Depression is a state of mind that affects many people and is one of the problems we face as a species.
What does depression mean?
Why do we suddenly find ourselves stuck in a sea of inertia, unable to think positively or hold on to positive thoughts, and frozen in a zombie-like state of inactivity?
Even experts have different ideas about what causes depression and how to treat it. Should they be soothing or should they be more direct?
This doesn't help us at all if we're in the middle of a depression that's getting worse.
If we ever feel depressed, we must find and build within ourselves the strength, motivation, wish, and will to beat this crippling state of mind.
First, we have to admit that we are the ones who let this bad way of thinking take hold.
The cause could have been any of a million things, and it could have been something outside of us that we had no control over. However, the cure must come from within us and is in our hands.
First of all, we need to know that we are not alone.
If you read the news or watch TV, you'll keep hearing about people we might think of as "having it all" who check themselves into this or that clinic for help with some problem or another.
What might be just a small setback for one person can be the start of the "poor me" syndrome for someone else. This is a way of thinking that makes you feel bad about yourself.
Why is it that something that makes one person a little annoyed can make another person almost want to kill themselves?
We're all different in some way, so that's why.
You can start to learn more about yourself by going to one of the many websites that offer behavioural profiling. This will help you figure out your personal style.
Once you know why you react the way you do to certain situations, you may be able to change your life to avoid those situations in the future or at least be better prepared to handle them when they come up.
Self-help for depression starts with knowing yourself and why you act the way you do in different situations.
The next step is to learn, understand, and accept that we have control over what our brain accepts as true. So often, what we thought at first turns out to be wrong. In general, nothing is ever as bad or good as it might seem at first.
What's important is to know that we can get to a place where we can take steps to make sure we don't have any more negative thoughts that spread to us in the future.
Depression starts with thoughts that aren't good. These bad thoughts and mental videos of failures and disappointments from the past clog up our brains. They were dormant, waiting for the right set of circumstances to make them come to life and mess up our minds.
Dr. Hall was a clinical psychologist who was known all over the world. He spent his life helping people figure out who they were and then pushing them to take the steps they needed to take to become who they really wanted to be.
Doctor George Hall found out that it is possible to set up a filter in the brain that stops the brain from accepting negatives. Just like we can put a virus checker or firewall on our PC or laptop, we can also put those kinds of protections in our brains.
Dr. Hall made a self-help course called "Human Cybernetics." It was a plan for people who really wanted to improve themselves and reach their full potential in life.
In 1975, I was lucky enough to be one of Dr. Hall's students. The tutorials he led changed the lives of those of us who were lucky enough to hear them.
He always said that negative self-talk and replaying mental tapes of past failures and disappointments were the most crippling things a person could do because they only made them feel worse about themselves.
Negative self-talk needs to be replaced right away with positive self-talk and positive visual images. You need to get rid of those negative tapes and videos in your head and replace them with new images of success and achievement.
There are a lot of self-help courses out there now. If you search for "personal development" or something similar, you will find a lot of sites that can help you, and many of them will do so for free.
There are also sites that offer self-awareness questionnaires that are meant to help you focus on any deep-seated negatives that might be stopping you from achieving your life goals.
You can then use this as a starting point for your new life.
Self-help for depression is all about taking that first step to control your future thoughts and actions.
Decide right now to take charge of your life and live it the way you want to, not the way other people want you to.
Whatever you do, do it for you!
