A Step by Step Guide to Feeling Depressed It occured to me while I was washing a week's worth of piled up dishes today that it would be useful to list all the thoughts and beliefs that contribute to making me feel so unmotivated and depressed. I had a quick flick through How to Win Friends and Influence People last night and Mr Carnegie makes a very good point in a preliminary chapter on how the human mind is so utterly useless at retaining information and how we must revise things on a regular basis in order that we don't forget them entirely.
The list:
- Be harsh, critical and punishing with yourself especially about past events
- Play back painful past events over and over in your mind reliving the emotions
- Take a completely unsympathetic view of yourself, your actions and life
- Call yourself names, caricaturing yourself by focusing on some negative quality or action
- Take a simplistic unsympathetic view of all things devoid of nuance
- Sit at home neglecting yourself, avoiding enjoyable activities and human contact
- Do nothing productive whatsoever, instead sit in your own mess wallowing endlessly
- Make your happiness dependent upon the approval and esteem of others
- Be gentle and understanding with yourself, you're a human
- Beating yourself up about past events = depression, nothing more. Stop it.
- Take a sympathetic understanding view of yourself, you're human
- Remember that humans are a complex mix of positive negative and neutral
- Remember that things are never as simple as they seem - many factors are at play
- Do things that you enjoy and work on building a heathly social circle
- Be productive, have realistic goals, keep yourself occupied
- Approval addiction = dangerously vulnerable junky-like state. End it now.
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