D3

Let’s continue with that glasses idea. When something happens in the world, whether it be to us directly or in general, we filter it through the lens of our thoughts and beliefs. This has a direct impact on the way we feel. The thing is, depression plays a lot of tricks on us, and we end up with distorted thinking patterns that tell us things like “you don’t matter”, “nothing you do is going to help”, or “nobody likes you”.

Here is a thought pattern that some of you have probably fallen into: blaming yourself for everything. Even if something is logically outside your sphere of influence, you assume that somehow you have to be responsible for any mishap. In turn, you feel the need to apologize and beat yourself up emotionally. I don’t mean something as obscure as seeing a plane crash on television and assuming that you somehow are to blame. Let’s say that your significant other was up for a promotion at work and didn’t end up getting it despite their confidence and hard work. Some healthy assumptions and beliefs about this situation might be that there was a better candidate for the promotion who really went above and beyond to seal the deal. Perhaps your mate’s employer is in a tight spot financially and is trying everything that they can to avoid giving out more money, so they decided to skip this round of promotions entirely. When you filter the world through your shit-colored glasses, you instead just find a way to blame yourself for what happened. Maybe it is because you got into a fight a few nights ago, and it must have been distracting them and put them into a negative emotional state. Or maybe it is because you are too needy and took up all of their time they could have spent preparing for the interview, and they were unprepared as a result. Seeing it on paper might seem a bit ridiculous, but we totally do stuff like this.

Here’s a super common one that can cause all sorts of problems: “Things never work out for me, so what’s the point?” Hopelessness is a symptom of depression. That is a really important thing to remember. That is why you feel like you are never going to overcome your depression. That’s what the depression devil is whispering in your ear all the time. Now, I’m not calling you dumb, but most of the time depressive hopelessness is not the result of logical reasoning. It’s a trick that your mind plays on you to convince you that it’s not worth trying. Let’s say that you are trying to get more physical exercise to improve your physical and mental health. Well, when you think about it, there is really no point… last time you tried to exercise, it didn’t make much difference, so why bother trying this time? This mental filter is causing you to not notice the fact that all of the positive effects of exercise are not evident right away, and you gave up last time pretty early into the process due to the very same cognitive trap that is playing out right now. This is one of the main challenges in writing a book like this. Trying to convince you that the voice in your head, the one that tells you there is no point in trying, is completely wrong.

I don’t want you to be all rosy and blindly optimistic. That’s just annoying. Instead, I want to encourage you to be more realistic. Be a good scientist. Before you jump to conclusions based on your gut feeling and the influence of the depression devil on your shoulder, give yourself the chance to examine the evidence. If it turns out that all of the objective evidence still points to something upsetting, then by all means be upset. Like I said earlier, shitty things should feel shitty. However, if you are experiencing depression, it is almost guaranteed that you are distorting the way in which you interpret the world to match gross feelings in your heart.

There are a few ways that we can counteract this process and bring about a healthier pattern of thinking. One big piece of advice I have is to avoid keeping it to yourself. If you have people in your life that you can talk to, tell them a bit about what you are struggling with internally. Help them understand your thought process and then invite their feedback about whether it makes sense. You should tell them that you aren’t just looking to be told that everything will be okay, but rather that you want to know how they would think about this situation if it were happening to them. (I should interrupt here to mention that this works much better when you enlist the help of people who are not also depressed. Substituting one distorted thought process for another is not going to do much good.)

There are a couple barriers to asking people for their opinion of your thoughts. For some people, that will feel very exposing and scary. Opening up is not always easy and I think it is even scarier when you know deep down that your current thought process might be a bit skewed. No one likes to be thought of as crazy. If this is a barrier for you, it might be most useful to enlist the help of the top 1% of people in your life that you really trust and who you are almost certain will be there for you no matter what. If your life is an ever changing equation, these people are the constants. This is different for everyone. For some people, a parent provides that unconditional support. For others, they have a best friend from school who will always call you on your bullshit but never love you any less. Start with these people and recruit them as your logical barometers. Don’t ask them whether you should be upset. Ask them if your line of thinking makes sense. Ask them how they would think about a given situation. There is no right or wrong here. You just want to get some alternative perspectives so you can really consider all sides of the evidence before you conclude that you truly deserve to feel like shit.

Another potential barrier is a lack of people in your environment that you can access. Luckily, technology like the Internet and texting has given us unprecedented access to friends and family whenever we may need them. Sometimes it just isn’t possible or convenient to reach out to someone else, though. For those situations, I would encourage you to envision someone that you care about. As before, this can be a friend, family member, or miscellaneous loved one. Now, think about that person coming to you and describing a similar situation. What feedback would you have for them? This works exceptionally well with that “best friend who calls you on your bullshit” I mentioned earlier, because you can imagine yourself saying, “Dude, you’re an idiot. That doesn’t even make sense.” What holes can you poke in their logic that might explain exactly why they feel so terrible about the situation at hand? Even better, you can combine these two approaches. You have some people in your life that serve as logical barometers for you. You reach out to them every so often and request feedback about your patterns of thinking. Over time, you start to internalize their voices and their thinking styles. So when the depression devil pops up on your shoulder and whispers some stupid self-sabotaging pseudo-logic in your ear, you also have your panel of trusted advisors that pop up and provide some alternative approaches that they would be more likely to employ. In the end, the decision about how to proceed is always yours, but using these strategies gives you the best shot at success. It’s fairer and is one step in the direction of being less of a dick to yourself.

I also want to talk for a bit about a psychobabble term that you may have heard before. Have you ever heard of schemas? The word schema (skee - muh) basically just refers to your own unique pattern of thinking. It’s how you selectively pay attention to certain things while ignoring others and then make overall conceptualizations about the situations that you encounter. The reason that I bring this up is that when you are depressed, you tend to develop a nasty little schema in which your negative view of yourself leads to a negative interpretation of things that happen to you in the present and eventually to negative predictions about things that have not yet come to pass. You can probably see how having a stable negative schema might lead to the feelings of hopelessness that are common in depression.

One valuable exercise is to try and identify your own schemas. We often apply these as sort of fake rule sets that we hold ourselves to. For instance, we might say something like, “I must get good grades if I want to please my family. They won’t love me if I fail. If I don’t excel, I have essentially failed.” Obviously, these are not completely logical. We don’t necessarily say these things verbatim to ourselves, but when you scratch beneath the surface of your assumptions and reactions to everyday situations, sometimes these are what you are left with. Another negative schema might be, “Nobody likes me. People think that I am awkward. I won’t ever find love because I am not comfortable around people.” Each of these negative patterns serve as one of those shit-colored filters that we talked about and can lead to some pretty serious cognitive errors when we apply them indiscriminately.

I am sure that you are guilty of sometimes overextending these “rules” and applying them to circumstances that they do not fit. For instance, I’ve had someone tell me about a situation in which their schema about being too awkward to ever find love really bit them in the ass. They were at a get-together at a friend’s house (first red flag: if they were that awkward, they wouldn’t have any friends), and they wound up talking to a girl that they thought was cute and charming. They got on a topic that he was passionate about: video games. Before he knew it, the guard was down and he launched into a mini rant about the state of gaming, microtransactions, and stupid pre-order nonsense. The girl he was talking to said something to the effect of, “Aww how nerdy.” Now this simple expression, when filtered through his own unique brand of shit-colored glasses, meant that he was an idiot for revealing his true awkward self and ruining any chance that he might have had. In reality, she was totally into it. He learned later on that she actually thought his passionate rant was endearing because it is nice to find a guy who actually gives a shit about anything these days. However, since that possibility did not fit into his narrow negative schema, it didn’t even come close to crossing his mind. As a result, he started acting like an asshole. He shut down and found a way to abruptly end the conversation. The self-fulfilling prophecy was thus fulfilled.

How do you begin to start recognizing your personal schemas and self-sabotaging thought patterns? Step 1 is to document. I will give you some ideas here, but please don’t take these as absolute musts. The key is to do something that works for you and fits with your personality, lifestyle, interests, etc. The point of documenting is to record your thoughts, reactions, and assumptions so that you can start to look at them from a more detached perspective. You might find that the process of tracking and recording these things is like a sort of self-feedback. You don’t always realize how you are changing, but simply paying more attention to your patterns and seeing them from a different perspective often leads to improvements. It helps to build your innate sense of what is helpful and what is not, so that you can start to make slight adjustments here and there that combine to make a real difference in your overall mental well-being.

A really simple way to get started is making a basic two column chart. One column says “immediate thought” and the other says “reasonable response.” This is probably as basic as it gets. Simply write down the immediate thought that you had. In the example that I presented above, it would be something like “She thinks I’m a huge nerd.” On the other side, you would put in a more reasonable response. Again, I don’t want you to be a rosy optimist. You don’t have to be succinct on this side. Brainstorm a bit. You might write “I don’t know for certain how she felt. She said ‘aww’, which usually implies that someone likes something. It actually pisses me off when people pretend like girl gamers don’t exist, so maybe she could totally relate. I did not give her the chance to communicate whether she liked what I was saying or whether she was embarrassed to be with me.”

When you record your thoughts, you usually need to start by logging them at the end of the day or after you are finished with whatever event you have going on. It can be a little difficult to remember everything accurately (especially with your shit-colored glasses), but that is okay. You don’t have to get everything “right.” Just go over the situations that caused you distress or stuck with you. Write down what you immediately thought or assumed in the situation, and then make yourself a cup of tea and start trying to poke some holes in your brain’s asshole logic. The important thing here is to be consistent and do this process as often as you can, especially when you are first getting started. You might even want to do this every night. Eventually, you can begin to log and document during your day on the sly. When you have a lunch break, when you get into your car before driving back home, or even in the moment on a little post it note. The trick is to start migrating your awareness of your cognitive errors and negative schemas closer and closer to the actual event. Over time, you will start to internalize this process and do it in your head automatically, so you don’t have to write it down. Then, when you start to achieve a bit of mastery over it, you can apply it in the moment and avoid falling into the same traps that you used to.

The reason I said to do something that works for your particular personality and lifestyle earlier is that there are many different creative ways that you can apply these old, fundamental self-help techniques. For some people, having a nice leather bound journal that they can keep next to their bed works best. One creative solution that has worked really well for me is using the voice memo function on my phone. When I am driving on the way back from something and I really need to externalize some of my thoughts, I will pop in my headphones and talk out loud to my phone. To be clear, I only do this when I am driving alone. I’m not that weird. There are a couple cool things about logging your thoughts this way. First off, when you have your headphones or ear piece in, it just looks like you are talking on speakerphone, so no one will give you strange glances as they drive by. The other cool thing is that when you get home, you can listen to your own analysis. There is actually some scientific validity to the idea that hearing yourself reason out loud can be very helpful. When you take in information through different mediums, be it written, auditory, or visual, you are giving yourself another avenue to process it. Hearing yourself speak out loud about the ways you are screwing yourself over can allow you to have a more objective perspective and internalize your own voice of reason. Pretty awesome stuff.

There is no limit to the amount of creative ways that you can log your thoughts, reactions, and assumptions. You can blog or vlog about them. You can make visual art. You can write fiction where a person goes through a similar situation, but handles it better. You can create music about them. You can write a rap verse about them. Do something that works for you. If this preference shifts over time that is fine. Just roll with it. What I want you to do is start paying closer attention by recording your thoughts right now, so that you can start reaping the benefits that this perspective provides.

When you have practiced the process of noticing where your assumptions and beliefs go off the rails, you can catch yourself in the moment. Some people can even learn to practice something called cognitive rehearsal. When I was working with people struggling with substance abuse, we would call this “playing the tape through”. That means playing the mental video about what might occur and how you might react. This helps you to anticipate roadblocks that may pop up and how you can work to overcome them. You certainly don’t have to predict every possible scenario. That is impossible. Instead, you imagine what might happen, notice some of the cognitive mistakes that you have a tendency to make, and craft a few strategies to avoid falling into the same pits of mental douchebaggery that have screwed you over time and time again.

The other thing to consider, when it comes to labels, is that they always have a flip-side. Sometimes, it can be useful to examine the other side of the coin. Even though the immediate label that you give yourself such as “greedy”, “asshole”, “idiot”, or “failure” may have a clear negative weight to them, you can also ask yourself whether there are some positive qualities in there as well. For example, if you are dealing with the asshole label, you might be able to look at the other side of the coin by breaking it down a little more. What are some positive aspects of assholeness? Maybe you are a skeptical person. That’s definitely an admirable quality which can enable you to think critically and get to the heart of important issues. Maybe you are assertive. That’s also great in a lot of ways. Many people never learn how to stand up for themselves and instead get stepped on by other people every day. With this example, you are not throwing out the label entirely, you are just recognizing that there are some nuances to it. You can own both the good and the bad. You can notice that you screwed up overall, but, in some ways, it was just a case of admirable qualities getting out of hand. That is much easier to learn from. You can adjust your behavior with information like that. I’ve made a lot of references to scientists in this chapter. I really want you to internalize that idea. Create a mental picture of yourself in a silly white lab coat with protective glasses or whatever image really screams scientist to you. Adopt this little mental alter ego when you find yourself engaging in these unhelpful patterns of thinking. You don’t have to walk around all day, analyzing and questioning everything (unless that’s already your personality), but you can switch into this mode when you need to examine the evidence that your silly brain tries to immediately pass off as fact. Of course, any good scientist knows the importance of documenting your findings. That’s why your grade school science teachers made you write down every detail in those little composition books during lab. It is exceptionally hard to see yourself changing on a day to day basis. If you’ve ever trained physically for something, you know that this is true. If you are trying to gain muscle definition, lose weight, or complete your race faster, you really can’t see much difference from one day to the next. However, when you keep track of your progress through pictures, or logging your performance in a paper or digital log, it becomes much easier to see change across weeks or months. Fighting back against depression can be much the same way. Remember; your brain is currently trained to tell you, “See? That did nothing. The same shit happened again, just like always. This book is useless and you are not getting any better.” When that happens, you can whip out your log and determine whether that is true or not. You can say, “Well let’s slow down here. Sure I made the same mistake that I did yesterday, but it looks like overall the number of times that I am engaging in distorted thinking has gone down by 20% over the past month.