Learn To Take Control of Depression
By Sean Harder
While depression is a growing epidemic in western society, it remains to
be one of the most treatable as well. While the medical profession looks
first to medication, I believe only the most severe cases require any
long-term medical treatment.
If you look at the criteria for diagnosing depression, you will notice
that most of it relies on behavior and thinking. Two things that we can
consciously control, even if in the pit of depression it does not seem like
it.
I was clinically depressed for several years in my early adulthood, and
have since worked with hundreds of people suffering from anxiety and
depression. What I have seen in people who get through the depression
without medication, is that they relearn how to not act and think depressed.
They learn that they are responsible for their depressive thoughts and
behaviors even if they do not feel great. I remember taking half an hour to
roll off the couch and do a push-up when I was depressed because I knew I
had to do something that went against how I was feeling.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy has always been known to be effective in
dealing with most depressed people. The basis of this is to understand how
your thoughts influence your feelings and behavior, then to work to change
the habitual thought patterns in a beneficial way.
Some of the more common depressive thinking patterns are to:
catastrophize, to attribute specific events to always and never
(over-generalizing), and to argue against hope and positivity. Just these
three can lead us to think that everything is always worse than it really it
is and will never get better. The more someone tries to cheer a depressed
person up, the more the person argues and holds onto their view, because
they think nobody else can understand how bad it is for them. We get into a
habit of negative perception, and exclude any evidence that it can or is
getting better.
At the root of depression you will usually find anger (at self, others,
and the world), feeling alone, fear, hopelessness, and helplessness. Often
depressed people will have some social anxiety, causing them to isolate and
be uncomfortable around others. When you talk to a depressed person they are
usually trying to convince you how bad it is, so they are also looking for
validation. Rather than trying to convince you that it is not as bad as you
think and will get better, I would rather start where you are and agree with
you. I would ask you how being this depressed and having such a terrible
life benefits you and why you would want to stay there.
The truth is that most depressed people get a benefit from being
depressed, and it is often that nobody expects anything of them, and they
can justify their ineffective behavior. Being depressed is easier than
dealing with life and taking action to improve it. We fool ourselves into
believing that we are helpless and there are no options to make it better.
Depression becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that helps us prove how bad
our life is because we don't do anything to change it. I have found that
sometimes having suicidal thoughts can actually bring about positive change
because when you get that desperate you are usually willing to see other
options and maybe choose one over killing yourself.
While I know that depression can usually be helped without medication, I
am not totally against taking short-term antidepressants as long as it is in
combination with other things as described above. If all you do is take the
meds, any improvement is attributed to the meds and you don't learn to live
differently and feel a sense of personal power. However, sometimes the meds
can help us just enough so that we can start making these changes and then
eventually when our life looks better, we can be weaned off of them.
For a full program to help you overcome depression at WholeLifeGym click
below.
http://www.wholelifegym.com
Sean has been a therapist and life coach for oveer 13 years. He is a
published author and founder of
WholeLifeGym.com, home
of "The 10 Pillars of Health and Happiness" eBook.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
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