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A Brief Manual of Ways To Overcome Depression

cont.

Because of childhood experiences or because of their values, depressives tend not to be flexible in choosing dimensions that will make them look good. Yet depressives can successfully shift dimensions if they work at it. In addition to the ways mentioned above, which will be discussed at length in Chapter 14, there is still another -- and very radical -- way to shift dimensions. This is to make a determined effort -- even to demand of yourself -- in the name of some other value, that you shift from a dimension that is causing you grief. This is the core of Values Treatment which was crucial in curing my 13-year depression; more about this shortly.

The Sound of a Numerator Clapping

No self-comparisons, no sadness. No sadness, no depression. So why don't we just get rid of self-comparisons completely?

A practicing Zen Buddhist with an independent income and a grown family can get along without making many self-comparisons. But for those of us who must struggle to achieve our ends in the workaday world, some comparisons between what we and others do are necessary to keep us directed toward achieving these ends. Yet, if we try, we can successfully reduce the number of these comparisons by focusing our minds on other activities instead. We can also help ourselves by judging only our performances relative to the performances of others, rather than judging our very selves -- that is, our whole persons -- to others. Our performances are not the same as our persons.

Work that absorbs your attention is perhaps the most effective device for avoiding self-comparisons. When Einstein was asked how he dealt with the tragedies he suffered, he said something like: "Work, of course. What else is there?"

One of the best qualities of work is that it is usually available. And concentrating upon it requires no special discipline. While one is thinking about the task at hand, one's attention is effectively diverted from comparing oneself to some benchmark standard.

Another way to shut off self-comparisons is to care about other people's welfare, and to spend time helping them. This old-fashioned remedy against depression--altruism--has been the salvation of many.

Meditation is the traditional Oriental method of banishing negative self-comparisons. The essence of meditation is to shift to a special mode of concentrated thinking in which one does not evaluate or compare, but instead simply experiences the outer and inner sensory events as interesting but devoid of emotion. (In a less serious context this approach is called "inner tennis.")

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Some Oriental religious practitioners seek the deepest and most continuous meditation in order to banish physical suffering as well as for religious purposes. But the same mechanism can be used while participating in everyday life as an effective weapon against negative self-comparisons and depression. Deep breathing is the first step in such meditation. All by itself, it can relax you and change your mood in the midst of a stream of negative self-comparisons.

We'll go into details later about the pro's and con's and procedures for various methods to avoid self-comparisons.

Getting Hope Back

Negative self-comparisons (neg-comps) by themselves do not make you sad. Instead, you may get angry, or you may mobilize yourself to change your life situation. But a helpless, hopeless attitude along with neg-comps leads to sadness and depression. This has even been shown in rat experiments. Rats that have experienced electric shocks which they cannot avoid later behave with less fight and more depression, with respect to electric shocks that they can avoid, than do rats that did not experience unavoidable shocks. The rats that experienced unavoidable shocks also show chemical changes like those associated with depression in humans.10

It behooves us, then, to consider how to avoid feeling helpless. One obvious answer in some situations is to realize that you are not helpless and you can change your actual state of affairs so that the comparison will be less negative. Sometimes this requires gradual re-learning through a graded series of tasks that show you that you can be successful, eventually leading to success in tasks that at the beginning seemed overwhelmingly difficult to you. This is the rationale of many behavioral-therapy programs that teach people to overcome their fears of elevators, heights, going out in public, and various social situations.

Indeed, the rats mentioned in the paragraph above, which learned to be helpless when given inescapable shocks, were later taught by experimenters to learn that they could escape the later shocks. They showed diminished chemical changes associated with depression after they had "unlearned" their original experiences.

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