Welcome to my Blog

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

How Brainswitching Works

I received this comment from humanjoke
i've got the all time most pathetic case of depression. 19 years i have dealt with this with the last 10 on meds. it involves a time in my life when my wife (who was my girlfriend then) and I made some mistakes. I never fully trusted that i got the truth but i found a way to cope and move on with life. but after my first child was about to be born the depression resurfaced like a freight train and has been on and off. the fact that my wife still says she loves me and hasn’t left me is a freaking miracle. 100,000 would have gotten a divorce and another 100,000 would have committed suicide by now if they had my brain. 19 years PATHETIC! I feel there is no help for me and not only am i suffering but so is my family by not having me healthy. so if u think that a couple of years of depression is bad remember and learn from this. do everything u can to fight it or end up like me. a walking shell of a person
Dear humanjoke

I do understand the pathetics of depression. I spent 30 years, off an on, depressed and causing my family a lot of stress and pain. One day it was so bad I thought I would die from the pain. Which is why I didn't kill myself. I felt like I was already dying. I was screaming, groaning, crawling on the floor, knocking my head against the wall and insisting that "someone has to help me."

But no help came and I was all by myself. I had been reading all these self-help books about positive thinking. Why couldn’t I help myself? I’d never thought of that before. I always thought I needed to find the perfect therapist who would give me the magic solution and the reason I was so pitiful was that I hadn’t found the right person yet to cure me. It never occurred to me before that the only person who could cure me was me.

For some reason I finally decided no one was going to help me and if I was going to be saved I better do something myself. But I didn’t know what I could do to help myself. What? I had no idea. I decided to think a positive thought like all those self-help books said.  I couldn't think of a positive thought. The only thought that came to me was "green frog" so I decided to think that. What could I lose? I could always fall back and continue and pick up my screaming and crying. and crawling on the floor anytime I wanted.

But, just for a minute, I would think of "green frog." I kept thinking it and thinking it and thinking it and I kept putting off the depression for just a bit more while I thought "green frog." It was the first time I had ever stood up to my depression and challenged it. After about 20 minutes I really felt okay. No pills, no shock treatments no therapy. I just fought back, all by myself. I was totally surprised. I had never "come out of" a depression before as a result of some action I took. Before, depression had lasted for days, or weeks or months, then it kind of faded on its own, then it hit again.

From this day on I devised a whole new way of thinking for myself. Depression might come upon me, but I found I could always hold it at bay for a while with new thinking and new behavior. I no longer cringed before my depression. I learned to ignore it while I engaged with life in some small positive or productive way and always, after a while, minutes sometimes, hours other times, my depression faded back into my brain from the "devil's corner" in my brain where it always lays curled.

I know it is there. I can never kill it. But it no longer runs my life. Like a mad dog, I turn away from it and it seems to have an invisible chain that it cannot follow me any longer where I go. The darkness cannot intrude itself on the light. We need to keep our light turned on.

The principle behind the chain on my depression is that the brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. My current dominant thought used to be how depressed I was. I learned to make other thoughts dominant by repetitively thinking them over and over until the brain turned away from its following depressive thinking and became engaged in more productive thinking, at which time the "mad dog" holed up again in its cage, waiting for another opportunity to take me over.

The depression dog can try, and it still does, now and then leap on me and bring me down. But my thinking is so automatically geared to making another thought dominant that the dog’s lunges are usually short-lived. The dog has its own chain because of the principles by which the brain functions. One is that the brain works by learned association. There is a new learned association in my brain between depression and my thinking another thought so that depression never appears without the idea to think something else.

Here is another principle. Depression is only produced and is limited to the subcortex of the brain. It is never in the area of the neocortex. You can learn to brainswitch from the subcortex to the neocortex by thinking a different non-emotional cognitive, or funny or nonsense thought.

The other principle is the process of pain perception. The signals that depression, or any other psychic or physical pain, is being produced in the subcortex must travel up the brain and not only be received but be acknowledged in the neo-cortex. The acknowledgment is beneath our normal awareness but if you know it happens you can prevent the acknowledgement that depression is going on in the subcortex by thoughtjamming it with another thought in the neocortex, like "green frog."

The other principle is that the human being can only think one thought at a time. This is why hypnosis workd for heart surgery and transcendental meditation works for depression and anxiety.

Don't give up. First go to a good Chinese nutritionist to make sure you don't need to take some hormones or nutrients that are missing in your brain that could bring on depression or anxiety. Then start to plan some mind techniques, some nonsense thoughts, nursery rhymes that you are going to concentrate on instead of your depression.

No longer do the behaviors of depression. This is easier even than doing the mind techniques. Don't talk in a weak, sad voice. Don't look unhappy. Don't lie sulking on the couch. Smile. Look at the sky and thank your lucky stars that you don't see a mushroom cloud outside your window. Get up, do some exercise, do some small chores and be cheerful and helpful to those around you. and stop thinking so much about how you feel. Self-focus breeds depression. When your behavior changes a lot of your feeling does too. 

Believe me. If someone were sawing off one of your arms you would immediately cease to be depressed. You would be thinking about how you were being tortured. But you don't have to get that drastic. You can think something like "green frog" or "hippoty hop" instead of the thought I am depressed. Hope this helps. It's hard to do at first, but you get better at it.  A. B. Curtiss

No comments: