4 ms·
On one hand, headlines like this come off as so cliche as to be a literal Twitter joke—"Oh you're depressed? Why don't you just cheer up?"—but on the other hand
by jaqalopes 4y ago
On one hand, headlines like this come off as so cliche as to be a literal Twitter joke—"Oh you're depressed? Why don't you just cheer up?"—but on the other hand, I think that people dismiss the potential of cognitive techniques to help their mood and stress levels.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but I do have clinical depression, and I would never advise anyone that you can simply think/meditate/hack your way out of it. HOWEVER, I have been having what feels like success with the following, very simple CBT-style thought exercise:
When you find yourself having a negative thought, "respond" (inwardly) with a constructive and proportional "but" statement. Example: "[After eating a bunch of junk food late last night] I'm so unhappy about how weak and out of control I was last night... BUT I now have more information that I can use to make better decisions in the future."
The point here is NOT that you are logically convincing yourself that the bad thing is actually good. The effect is much stranger than that. Simply doing the exercise itself will improve your mood. A cynic might say "well you're just saying the glass is half full instead of half empty, but I still know that it's empty." My counter to this is, no, you've missed the point entirely. The life of every non-depressed person you know is filled with half-empty glasses. But part of the reason they are not depressed is that they are not in the habit of letting that fact get them down.
Crucially I am not advising that you ignore your problems or allow them to fester unresolved. Rather, I recommend "demoting" your bad feelings. Instead of giving them a dominant position in your awareness and decisionmaking, pull them back to a more proportional place. It feels counterintuitive, but you may find that you're actually more able to face these problems, even the serious ones, when you strive to worry less about how bad they are.