D1

One of the biggest roadblocks that has been shared with me by people actively contending with depression is the tendency to dwell on the shit that has already gone wrong. I totally get it. All of the strategies and tidbits of enlightened information are great, but what good are they if you don’t even have the mental real estate to put them into practice? You can’t begin your journey of a single step if you are too crushed by your feelings to get up off of the floor. All too often, guilt, frustration, and anger from the past keep you held back. Allow me to tell you the story of the annoying party guest.

So let’s say that you are having a party. Not a giant rager, but a sizeable get together with friends and family. Everyone arrives at your place, and you find yourself hopping around from group to group saying hello and joining in on the different conversations taking place. It’s a wonderful day and you are really enjoying yourself. That is until they show up. We all have one… the annoying co-worker or classmate that thinks they are your friend, but they most certainly are not. You didn’t invite them to this get together, but alas… here they are. Ugh! They are so annoying. What are they doing here? You don’t even like them! So you go over to them, try to politely express that you were not expecting them over, and drop some pretty non-subtle hints that they should probably leave.

Alright. Problem solved. You think you made yourself pretty clear and got rid of the unfortunate character. You go back to the party and get caught up in a new conversation about the latest blockbuster movies or something like that. Then, you hear it. That annoying-ass voice from the other room. They are STILL HERE. WTF?! You tell your friends that you will be right back and excuse yourself to the other room. This time you are a little more forceful and tell them flat out that they are not welcome in your home. You tell them that they need to leave. Good job! Peace is restored. A few minutes pass, and you think that your efforts were successful. Your moment of glory is fleeting, though. Before you know it, that persistent douchecanoe (technical term) is back again, trying to buddy up with the other guests. They are totally killing the vibe. This time you’ve had enough. You lose your filter of politeness and tell them to get the hell out of your house before there is serious trouble.

This relentless pattern is maddening and exhausting. You just want to enjoy your freaking party, but here you are managing this idiot’s behavior, and before you realize it… people start heading home. You just missed your own party, and that royally sucks. The worst part is that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Cue frustration, guilt, anger, and all of those other fun things. I’m sure you can see the parallels here between the party scenario and the battle going on with the thoughts in your own head. Whether it be a nagging self-doubt, a sense of guilt about something, lingering anger about some injustice, or an obsessive worry about something that hasn’t even happened yet, sometimes these thoughts seem to exhaust all of your mental horsepower. The more you fight back, the bigger they grow and the more disruptive they become, just like that annoying party guest.

Here’s another approach. Let’s go back to the party scenario. Imagine that when that obnoxious dummy came by in the first place, you didn’t fight back so hard. They may not be your friend, but they aren’t exactly your arch nemesis either. Sometimes, you can just let them be that annoying party guest. Sure, you still notice that they are there, but once you decide to let them do their own thing, it seems like they don’t quite have as much power over you. You aren’t constantly leaving your own fun moments to deal with them. It can even be amusing in a television sitcom sort of way. Oh, there’s the annoying party guest again! Look at them being lame and bugging the crap out of my uncle in the other room [Cue studio laugh track]. This does not mean that you’ve lost the battle. Let me say that again. This does not mean that you have lost the battle. It just means that you are not playing their game this time. You can have great conversations and thoroughly enjoy your party in the presence of this annoying party guest.

I hope you can see the parallel to your own thinking patterns here as well. Just like the annoying party guest, you are not pretending that those thoughts and feelings do not exist. You are simply deciding to not let them run the show. You are acknowledging that they are there and then bringing your attention back to your ongoing party. In a certain way, that acknowledgment that they do exist helps to take away some of their ability to derail you. This shift of perspective that I have been describing is typically referred to as mindfulness- a term that has been a huge buzzword in the field of mental health for some time now. The reason it has become such a popular concept is that it seems to suggest a very different approach from the more cognitive based approaches, which try to help you actively fight back against your thoughts. In my opinion cognitive approaches and mindfulness actually play really well together. I think that you 100% need to fight back against the depressive mindset, but you also need to get better at sitting with the thoughts and feelings that you do have and recognize that they are not always so threatening. Let me explain mindfulness in another way.

So clouds, right? They are awesome. You can lay on your back and look up at them and see all kinds of things. Some of them are big and fluffy, like they would make an awesome bed to go take a nap on. Some of them are kinda gross and unhealthy looking. Maybe some of them remind of you different animals (I always seem to see dragons). Obviously, each of these different interpretations (comfy bed, gross darkness, awesome dragon) brings about different feelings as they pass into your awareness. Here’s the thing, though. They are all made of the same stuff. They are just water vapor up in the air. That’s it. And if we keep lying there and looking up, we can notice that the clouds will drift into our awareness, and if we allow ourselves to not fixate on them, they gently float past as well. I think of our thoughts as being just like these clouds. Some of them are happy thoughts, some of them are worrisome, perhaps some are even a bit scary. They are just thoughts though. We may have our own different interpretations of them and we like to apply labels like “good” and “bad” to them, but in the end they are just thoughts.

Often, we get stuck on thoughts and get into these huge, annoying battles with them. If instead, we take a moment to acknowledge them, just like those clouds up in the sky, they will continue to drift through our awareness at the same pace as any other thought we might have. As humans, we have a tendency to engage in something called “fusion”, where we fuse our thoughts and our behaviors together. We saw a bit of this in the motivation chapter. I feel like a bum, therefore I can’t get anything done today. In reality, you can feel any sort of way and also act in whatever way you would like. It’s not being ungenuine or lying to yourself. It’s about allowing your thoughts, emotions, and other private internal experiences to exist and not necessarily dictate all of the actions that you take. The mindful approach really helps us to move forward in our quest to eliminate depression, or rather to reduce the impact that we allow depression to have on us.

The thing about mindfulness is that it definitely takes some practice. It’s not a difficult concept to understand, but sometimes putting it into practice is a different story. Don’t worry. I got you covered. I have a simple exercise that you can do to start training yourself to be more mindful and less judgmental about your own thoughts and internal experiences. When I say training, I mean it. Think of this as a skill that you can get better and better at. So, the exercise itself is a simple breathing exercise. It is a bit different than some of the breathing exercises you have probably encountered before. Many of those are designed to put you into a state of relaxation or to relieve stress. It’s possible that this exercise could have that effect on you, but that’s not really the point. Okay. Okay. Let me just explain the damn thing.

You already have a head start in this mindful breathing exercise, because step 1 is to breathe. That’s it. Just breathe. If step 1 is a problem for you… you might want to make sure that you aren’t actually a ghost. The cool thing about this is you don’t have to do any particular sort of breathing. You don’t need to change anything. I just want you to draw your attention to your breathing. Notice your breath. Pick a place in your body that you can really feel that breath. This can be different each time. Just notice where you can feel it in your body in this moment. Maybe it is the rise and fall of your belly. Maybe it is the expanding and contracting of your chest. Maybe it is the cool air rushing into your nose and the warm air flowing out of your mouth. Like I said, just notice the place that your breath is apparent to you right now.

Now, being human (presumably), in a few seconds your mind is going to start to wander. You will realize that you are no longer focusing on the physical sensations of your breath, and instead you are thinking about what you are going to do in an hour, trying to remember if you forgot something important, feeling emo over a recent break up, or getting angry because that damn commercial jingle is still stuck in your head after 4 days straight. That’s great! You are supposed to get distracted. That’s where the training part comes in.

When the spotlight of your attention leaves your breath and instead shines on some other thought or feeling, I don’t want you to try to force it out of your head. Instead, allow it to sit in the spotlight for a moment, and give it a few seconds of acknowledgment. Allow yourself to identify what the thought or feeling is. Once you’ve given it a moment in the spotlight, gently redirect that spotlight of attention back to your breath. And that’s it! It’s seriously so simple. Don’t get frustrated when you find yourself moving your attention away from your breath very frequently at first. Be excited about it. Every time you get distracted by some thought or feeling, it is another chance to practice this attentional shift.

I seriously love this exercise. It’s beautifully simple. At first it is SO hard, though. Your distractions per minute will be too damn high. Keep practicing it! I know it might be hard to understand the usefulness of paying A LOT of attention to your breathing. The secret is, it’s not about breathing at all. It’s about becoming better and better at noticing your thoughts and feelings and not letting them derail you. It’s about growing in your ability to intentionally shift your attention back to the thing that you are focusing on. If we are continuing the spotlight metaphor, imagine that you are making a transition from a newbie spotlight operator to a seasoned theater veteran who can shift that light to any subject at a moment’s notice. You don’t necessarily need to have intruding thoughts or feelings any less. You can just become better and more efficient at quickly shaking hands with your distractions and then redirecting your attention back to the matter at hand. I have given this exercise to probably 90% of my psychotherapy clients, and many of them have come back to me and expressed how liberating it is to be able to practice something that allows them to not get so thrown off track by the thoughts in their mind. Hopefully over time, you will be able to achieve the same sort of success with this technique. You will have that damn nagging thought in the back of your mind that you have ruined things beyond repair, AND you will be able to quickly switch your attention back to taking those actions that will help you move forward in your quest.

That whole looking back scenario can also serve as the basis for another helpful activity. Imagine sitting with a friend over a beer, coffee, or whatever equivalent situation comes to mind. Picture yourself in the future. Don’t be particular about the details. It’s just been enough time for this difficult period to be a memory that you can reflect on. As you sit there with your friend, you tell the story of all of the crazy shit that happened and how it all contributed to you feeling really upset, sad, and hopeless. This is a story of triumph, though. You also tell them about how you were able to overcome some of your personal demons and the roadblocks that were keeping you at a standstill. You tell them about the lessons you learned along the way. Don’t be shy about dropping some knowledge on this friend. You learned these lessons the hard way. I encourage you to get out a piece of paper and actually write this narrative down, or even speak it out loud to the voice memo thingy on your phone as if you were literally talking to that friend.

There is actually some magic to this technique. Writing from this future perspective is great, because it forces you to automatically adopt the assumption that you are capable of getting through the muck that you currently find yourself knee-deep in. You can upload some of the burden onto the pages of your journal and relieve a few pounds of that heavy pack you carry all of your worries and regrets in. Like before, I don’t want you to think for one second that I am asking you to be blindly optimistic. I don’t roll like that. Essentially, this is a visualization exercise, and visualization exercises seem to be much more effective when we are realistic. Don’t imagine that you are suddenly a superhero with thick skin that is impervious to the stupid offhand comments that gnaw at your self-confidence. Don’t imagine that you one day found all of the motivation in the world to complete every single project you had previously abandoned. Instead, imagine yourself struggling. That’s right. Imagine that you had to put up the fight of your life against this crap, but you did it. You got through it one way or another. Visualize yourself putting in the work and learning all of the lessons that come along with enrolling in the School of Hardknocks. I’m talking Rocky-style montages of getting your ass kicked over and over while you learn the best ways to rise above each setback. In the end, you get to look back on this period of progress and shake your head at how fucking wild it was. Maybe you can even laugh a little bit at how it simultaneously feels so far away and like it was just yesterday that you were having such a hard time. Emotionally, it feels miles away. That is a great feeling to have. You will get there. I mean it. -- —-oooO—- —-(—)—- —–\–(– ——\_)- ———–Oooo— ———–(—-)— ————)–/—- ————(_/- —-oooO—- —-(—)—- —–\–(– ——\_)-