Marcos Salazar - Co-founder and Innovation Catalyst at Be Social Change, Social Entrepreneur, Leadership Researcher, & Expert on Psychology of Gen Y & Millennials

Post-College Depression: Part 3 - The Tyranny of Choice and High Expectations

This is the third post in a series of entries I will be writing on Post-College Depression.

In the first post of this series I talked about what post-college depression is and typical symptoms and causes. In the last post we discussed how a lack of a sense of control over one's life can result in millennials and emerging adults from Generation Y developing post-college depression. Today we will talk about how the tyranny of choice and high expectations can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression after college.

After graduation we have the freedom to be the master of our own fate and can choose any direction we want to go with our lives. However, just because we have more choice does not necessarily mean that we are always better off. In fact, today’s overabundance of choice can actually plunge emerging adults into the post-college blues pretty quickly after graduation.

Because we have grown up in a time of increased choice and higher levels of experienced control, there has also been an increase in expectations about control.

As Barry Schwartz explains in The Paradox of Choice, we believe, "...we should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting...With all the choice available, we should never have to settle for things that are just 'good enough'" (2003, 210).

In addition, we not only have grown up expecting perfection in our external lives, but also expect it from ourselves. We expect to be able to manage every aspect of our life and when we fail or seem to lose control, we blame ourselves intensely, making us susceptible to developing learned helplessness and post-college depression.

As Schwartz has found in his research, "Unattainable expectations, plus a tendency to take intense personal responsibility for failure, makes a lethal combination."

Are You a Maximizer or Satisficer?
One possible factor in determining whether you will develop this kind of learned helplessness is whether you are a maximizer or a satisficer. A maximizer is someone who strives to make the best possible choice in every instance while a satisficer simply looks for the choice that is "good enough."

Post-College Depression: Part 2 - Developing Learned Helplessness

"Right after college I fell into a really deep depression" says Jody, a 24-year old from Boston. "I decided to go out west because I got offered a job I couldn't pass up, but soon after I got there, I became sad and lonely. My job wasn't what I expected it to be and I really started to miss college and all my friends. My life had changed so much and I felt like I didn't have control over it. I still feel pretty lost because I don’t exactly know what I want to do with my life , but I’m hoping that I'll figure that out soon."

Have you ever felt like Jody? Do you know someone who does? If so, then please continue on.

This is the second in a series of entries I will be writing on Post-College Depression, and Jody hits on the three main points we will be exploring today - how a lack of a sense of control over one's life, the tyranny of choice, and high expectations can result in millennials and emerging adults from Generation Y developing post-college depression.

A Generation Plagued by Helplessness?
First, I want to talk about what psychologists call learned helplessness because it is something that can have a pretty big impact on our post-college years.

Learned helplessness is when we learn to act or behave helpless in a particular situation, even when we have the power to change the circumstances that are causing us to feel this way. The reason it is called "learned" is because it is usually brought on by us attempting to correct a bad situation and we fail, or perceive that we have failed, to change the situation.

If this failure keeps happening, we start to believe that the situation is unchangeable and develop feelings of helplessness, which we then learn to use as a filter for perceiving future events in our lives.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first to investigate learned helplessness through a series of experiments in which he used electrical shocks on animals to test different perceptions of control.

During this line of research, Seligman found, "When shock is inescapable, the dog learns that it is unable to exert control over the shock by means of any of its voluntary behaviors. It expects this to be the case in the future, and this expectation of not being in control causes it to fail to learn in the future." Seligman found that when animals and humans begin feeling this sense of helplessness, they develop symptoms of depression.

Post-College Depression: Part 1 - What is Post-College Depression?

One of the most disconcerting things I found while doing research for The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide is almost everyone I spoke to about emotional health after college mentioned to me that either they had become depressed or knew of fellow graduates who had developed what I call post-college depression. Along with post-college depression, many spoke about feeling extremely nervous about how their life was unfolding after graduation because they didn't know what the next step was and felt like they were simply wandering through their twenties and thirties. What compounds this worry and stress is the assumption that these feelings of sadness are somehow abnormal when in fact, it is just the opposite.

You Are Not Alone
If you or someone you care about are experiencing feelings of anxiety, helplessness, or depression, you or they are certainly not alone. It is extremely common to struggle with an array of negative emotions that arise from all the challenges changes you face after college throughout your twenties and thirties. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, acute depression is the second-most common illness in the United States right after ischemic cardiopathy (congestive heart failure). As Eduardo Punset describes in his book, The Happiness Trip, "Depression is the greatest cause of incapacity in the world, measured in years lived with an incapacitation condition, among people over the age of five...Although we are well on the way to eradicating disease caused by external factors, we are invaded by malignant sadness that germinates from within."

Post-College Depression Can Also Affect Your Work and Career
Post-college depression not only has a major impact on you personally, but can have a a negative impact on your work and career. Feelings of sadness and helplessness from the post-college blues can result in poor performance, absences from work, or even losing your job. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to effectively do all the things that your job requires (much less excel) if you're struggling psychologically. Our emotional health is just as, if not more, important than having a stellar resume or the perfect cover letter. While we don't think about it, it is vitally important to put just as much time and energy into becoming psychologically strong as we do in all the other external aspects of our life.

There is a running thread about post-college depression on the Life After College Forum however, what I will be doing on MarcosSalazar.com is delving much deeper into the increasingly common problem of depression, anxiety, and stress emerging adults of Generation Y through a series of posts as well as show how it can affect your work and career. I want to raise awareness of this epidemic among millennials and let people know that they are not alone in facing this problem. I exposed this problem in the Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide where I provided the first comprehensive explanation of this common problem and here I will expand on my findings as well as provide ways that you can combat the post-college blues.

What Are the Symptoms of Post-College Depression?
Below are a common list of symptoms that post grads have mentioned they feel after college:

• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Feelings of worthlessness or guilt
• Focusing on failure
• Excessive anxiety
• Lack of confidence
• Feeling of being overwhelmed
• Sadness
• Loss of interest in normal activities
• Tiredness
• Feeling like they're not good enough
• Impaired concentration or memory
• Inability to cope
• Despondency or despair
• Hopelessness

Following Your Passion: Blog Interview with Professional Photographer Wendy Ploger

If you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.
-- Author Unknown

Are you currently working in a job or on a project that you are passionate about? If not, what is preventing you from pursuing it? These are just a few of the questions we will be delving into during my series of Blog Interviews about people following their passions in life. Finding and pursuing work that is engaging and meaningful is a basic psychological need however, this need is only met if we consciously make the decision to pursue something we are passionate about. Yet, we all know it is easier said than done, so sometimes an unexpected event pushes us forward in a direction we have been contemplating.

My first Blog Interview is with Wendy Ploger, a professional photographer in New York City who's story will touch and inspire you. I have been in love with her pictures since the moment I first saw them, especially ones of the famous one-eyed Ernie (how can you not love that face!). So sit back and enjoy the interview.

Discovering Your Passion
When I asked Wendy what is it about photography that excites her she said, "When I take a photo, it is about remembering--capturing a moment that brings you back to that memory of the past. It is also an important way to express myself. In photos, you can sometimes say so much more than words. Visually it is a way I can tell a story."

When Wendy was in college, she was a communication major but decided to change to graphic design as she began exploring her creative side. She took a number of photo classes in college that helped her get a sense of her artistic abilities and also had a great professor who began showing her the subtleties of her work. However, at the end of college she decided to go the path of a graphic designer, "Photography simply didn't seem practical to make a living at."

Wendy points out an important fact of reality that we may have to come to terms with during our early years after college--sometimes our passions are something that, at the time, we simply can't make a living at or we just don't have the experience on how to make money doing it, so we decide to pursue other opportunities that are a better fit for us at the time. The key is to still pursue something we enjoy while on our journey of finding things we are passionate about.

Following Your Passion
Wendy had been doing graphic design in Washington, DC for a number of years but began getting restless in her job. She felt stagnant in what she was doing and was tired of working for people telling her what to do. She wanted to make a change so she started looking into photo schools and trying to find a way to make the leap to follow her passion. During this time, the unimaginable happened.

On September 11, 2001, Wendy's dad and step-mother were on American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. After this tragic event, Wendy said that her perspective on life changed. In an interview for the Washington Post, she explained, "I don't know if it was because of 9/11, but I just started to realize that life was too short, and I needed to be following my passion, no matter what the cost," she said. "He would be proud of the direction I've taken." She mentioned to me that after this, "I became less fearful and more willing to take chances," which led her to take more photography classes and eventually move to New York City to pursue photography on a more full-time basis.

(photo of the Pentagon Memorial by Wendy)

Wendy's change in the way she viewed life after 9/11 points to an important psychological phenomenon that happens after such events or even, as I have personally experienced, when we get older--developing a greater sense of our mortality. When we are young we think that we have all the time in the world and often go through our youth not really worrying about time. In some ways it is a great feeling, but the down side is we lack of a sense of urgency to do things that are important to us. This is why our growing sense of mortality can be so valuable to us--it makes us realize that time is our most valuable resource and we have to spend it as wisely. This means following your passion and spending time on activities that make you happy and give you a sense of meaning and purpose. In order for our sense of mortality to be beneficial to us (as opposed to it causing us anxiety), it must drive us to take action.