Act Happy - Condition Your Mind Happy

[dannyhunt]

Act the way you want to feel and soon you will feel the way you act

This is common in self confidence building therapies or courses where you are asked to act the part of or like a confident person. You soon develop that skill or behavior which results in the person having more confidence. There is increasing evidence that acting enraged, obsessed, malevolent, or depressed maybe bad for you. Actor Leonard DiCaprio developed obsessive-compulsive disorder while playing Howard Hughes in the block buster The Aviator. This often happens to actors who get "caught up" in the role they play or keep many of the same character traits of the role they played. Heath Ledger who played the Joker in the Batman movie died and was allegedly clinically depressed. If you act having an enraged or angry conversation with someone, you will usually find that your emotions do get engaged even though you are simply acting the part.

When you are acting happy, you are thinking happy thoughts that go with the acting role you are playing, so it's like conditioning your mind to be happy. So try acting happy and you can also consider it acting happy therapy.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Actor Leonard DiCaprio developed obsessive-compulsive disorder while playing Howard Hughes in the block buster The Aviator.

That's not quite accurate. DiCaprio already suffered from OCD long before he made the movie. However, he had learned how to manage his symptoms well. Making a movie where he was required to display OCD symptoms exacerbated his previously-existing condition. This makes perfect sense if you understand that he had learned compensating and coping strategies and that during the movie he needed to inhibit or bypass the strategies he had developed to manage OCD.

Heath Ledger who played the Joker in the Batman movie died and was allegedly clinically depressed.

Again, not quite accurate. There seems to be no doubt that he was depressed and was plagued with self-doubt, and some evidence that he suffered from bipolar disorder, where individuals are at high risk for suicide during the transition from hypomania to depression. Whether his role as The Joker had anything to do with that at all is unknown.