Depression, a common thing that we all deal with, we all know someone who deals
with it, how to deal with depression today at Live On Purpose TV.
Today, we're going to talk about depression. I know right?
Depression...
Actually, you know what? Depression is a common human experience,
it's probably one of the most misunderstood of a lot of our
experiences. It feels like if I'm depressed, something's wrong with me.
I don't think it means that. A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that
depression is really kind of like the fever of mental illness or from a mental
health standpoint, it's an indicator that something's wrong. Like if you have a
fever, right? That's not the problem, that's an indicator that there's
a problem, that there's an infection or that there's an injury of some kind.
Depression is very similar, it means something is out of whack, something is
off kilter somewhere and there are two elements to that, there's a
brain element and there's a mind element. Now your brain and your mind aren't the
same thing, your brain isn't your mind anymore,
your little finger is your mind, it's part of your body, it's an organ in your
head and there is neurophysiology and neuralchemistry
that affects our experience emotionally. That's important to pay attention to,
that's one element of depression. The other element is a mind element and
that's the one that I really focus more on because that's my area of specialty
and expertise. That has to do with how we are thinking, what are the processes
going on in our mind. Now I'll refer back to another video that we've done here on
this chapter you can link to it right up there, this other video goes over a model.
This will be familiar to some of you but if this is the first time you visited
Live On Purpose TV, this is going to go to be new. In that other video is an
explanation of this model. These are two processes that are constantly going on
in our mind, evaluation and creation. Depression as I pointed out in that
other video, tends to originate down here in evaluation mode. Now what I mean by
that in short version, when we judge what is to be bad, it tends to fuel depression, okay?
Think about what I'm saying, when we judge what is to be bad, it tends to fuel
depression. Now you might look at your circumstances in life say, "Well this is
bad." Okay, well that's still a judgment, alright.
In fact, I had somebody sitting right
here in my office recently, just going on and on and on about these problems that
he's having in his job and I wanted to call his attention to this
concept, I kind of jumped in and I said, "What? You have a job?" He kind of rolled
his eyes maybe like you are right now. Like, "Dr. Paul, yeah." But it helped
him to realize in that moment, "Oh, hmm, yeah, this thing that I'm troubled
over actually has some elements that are really awesome and cool." The fact that he
has a job, right? So we start with our perception and our evaluation of what it is.
There are some things from the research and from the psychological
literature that you ought to know about depression. One of the things I learned
this years ago and it has been even more solidly
verified since, is that there is a common belief that tends to be one of the most
common depressionagenic beliefs. Now I just threw in a $10 word because we do
that as psychologists, makes us feel smarter. Depressionagenic just means it
creates or causes or leads to depression and here is the belief, it is the belief
that my value, my worth can change. That might surprise you.
You'd think, "Oh no, it's the belief that my value is bad or that it's and I don't
have value." Yeah, that can happen but it's tied to a root belief that my value can
change. Now you might consider what you just think about this now or what
you have traditionally believed about this. Can my value change? Can it go up?
Can it go down? Because if I believe that it can change then my every effort is
geared toward managing it, either toward preventing it from going lower or trying
to force it to go higher and how's that going for you?
This is a depressionagenic belief and it causes us to feel depression.
That's something that we have known for years now through a research and clinical
experience. So what are we going to do with our beliefs that are causing depression?
This is the most powerful part of what we can do to deal with depression, to get
clear about our own thinking and really, I'm not asking anybody to change this.
In fact, one of my clients recently said to me, "Okay. I get it, doc. I just, I guess
I just really need to change how I think." And my response to him was, "Or not."
That puzzled him. He said, "What do you mean? I want to change how I think!"
Well, that's different. Okay, we can go there. I want to take the pressure off, you don't
have to change how you think, I want you to see that how you think matters and
you know you're right. Have you connected with that yet? We know it's not that we
think we're right, oh we know we're right, yeah, this gets in our way more than
anything because we know we're right, we just couldn't kind of trapped in that
destructive pride and our story, our position about our life whether it's
sucks or whether it rocks, we know that we're right.
So an openness to a different interpretation is going to help and it's not going to
seem natural at first. Think about it. If you're used to saying, "Oh my life is so
hard." And if I come to you and say, "You know what, actually your life kind of
rocks, I mean you're richly blessed and you've got all this abundance and things
to be grateful for." And you're like, "Okay, whatever." And you'll blow that off
because you know that you're right. So being open to another interpretation is
key and then going back to the model that we talked about in that other video
will help you to have the tools that you need to actually start changing the
way that you think about certain things. Now, I set up earlier that there are two
parts to this. There's a brain component, there's a mind component. So let's take
both of those on as we deal with depression. There's lots of other videos
and resources that we've put out here I Live On Purpose TV and other resources
that you have on the thinking part. Now let's go to the brain part for just a
minute, the physiological chemical aspect that we cannot ignore and sometimes,
medication can be a very helpful adjunct to the other things that you're doing.
I would caution you against using that as the only thing that you're doing about
your depression but be open to the possibility that that could help and
there are trained doctors and professionals who can assist you with
that, who are licensed to take that on. There's a lot of natural or alternative
kinds of remedies, you get to explore that and see what's going to help you
the most. Here's something that I have found to have some traction, some bite to it.
This came from some research done at Harvard University, Dr. Ed Halliwell is
the first one who presented this to me in a seminar that I attended years ago
and he called it brain maintenance. Brain maintenance, do you like that idea?
When you do maintenance on your car you do the minor little things that are going to
prevent the major breakdowns so you don't have to
get into major repairs later on, that's the idea of maintenance. What if we were
to maintain the physiological equipment up here that is driving the depression?
What would it take? Four steps.
The first step is to get enough sleep, okay?
To get enough sleep, that is really key to managing our mental health, get enough sleep.
Step number two, eat a balanced diet that is healthy and nutritious.
Now I'm not a nutritionist so I'm not going to tell you how to do that but you
already know that there's some improvements you could make, yeah?
Take a look at what it is you're eating. What is the fuel that you're running through
your system? And you think, "Well, okay that's going to benefit my body but we're
talking about my brain here." Yeah, your brain is part of your body. In fact,
it's the most vital organ of your body. All of the nutrition and the nutrients and the
oxygen and everything that you take into your body goes first to that most vital
organ in your body so it's important to pay attention to the fuel.
Okay, so far,
we've got get enough sleep, eat a balanced diet, nutritious diet, watch the fuel.
Number three, regular exercise. You knew I was going to say that, didn't you?
Yeah, this is huge. Exercise beats antidepressant medication in the
clinical trials. It's a big deal and it has a huge impact if you're having a
little problem motivating yourself to do that, there's other resources to address
that but just understand that exercise is an important part of taking care of this,
your brain, the most vital organ in your body and it's going to have other
benefits for other aspects, you know, your nice shapely figure or other things that
you're working on for the exercise, weight loss, whatever it is, I'm talking
about taking care of your brain.
Step four, meditation, mindfulness, prayer, solitude.
I'm throwing a bunch of words at you, pick the one that fits you best.
You've got to have some time in your life where you quiet the noise and
you get connected with your core and with your values.
So whatever practices serve you best to get there, solitude, mindfulness,
meditation, prayer, we have seen through research and clinical experience that
these things improve brain health. Not to mention how it might benefit you
spiritually or otherwise in your relationships. Brain maintenance.
Okay, so we've talked about just in summary a couple of things we can do to handle the
depression.
First of all, realize it doesn't mean that there's something
wrong with you, you're probably human having some human
experiences and depression is a manifestation that some adjustments
might be appropriate. Some of those have to do with your brain, some of those have
to do with your mind and your thinking. Positivity, paying attention to
evaluation and creation processes that we've talked about here at
Live On Purpose TV and practicing new ways of thinking, new perceptions, huge huge
powerful impact and then on the brain side, doing some brain maintenance.
Consider the possibility of medication or other remedies that might help you
but then basically taking care of your brain through sleep, diet, exercise, and
prayer and meditation. That's the brain maintenance piece. If we attack it from
both sides, we're going to have a whole lot better experiencing in managing and
taking care of our own depression.
Depression, it's something that we can
deal with, that we can handle.
There's more great content coming, make sure you
get tomorrow's episode at Live On Purpose TV.