All dark moods have an inside and an outside. When we are in them different things feel persuasive and different things feel empty. When we come out of them everything looks different.

It isn’t a matter of disagreement, though. The dark moods make empirically false claims.

Dark moods lie to us. If we held dark moods accountable for its claims, they’d lose all credibility.

Here’s a technique:

Whenever you manage to overcome a dark mood, recall the claims it made and carefully note each of its lies.

It might have said: “Your past happiness was a farce. I’m smarter, and I can tell you ‘Happiness is nothing.’ You were never happy and you will never be happy again.”

Or: “This minor symptom you have indicates a debilitating and fatal illness.”

Or: “You will never get through this work and produce anything good. You can try, but you will fail.”

Or any number of heavy, demoralizing things. Everyone has different dark moods and different dark claims.

When your better self emerges from darkness, it will be tempted to just enjoy the sunshine of not feeling like shit. Enjoy the better mood, but first make yourself take some notes, mentally or on paper. Observe what you believed and how it seemed to you at the time, and contrast it with what turned out to be the truth. Then figure what the best response to the situation would have been. Leave instructions to your future self: “In case of a dark mood, break glass.”

Then, next time you are gripped by a dark mood and persuaded by it you can go back and look at your notes and your instructions to yourself.

The notes will not feel true, and the instructions will feel pointless, but that does not matter. You can’t go by feel in times like those.

You have to go on faith. If you obey your better self you will retrieve yourself from the darkness.

This is very boring advice, but boringness happens to be the earmark of practical goodness.

(I made a picture of my boring instructions to myself.)