Please dont make the mistake of thinking, Its different with children because they arent grown up with real problems. To a child, problems are every bit as real as yours are to you. Children deal with very difficult, age-related, problems: parents who fight or who are separated, adults who tell them what to do, people who take away their things, and the need to be included and loved, to name just a few. The difference between adults and children and their level of happiness isnt tied to how real their problems are, but to how much attention is placed on those problems.
If you are constantly analysing or keeping score of your life, you will always be able to find fault in whatever you are doing. After all, who couldnt improve? Many people even pride themselves on their ability to be on the look-out for whats wrong. But if you follow thoughts like Life would be better if you will once again be at the mercy of your own thinking. One thought will lead to another, and then another, and so on. Its just a matter of how much negativity you can handle. Sooner or later youll be down in the dumps. True happiness occurs when you quiet down your analytical mind, when you give it a rest.
Once you realize that your thinking is what creates your experience of life, including your depression, analysing your life will lose its appeal. Youll prefer simply to do the best that you possibly can in any given moment and pay attention to enjoying what you are doing, knowing that you can always do better.
Im not suggesting that you shouldnt improve your life. Your life will inevitably improve as you pay more attention to living and less to how you are doing.
Thoughts Floating Down a River
Have you ever sat next to a river and watched leaves floating peacefully by? Its a very therapeutic thing to do. Each leaf is independent of the others but is still connected by the river. You can watch any leaf until it disappears out of sight. Its a very impersonal process. What I mean by impersonal is that the leaves just keep on floating. They dont care if you like them or whether youd rather they floated differently.
Your thoughts can be looked at in much the same way. Your consciousness produces an ongoing series of thoughts, one right after the other. When you focus on any particular thought, it is present and visible. Once your attention goes elsewhere, the thought disappears from your mind. Your thoughts come and go. You have surprisingly little control over the content of your own thinking unless you are actively trying to control it. Once you understand that you are the thinker of your own thoughts, and that your mind doesnt produce reality, it produces thoughts, you wont be as affected by what you think. Youll see your thinking as something that you are doing an ability you have that brings your experience of life rather than as the source of reality. Do you remember the old saying Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me? Thoughts could be substituted for words. Your thoughts cant hurt or depress you once you understand that they are just thoughts.
When you start to view your own thinking in this more impersonal way (in other words, looking at your thinking instead of being caught in it), you will find yourself becoming free of depression. Your thinking goes on and on, and it will continue to do so for as long as you live. But when you step back from your thinking and simply observe that you are doing it, your mind becomes free, and you open the door to experience.
Attention and Your Thinking
If your thinking determines how you are going to feel, then its very important to understand exactly what happens when you focus your attention on your negative thinking.
Use your own common sense to answer the following question. If negative feelings are caused by negative thinking, then what possible good can it do to overanalyse the negative parts of your life? If you spend a great deal of time rehearsing potential problems, dwelling on whats wrong, and thinking and talking about problems, only two things are certain to happen. First, you will become an expert in your problems! Not an expert at solving your problems, but an expert in describing them. Therapists will love you! Second, you will be depressed or at least your spirits will be low. This is true because there is a fundamental law at work here: thoughts grow with attention! The more attention you give to what you are thinking, the bigger that thought becomes in your mind and the more important that thought will seem. If I ask you to think of what is bothering you, you can probably provide me with an answer. If I explore your answer with you and ask you to describe it further, and speculate as to what else might go wrong, I draw you deeper into your pain. The more specific and detailed you get, the bigger the problem will become.
Now hold on a moment. A few seconds ago you were fine and you werent even thinking about the problem. Now, with my help, you are describing a painful event as if it were really happening! But its not happening except in your mind. Im the first person to admit that it is important to acknowledge a real problem. But acknowledgement and commitment to solving a problem takes a moment or two, at most. Acknowledgement is very different from dwelling on and rehearsing, or doing endless post-mortems on situations or events.
Remember, the way you feel is determined by your thoughts. So guess what: the more attention you put on anything that is negative, the worse you will feel. Again, I ask that you use your own wisdom and common sense to decide whether or not to believe me. Despite the popular idea that talking about and working through negative emotions is a good idea, Im suggesting that common sense dictates otherwise. After all, people have been working through endless negative emotions for years now and very few are much better off than when they started and many are worse off. The questions to ask yourself (and your therapist if you have one) are: when does it (the analysis) stop? When have I had enough? When do I get to feel better?
If you believe that your thoughts are real and you are encouraged to work through the worst of them you will end up with even more to contend with. The more you think, the bigger and more important the thoughts will seem and the more of them there will be to deal with. Because your feelings are determined by what you think, you will, by necessity, sink even lower. And, unfortunately, because you are lower, you will think even worse thoughts, which you now have to work through. This endless negative spiral never takes you upwards towards the place you want to be. The spiral will end when you decide that enough is enough, when you start over with a clean slate, with a clear mind, and when you realize that the only thing holding your depression in place is your own thinking. You must stop focusing on your depression.
Humility
As you learn this approach, and as you begin to pull out of depression, try to be easy on yourself. It takes a great deal of humility to admit that your own thinking is the cause of your suffering. Everything you have learned prior to now may have suggested otherwise. Before you realize that your thinking is causing your depression, its easy to blame other people and the circumstances of your life for your misery. The reason for this is clear. When you feel bad, you will have the tendency to come up with a theory as to why you feel the way you do. Without knowing the actual cause, it makes sense to create a reason. As long as you can create reasons for your depression your marital status, your job, your children, your genes, your financial situation, your future, and so forth you can maintain the false hope that things will get better when But you can probably see that, in actuality, this is not true. The mindset that says, Life will be better when will create further conditions that must be met as soon as the initial conditions are satisfied. You need only to look at the countless times in your life that you received what you wanted and happiness still eluded you to realize that changing your circumstances isnt the answer to your problems. If it were, youd already be happy! You wanted to graduate, you graduated. You wanted a mate, you got one. You wanted a pet, you got one. You wanted a pay-cheque, you got one. And so on. Tens of thousands of times in your life you got exactly what you wanted and yet youre still unhappy!
The solution is to have the humility to admit that all along you have been creating your own pain through your own thinking. Dont worry; almost everyone else is doing the same thing. The good news is that as soon as you see that this is true, youll be on your way to a far better life. No matter how depressed you have been, or how long you have been depressed, the moment you can see that its only your thinking that is holding your depression in place, youre on your way to freedom.
You Cannot Think Your Way out of Depression
In many respects, if you want to escape from depression, its just as important to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. If you have followed what you have read thus far you will have no difficulty understanding the statement You cannot think your way out of depression. You could think and think for a hundred years and you would never escape from the grips of depression. The reason: when your spirits are low you will generate negative thoughts. All you will see is negativity. You already know that your thoughts determine how you feel; thus, when you think in a depressed state of mind you will only make matters worse. The famous American football coach, Vince Lombardi, once said, Just because youre doing something wrong, doing it more intensely isnt going to help. No idea applies better when you are depressed. Its your thinking that lowered your spirits to begin with; doing more of the same will only make matters worse.
Fuelling the Fire
When you are depressed, the single worst thing you can do to yourself is to continue thinking especially if you are attempting to use your thinking to pull yourself out of your depression. To do so is only fuelling the fire. Perhaps you believe, as many people do, that you cant stop thinking when youre down in the dumps. And although it can be difficult to stop thinking, there is an enormous difference between doing something while believing its natural and necessary and doing that very same thing knowing that it is the cause of your suffering. Once you realize that what you have been doing has been hurting you, you will find a way to stop doing it! The only reason you have tried to think your way out of depression in the past is because you knew of no other options. But you wouldnt put salt in your wound once you knew it was going to sting like crazy. Thinking while you are depressed is similar to pouring a bucketful of salt over a deep cut! As you begin to understand the dynamic between your thinking and the way you feel, you will be able to ease off your thinking, in much the same way that you can ease off your cars accelerator when you are stuck in the mud. Before you understand that trying harder to get out of the mud doesnt work, you are tempted to put your foot down onto the floor. After you understand the relationship between the weight of your foot and sinking deeper into the mud, however, you ease off a little bit. If youve ever been stuck in the mud in your car, you know how tempting it is to try to force your way out, even when you know that accelerating makes matters worse; but because you do know better, you are able to resist the urge. Resist the urge to think your way out of your depression and you will find yourself out of it quicker than you expected.
Three / Healthy Psychological Functioning
At the core or centre of your being is something you were born with, your healthy psychological functioning. Healthy functioning is not learned, its inherent, its your birthright, and its always present when you are not engaged in your thinking mind or your personality. Your healthy functioning is innate, its your most natural state of mind. Its not who you think you are (your ego), its your higher self, who you really are and who you can be. Your healthy functioning is where your wisdom lies, it is your peace of mind, your common sense, your satisfaction in life, and your feeling of wholeness.
I will refer to your healthy functioning in different ways, with words like wisdom and common sense. It doesnt matter what you call it, the words are interchangeable. Your healthy functioning is the part of you that sees beyond unhappiness; its your source of emotional buoyancy, the part of you where true and lasting happiness exists, and the part of you that isnt disturbed when the circumstances in your life are less than perfect.
Its important to know that you were born with healthy functioning, and that it wasnt something you had to learn. The truth is, you had to learn how to have unhealthy functioning, you had to learn to be unhappy. No one is born sceptical or negative. Self-doubt, self-criticism, negativity and pessimism are the result of negative thoughts that you have learned to take seriously. Your self-image and personality are a compilation of thoughts that you have about yourself, some of which may be negative. If you had never learned to take seriously negative thoughts about yourself, you wouldnt experience the feelings that go along with them today. You are the sole creator of all your negative thoughts. Your thoughts have no power to harm you other than the power you give them.
Unfortunately, if you are not taught that the thoughts you have about yourself are just thoughts, you will start to believe that they describe the way you really are. The more you believe your own thinking, the more obscured your healthy functioning becomes. Poor self-esteem is healthy functioning that has been obscured with self-doubting thoughts you have learned to take seriously. Consider this: a young child wouldnt think of asking himself, Am I good enough? He would have to learn to ask himself such questions. Prior to learning these types of self-doubting thoughts, a childs self-image is quite healthy and intact. If you can learn to accept negative thoughts about yourself, then you can also learn to disregard and take less seriously the negative thoughts that run through your mind. And as you do, your healthy functioning will return very quickly. As the thoughts are dismissed, a more elevated feeling will return.
Your healthy functioning is an invisible but knowable force within you. Its not something that you can touch or prove, but then neither is a dream. Yet you know that dreams exist! The first steps in tapping into your healthy functioning are to trust that it does indeed exist, and then simply have the desire to access it. Remember, there are plenty of miraculous aspects of life that are invisible thoughts, dreams, creativity, intuition, common sense, and wisdom.
The reason that healthy functioning may be so foreign to you is that when you are experiencing it, you usually dont even know it. Its such a simple, uncomplicated feeling that you dont take notice. Its not a feeling like excitement that you can easily describe. In fact, healthy functioning is easier to describe in its absence.
Healthy psychological functioning is the feeling you have when everything seems OK, when life seems simple and you have a sense of perspective. Its the feeling you get when you are able to be touched by the simple things in life watching a child playing, the leaves falling from a tree, or the motion of a door opening. When you are engaged in healthy functioning you are able to maintain a sense of internal equilibrium irrespective of what happens to be going on around you. Healthy functioning exists independently of the external parts of your life. Its a feeling within you that you can learn to access.