In general, Feelings cannot happen without a thought happening first. If you feel sad, it’s because you are thinking sad thoughts. If your thoughts are happy, you will feel happier. If you think you cant do something, then you’ll feel powerless, and you wont do that thing–even if you have the ability and really CAN! We can delude ourselves like that. If your feelings seem “automatic”, it’s a good indicator that youve been running your thoughts on “auto pilot”. Its possible to take back control though. What you put into your head or keep inside your head is what you will get right back.
Thought -> Feeling -> Action
Being more aware of your thinking habits can allow you to stop the cycle of negativity. People with chemical imbalances should take meds as well.
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Usually I think about how terrible my life has been and how I have no control over making it worth living .. and how it just gets more terrible with every day
Try not to think of an elephant…
Thoughts arise out of a combination of disposition and environmental cues. While they can be altered by changing inputs, they cannot be convincingly fabricated in entirety. No matter how much effort I spend trying to convince myself that I’m an admirable person, the contradictory evidence will still undermine any positive feelings that might be generated. Humans do not have complete control of their awareness – thoughts just arise, unbidden, triggered by circumstance. You cannot force yourself to forget something, no matter how hard you try. The awareness will simply bubble up again, because the subconscious brain has retained the information and it’s significance. Conscious thought and feeling is more like the brain’s way of talking to itself – it’s the tip of the iceberg, rather than the bit that really calls the shots. The ‘monkey’ rather than the ‘organ grinder’/
TLDR: It ain’t that simple.
It’s not about forgetting. I can notice the thought about the elephant, but I can choose not to CONTINUE to think about the elephant. I can choose to play guitar instead. I can go for a run. I can get some work done around the house.
You CAN control your mind–it takes PRACTICE!
At this moment I’m working on visualizations. I’m converting abstracts such as depression, sadness, anxiety into easier to understand formats. Like I’m thinking about depression as a pit trap, a hole dug into the earth just far enough that I slip down and all I see is dirt. It’s an apt metaphor, and I’m always proud when my metaphors hold up. Then I think about the ladder that I have to climb to escape. I’ve climbed it before. The ladder represents the process of capturing dark thoughts and cutting them off, finding the root thoughts and building a redirect set of thoughts.
Example of redirect, a rephrase: I’m stuck in this terrible place.
Redone thought would be: The situation that I’m in doesn’t meet my expectations, I need to work towards a solution that gets me out of this situation and prevents it from happening again.
See, I try to be productive. Keep my hands too busy to tie the noose, keep my mind to busy to cycle through the depression. Depression saps the brain’s power(chemically speaking) and so it takes less work to use up the productive energy of the brain.