Take our Depression Test

Find a therapist to overcome depression

As Jerry says in "Seinfeld," doing the opposite might pay off.

Brooklyn is not expanding, so do your homework.

A reboot can always help.

A confession: I grew up without television. I was not off the grid but in a perfectly ordinary leafy Midwestern suburb in the 1960s, with five siblings and parents who "didn't believe in TV," the way other people don't believe in astrology or extended warranties. We were raised on books, DC comics, and Mad Magazine, amd consequently alienated from everything our classmates talked about on Monday mornings.

We did sneak our fix—afternoons at my grandparents' house watching Bonanza and Bewitched, or football games flickering in friends' basements. But the household belief was clear: Television rots the mind.

Flash forward a few decades. I am now a psychiatrist with a fully internet-wired home and favorite series on BritBox, Criterion, and Netflix. And it turns out—with apologies to Dad—that some of the most useful concepts I've encountered in clinical psychiatry have arrived not from peer-reviewed journals but from the writers' rooms of Seinfeld, The IT Crowd, and Harold Ramis's masterpiece Groundhog Day. Here are four lessons I return to again and again with patients.

Lesson One: Do the Opposite

In a famous 1994 Seinfeld episode, George Costanza reaches a moment of painful self-awareness. Sitting in a diner, he announces: "Every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be."

Jerry's reply is swift: "If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right!"

George orders chicken salad instead of tuna. He approaches a woman he'd normally avoid, tells her with disarming honesty that he's unemployed and lives with his parents. She is charmed. He gets a job with the........

© Psychology Today