today i'm going to be talking about how giving up and surrendering is the first step in overcoming
depression it may be counter-intuitive but it absolutely works and i'll explain why
hi everyone in today's video i'm going to be talking about depression and why giving up
and surrendering some of your goals is actually critical in overcoming depression but before i
get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in the province
of british columbia canada and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended
as a replacement or substitute for advice from your doctor or mental health professional now
with those things out of the way let's start talking about how you overcome depression
now there are a lot of misperceptions and misunderstandings about depression and one
of which that i tend to encounter a lot with my clients is that they perceive that depression or
they or some of their family members or friends perceive that their depression is resulting from
them just giving up they they stop trying they stop uh putting any effort into getting better
and all they really need to do is to just try harder or to work harder to overcome
the depression now that is one of the main issues and main problems that tends to perpetuate
depression and that's actually one of the ways that depression wants you to think in order to
keep the depression going and so to explain i want you to imagine your level of motivation and energy
and to think about your goals and expectations of yourself based on this on levels of motivation
and energy now most of the time in our lives our goals our expectations of ourselves
kind of match where our level of motivation and energy actually is so we have the energy and
motivation to achieve the goals to accomplish the things that we think we ought to be accomplishing
now when life setbacks happen when stressors happen when
failures or losses occur what that can do is it can sap a person's energy or motivation and so
what that person's energy and motivation what happens that person's energy and motivation is
it drops a little bit and so now their energy and motivation is lower and it's lower than the amount
of energy and motivation required to achieve their goals or expectations of themselves so if you have
goals and expectations that are greater than the amount of energy and motivation you actually have
what do you think that's going to do to your ability to complete those goals what do you
think that's going to do to your ability to live up to your expectations of yourself
well you're probably not going to be able to achieve those goals and expectations if
you don't have the energy required to do it you're not going to be able to do it
so what do you think happens when you fail to achieve goals or expectations for yourself what
do you think that does to energy and motivation well it causes the energy and motivation to drop
even further and so now your motivation and energy is lower even lower than it was because you are
failing to live up to the expectations and goals you have for yourself and so your expectations
and goals are here and your energy and motivation are down here so what's tempting at this point is
to tell yourself okay you know what come on just just let's get over this just pick yourself up
by the bootstraps and just try harder and this is one of the the key problems that i often see
in depression and it's it's what i call the the trying harder problem that you recognize that
you're not living up to your goals and expectations and so you just try harder
to achieve those goals and expectations but the problem is if your level of energy and motivation
doesn't match those goals and expectations no matter how hard you try you're still going to
fail to achieve those goals and expectations which then drives your motivation and energy
even further down because now you're failing to achieve your goals and expectations for yourself
even though you're trying really hard and so it's easy to start to wonder okay what's going
on what's wrong with me that i can't accomplish anything what's wrong with me that i'm not able
to do the things that i should be doing and that failure just saps motivation and energy and these
constant failures that start to build on each other because i'm trying harder but i'm not
achieving what i think i should be accomplishing and it just drives my motivation and energy
further and further down failure saps motivation and energy and what often happens in depression
is that a person gets into this failure cycle where they're failing to achieve their goals or
expectations of themselves which makes them feel worse about themselves which drives their energy
and motivation down which causes them to not be able to live up to the goals and expectations
which then spirals them even further down so it's not uncommon when i'm working with someone
in depression when they first arrive in my office their level of motivation energy may be down here
yet what they expect of themselves is up here and so the question becomes
what do you do with that how do you how do you overcome this if if my level of goals is way lower
than what i expect of myself and what i think i should be doing and what i used to be doing
how do i make that change how do i change that
and the solution isn't to just try harder or work harder or pick yourself up by
the bootstraps or to just you know give yourself a kick in the pants to get going
because that's the type of stuff that's the type of attitudes that drive motivation and energy down
so the first step in terms of overcoming depression like i said earlier it's
counterintuitive but it's actually to give up and to surrender your goals and expectations surrender
those higher goals and expectations that you have of yourself and to actually drop your goals
and expectations to match where your level of energy actually is a metaphor i use to
explain this to my clients is to imagine yourself riding a bike and you're going
along on your bike ride and you come to a stop sign and you bring your bike to a complete stop
what happens if you try to start riding your bike again but your bikes again in 10th gear well
you can push as hard as you want on those pedals it's going to be really really difficult to get
going because your bike is just in too high of a gear so what do you need to do to get going again
well what you do is you drop your gear down into first gear and you start going now that doesn't
mean you spend your entire bike ride in first gear you're just dropping it into first gear so that
you can get moving and then you gradually gear up second gear third gear and eventually you're
back up to 10th gear and you're riding at full speed it's kind of the same thing in depression
when people are when their energy and motivation is really low but they're expecting really high
expectations well that's kind of like riding your bike or trying to ride your bike in 10th gear from
a full stop no matter how hard you try you're not going to be able to get going so by surrendering
and giving up on those bigger goals what you do is you drop your expectations of yourself
to match your actual level of motivation and energy not the level of motivation energy that you
think you should have not the level of motivation energy that you wish you had or you feel you
should have but the actual level of motivation and energy that you do have and so if your goals
are now matching your level of energy do you think you're going to be able to achieve those goals
well yeah probably you're probably going to be able to achieve the goals
because your energy is down here but your goals and expectations are down here as well
and so you're likely to succeed at those goals and what do you think happens to energy and motivation
when you succeed at a goal well it improves now the key thing is it doesn't just improve in like
your energy motivation jumps up to what it was before it improves just a little
bit and so the idea is to then set another goal that's maybe a little bit higher that matches
your level of motivation and energy and if your goal matches the motivation energy that
you have you're likely to succeed at that goal and your energy may be a cup a little bit more
and then you set another goal based on that new level of energy and so what you're doing is you're
gradually building up your energy and motivation by setting up these stepwise goals to help
help you experience successes and that's the key what we know is that what drives depression is
a series and spiraling of failure to overcome depression what you need to do is to be able
to build successes and it's going to gradually bring your level of motivation and energy up
and you may be able to bring your motivation energy up back to where it was before you began
to experience depression now sometimes so what you realize through this process is that the level of
goals and expectations you had before you became depressed well maybe those level of expectations
and goals were what actually contributed to the start of the depression in the first place
maybe the expectations and goals were way too high and so you weren't able to sustain that level of
functioning and that led to the the deterioration and the drops and the failures that started the
depression cycle and so part of this process may be to recognize that i need to set more realistic
goals and expectations of myself that maybe the what i was expecting of myself before wasn't
actually realistic or sustainable and so i need to make some adjustments that you won't know until
you start working on this process and seeing uh where you get to in terms of energy and motivation
but this is the single fastest way to to build and recover from depression a lot of my clients will
first look at this process and they'll say hey this seems like it's going to take forever
but the reality is it doesn't take forever you you pick up steam as you
start to experience successes as you start to feel like you're accomplishing things again
it starts to create a positive spiral that works you up out of the depression
but it's a lot faster than uh trying to overcome your depression by
living up to really high expectations that you just don't have the energy and motivation to do
and so i'll be doing future videos on how you actually set goals to help to begin this
positive spiral out and to be able to set goals based on your level of motivation and energy so
keep an eye out for those videos when they come out
so i'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this i this notion of surrendering or giving up
as a key first step in overcoming depression so please leave me some comments and thoughts down
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so thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one