Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 15

cont.

The Limitations of Meditation

If meditation can have such anti-depressive effects, and if - as seems to be the case - almost everyone can learn to meditate, why is meditation not the perfect cure for depression? For some people, lengthy meditation may in fact be an excellent therapy. But most people cannot leave the workaday world and remain in the world of meditation. Even if one can financially afford to do so, many people feel an urgent need to work for its own sake, as a contribution to society or because one's ability cries out to be used. Another reason that people will not choose to forego involvement in the workaday world is that they hope for joys as well as pain, and full-scale Buddhist-type meditation implies putting aside the craving for joys and the joys themselves.

Zen prescribes that you should do your best at whatever you do, but you should not feel sad when you fail to succeed. This is marvelous advice, but it is a prescription for walking a tight wire so thin and so high that few of us can balance ourselves on it. To strive to do well requires evaluation of how you are doing. But not being sad requires not evaluating how you are doing. So unless you are capable of extraordinary skill in compartmentalizing your thoughts, this prescription is not a perfect cure for most of us - though trying to take the prescription will certainly help all of us somewhat.

Another way through the horns of this dilemma is to restrict your evaluation to your act, and refraining from allowing the evaluation of the act to become a judgment of yourself as a person. It is certainly possible to evaluate that a tennis stroke was hit badly without judging the hitter to be a bad person or even a bad tennis player. This separation of the evaluation of the act from evaluation of the actor is exceedingly valuable mental hygiene for everyone, at all times. And it reconciles Zen doctrine and practice with active participation in the everyday world.

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Happiness and unhappiness are not simple mutually-exclusive opposites as light and dare are. Attaining happiness and getting rid of unhappiness are related but not identical goals. Watts wrote that "happiness is associated with relaxation...the essential principle (in achieving happiness) is one of relaxation."20 That is not correct, I believe. It is indeed true that relaxation induced by meditation or other means can replace sadness with a feeling of inner peace. But for most people - especially in their younger years - "happiness" means excited pleasant feelings - work achievement, sexual success and sexual experience, falling in love, bearing children, athletic or political victories. Peaceful relaxation is not an acceptable substitute for these aspirations in the minds of most Westerners (and Easterners, too), especially in the first half of one's life.

Though meditation may not be a total cure, a depressed person can be cheered considerably by receiving relief in meditation from time to time, and from knowing that such relief is possible without braving the dangers.

Summary

If you make no self-comparisons, you will feel no sadness.

If you have a propensity to evaluate yourself unfavorably, then each such evaluation is a source of pain and sadness for you. For such people, the frequency of self-evaluation determines the amount of pain and sadness, and the depth of depression. We depressives not only have a propensity to make negative self-evaluations, but we also have a tendency to make them frequently.

Reducing the number of self-comparisons you make is a powerful and effective way of fighting sadness and depression. There are many ways of reducing self-evaluations and self- comparisons including focusing on work, engaging in altruistic activities, meditating, praying, and simply shifting one's attention to other subjects. And one can form effective habits of shifting your thoughts in such fashion. All of us have very considerable powers to refuse to make evaluations and self- comparisons, and to influence our moods by sheer decision and force of will.

Some evaluations of how you are doing is crucial in keeping you on the right course of action. If you don't check how well you are doing when you are engaged in any productive activity, you have no way of directing your actions so that they will be fruitful. But much of our self-evaluation is not needed for survival.

Once again, Self-comparisons Analysis directs us to a useful tactic in fighting depression - in this case, reducing negative self-comparisons by avoiding any self-comparisons. Yet the willingness to exert the effort, and the implementation of the decision to exert the effort with habit formation, are also crucial. This adds up, then, to the following prescription: When you recognize a negative self-comparison entering your thoughts, tell yourself to direct your thoughts toward a work project or an altruistic activity - and do it.

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