Breaking the Spell of Depression

I don’t normally advocate focusing on the symptoms of problems. Instead, I favour working on the root cause of problems so that the symptom no longer has reason to occur. However, some symptoms have such a debilitating effect that we find ourselves unable to do much of anything until we get some relief. I consider depression one of those symptoms.

The Cause of Depression

As with all emotional problems, our depression occurs because we cannot fulfil our desires. In the case of depression it normally comes as a result of continuously failing to meet desires over a long period of time until we can no longer bear to face another attempt at what, in reality, has become such a fruitless enterprise. This often happens from continuously wanting things that remain impossible to have, either because life doesn’t deliver these things for us or because we lack the personal competence to deliver these things for ourselves. The answer lies in controlling our desires so that we eliminate all of that impossibility. Once we change our desires to possible outcomes that we can normally and relatively easily fulfil, then depression itself will evaporate very quickly and if we maintain careful control of our desires then it will never return again.

Inaccurate Personal Assessments

Because we get depressed due to a consistent inability to realise our desires then we can counteract this feeling of helplessness by doing something practical that we know we can definitely do and complete. For example, some weeks ago I did not manage my desires well and I got hung-up on seeking outcomes that I did not have the competence and wherewithal to achieve any time soon. I couldn’t put my finger on the cause and I began to freeze up and got less and less done. I felt worse and worse about myself and began thinking in very negative terms about myself. This would normally lead to a negative feedback cycle of fewer and fewer results leading to a poor personal self-judgement, an increased feeling of desperation, inadequacy and helplessness and an inability to get much of anything done.

The danger with such personal assessments is that they are usually abstract, i.e. they occur only in the mind and are often based upon inaccurate conclusions and without reference to real world sensory inputs. We make our personal assessments in isolation, which gives them an inaccurate ‘absolute’ nature, instead of relating them accurately to other things that we can do. We judge ourselves poorly and hence we become ‘absolutely poor at everything’ and we then tend to look for evidence that justifies this conclusion. This makes it difficult to ‘get a grip’ on ourselves. However, such damning personal assessments will disintegrate in the face of real world results to the contrary.

Fulfil a Desire that’s Possible to Fulfil

To create the disintegration of our false mental assessment of ourselves we need the real world sensory inputs of good results that come from doing things that we have full competence to complete. We must take actions, fulfil some simple desires and get real world evidence that we still have the power to control outcomes and that we still have many competencies. That shows us that we have the power to cope with certain things and it brings back a measure of confidence and self-reliance with which we can ‘get a grip’ and return to a condition where we can manage ourselves and the fulfilment of our outcomes once again.

For this method to work you must immediately stop moping around. If you lie in bed, lie in the bath, sit on the sofa and just do nothing but think about your problems then you simply exacerbate the symptoms of immobilisation and feeling bad. You must do something physical and practical. Any activity that involves body and mind in some kind of focused activity will work. This will take the attention of your mind away from whatever sparked off your depression and by doing something simple and practical you give real world sensory inputs about results that you created. You show categorically that you can fulfil possible desires. Hence you show competence and an ability to cope. This breaks the assessment that you “are absolutely hopeless” and by breaking the absolute nature of that assessment, you create a little chink that you can expand upon by doing other practical things until you return to normal.

Suggestions of activities that you can do to break the spell of depression:

Go for a walk and feed the birds

Cook a meal (make sure you choose something to cook that you have great competence to complete as you desire)

If you play an instrument then go to it and play things that you can play easily

Build something (I myself favour plastic model kits, Lego or similar – you could call it child’s play but sometimes I need just exactly that!)

If you have craft skills then make something (origami, flower arranging, sewing, making cards and so on)

Organise some files on your computer

Write a postcard or a letter to a friend

Do the washing up

Clean a room

These things work because they engage you in real world sensory activities and so they have no delusory nature. Great satisfaction comes from making things by hand. Make sure that you engage in something active. Watching TV, going to the movies, reading books, surfing the web, I consider as passive activities and they do nothing to break the cycle (With the possible exception of comedy and humour that makes you laugh, as this can also break the spell. A good laugh about the folly of life and a reminder that plenty of other people have problems can also give you a point of reference that things don’t go so absolutely badly for you).

Beware of the Abstract

In advanced economies, we live in an environment that increasingly encourages the setting of abstract desires and we also increasingly do work involving abstract concepts. Consequently, we become more and more divorced from reality and unfortunately we have minds that handle abstract concepts very badly unless we configure things properly in the first place – an art that most people know nothing about but which you can learn about in this blog. Because we get increasingly divorced from reality our minds can quickly end up perplexed and confused and that leads to maladjustment and mental sickness. We can alleviate some of the symptoms by grounding ourselves, or better, fully immersing ourselves, into real world, sensory laden activities where we make things that we have the competence to fulfil.