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.

Creating the Proper Habits

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.

Habit-formation may be more effective in suppressing comparisons than one thinks at first. Drawing upon my own experience, now: Even after I banished my daytime depression I often woke early in the morning - at 4:00 or 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. - and would lie half-asleep and half-awake with thoughts of past failures and future difficulties. The evil genius of the depression seemed that even if I could fight it when awake, I had no defense against it seizing me when unconscious with sleep. And I was convinced that habit-building tricks therefore could not help, because such tricks require consciousness and "will."

To my delight, I was wrong. It began when one of my children told me of his device to avoid bad dreams: Before falling asleep give yourself a pleasant subject to think about, such as a beaver or a swallow (this son was interested in animals). I took the suggestion, and it helped, though my subject is a family pleasure rather than an animal.

Additionally, I have now found that the habits I developed during the day began to work when half-asleep, too, shoving away intruding ugly comparisons even when half-asleep.

By now, though depressing thoughts still break into my sleep occasionally, my habits are almost always powerful enough to protect my tranquility and allow me to return to sleep.

Milking Joy From Past and Future

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Having pleasure, and feeling good because of it, is partly a matter of the events that occur to you. But even more important is whether you keep the thoughts of pleasant events in your mind long before and long after they occur, or whether you turn your mind to other things except when experiencing the event. Having thoughts of pleasant events in your mind affects your depression in two different ways, both very important. (1) As with meditation, work, and exercise, thinking about happy events substitutes for the negative self-comparisons that cause you to be depressed. (2) Even more important, perhaps, is that having pleasure in fact and thought - in memory and in expectation, as well as in actual experience - is a terrific reason to stay alive, and to believe that life is good. As Dostoyevsky remarked, one really good memory will go a long way - if you make good use of it.

It is a characteristic of depressives that their thoughts dwell on self-comparisons and do not dwell upon memories of past pleasures and expectations of future pleasures. But this is a tendency that can be changed if you decide to do it, if you "allow" yourself to do it, and if you practice it. Oil-company junior executive Rollie G. always had his mind working on "productive" thoughts about his job-- whom he had to instruct to do what, what he had to remember to check before sending out the products, the job evaluation forms he had to fill out for his assistant, and so on. He felt that he "ought" to be "taking advantage" of spare moments to get more done, and he constantly did so - except when negative self-evaluations flooded his mood and made him sad, and that was often. Then he came to realize that there is no necessity to make a maximum production machine out of himself. And he trained himself to spend five minutes or a quarter of an hour alone or with his wife, reminiscing about the lovely times he had had with his children, and about such upcoming events as the children's confirmations, the good meals that they had had, and about trips past and future. These pleasurable thoughts pushed out negative self-comparisons, and gave him the real stuff of life to lean upon and to make life worthwhile.

How can you get yourself to spend more time remembering and expecting those happy events that are in everyone's life? By working at it, and teaching yourself the habit of doing so, that's how. Train yourself that when you start to ruminate over your failings, shift your thoughts to the happy times, and stay in those happy times for a few minutes, before moving on to other thoughts.

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