasts this with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: “ Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature”. What he concludes is that traditional Indian thinking, moral and otherwise, is “context sensitive” as opposed to the “context free” orientation of mainstream Western thought which aspires to universal principles and norms.”

As Anand argues “Universaliation means putting oneself in another’s place- it is the golden rule of the New Testament- do not do unto others what you do not want done unto you." The main tradition of Judeo Christian ethics is based on a premise of universalisation while for Manu to be moral is to particularize- to ask who did what, to whom and when. In India, the context for moral reasoning has traditionally been ones caste or class or family circle, not the society at large and not the civic commons. It is an alternative morality of the family, a context sensitive morality in which moral reasoning is based on the effect of ones choices on those one cared about and not about any universal values or norms. The first was a society of propriety and principles and universal ideals. The second of context sensitive choices of right and wrong.

And according to Anand, the second vision was winning in modern day India- it was after all the vision of Dhirubhai Ambani – and not the first vision of universality of laws and values espoused by Nehru. In this emerging vision, it was fine to aspire to riches, to bargain and bribe to get to the top, to reward family loyalty, to undermine the judiciary and bribe the political establishment. These were becoming the ethos of the new “robber barons” of India.

The problem that Anand avoids discussing is what happens if this vision expands to cover the entire society where each individual is left free to bribe and pillage his way to success unheeding of the public good or adherence to public norms of any kind, where might is right and achieving monetary success is all and be all of existence. Will it not lead to a period akin to that of the robber barons in the U.S where a handful of mid- to late nineteenth century railroad owners and executives , who became known as the "robber barons" because of their illegal and monopolistic practices they used to control the U.S. railroads. Without laws and regulations, these robber barons largely did what they wanted, amassing wealth and power through their various monopolies in different sectors. Jay Gould, perhaps the most notorious of the robber barons, took over the Erie Railroad by bribing politicians, issuing fraudulent stock, launching price wars, influencing the gold market, and deceiving business associates. But there was a day of reckoning coming for these robber barons.

Around the turn of the century, the robber barons' dominance began to wane because of growing public anger over ticket price fluctuations and stock market dips stemming from the railroads. These fears were stoked by the muckrakers who publized their misdeeds. During this period, the federal government also dealt a series of blows to the robber barons in the form of laws, regulations, and court orders, which led to policies that curbed the formation of monopolies. These laws and regulations were not however sufficient or timely and this culture of excess and fraud was a major contributing factor to the famous "crash of 1929".

The simple lesson is that while unbridled greed will inevitably lead to a crash; it is equally true that a network of government regulations only leads to stagnation. Finding that balance between the two visions is essential to economic and equitable growth.

I turned once again to the two persons I mentioned above. How had they coped and dealt with the two visions and morality ? They had now been married for almost fifty years, They had two sons- one followed the traditional path of an arranged marriage and a service oriented career, albeit in a corporation not the government world and that too outside India, while the other son was more adventurous, marrying for love outside his caste and starting various ventures struggling to become an independent entrepreneur. While he was content to live within his modest means, she had become now a minor real estate entrepreneur and through careful investments in real estate had managed to increase the family wealth manifold. Just a small town girl...

In the land of scams

I returned from India last week. And the first thing I did was to take a bath. Rarely have I felt so totally unclean for India seems to have become a land of scams. A new more dishonest method of looting public monies or hoodwinking the public seems to be found almost every day. And the tragedy is that the rate and depth and extent of these robberies only seem to be increasing by the day.

Here is a short list of the scams over the past 20 years. And remember that the major scam till then was the Bofors arms purchase where the loss was only estimated at Rs 64 crores.

1992 -Harshad Mehta securities scam Rs 5,000 cr




1995 -Preferential allotment scam Rs 5,000 cr; 
Yugoslav Dinar scam Rs 400 cr; 
Meghalaya Forest scam Rs 300 cr



1996: -Fertiliser import scam Rs 1,300 cr
; Urea scam Rs 133 cr; 
Bihar fodder scam Rs 950 cr



1997 -Sukh Ram telecom scam Rs 1,500 cr
; SNC Lavalin power project scam Rs 374 cr
; Bihar land scandal Rs 400 cr
; C.R. Bhansali stock scam Rs 1,200 cr



1998 -Teak plantation swindle Rs 8,000 cr



2001 -UTI scam Rs 4,800 cr; 
Dinesh Dalmia stock scam Rs 595 cr
; Ketan Parekh securities scam Rs 1,250 cr



2005 -IPO-Demat scam Rs 146 cr; 
Bihar flood relief scam Rs 17 cr
; Scorpene submarine scam Rs 18,978 cr



2006 -Punjab's City Centre project scam Rs 1,500 cr; 
Taj Corridor scam Rs 175 cr



2008 -Pune billionaire Hassan Ali Khan tax default Rs 50,000 cr
; The Satyam scam Rs 10,000 cr
; Army ration pilferage scam Rs 5,000 cr
; The 2-G spectrum swindle Rs 60,000 cr; 
State Bank of Saurashtra scam Rs 95 cr; 
Illegal monies in Swiss banks, as estimated in 2008 Rs 71,00,000 cr



2009: -The Jharkhand medical equipment scam Rs 130 cr
; Rice export scam Rs 2,500 cr; 
Orissa mine scam Rs 7,000 cr; 
Madhu Koda mining scam Rs 4,000 cr.

The scams have not only increased in amounts – the 2 G spectrum scam has been estimated to be as much as Rs 120,000 crores. They have increased in the geographical coverage. In the early days, the scams were mainly focused in Delhi and Bombay. But now there is almost no part of the country unaffected by scoundrels. The other distressing part of these developments is that almost no part of the Indian society is left untouched. Consider this

The last Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, KBG Balakrishnan is under investigation.

The last Chief of Army staff is accused of land grab and some senior officers are being court-martialled.

The most upright of Indian businessmen- Ratan Tata- is accused of manipulating spectrum allocation through the notorious Radia tapes.

The world famous India entrepreneur and the doyen of Indian expatriates – Rajat Gupta- is accused of insider trading by the U.S SEC.

A minister – A Raja- in the cabinet of the most honest of prime ministers, is said to have plundered almost Rs 120,000 crores of the nations monies right under his nose.

An IAS couple is found to have assets worth Rs 40 crores.

And the crowning blow- the Chief Vigilance Officer for the country, Thomas- is accused of corruption which renders him unfit and is so removed from his post from the President of the country.

If all this reminds you of the days of the “robber barons” in the U.S in the early twentieth century, you would not be far wrong. Our modern day robber barons are just as venal and amoral and unmindful of the public interest. Here is a partial list of these U.S robber barons:

▪ John Jacob Astor (real estate, fur)—New York City

▪ Andrew Carnegie (steel)—Pittsburgh and New York

▪ Jay Cooke (finance)—Philadelphia

▪ Charles Crocker (railroads)—California

▪ James Buchanan Duke (tobacco)— Durham, North Carolina

▪ Jay Gould (railroads)--New York

▪ Edward Henry Harriman (railroads)—New York

▪ J. P. Morgan (banking, finance, industrial consolidation)—New York City

▪ John D. Rockefeller (oil), Standard Oil--New York

▪ Charles M. Schwab (steel) Carnegie Steel, United States Steel Corporation, Bethlehem Steel - Pittsburgh and New York

▪ Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads)--New York

A major role in limiting the power of these robber barons was played by the muckrakers. A muckraker seeks to expose corruption of businesses or government to the public. The term originates from writers of the Progressive movement in America who wanted to expose corruption and scandals in government and business. Muckrakers often wrote about the wretchedness of urban life and poverty, and against the established institutions of society, such as big business. And yes, they too were often accused of being socialists or communists or in the pay of foreign governments.

Nevertheless muckrakers were a significant part of reform in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries because of the freedom of the press provided for by the First Amendment of the Constitution. They played a significant role in the social justice movements for reform, and the campaigns to clean up cities and states, by constantly reporting and publicizing the dark corners of American society in a sensationalist way. During this time period, these journalists, through their research and constant exposure of the wrongdoing by officials in American public life, gave fuel to protests that led to investigations and later on reform of not only Corporate America but the American Government. The Muckrakers’ journalistic efforts helped reform and regulate Wall Street and aspects of big businesses.

Our society too seems headed to what Rudyard Kipling spoke of in “ The Jungle Book”, a society which is governed by the law of the jungle with its operating ethos being "every man for himself," "anything goes," "might makes right," "survival of the strongest", "survival of the fittest", "kill or be killed", "dog eat dog" and "eat or be eaten" almost a replication of the days of the robber barons in the US. The real question is will the muckrakers in India rise to the occasion and expose these corruptions and fuel protests leading to real reform?

When daughters break your heart...

It is said that a son gives man immortality but a daugher makes a man complete.

The relationship of a father to his daugher is one of those unique loves that transcend life. Or as Addison points out so eloquently "Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express."

It has always surprised me that despite this, most men hanker for sons rather than daughters. The proliferation of clinics that determine the sex of the new born is a frustrating illustration of this strange phenomenon. In most countries, the ratio of males to females is heavily tilted in favour of the male sex. If more men were only to know the joy that a daughter will bring to their lives, perhaps there will be less need of these clinics.

For truly " a daughter is the happy memories of the past, the joyful moments of the present, and the hope and promise of the future."

As you grow older, the truism of this saying becomes even more acute. Yet is not all roses either. However old you may be, there will be some events you will always remember, and more than most, it will be the times your daughter broke your heart!

As when you were away for a few days on work and returned home and your three year old came running to the door and hugged you with all her might and cried triumphantly " Daddy is back"...

Or when she is pining in her room, with dark music playing, waiting for a boy to call to take her out to the prom and the call never comes...

Or when she goes for her first job and returns home downcast as she had not performed as well as she expected and the job of her dreams was floating away..

Or when she announces that she hates her job and life...

Or when she wants to quit her job but does not know what she wants to do with her life ..

Or when she is not succeeding in her search for a partner...

Or when she breaks up with her partner and thinks the world has come to an end..

Or when she rails at the unfairness of life at the poverty she sees around her and feels she can do nothing about it...

Or when she is at a crossroads in her life and is confused and angry and helpless. Yet you know that she must make her own life and her own decisions and so needs standy by helplessly as she finds her way. For a father there is no greater pain than to watch any pain inflicted on his daughter and being unable to help...

The truth is a " daughter may outgrow your lap but she will never outgrow your heart". And she will break your heart all your life but no father I know would have it any other way, ever.