Thanks for Your Great Book

Dear Ms. Curtiss

Your book „Brainswitch“ helped me very much in easing the depression I suffer from since my fathers death 28 months ago.

Actually for 8 months depression left me completely, but two months ago it popped up again. So I guess I have to work harder ( I am using Sanskrit mantras for emergency now).

One question is on my mind:

When You speak about directed thinking, repeating „ yes“ or „green frog“ or whatever , do You mean saying it loud, or whispering or mouthing the words or think them silently?

Please be specific about this, I am the kind of person who needs exact guidelinesJ

One observation I want to share :

Directed thinking definitely helps and eases the pain of depression, but in  my case after doing it a while a kind of obsessive reaction starts. Strange, uncomely words pop up and making me feel desperate again (How can I have such bad thoughts?“). This obsessive thinking is very hard to get rid of.  Maybe You can comment on this.

Kind regards

J., Vienna, Austria

Dear J,

When I refer to saying "green frog" over and over I mean in your mind--saying it to yourself. When I first started using "green frog" I screamed it in my mind. Now if you want to say it out loud, you can, and it may be that hearing the words and the act of mouthing them will be of help in increasing your powers of concentration on them through a kind of body-mind connection.  Nursery rhymes are especially good for saying out loud as well as saying in your mind.  What is necessary is to say it so fast, either out loud or to yourself, that it blocks the acknowledgment in the neocortex that depression is being produced in the subcortex--gives the downer thinking less of a chance to intrude.

Obsessive thinking of horrible thoughts should slowly be exchanged for obsessive thinking about non-horrible thoughts. Any kind of meditation or breathing exercises are helpful for obsessive thinking. Transcendental meditation and deep breathing helps with obsessive thinking. You need to distract your mind away from obsessive thinking toward something else that is more outer directed and productive. You can choose your own thoughts. It helps to plan ahead which thought you are going to think instead of the horrible thought so that you link those two together in the brain so that when the bad thought pops up, the good thought is linked to it. Remember that the brain works by learned association. You can create new learned associations between thoughts. And the other thing to remember is that the mind always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. You make any thought dominant by repetitively thinking it over and over.  

A. B. Curtiss