If You’re Struggling, Try Finding Moments of Beauty in Your Day

Image by Juliandra Durkin

Anyone who has ever been depressed knows that it’s a terrible thing. At its worst, depression can completely knock the stuffing out of you, making it impossible to leave the house, or even your bed. You might feel completely exhausted, finding the smallest task utterly daunting.

You may well struggle with sleeping, either lying awake for hours, with dark thoughts swirling round your head; or go to the other extreme, sleeping for long periods (and no wonder – I often tell my clients who sleep a lot that nothing helps us avoid painful thoughts and feelings better than sleep). And eating can go the same way, either completely losing your appetite and struggling to eat a mouthful, or comfort-eating junk food all day.

When depressed, your thoughts will probably be extremely negative and hopeless. People tell you that what you’re going through will end, or you will get better, but you probably don’t believe them. And rumination is a central feature of ‘depressogenic’ thinking, which is those thoughts that go round and round your head like, ‘I am so pathetic. What’s wrong with me?’ or ‘My life is a complete mess. How did it get this bad? And why did I make all those stupid mistakes?’

Asking these kinds of negative, existential questions is rarely a good idea, as there are no good answers, are there? And sadly, the more you ruminate, the more depressed you feel, which makes you ruminate more, which makes you more depressed…

More right with you than wrong

Sorry if this is all getting a bit gloomy, especially if you’re struggling with depression or low mood right now. It’s important to recognise just how awful depression can be, but let’s think about it a bit more positively, starting with this wonderful quote from a towering figure in the treatment of depression and other psychological problems:

‘As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel’

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Dr Kabat-Zinn developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programme in the 1970s. He later inspired a group of psychologists to develop mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which has helped millions of people both recover from and prevent future episodes of depression. And a key idea of both MBSR and MBCT is that where you place your attention – especially what you think about at any given moment – has a powerful impact on determining your mood.

As we saw with rumination, if you spend hours each day going over and over what’s wrong with you, your life, your choices, and so on, your mood will inevitably sink. It’s just common sense. So, rather than obsessively chew over all the negative stuff you perceive in your life, learning that you can choose where you place your attention and what you think about is a simple but potentially life-changing insight.

Finding moments of beauty

I should say here that I struggled with depression for many years, so I don’t say any of these things lightly. I know how awful it is. I understand only too well how hard it can be to shift your attention from the gloomiest subjects, the darkest thoughts, the seemingly hopeless future. Trust me, I have been there, many times.

But I’m also glad to say that I don’t get depressed any more. My mood can be low, from time to time, but that’s only human – and is a world away from the prolonged bouts of depression that used to floor me for days and even weeks at a time.

And one of the key parts of my recovery (apart from a lot of therapy) was taking the MBCT course myself. That course was so profound for me. It helped me start meditating and continue that daily practice for over 12 years now. It deepened my love of Buddhism, which is a wonderfully rich, compassionate and insightful system of philosophy and psychology.

MBCT also taught me to look for moments of beauty throughout the day, even when I’m struggling. One example: it makes my heart so happy to see little kids walking up the road, hand in hand with their parents. Because (and check this out for yourself) little kids never just walk! They do little skips and jumps, or dance, or sing a silly song. They weave along the pavement, skirting imaginary obstacles (crocodiles, lava, icy crevasses). It never fails to put a smile on my face, because they are so full of joy and completely un-self-conscious.

You are a walking miracle

Another example: do you ever stop and think, just for a moment, what a miracle it is that you’re actually alive? Think about the mind-boggling fact that you are, quite literally, made of stardust (every atom in your body originated from some star, billions of years ago, exploding and sending raw materials like carbon streaming out into the universe). Without those stars you, I and every other living creature on our planet would not exist.

How about the fact that your ancestor (and mine) was a single-celled amoeba, floating around in the primordial soup of Earth’s newly formed oceans, around four billion years ago. From a simple amoeba to the magnificent complexity of you, purely through the wonder of evolution and a trillion tiny moments of chance and good fortune that enabled you to exist.

Or all of the millions of life-preserving processes happening in your body, right now, allowing your heart to beat and lungs to breathe and blood to flow and food to digest… And we just walk about, eating sandwiches and playing Candy Crush, completely oblivious. The daily miracle of life, which we all take for granted.

And don’t get me started on cherry blossom, or sun shining through fresh spring leaves, or puppies, or the light of a full moon, or hugs, or the first juicy bite of a nectarine, or your football team scoring a 90th-minute winning goal… So much joy, beauty and wonder, if we just let ourselves see/feel/taste it.

Again, I know that none of this is easy, especially when you’re down. (And if you’re struggling with depression – especially if you are having suicidal thoughts – please do contact your GP or a mental health professional right away.) But it will help, I promise, if you can just shift the spotlight of your attention from all of the bad stuff (real and imagined) in your life to those moments of beauty, or everyday miracles, which are right under your nose.

I hope that’s helpful. And sending you love, strength and hope, whatever you may be struggling with right now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Hardwiring Positive Experiences and Emotions in Your Brain

Image by Mi Pham

One of my favourite techniques to use with my schema therapy clients is psychologist Rick Hanson’s neuroscience-based approach to ‘hardwiring’ positive experiences and emotions. As he explains in his excellent book, Hardwiring Happiness: the New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence, the human brain is designed with an in-built negativity bias.

This means that our attention is directed towards negative thoughts, feelings and experiences such as failing at an exam, being rejected for a job or left by a partner.

Human brains were built over millions of years of evolution, which were mostly spent in environments of extreme threat – wild animals trying to eat us, other tribes wanting to bash us over the head with clubs, poisonous snakes and spiders underfoot, simple injuries and diseases meaning certain death because we lacked effective medicine.

So our threat system became the dominant system in the brain – and consequently 21st-century humans pay a great deal of attention to anything that could be threatening, hurtful or upsetting.

How schemas affect us

To an extent, this is how schemas work – affecting our information-processing systems, memory, attention, and so on to make us focus excessively on negative or upsetting things. I see this all the time in my practice – and I’m sure you do too.

Someone comes in talking at great length and in fine-grained detail about some incident where they felt someone rejected them; or a time when they messed up at work and felt terrible about it. As well as giving plenty of space for that (which is, after all, what therapy is mostly about!) I always get people to make the most of positive experiences too.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say James tells me about getting a Distinction for an assignment on his Master’s. He then quickly whizzes on to the next thing, an upsetting story about his brother. I get him to pause, slow down, and tell me more about getting the news about his Distinction – I often use imagery to get him to relive the experience, closing his eyes and describing where he is, what he’s thinking when he reads the email and, most importantly, how he feels.

James tells me he feels happy and proud, so I ask him where he feels that in his body. James says in his chest and throat, so I get him to focus on those bodily sensations for one minute (anything from 10 seconds up works, but longer is better).

After he does this, I get him to open his eyes and explain that we just hardwired those positive feelings to the memory – so now every time he thinks about it, he will feel happy and proud again.

Repetition is key

I just love this technique – and so do my clients. It feels great and is a really simple thing to give them for homework – just repeat, as often as possible, any time they have a positive experience. The more they do it, I explain, the more they are rewiring their brain to take more notice of and enjoy good experiences; and to be less sensitive to the bad ones.

Over time, this creates feelings of calm, confidence, satisfaction, pride, self-compassion, and so on.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Finding Your Way Through Depression

Image by Aiony Haust

When you get depressed, it's easy to think you are the only person who has ever felt this bad – but anyone can become depressed, especially when they suffer a major loss such as bereavement or divorce. Depression can also be a response to feeling overwhelmed by life, when the stress or upset are just too much to bear. Even the strongest of us have our limits, so when we take on too much, or life overloads us with problems, it’s easy for our mood to dip.

When you are feeling depressed, it's easy to imagine that everything is hopeless, or that you will never get better. You may be tired all the time, unable to sleep properly, taking little interest or pleasure in the things you used to enjoy. You might feel angry or irritable about every little thing, or be fearful and anxious for no obvious reason. You may also have suicidal thoughts, which are very common when we are depressed.

It’s important to distinguish between different kinds of depression. Mental health professionals talk about mild, moderate and severe depression, which are just ways of distinguishing between how much it is affecting you, your day-to-day mood and ability to function. I think it’s also useful to recognise that some people only ever have one episode of depression – usually in response to a loss or life crisis – while others have ‘chronic’ depression, which means they experience repeated bouts of low mood for years or even throughout their life.

There is much debate about what causes depression, but in the cognitive therapy model we see depression as a result of persistent negative thinking, which may be triggered by a painful life event, but is also linked to underlying negative beliefs.

Negative beliefs are key

Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, calls these beliefs the ‘cognitive triad’, meaning negative beliefs about yourself, your experiences and your future. These beliefs may lie dormant throughout your life, until they are triggered by a loss or crisis, when they become active and start to dominate your thinking.

People with depression use all sorts of images and metaphors to describe their experience, but commonly talk about viewing the world through dark glasses, being under a black cloud, or everything looking grey (Winston Churchill, one of many famous people who have suffered from depression, talked about the ‘black dog’ that followed him everywhere). These images reflect the overwhelmingly negative bias to your thinking when you are down, making everything seem a bit bleak, hopeless and too much to cope with.

Withdrawing from the world

When you are depressed you also stop doing the things you used to enjoy, like going to movies, spending time with friends or cooking delicious food. This is absolutely normal, and in many ways perfectly understandable, because these things no longer give you any pleasure, so why would you bother?

You may also be exhausted, so lack the energy to go out and engage with the world. More than that, you might find interacting with other people difficult or even painful, so again it makes sense to withdraw from your relationships with others.

The key point here is that, although completely normal and understandable, when you stop doing things you used to enjoy or seeing other people you get increasingly withdrawn and isolated. If you spend all day in bed, you will probably not be resting, but instead engage in ‘rumination’, with all those dark thoughts going round and round your head.

Think of it this way – who wouldn’t get depressed if they never did anything fun and spent all day thinking about everything that was wrong with them and their lives?      

Re-engaging with life

So one of the first things I do with depressed clients is to help them start doing things again – very gently at first, but slowly re-engaging with life. If you are really down, this might just be doing the laundry and tidying your flat; for other people it may be doing some gentle exercise, cooking at least one healthy meal a day, or planning a trip so they have something to look forward to.

Gradually their mood lifts until they feel well enough to tackle those negative thoughts – again, slowly and steadily, but persistently examining and talking back to the thoughts that tell them they are rubbish, hopeless or a failure. Over time they realise that once they take off those dark glasses, they can see life is not so bleak, that there is hope and that – with a little help, guidance and support – they can find a way through depression.

Warm wishes,

Dan