Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Beat Depression with Do-it-Yourself Cognitive Behavior Techniques

Depression has always been a part of our civilization. But 30 years ago, not as many people went to their doctor complaining about it. Why is it escalating today? Why are more people losing their ability to function due to their inability to handle their depression?

Perhaps the reason we don?t handle depression well when it arrives is that we see no need to equip ourselves for it ahead of time. How come? We study up before we drive our first car. We rush right over to the nearest Home Depot to prepare for the smallest do-it-yourself project. Why don?t we prepare ourselves to handle depression, one of the most traumatic and universal experiences of life?

For instance, no matter how smart and dedicated we are, we know we cannot sink a screw into a hard piece of solid wood without a screwdriver. With the most positive mental attitude in the world, on or off of medication, with or without psychotherapy, a fingernail will not do the job. Nobody cries, or rages, or makes excuses about it. We just know better than to try and drive a screw with our bare hands.

Yet we think nothing of driving our emotional lives with our bare hands. We still use the screwdrivers, hammers, and saws that our great-grandparents passed down to us. But we turned our psychologized backs upon the empowering principles they bequeathed to us; those common-ground golden oldie rules of behavior that previous generations used to control their troubling emotions. We threw most of them out in the 1960?s. Well, cognitive behavioral therapy is bringing them back.

Our great-grandparents used behavioral options rather than anti-depressants when depression hit. They valued self-responsibility, self-determination, hands-on effort, and personal courage. And they practiced learning to bear suffering with coping mechanisms of distraction, acceptance and concentration on helping others, rather than self-focus on their own problems. There were still occasional suicides but rampant depression was not the problem it is today.

Today most of us know nothing at all about how we came by the concepts, values, and habits that conscribe our behavior during depression. What is worse, we may not even know at all what those concepts and habits really are. Still less do we know anything about how our own mind works, or how we get from one thought to the other.

Putting a stop to depressive episodes is no more technically difficult than learning how to stop a car. But we are forced to learn how to operate a car in order to get a license, and nobody has ever forced us to learn how to operate our own mind, an even more complicated piece of machinery. Until we know how it works, we tend to be the passenger of our mind instead of the driver.

We need to acquire the proper tools to get out of depression . They exist in the form of cognitive behavioral techniques, many of which are modern-day renditions of what your Grandma would have been advised to do fifty years ago when she felt depressed.

We have operating instructions for our brain in the cognitive behavior techniques of directed thinking and brainswitching. In brainswitching you use specific neutral thoughts to power up the thinking brain which often goes ?off line? when depression hits.

Brainswitching exercises separate the message that you are depressed from one part of the brain to the other until the chemical imbalance rights itself. Directed thinking stops depression in its earlier stages by changing self-talk that has turned negative.

We wouldn?t dream of driving a car without knowing how to control such a complex and powerful machine. We learn how to start and turn off the engine. We learn where the gas and brake pedals are, study the basic traffic laws, and get some driving practice on empty side streets before we take on the Expressway. But most of us haven?t the slightest idea where are the brakes and gas pedals to our own mind. We don?t know how to stop at our own emotional red lights.

Chronic anxiety and depression are not necessary. Our brain is only one part of us. We, the totality, are more powerful then the pharmaceutical industry would have us believe. We are more powerful than our feelings. Feelings are data not imperatives! Letting feelings like depression direct our lives is like starting our car, releasing the brake, stepping on the gas, and refusing to steer!

People who struggle with depression need to learn how their psychological defense system works. There are exercises you can do to make your brain do what you want, instead of letting your brain do it its own feelings, like depression. There?s no need to let an unmanaged brain make your mind mentally ill.

For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and emotions. In the last 50 years we have un-principled ourselves and become ?psychologized.? Now the power struggle is between the ?expert? and the ?disorder.?

Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don?t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about mental disorders. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self. Anti-depressants only work half the time anyway, and give you no coping skills.

We have somehow come to believe we are at the mercy of our feelings. Grandma knew better. Most of these feelings we struggle with didn?t used to be called feelings; they used to be called sins. Pope Gregory listed them as the familiar seven deadly sins we were to guard against: pride, envy, anger, sadness, avarice, gluttony and lust.

Strangely, in the last few decades, as depression has come to be thought of as a disease, ?sadness? has been dropped from the list and ?sloth? substituted. But sadness is one of the original seven deadly sins, although people of our psyhcologized culture would find it quite odd to speak of sadness as a vice.

If we are not going to be led around and laid waste by our feelings (the sloth and sadness of our unchecked defense mechanisms, we need some system to have at our disposal, some mind tricks that we can use when feelings like depression threaten to take over our brains. We need to educate ourselves about cognitive behavior techniques like brainswitching and directed thinking so that we can take charge of our brain. Otherwise depression is going to take charge of it.