Good Mood: The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

The first step is every tactic we shall describe, then, will be to observe your thoughts closely when you are depressed, analyze which negative self-comparisons you are making, and write them down if you can make yourself do so. Later, when you have learned how to keep depression at bay, an important part of your continuing exercise will be to identify each negative self- comparison before it gets a firm foothold, and pitch it out of your mind with the devices we shall describe.

One useful trick is to watch your thoughts in a disengaged fashion, as if they were the thoughts of a stranger whom you were reading about in a book or hearing at the movies. You can then examine the thoughts and see how interesting they are, including the peculiar illogical tricks we all play with our thinking. Watching your thoughts in this way is like what happens in meditation, which is described in Chapter 15. Watching your thoughts at a distance desensitizes them; it removes the sting of neg-comps. You will be amazed at the fascinating stream-of- consciousness drama that goes on inside your head, how one thing leads to another in the most peculiar way, with astonishing emotional ups and downs within a minute or less sometimes. Try it. You'll probably like it.

Learning to monitor your thoughts also is like the first crucial step in stopping smoking: You must first be aware of what you are doing before you can intervene to change the behavior. Confirmed smokers often pull out and light cigarettes without being fully aware of the process, and do not make a conscious decision to do so.

Other hard thinking also is necessary to overcome depression. You may have to straighten out some misapprehensions or confusions that customarily depress you. You may need to re- think your priorities. It may even help to search your memory for some childhood experiences. Perhaps hardest of all, you may have to study how you misuse language, and how you fall into linguistic traps. For example, your vocabulary probably makes you think that you must do some things which, upon inspection, you will conclude you have no obligation to do, and which may have dragged you into depression.

Conquering depression is not easy - rather, it is difficult. But difficult ...does not mean impossible. Of course you will find it hard to think and to act rationally in an irrational world. Of course you will have trouble reasoning your way out of circumstances which have unreasonably bogged you down for many years. All right, so you find it difficult. But it also proves difficult for a blind man to learn to read Braille, a victim of polio to use his muscles again, or a perfectly normal person to swing from a trapeze, learn ballet dancing, or play the piano well. Tough! But you still can do it.1

You should -- I'd say "must" except that I don't want to add any must's to your life, and besides, there always are exceptions -- you should observe your thoughts with pencil and paper in hand, and write down the thoughts and their analysis. Better yet, because it makes writing easier, use a computer when you are near one.

Let's take this idea further. It is crucial that you actually take action to fight your depression. Writing down and analyzing your thoughts is one such action. But other actions are important, too, such as getting out and participating in pleasurable activities so that you will enjoy life more, or, arriving at meetings on time if you know that getting there late will start you thinking depressing thoughts. Certainly, all this takes effort. But cranking yourself up to carry through with the actions is often a crucial part of the cure of depression. More about this below.

Now back to your thoughts. Ask yourself, "What am I thinking right at this moment, as I am feeling so sad?" Record your thought in the format of Table 10-1. This table guides you from the raw "uninvited thought" ("automatic thought", some writers call it) which floats into your mind and causes you pain, into and through an analysis of that thought which pinpoints the problems and the opportunities to intervene so as to get rid of the painful negative self-comparison you are making.

Let's follow through an example I have taken from Burns 1.1 so that a reader who uses his book can expand this method (developed over many years by Aaron Beck) with Self-comparisons Analysis. Let's call it the case of Ms. X, a woman who suddenly realizes that she is late for an important meeting. The thought then zips uninvited into her mind, "I never do anything right". Ms. X writes down this thought in column 1 of Table 10-1. She also writes down in column 2 the event that triggered the uninvited thought, being late for the meeting.

The thought in column 1 creates pain. Let's assume that X has a hopeless attitude, too. The uninvited thought then produces sadness.

The uninvited thought in column 1 translates logically into the negative self-comparison, "I do fewer things right than does the average person". So Ms. X writes down in column 3 this analysis of her uninvited thought. Now we may consider various aspects of this neg-comp. The methods for dealing with the various aspects of neg-comps are discussed in detail in the chapters to follow, but we shall now skim through the process briefly in order to focus on the process rather than upon the particular methods.

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