Thinking positively about depression

How to get out of Depression

Negative thoughts can lead to depression and positive thoughts can take you out of depression again. The most effective common treatment for mild depression consists of exercises designed to change the way you normally think. Thinking about negative outcomes causes people to only see negative outcomes and ignore positive events. Continually seeing only negative things only confirms the person's personal outlook and encourages more negative thoughts. More negative thoughts leads to more depression, and so on. The solution is to recognise when you are having a negative thought, and to challenge it and change it.

The cognitive basis of depression

When an individual feels threatened and anxious they tend to discount or ignore parts of their world. For example if a person feels threatened and begins to prepare for some stressful event, that person begins to ignore positive or neutral messages from their environment but to pay additional attention to information and events that tend to confirm the threat. The denial behaviour takes many forms: the person may avoid associating with others, may feel emotional numbness, flattened emotional range, dimming attention, constricted thought, memory failure, disavowal or may try to escape into fantasy and daydreaming. This way, people actually avoid the very things needed to make them feel less anxious.

Research also suggests that your ability to learn is affected by how you feel. Your state or mood affects what you notice, what you remember and what you learn. Mood, thinking and behaviour are three sides of a triangle that magnify and extend each other. If you are feeling good, this makes you think positively, and that makes you behave in ways that make you feel even better, like phone friends and going out to do fun things. On the other hand a bad mood makes you think negatively, you notice all the bad things around you and you are more likely to withdraw into yourself and that makes you feel even worse. Any one side of the triangle is connected to the other two and going round the triangle can either make you feel better or cause you to feel worse. This is why an invitation to go out with a friend can banish the blues, or why deciding to go to the gym or for a walk can lift your spirits.

The easiest and most lasting way to alter your mood is to focus on the cognitive side of the triangle, how you habitually think. Thinking positive thoughts will cause you to focus on the good things in your life, which will cause your mood to lift, which will motivate you to go and do something which will make you feel even better, and so on. Then you are more likely to do more things that affect you positively and to stay in a positive mood.

People who are susceptible to depression generally allow little things to get to them. Each little thing builds on the last little things and each little things adds another little grain to the pile of misery. Getting rid of depression involves getting rid of depressive thinking, which means tackling each and every little incident every time and every day and taking back control over how you let things affect you.

 

The 'ABC' approach

The ABC approach is a recognised and proven cognitive treatment. The basis of this approach is to learn to identify your own negative thought processes and replace these with ones that will improve your mood and motivate you to positive behaviour.

 

A

• Activation
• Anything that happens can make your feel bad. There are always many ways of thinking about a situation but the depressed person usually chooses to accept one interpretation: it is their fault, they could have prevented it, they should have done better. Accept this as ineviable, something that will happen to you, like getting a cold in winter. Just accept that it will happen from time to time, and learn to notice when it is happening, the same way you learn to recognise the beginning of a cold.

B

• Beliefs
• For the depressive person, the outcome of every adverse situation is a belief, and that belief is usually about personal failings. There is a never ending dialogue that goes on in their mind that keeps that belief going. Every time they do something wrong, or something bad happens to them, the self talk starts again 'I've screwed it up again'.'I can never do anything right','I'm a failure as a parent, a lover, a provider'. 'Why can I never get the littlest thing right?'. 'Why is everything always crap?'.
  The more times you repeat the belief the more entrenched it becomes and the more it will affect your natural mood.

C

• Consequence
The next step is to consider what the consequences of holding that belief is. Did what happened make you feel sad? Anxious? Guilty? Angry? The incident may have caused more than one feeling.
Now examine what that feeling caused you to do. Did you stomp out and say nothing? Did you scream and shout? Did you sulk and pout? Negative feelings arising from how you reacted to the incident link directed through beliefs to make you behave a certain way.
The point of the ABC part is to make you aware of the thoughts, feelings and the consequences that come with the way you react to situations. If you change the beliefs that follow adverse situations then the way you behave in future adverse situations will automatically change as well. Once you are aware of how you are manufacturing your own behaviour, you can be in a position to change it.

D

• Dispute
• There is one guaranteed way to get rid of negative beliefs: dispute them.
  1. Dispute how you see the situation.
  With practice you can learn to look at any event and find a positive way of thinking about it. There are no things that are absolutely good, or absolutely bad. It is thinking that makes them appear so. Depressives habitually look on the dark side. But it is just a habit, and that habit can be changed. So the first step in the ABC method is to stop automatically taking the blame and to look at the situation for what it really is.
  Dispute your normal way of looking at things. Argue with yourself that it was not your fault. Find evidence to support your position, that these things just happen, it could happen to anyone, it is not something to do with you particularly. The vast majority of our daily interactions are trivial and unimportant and should be treated that way. If something goes wrong, then get into the habit of finding a positive in it.
• 2. Dispute the belief that comes with the situation.
  The correct response is to challenge the automatic self talk. Get into the habit of listening for habitual self destructive self talk and then tell yourself the opposite. Tell yourself 'No, that is not so. I usually get things right, don't I'. 'I made a trivial mistake this time, it will help me to improve'. And so on. And repeat the opposite wording again and again. You cannot do it too often.

E

• Energize
• As you dispute each belief and change its consequences you will find that just doing the challenging energizes you. You will immediately feel much more in control. You will begin to find ways that you can not just get over the adverse situation but to do things to change it, and be able to turn every situation into a way of making yourself feel good.

 

 

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