How Do I Deal With Depression?
Depression is complex and when you are depressed, it seems like you brain just isn’t working right. I’ve been very depressed when I felt like I had no reason to be so. It wasn’t that I thought I didn’t have problems, but I felt like I had no problems I couldn’t easily handle. I dealt with depression for several years. It prevented me from doing the things I desired and moving forward in my life. I began to feel helpless and not in control of my life. It took some time, but I did eventually get control of my depression and my life. Probably everyone’s depression is different, but there was one factor that I feel was required for my success. I believe this factor applies to everyone. I took responsibility for my depression. I realized my emotional responses were my responsibility.
If you feel this is a little harsh and unfair, you are right. Life is harsh and unfair. For me, accepting this reality was difficult. Acceptance, though, gives you a great advantage. You stop looking for other people to solve your depression. You stop expecting that finding the cause of your depression will solve it. It is beneficial to find the cause, but afterwards, you still have to manage your emotions. Since I began managing my depression, scientific advance has been made in discovering psychological structures that contribute to managing your feelings. Mindset is a structure that can contribute much to you taking responsibility for your depression.
Positive Mindset Key Success
The success you seek is that of controlling your depression. Notice I didn’t say cure your depression. Feeling badly is a natural part of life. Life involves a certain amount of pain, both physical and emotional. Normally, we have enough control over our feelings that we can manage them. If something leaves us feeling badly, we can move on from it. Depression arises when we are unable to move on. We become unable to move on because we lose touch with our emotions. Their source gets buried in our memories. What was once a positive mindset, becomes negative and spreads throughout our perceptions of our life.
How you think about your life and your world is a big part of your happiness. I am talking about thoughts that hang in the background of your mind. They may not be noticeable. If I asked you what you are thinking, you wouldn’t mention one of these thoughts. You wouldn’t mention them, because they have become part of your perceptions of your world. You no longer have an objective distance from them. They are like the color on the lens of a camera or pair of glasses. What if that lens, slowly over time, becomes darkened. You will not notice the gradual dimming of your world; you will simply see your world as dim. You will begin to see the world that way. If you continue to wear these darkened glasses, you will forget the world is dim, but you won’t expect it to be any other way. This is how a mindset works. Mindsets are actually part of our perceptions of the world we see, feel, hear, smell, and touch.
When I mentioned positive mindset, I referred to the positive thoughts you have about your life. We are conscious of some of these thoughts, but others are more subtle and not the focus of our attention. Nevertheless, they are there, and they influence our feelings and perceptions. Don’t confuse a mindset with moods. We have moods, some are positive and some are negative. Moods are very pervasive and we don’t always know what caused them. But like buttons, moods come and go. A mindset is more stable and actually more general. We don’t see the world through a mood; we see the world through a mindset. As a psychological structure, a mindset is much stronger than a mood. Mindsets are formed from psychological things that don’t have much structure, emotions.
What Causes Mindset
Fortunately, emotions are things that live close to us and a major habitat for them are our thoughts. There are two general classes of thoughts: positive and negative. They have opposite effects on us. These effects are very general. Positive thoughts increase our energy for living. Negative thoughts decrease our energy for living. Both kinds of thoughts have other effects, but in general, they all have these two effects.
A mindset is rather elusive but can be detected easily by your responses to your environment. For any kind of self management, your environment is one of the most important factors. Always ask first, what’s happening in my environment. A second important factor are your responses to what’s happening in your environment. How you respond to changes in your life can give you important information about your mindset. If your first response to a change are negative thoughts, even though they may be mildly negative, you may have a negative mindset. The color of your perceptual lens have darkened. Alternatively, if your first response is positive thoughts, you probably have a positive mindset. Sometimes we try to cover up our negative mindsets. I may tell myself that I was just joking with my negative response. Even if that is true, it doesn’t make a negative a positive. The point is you had a negative thought when you could have had a positive thought. Negative thoughts always decrease energy for life.
Negative thoughts are interesting in that we tend to experience them as more natural than positive thoughts. If I have a positive thought, I experience it as something I intended, something I produced. If I have a negative thought I think it is a natural response to a negative experience. I feel the experience made me negative. That’s not true; that is just an illusion. What’s amazing is that human beings have developed much control over their thoughts. This is very fortunate, because thoughts are imbued with emotions. Because we have much control over our thoughts, we also have the same control over our emotions. These facts benefit us when it comes to mindsets.
Managing Your Mindset
Through systematic use of your thoughts, you can affect your mindset. By the phrase “systematic use,” I mean that you will use positive thoughts in a focused and intentional manner. Much of our lives are spent semi-focused and unintentional. We move through our daily schedules operating from routine responses to our daily environments. This is not a bad thing, but changes in ourselves only comes from systematic responses. Unsystematic responses merely strengthen the status quo.
To be systematic in my thoughts or statements, I must attend to what I’m saying in response to events in my environment. I must have some kind of momentary evaluation of my responses. As I move through my environment, I set an intention of observing my statements and of making positive statements. The procedure for systematically using my statements or thoughts occurs in a couple of stages.
First, I choose an environment in which I want to observe my mindset. Let’s assume it is at my work place. I spend about 5 days observing my thoughts and statements in my work place. I observe to see if they are positive or negative. At the end of each day, I reflect on whether the responses were mostly negative or positive. Your first impression will be the most accurate. You only need to be accurate enough here. At the end of the 5 days, reflect on whether there were more positive or negative days. This is called your baseline for your mindset. Let’s assume the majority of days showed more negative than positive responses and you want to increase the number of positive days. This is simple to do if you are systematic and persistent.
Your thoughts and your statements are a type of behavior. They are called verbal behavior. Like all behavior, verbal behavior has powerful effects on us. However, behavior does not immediately change. Your behavior will require some time and attention to change. In taking the baseline of your mindset described above, you were observing and qualifying your verbal responses to your environment. Next you will provide responses to the verbal behavior you observe. When you observe a positive statement, give yourself a pat on the back. When you observe a negative statement, notice its negativity and think of an alternative positive response. Here, you are not punishing yourself for making a negative thought or statement. You are simply observing that you did so and offering yourself an alternative positive response. Then, move on.
If you do this systematically, you will find that your tendency to response in a negative manner will gradually change to positive. The lens through which you view the world will gradually lighten. If you were not systematically observing yourself, you wouldn’t notice this change.
Conclusion
You have learned that positive and negative thoughts are part of a larger mental structure called a mindset. You have also learned that you can let your environment control your mindset or you can control it. But how do you create a mindset and how do you change one?
These topics will be discussed more fully in the blog “Depression, Positive Mindset Part 2.