Negative Thoughts Keep Pursuing Me

QUESTION:

I could use a reminder if you feel willing. Life seems pointless. Are people just pretending that life is good and ignoring all this bad stuff? My most persistent recurrent thoughts are like: "You are not doing enough." It’s like the thoughts are really after me right now. It does not seem like it's from a mental habit. It seems downright malicious. Like something is trying to kill me to be honest. I mean, how much more can I stand? Even if I am miserable, I just keep going right? Just keep going to work, just keeping living, no matter what. So sorry for all of this negativity.  I should wait to write til I’m in better a mood.

ANSWER:

Might as well get all the garbage thoughts out when they knock on your door. But remember, you have many doors in your mind. Each thought is a new door. If one opens which you did not want, simply open the door to a thought you do want. The brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. You make any thought dominant by thinking it repetitively.

Your thoughts can pursue you but they lose their strength because you are not obligated to think them when they pop up. You can notice them, “thanks but no thanks.” Then, immediately, you can think another thought and if you concentrate on YOUR thought, the thought that popped up will fade.

An important thing to remember is that depression is the FEELING of hopelessness--that all is lost, nothing is worth anything, life is worthless, I am worthless and I am helpless to get out of this bad place, none of which is true. You don't have to think these thoughts. They are not reality. Reality is doing the task at hand, not musing about whether or not it is worthwhile to do it. STOP the negative thinking and think something else. A. B. Curtiss

I Keep Asking Myself What is Life Really About Anyway

QUESTION:

Here are a bunch of thoughts which constantly go through my mind. Especially when I’m in a group of people whose company I’m supposed to be enjoying. "What is life really about, what's the point, are people all just acting?" These thoughts are super sticky. Hard to get rid of them.

They seem like they are reasonable thoughts but now I’m beginning to wonder if they are just negativity too, disguised as philosophical ponderings, though they do feel pretty awful so that’s probably the first clue. They come in demanding answers and leave me feeling distant from others. I end up watching life as if I am some cold alien observer, and when it happens in front of people I feel panicky. I recall your advice was to get interested in what people are saying, but I am still left with that yucky removed feeling.

ANSWER:

That yucky, removed feeling is the first clue that you are into trouble--a trouble called self-focus. Self-focus is the same trouble all us human beings share to one extent or the other. If you understand that the brain and its product, the mind, is a defense mechanism, then you can see how, if it is left to wander and think by itself, it can easily end up in fearful thinking.

All that stuff about what is life all about seems philosophical, but it is simply fearful thinking. The way you find out what life is all about is when you actively engage in life, with others, and with things that other people are interested in. Panic always results from self-focus which always turns into fearful thinking. Self focus is the very opposite of self-understanding.

Self-focus is really the key to everything. If we do not choose to direct our minds, our minds can overwhelm us with all sorts of varieties of negative thinking. In the absence of any conscious direction on our part, the mind can direct itself right into a sticky mental mess. It is the sticky mental mess that always wonders what life is all about.

The poet Goethe was clearly referring to this same idea when he wrote, “Where a man has a passion for meditation without the capacity for thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.” Understanding the role of self-focus can insure that we know how to avoid that. We just have to put our intellectual understanding of what self-focus is into a daily practice of avoiding self-focus and quickly getting out of it when we find ourselves in it.      

A. B Curtiss

How to Override Your Instinctual Negative First Thought in Any Situation

QUESTION:

My goal and intention is to retrain my brain so that I can immediately turn away from negative thoughts and feel my okayness. I want to be able to rely on my ability to do this so that I can lose the fear of the return of bad feelings.

Last night I turned to your website for some uplifting reading and I clicked on the thought of the week and it was about how you had trouble sleeping and your mind was racing and how you eventually got to sleep. I allowed myself to feel anxious about the fact that you can still suffer anxiety and you are way more practiced then I am. So in the end, I just ended up picking up more worry where I was looking for ease. That is the way my mind currently operates. I am working on it.

ANSWER:

It is human nature that our first instinct is to jump to the negative because our brain is a defense mechanism. Our brain is responsible for our DEFENSE: As a defense mechanism, it is always looking for the negative slant in everything. Just like the Secret Service agents who guard the president. These agents are not trained to look for the positive. They are dedicated to look for the slightest thing which might turn into a negative and endanger their “charge.”

Our brain is the same way but, of course, in this case WE are the “charge,” not the president.  And we should always respect this facet of our psyche because it is designed to alert us to some unusual real danger that might one day occur to us.

However, in general, since most of us do not live a life of everyday danger and intrigue, we have to override this tendency toward the negative by insisting that WE can look for the more productive possibility in what lies before us.

When we earnestly decide to do this, since the brain works by learned association, we will find that we can attach to that first instinctual thought caused from the fact that the brain seeks the negative, the concomitant thought that HOWEVER, WE can look for the possible, or positive idea so that it will immediately pop up and occur to us at the first stab of needless instinctual doubt or fear.

Learned association, remember, is just like thinking salt and then the idea of pepper naturally occurs to us because we MADE that association between the two. Most associations are caused accidentally but we can also make on-purpose learned associations. Like associating the thought “I have just turned off the ignition key” to the thought, “now put the keys in a safe place before you open the door.”

OR. Okay, I can see that negative in this situation, now what is a more useful, productive thought I can think that can override the useless, instinctual negative and get me going in a more positive direction. The more you practice, the quicker you will remember to grab for some more positive application.

A.B. Curtiss

Don't Feel Guilty about being Unhappy

QUESTION:

In your book DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE you say that your husband is never depressed.Did you feel guilty about your husband ever? What I mean is when you were so depressed all those years.

For myself I keep thinking that this is not the person my husband signed on to marry—someone who is constantly miserable and unhappy. I love him so much that I would rather see him with someone else who does not have this trouble. Someone who is not afraid of so much, afraid to have kids. I feel like such a burden. Also I am deeply embarrassed that I can't control my mind enough to be happy. It's so effing embarrassing.

ANSWER:

One of the first permissions I gave myself after I started to get a better handle on my depression was that I don’t have to be happy. It’s not a requirement in order to move ahead with my day. You’d be surprised how much guilt this lifted from my overburdened soul. You can’t just will yourself happy. It doesn’t work that way. Happiness is a byproduct of the relationship between on-purpose thinking and on-purpose behavior.

When those moments of unhappiness come to me, I recognize them and accept them. But I no longer self-focus on them. I no longer further power up the fear factory of stress chemicals by the immediate reactive thought. "Oh, no. Not again!. I quickly move on to something more pro-active and productive. What I found was that no matter how unhappy I get, I can always be cheerful. Just because I get a neurological hit of depression, that doesn’t mean I am therefore compelled to do all the depressive behaviors I used to do in addition to the yucky feelings still blindsided me now and then.

You don't have to be happy, you just have to be cheerful and move forward courageously with your day. You just have to avoid and ignore whatever unhappiness has fallen to your lot. Unhappiness, a feeling, is a product of the subcortex. Cheerfulness, a principle of attitude, is a product of the neocortex.

We have two different chemical factories and we can choose which one we wish to power up by manning one production line or the other, according to the thoughts we choose to think.  “True joy,” says Seneca, “is a serene and sober motion; and they are miserably out that take laughing for rejoicing; the seat of it is within and there is no cheerfulness like the resolutions of a brave mind.”  

A. B. Curtiss

Should I go into Counseling for my Depression and Anxiety?

QUESTION:

I am wondering if I should go into counseling for my depression and anxiety. My concern about going into counseling is that I would use it as a format to let out all of my negative and fearful thoughts and get someone’s feedback on them and then this would become a crutch. Did you find any use for counseling?

ANSWER:

I learned a great deal from counseling. The best way to get something out of counseling is to decide, in advance, what it is that you want to learn. It is helpful if you can coalesce your whole confusion of concerns into a single problem that you think would be helpful as the first thing for you to solve; or a short list of specific goals. Then you will have a better handle on where the counseling is going and, more to the point, whether it has accomplished anything for you.

The problem with some counseling is that it can drag on for years with no apparent changes for the person being counseled. After three or four sessions you should compare your progress with the goal or goals you had set in the beginning and see if your time and money has been profitably spent.

If you can narrow it down to a single problem to start with then you can ask your counselor if he has worked with people with this same problem before and what general methods he will use to help you.

A counselor who listens to session after session of “storytelling” is not terribly helpful. You can do that with a recorder and listen to yourself and make just as much progress.  I have told many of my patients who were used to doing that with former counselors that people’s back story is seldom all that useful. As a matter of fact you could exchange back stories with anybody because the cure to your problem does not lay in past behavior but in present behavior.

If you don’t like the way you are feeling or acting in your day-to-day life then the real question is what can you change in your daily life to start heading in a different direction where you exhibit different feelings and different actions? It is not helpful to figure out who is to blame for where you are. 

One of my friends told me that her husband had been going to a psychiatrist for decades to cure his depression, and all the psychiatrist ever suggested was anti-depressants and then he would encourage her husband in every session to rant and rave about the abuse he had suffered from his relatives. After a lengthy period of ranting and raving, toward the end of the session, the psychiatrist would hand her husband a pillow and tell him to "let out his feelings" and “punish” his aggressor by beating on the pillow. This kind of counseling I consider practically useless. The point is not to act out your fear and anger but deal with the pain of the repressed fear that is the source of most of our problems. There may be many people to blame for why you are the way you are, but there is only one person who can heal you and that's you. And you can only heal yourself in the present, not the past. Luckily there are many techniques to help you heal yourself.          A. B. Curtiss

The Red Flags of Irrational Action

There are times everybody gets down. It's more rational to not to go along with the down mood but to turn in another direction. I look at it this way. Sometimes it is helpful just to use your logical mind. So when I get a downer mood I might ask myself, "Would I rather spend two hours being depressed and unhappy or would I rather spend two hours going out and doing something productive and helpful to someone else no matter how I feel." The answer is then obvious. Just the very  action of getting up and accomplishing  some small task or activity may be a real catalyst to change the entire direction of your downer mood.

One of my friends told me he once went into a deep depression that dragged him down for months. “One day,” he said, “I realized that I had sat in the same chair for three days in my underwear, without doing anything except getting up and going to the bathroom. I started to talk to myself, out loud, ‘Is this rational?’ My answer was ‘No, this is not rational.’”

“So,” he said, “I got up, got my car keys, got in my car and drove down the road to the 7-Eleven. I was still in my underwear, so I didn’t go in. I waited for about 5 minutes in the parking lot and drove back home. But I had done something other than sit in that chair. It was a victory of sorts. When I got home, I got myself something to eat. I felt better.”

“After that incident, says my friend, “I decided to erect a boundary for myself, a marker to alert me. Now when I am deep in depression I visualize two little red flags, one on either side of my head, just in my peripheral vision. Those red flags tell me to get up and do something. Those red flags tell me that it is not rational to lie around and be depressed. The flags tell me to get busy. And when I see those red flags, believe me, I do get busy!”

It doesn't matter the greatness of the task that you decide to do instead of doing depression. What matters is the turn you then make, with any small non-negative action, in your direction of focus away from depression

Bad Thoughts Make the World Seem like a Bad Place

Dear AB

QUESTION:

Part of the issue for me is, although I know it must be true that thoughts are not reality. I sometimes still accept them as such. (Even though I REALLY don’t want to!) I still allow them to threaten me. They pop up, I say STOP, I move on to another thought, they come back, I stop them, they repeat. They leave this yucky feeling in their wake.

That these thoughts are there at all makes the world seem a bad place, it seems almost evil in a way. We can't have been put here to suffer...?

ANSWER:

There is no way we can prevent suffering in our lives. The good news and the bad news is that suffering is the only way we grow and nurture our strength of spirit. But we are never completely helpless when suffering turns into unmitigated anxiety. A good way to counteract the anxiety caused by our suffering is to use the four step program that Dr. Claire Weekes advised for people to get out of anxiety. Suffering does tend to cause us a lot of anxiety.

(If there has been no particular downturn for you, be sure to have yourself checked out by practitioner of homeopathic or Chinese medicine. Sometimes your body chemistry can be better balanced by use of natural supplements, or even a change of diet. Many people have found great relief by changing to a non-gluten or non-dairy diet.)

Here are Dr. Weekes's Four Steps to curing anxiety.

STEP 1: NOTICE

The first step would be to notice that you are suffering, not just from the downturn or tragedy in your life, but from your anxiety about that downturn; or from anxiety that comes from you know not where. It's best to learn to notice the first stages of anxiety because it is easier to nip it in the bud rather than let it escalate into a full-blown panic attack.

STEP 2: ACCEPTING:

:

The second step would be to focus on your anxiety in an accepting way. Oh, yes I know this, it will not overpower me. It is just my own feeling. This takes practice so, at first, just your intention to accept may be as far as you can go even if you can’t accept it all right at that moment.

I used these steps myself when I was diagnosed with PTSD after a taking a drug for a back injury. I only took it for 3 weeks so my heart goes out to those who suffer with high-intensity anxiety. The acceptance step is necessary because even the intention to accept will help over-ride the fearful thought that the anxiety is going to get worse which continues to power up the stress chemical factory in your brain. Accepting is an activity of the neocortex which, if employed long enough, can indirectly influence the subcortex into calming down. Here, too, you go back and forth from trying to accept to fearful thoughts of “Oh no, not again.

STEP 3: FLOATING:

The third step is to kind of float on top of your anxiety. Almost like you are on a cloud looking down at your pain. The pain is still there but you can insist upon yourself floating on top of it, like a forceful wave pulling you into some action or distracting possibility (like a book or a movie.) that draws you out of your pain. The pain is still there but it is more removed from you--at a distance which gives you some breathing room.

STEP 4: LET TIME PASS

Remind yourself that whatever caused this anxiety took some time to develop an insistent habit pattern in your brain. A new habit pattern of accepting and moving away from anxiety will take some time to develop.

Float on top of your stressful thoughts to thoughts about the beauty of the earth, the trees, the sky, the stars at night. Anything to turn your thoughts from self-focused to outer-directed while time passes.

A. B. Curtiss