All-natural Anti-Depressant: Part 4

Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions

BROADEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE: SITUATIONS

Both of the times in my life that I had severe depression were influenced greatly by my perception of my situation. The situation of my first bout of depression was similar to many young teenagers: I was trying to cope with physical and emotional growth in a hostile environment and I wasn't hacking it. In my second bout of severe depression, my situation was conducive to self-doubt, guilt, and fear of consequences. It wasn't until I took a step back and critically looked at the things I valued and believed in firmly that I realized how to pull myself out. You have to have a plan if you want to get out of depression for good, it will not happen to you unless you make changes to your life.

When I was 13-15, the first time I was depressed, I didn't instantly conclude that my friends were causing my problems. It seems obvious now that the situation I had gotten into was the biggest influence on what was causing me stress and sadness. I had put myself into a situation that made me unhappy--or rather, I didn't do anything with my life and that's what put me in that situation. I didn't try to control my situation, I let my situation control me. Because I let life happen to me rather than make life happen for me, I had (and thought) that I had no control over my life and that is was miserable because of things outside of me.
I don't want to get into the details of the situation when I was 20 years old and facing another severe depression, but I can remember waking up every day in a bad, depressed mood and thinking that I must be under some sort of punishment for decisions I made already and couldn't change or correct. To add to my situation, I was among people who I didn't trust and I wasn't allowed to speak to my family and friends about my situation. Things were bad.
In both of my worst moments, I didn't realize that my depression was primarily situational. Once I got out of the bad situation, created some space from it, it eventually got better, but I wasn't sure at the time that it ever would. Once you get out a bad situation, life really does gradually get better, but sometimes that only makes you feel more depressed because the task of getting out of your situation can seem daunting. Don't be discouraged, because your problem isn't that you are in a bad situation, it is that right now you lack the knowledge of how to get out.

When I was 13 till I was 15, I didn't seize control of my life and therefore I didn't have any control over what happened to me. Instead of putting myself out into the world and into situations where I could make friends, I stayed at home and was comfortable with the "friends" who latched on to me, rather than me reaching out to make friends for myself. Instead of doing anything that would have given me accomplishments and would have made me feel good about myself, I did things that I thought made me smarter such as studying and reading. Don't get me wrong, I had a few good friends and I really was becoming smarter, but I was focusing on the wrong things and I wasn't making any kind of decisions! I thought being smart would make me friends and I thought that they would just come to me if they liked me--never did I realize that smart people have few friends and you have to reach out to other people to make friends.

The fourth ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is to broaden your perspective of your situation. The things that you're doing right now, the things that you value, you have to take a hard look at them and determine if they are contributing to what you ultimately want or if they are taking you in a different direction. The things that I valued and believed were good things, but they weren't directly correlated with what my desires were (to be happy). It has taken me many years to come to the conclusion that smart people have benefits, but making friends isn't related to being smart--it isn't one of the benefits of being smart--respect might be a benefit of being smart, but respect doesn't mean you'll make friends, it just means that the friends you make will be more likely to respect you.
In science, if a claim is considered "valid" that means that whatever the claim to do relates to what it claims will happen. One way you can look at this is that some of your values might not be valid values. Some of the things that you think will make you happy, such as having more money, possessions, or even things you have no control over, like better genetics, or pleasing your family or friends, or anything related to other people for that matter--these things might not actually make you happy or worse, they might not be possible.

Broadening your perspective of your situation will require you to make a list (mental or on paper) of all the things you currently believe will make you happy and to be open to the possibility that other things might be true, even the opposite might be true. For example, living your life trying to please your parents and not be seen as selfish might contribute to depression, but living your life to please your self and be independent of your parents might actually make you very happy. You never know if something is true or not unless you try it out, so don't limit yourself to false preconceptions and you might be surprised at how well they work!

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