Some of My Early Experience With Mood Change

I'm editing my book Depression is a Choice to put it on Kindle. Yesterday, I ran across this paragraphs about my early experience with getting control over my mood change and thought it might be a helpful addition to the posts lately.

"When I was depressed I, too, heard people say that depression was caused by self-pity and it helped me “keep a lid on myself,” out of shame, in front of those people. (Sometimes it is a great source of strength that we do not dare to show weakness in front of our fellows) Later, as a therapist, I noticed that everyone who believed that depression was caused by self-pity didn’t suffer from depression. One of my first investigations was to find out if these people believed such a thing because they didn’t get depressed, and were simply ignorant of the pain the rest of us had to endure. Or was it the other way around? Was the reason they didn’t get depressed directly due to the fact that they had that belief?

I concluded that the reason some people don’t suffer from depression is because they believe it is caused by self-pity, and therefore they simply refuse to concentrate on how bad they feel and, as an act of will, turn their attention to something else the moment depression falls upon them. It was my first important clue. My second important clue was people who believed that they could be happy if they just “put their mind to it,” and acted “as if” they were happy, whether they “felt like it or not.”

At first I considered such people stupid, boring, phony, and shallow. Then, when I found I could replicate their experience, I learned from them that the painful strategies of the primal mind can be fooled into “standing down” if we act “as if” we’re happy, and before long we will actually feel happy. This is corroborated by other therapists’ work. In his book on depression, Terrence Real encourages his patients to do the behavior and let the feelings follow later–to fake it until you make it. Which is really just another way of saying we should choose to fund our behavior by the use of higher-mind principles no matter how we feel, and let the resulting rational and creative thinking effect a positive mood change in the primal mind, sooner or later, as a result.

To be honest, in the beginning my mood control was more clever than wise as I often slipped right over into mania, of which I was sublimely unaware. The important thing about these experiences was that they taught me to question the reality of things that I had always taken for granted. I began to question the reality of my depression. This was the paradigm shift in attitude necessary to develop the concept of Directed Thinking.

But please understand that I am not just talking about intellectual conjecture. I experimented with myself by initiating behavior different from the usual just to see what would happen. When I got depressed I did something other than just taking to my bed. Anything else. It is not possible to question the reality of depression without some actual experiences that cause one to question it.

Much later I found the neuroscientific explanation for the positive outcome of these experiences, such as the mood management by those inveterate “happiness thinkers.” The mood change comes about because their very specific choice of thoughts or action activates neural activity in the higher mind, thereby causing a lessening of neural activity in the primal mind, where depression is located."

Sometimes I Forget the Most Important Thing

First I want to express my thanks for people who email me with supporting comments, and helpful ideas.  Someone wrote me that when they read in one of my first blogs that I beat depression, they understood where I was coming from, and they would go on to read the blog with a clearer understanding. Sometimes I forget that the most important thing about my work it that I beat my own manic depression (they call it bipolar now.).

I guess I do forget that sometimes, in the busyness of trying to answer someone's question. The most important thing about all my exercises and explanations is that these are the exact things that got me out of depression, and continue to get me out of depression whenever depression hits me. I spent so many decades a slave to depression whenever it called upon me to do its bidding, you'd think I wouldn't forget. But because I haven't "been depressed" for more than twenty years, I don't always remember that I need, more often, to make that connection for people.

There is no way to tell someone to read the first two blogs first. So I guess I will have to think about re-writing my intro that appears at the beginning of the most current daily post.

I will try to incorporate that most important fact in the most concise way, not leaving out all those things that add legitimate credibility to what I say.

In the meantime, let me state again. I beat depression with mind tricks, inspiration and intellectual understanding from ancient wisdom, and a system of brainswitching techniques I created by using the ideas and exercises on myself and my own depression. It is a system that never fails to work.  I can show it to anyone that wants to learn some cognitive behavioral techniques.

It doesn't matter if a person is on medication for depression. Learning how your brain works, and how you can manage a big depression hit can be useful if you are on or off depression medication. These techniques have no negative side effects. The only problem is that it is very difficult at first to direct your own thinking because your brain's entrenched thinking habits are hard to break. That's the bad news.

The good news is that it does get easier as you automatically start to build new neural connections to the new habits of thinking, but it always takes a great deal of effort and tenacity to turn away from depression when it hits.

I'm Sorry to Tell You this but You are Wrong and Disrespectful

I had an anonymous  comment on my post We Have No Idea What Percent of our Thinking is On-going Negative..."October 18. 2010:

HERE IS THE POST:

“I am sorry to tell you this but you are wrong. Studies show that football players who have a lot of concussions missing brain cells get depressed. Also the chemicals in your brain can be off or it can be genetic. Please try and be open minded because you cannot make up a disease that millions of people have. This is disrespectful.” Anonymous

HERE IS MY RESPONSE:

I pass along this information, not because I am not respecting people who suffer from depression, but because I absolutely respect their ability to take advantage of ideas and processes which are not well known to the general public, outside of the field of neurobiology.

It is certainly true that there can be tissue damage to the brain due to physical trauma, and the capacity for self-management of thinking and mood will therefore be limited. But for a normal brain that hasn’t been damaged by physical trauma, and chronically goes in and out of depression, obvious there isn’t tissue damage involved.

By knowing our brains work, how we actually get from one thought to another, and the importance of neurotransmitters and neurobiological processes like the process of pain perception  to getting out of depression, we can learn how to manage it. Psychiatrists, instead, point to chemical imbalance as a “probable cause.”

However there is a chemical consequence in the brain for every thought we think. If we think the thought lemon, there is a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes the physical symptom of salivation. The chemical imbalance rights itself when you stop thinking the thought lemon and you stop salivating.

A depression pamphlet from Kaiser Permanente states right on the front page “nobody knows the real cause of depression.” Once you know how your brain works, and that depression is only located in the subcortex, never in the neocortex, it is only common sense that if we are depressed  we should think thoughts that stimulate neural activity in the neocortex, our thinking brain, instead of our subcortex, our emotional brain (where depression is raging) .

It can be shown by neuro-imaging that some thoughts stimulate neural activity in the neocortex and other thoughts stimulate neural activity in the subcortex. This is not a matter of disrespect, this is a matter of science and anyone can check it out by hooking themselves up to a neuro-imaging machine.

As far as a genetic connection with depression. There is no medical evidence that points to depression as being inherited rather than a family, group, or or cultural “contagion” of adoptive thinking habits and behavioral strategies. See the book Depression is Contagious by Dr. Michael Yapko. There is medical evidence that depression is contagious.

There is ample medical evidence that the brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought and you can make any thought dominant by thinking it repetitively. This is how you can effect a mood change if you wish to make the effort. Again you can check this out with a neuro-imaging machine.

I was in a science museum in Connecticut last month that had a neuro-imaging set-up where  even children can hook up to the machine, lower their brainwaves by thinking non-stressive  thoughts and watch their brain activity on a screen go from agitated to calm.

Knowing about these things, things  like the process of pain perception is so important. All depression is produced in the subcortex  and the signals must go up the brain and be, not only received, but acknowledged in the neocortex before you can be depressed. With the use of interstitial choice you can block the message in the neo cortex that depression is being produced  in the subcortex and the depression, without your concentration on and acknowledgment of it, will soon fade in intensity.

People, including doctors and psychiatrists, who don’t know much about neurobiology will be necessarily limited in their ability to handle their depression. Unfortunately most doctors today are rushed and too dependent on pharmaceutical salesmen who are marketing their latest drug. While the cover story this year in Newsweek magazine (Jan 29) tells us that new research shows antidepressants are no better in the treatment of depression than placebos

Some people, just because they hear it constantly in ads from pharmaceutical companies, or read research funded by pharmaceutical companies get boxed into thinking they are the helpless victims of depression.  This is a hard psychological position from which to manage their depression.

It is sad that my work as a cognitive behavioral therapist to offer exercises and information to people who want to become self-responsible and learn how to direct their thinking and moods  to get out of depression  would be thought to be disrespectful to depressed people.

You don’t have to believe in the exercises. Do them and try them out for yourself. There are no negative side effects to educating yourself as to how your own brain works, or doing mind exercises to improve your management over your own thinking and moods. A. B. Curtiss

You Never Finish Working on Your Life--Life is a Daily Chore

I noticed this morning that I woke up without the upbeat feelings I've had for the last couple of days. I wasn't "down" either. I was curious, what about the laundry room, I thought? How did I still feel about that? I thought about the laundry room and got no big high about that either.

Oh, well, I thought, I have put a lot of clutter away already and if I want to, and I guess I can always give myself another jolt of jolly good thoughts, and connect them back up to the laundry room. Our brains are such absolute slaves to learned association.

The learned associations have no choice but to connect with one another.  Just by that thought alone, "jolly good" already I felt a "shift." My next thought recalled the laughing out loud I did the other day walking down the stairs. The next thought was recalling the old first feelings of excitement about the laundry room.

And now, just in the act of writing this, all those connections are flashing back and forth at the speed of light in my brain, and I can't even help myself from a really good mood returning (not that I would want to prevent a good mood). My mood just changed from okay to really okay. After I finish this post I'm going to get up and go put something more away in the laundry room, goody goody.

Now, to be honest. I have spent a lot of effort to learn how to focus my thinking where I want to because I spent so many decades in the abject subjection to depression. I am very good at it directing my mind. I am as good at changing my mood as I used to be at staying depressed for weeks at a time.

I can turn away from a down thought as soon as I know I have it, and not return to it, or at least I can keep turning away and turning away, and in just a few minutes my brain is off that direction and in a new direction. But if I can do it so can anyone else. It is a human capacity to direct your own thinking, and control your own emotions, and ultimately, your own life. Human freedom of thought. It is our greatest gift.
A. B. Curtiss

More on Moods and Feelings and Their Control Over Us

The last couple of posts I have been talking about my latest experience in changing my mood from a downer to a real up mood. I wondered if it might be helpful to include this snippet from my book Depression is a Choice, which I am now trying to reformat for Kindle but not quite through yet. 

It occurred to me that, unless you have at least the intellectual idea that you are separate from your feelings and not a prisoner of them, as people believe who believe that depression is a brain disease, changing your mood as an act of will might seem preposterous. 

I ran across this early experience of my thinking where I was just starting to get the idea that I could actually separate myself from my feelings. In the past I always “was happy” or “was depressed.” I didn’t separate out myself from my feelings and look at them as simply a part of me. They so enveloped me that I thought I was my feelings. Certainly I didn’t think I could change my feelings as an act of will. Here’s an example of my first work on separating  myself from my depression.

“At first I thought of the difference between depression and “feeling good” in terms of being“conscious” or “unconscious,” because Freud’s model of the mind was what I was trained in. The minute I realized I was depressed, I would remind myself that I had “gone unconscious,” and that any “conscious activity” on my part would get me out of it. I remember having an “insight” once that went something like this, “Oh, I get it now. Depression, being a defense mechanism, means it is “unconscious,” and any “conscious” thinking or behavior takes precedence over any unconscious thinking. I refined these concepts later but perhaps seeing depression as “going unconscious” was a necessary step. Ultimately I saw that I had to differentiate myself from my enmeshment with my whole mind, not simply from my depression.

I began to understand that if I was depressed I was never in present reality. I would test this out. When I got depressed I would ask myself questions about exactly what was wrong “right now.” My fears were always either regret or anguish about the past, about what I had lost; or anxiety about the future, and what I was not going to have. Any time I started to question myself seriously about my situation I could always see that in this exact instant I was really “not so bad.”

One of the mind tricks I created to help me to a more objective view of my moods was that when I was depressed I would visualize “saving some of it in my hand” to take into the next high, to “remember” how I was when I was down. This was not terribly difficult. And when I was really high I would “save some of it in my hand” to take into depression to “remember” how it was when I was high. This was much harder.

          Since depression by its very nature is “hopeless,” it necessarily seems “endless.” Thus, it is hard to remember “being high” in the midst of a down, with the implication that another high will also come. But I insisted on doing the exercise and slowly, little by little, I got to the point where I could hold onto the idea of both extremes as being temporary moods.
  
Switching from the idea of one mood to the reality of the other, back and forth, back and forth, regardless of which mood I was “stuck” in, I learned to feel my strongest feelings without losing my sense of objective reality that I was not my feelings, I was simply having them. I learned to raise my awareness and observe myself carefully when I was deep in depression, but not to the point of experiencing myself, until one day my depression was separated out, and I was alone, looking at it."

A Quite Remarkable Mood Change Experience

The mood change I effected the other day is truly remarkable. Not only for it longevity--I'm still very up today without any further effort--buut for its intensity. I'm so joyful I'd  be manic if I didn't know better. But also it shows how simple it is to link almost anything, your mood, a project, a chore, with a bunch of positive emotional tags that already exist in your memory bank. I won't say it's easy because when you don't feel all that up you don't feel like doing anything about it either. It's always an effort to get out of a down mood.

The mood change the other day also shows how infantile the emotional subcortex really is. I still can't believe how excited my emotional subcortex now gets over that darn laundry room. I have cleaned a good part of it. And what continues to amaze me is how "fun" all of a sudden that dumb laundry room is. After being a drag on me for months. I look forward (my subcortex looks forward) to my next visit. I can hardly get by the room without "putting one more thing away." I didn't know I had a potential
Disney World housing my washer and dryer. That's what my subcortex thinks anyway.

This whole thing has been a much more powerful lesson than I realized when I first started out just to get out of a kind of nothing much going on neutral mood because I really like an upbeat, energetic one. A. B. Curtiss

Effecting a Mood Change One Small Thought at a Time

Yesterday I determined to look for small things to think positively about, or even take a bit of joy in. I wasn’t overly  ambitious. I was just going to nudge my thinking off its negative course bit by bit .My mental barometer had slipped out of sunny mode into cloudy all day without my realizing it. But now I was realizing it.

I started looking for small things to think positively about, or even take a bit of joy in. I was just going to nudge my thinking off its negative course bit by bit. My mental barometer had slipped out of “sunny” mode into “cloudy all day” without my realizing it. But now I was realizing it.

I was determined to effect a course correction. While I was swimming I decided to think about the laps I had already done rather than the laps I hadn’t accomplished yet. I found I could do that with a little effort. I just kept  correcting myself. First I would think I had ten laps to go. Then I nudged that automatic thought aside with my chosen thought, “I’ve done ten laps already, good for me, think about that.”

Then I did the same thing with my yoga. I congratulated myself on the positions I had finished, instead of the ones yet to do. That too, I just had to keep correcting myself. Kind of like instructing a kid audience in a school play, “All right everybody, let’s have some applause for this  little lady, if you please.”

I next thought how I wasn’t real enthusiastic about editing my book because of the technical problems. So I decided not to think about that.  I kind of set that aside. It was planned work but it was “after breakfast.”I thought about getting breakfast instead.

Walking downstairs getting ready to make my smoothie for breakfast I decided to try a little laughing out loud since my husband wasn’t home. It didn’t bring any immediate change of mood. However, again I noticed to myself  that I had “at least done it, so take some credit for that.”

At the bottom of the stairs I decided that the laundry room was really a mess and I absolutely committed myself to put away at least one thing every day from now on until it was clean. I made a further decision to do that one thing right NOW. I did one thing and noticed that there were several items that were real easy to put in their proper place so I put away quite a few things. I spent maybe 5 minutes with this.

WOW. This time I noticed an immediate mood change. Not huge. Not that I was jumping for joy. But I was much more energized. I was thinking, “Hey this is really doable. I think I’ll have this spic and span in a week.“ This, after months of disarray and lint dusted floors. “I feel really good about the laundry room,” I told myself, as I continued on to the kitchen.

As I’m getting breakfast, I keep thinking about how great it was that I had put away so many things in the laundry room in such a short time. With not all that much effort. I kept thinking about it.  It wasn’t even so much I kept choosing, on-purpose, to think about it. I had started the brain in a new direction. The self talk just kept recreating itself in a more positive way. “Hey you really made a dent in it, didn’t you?” I think I may have even detected a childish “Goody,  goody for you” sneaking in.

After breakfast I got the idea of googling for help with my tech problem and what do you know? I found a company that for a nominal fee would take your book file and format it for Kindle. With that good news I was much more enthusiastic about getting down to finishing my part of the editing.

My mood now was totally different from what it had been for days. The grey cloud was all gone in about two hours.  I was energized to work on my book. I felt good about the things I had done, and was going to do for the day. And I thought about how it had come about. There were a couple of things that were obvious to me.

First,  I was glad I had taken my own advice that I hand out to other people and made an effort to redirect my thinking. Second, it was also obvious to me why these small changes, serially inconsequential as they were, turned the mood tide.

With every single  separate time I thought a small positive thought that nudged aside the small negative thought, I gave my brain another instruction to “connect with tasks accomplished,” “connect with things positive,” “connect with self-accomplishment,” connect with good thoughts about myself,” “connect with laughing,” “connect with clean laundry room,” connect with doing good,” connect with “goody goody,” connect with “fun things,”  

That’s the way the brain works, by learned association. Whatever thought you think, the brain takes as  instructions to get in touch with all other similar thoughts in your memory bank. And remember, the brain always follows the direction of your most current dominant thought. You  make a thought dominant by thinking it repetitively.

And when you are feeling good and energized, your mind is then ready for creativity, you get new ideas, like looking for help on the Internet for a technical problem. I had effected, on purpose, a complete mood change to sunny in the same way I had, accidently, effected a mood change to cloudy one small, inconsequential thought or action at a time.   

And that laundry room that had been a drag on my mind for months? It had turned into a “fun thing” by learned association in my brain to “fun things,”” accomplished things,” “good-for-you things,” instead of being connected to “things you haven’t done,” “things to feel bad about.” My feelings about the mess in the laundry  room, instead of bringing me down,  was actually turning  it into a fun thing, almost an adventure.

We should not forget that our emotional brain remains a child. Experts say it never matures like the neocortex. You see why you should never “believe” your emotional brain? It is so easily manipulated—on purpose or by accident. You are never gloomy, your emotional kid brain is gloomy.

So my emotional kid brain was now getting a "goody-goody" charge out of anticipating what things "we're going to put away next." The laundry room became  a source of “fun” and excitement for the emotional brain instead of drudgery. “Let’s do the laundry room again, Mommy? Nothing in my life had changed except my thinking. But I certainly felt my life had changed. My emotional barometer was now "sunny all day."

The brain is totally dependent upon us for its attitude about anything. Present reality for our brain is  how we connect it to our environment by the thoughts we think about our environment--by the new learned associations we forge in our brain, neuron by neuron. We make our brain and then our brain make life pleasant or unpleasant for us, depending on its mood. We have incredible power over our lives. We have as much power over our lives as we have over our laundry rooms. We should not forget to use it.        A. B. Curtiss