All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Part 3

I started to write this article in the original order (Part 3 was titled "Be Individual") but I realized that I needed to explain something that I was going to talk about in part 6, so I switched the order of things.


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

EMOTIONS

Most people look at life with the lens that being emotional is bad and that we should try to be rational at every opportunity, but I have learned from my depression that Emotions are superior to rational thought. The problem that most people have is that they don't deal with their emotions correctly and so their emotions come across as a bad thing. If you want to be happy, you need to understand the role that emotions have, after all, Happiness is an emotion of itself!
The common consensus is that decisions made based on emotion are, more often than not, poor decisions. They are often described as irrational, hasty, not well-thought out, and carry a lot of negative connotations. Generally, people consider being "overly-emotional" to a bad thing as though the individual's judgement is clouded and that they aren't experiencing life normally. This is why people look at depression as such a bad thing.
Contrary to what everyone says, Emotions are not bad, Emotions are very positive. Happiness is one of the most positive emotions. People who are happy are said to be more efficient, make better decisions, are more in tune with reality and better contributors to their community and the world around them. Happiness is an emotion just like sadness is an emotion.
At the most basic level, I have determined 12 primary emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Boredom, Loneliness, Frustration, Love, and Passion as well as Pain, Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue, and being too Hot or too Cold. The six that I excluded from the main list are actually clues into the purpose of the other emotions. We feel hungry, thirsty or tired when our bodies need food, water or rest, and we feel hot when our bodies need to cool down or cold when our bodies need to warm up. These emotions are messages from our subconscious to our conscious prompting a response.
The human brain is a sophisticated tool for automating and condensing information and emotions are the link between the conscious and subconscious. Think of it this way, the subconscious is constantly gathering and interpreting information from our senses. Much of the information that we receive is useless on its own, but used together it creates meaning. For example, smelling smoke indoors could mean that your neighbor is holding a bonfire, or it could mean the house is on fire; seeing smoke indoors at the same time and feeling heat could mean there is a fire in the building. Your subconscious can interpret these senses and synthesize them so that you don't have to consciously think about them and then send you the message to run--but the message that your subconscious communicates to your conscious isn't the clear and concise "run", the message is generally an emotion: fear, confusion, anger, etc. The emotion you feel is what prompts you to run outside or to charge in with a fire extinguisher. Feeling confusion/curiosity could prompt you to investigate further only to realize that someone lit the fireplace and it went out leaving smoke everywhere.
We learn emotions through our experiences. Many toddlers are considered "fearless" until something happens that they don't like. As a baby we learn through mimicry and observation what happiness is when our parents show us attention and play with us. As we get older, our emotions become more sophisticated because we have more experiences to draw on and some of our experiences are emotions reacting to emotions. Think of a time where a good friend scared you--you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend.
Our modern language still has a hard time expressing emotions. The sentence above "you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend" isn't entirely accurate: you first felt fear, then you felt anger, then you attributed it to your friend. In describing what actually happened however, you might have thought you were angry at your friend, which is only partly true. I point out this distinction because it isn't universal. Some people feel fear and then they feel happy and laugh at their friend, other people feel fear and then feel sadness and cry, still others don't feel fear at all and instead feel confusion or frustration. The feeling that you are feeling isn't directed at your friend, it is triggered by your friend.
Emotions are triggered responses. Jumping back to the topic of the subconscious and conscious, your emotions aren't caused by other people, they are caused by yourself. Miles Sherts, in his book "Conscious Communcation" drove this point home to me, that we don't feel things because of other people, we feel things because of ourselves, other people just trigger those feelings in us. The reason that we feel fear is because we learned when we were young to steer clear of people or things that might do us harm. Loud noises and abrupt movements scare most people because they are generally associated in our minds with accidentally getting hurt so when your friend makes a loud noise while jumping up from behind you it triggers fear.
The reason that I would argue that emotions are superior to rational thought is that they are founded on experience--experiences that we often don't even remember--and they happen at lightning speeds. Rational thought takes time in order to come to any conclusion and we have to research and recall the experiences that are pertinent to the decision at hand.
As I mentioned earlier, in society, emotions are generally considered a bad thing. I think this is a fatal flaw of our society--one that we as a society have only recently started dealing with since the start of the millennium. Because we look at emotions as a bad thing, whenever we feel a negative emotion, we don't deal with that emotion but instead we brush it aside in order to make room for more rational thought.

On my path to permanently overcoming depression, I noticed two things I was doing in regards to my emotions:
First and foremost, I never really learned how to accurately describe my emotions--there isn't an emphasis on learning this in our society, so I never really made an attempt to learn what I was feeling. I would, and still do, feel hungry and think that I am feeling anger. I would feel loneliness and think that I was feeling sadness. I'm a very thin person by my natural genetics, so this doesn't apply to me, but I know many people who when they feel bored they think they are hungry. Before I could overcome depression, I needed to correct my interpretation of myself and my emotions. The word "depression" is such an overbearing term that it makes it unmanageable, but when you break it down into its individual components: Sadness, loneliness, fear, etc. Those emotions are manageable.

The second thing I was doing with my emotions was that I wasn't really addressing them. Part of this was because I didn't know what emotion I was feeling, and the other part was because I thought it wasn't acceptable to feel emotions and to act on those emotions and a third part of this was that I didn't know how to address my emotions. We are generally taught that if we feel anger we should put it aside because it can never lead to a good outcome; but this is an incorrect statement and only leads us to never addressing the emotion! Anger is just an emotion--the acts that people do because of it are bad, but the Anger is just an indication that you are in conflict with someone else or with yourself. You need to resolve your conflicts in order to stop feeling angry and you can't push them aside and forget about them without first addressing them.

The third ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is addressing your emotions. You will have to first learn what emotions you are feeling, and then learn the appropriate response for dealing with them. The next time you recognize that you feel a certain way, you will probably have to put conscious effort into determining why you feel that way. Again, remember that other people don't make you feel a certain way--our language is such that it would make us think that they do simply because the natural response is to say: so and so is making my angry--other people trigger the emotion, they don't force it upon you. Once you can determine what triggered the emotion you can address it. If your friend jumping out of a bush scared you and you were angry because of it, you could appropriately address that emotion by telling your friend that you are angry and to please not do that again.
Everyone handles their emotions differently, for some people having some room to breath (being away from others) helps them to calm down and release the emotion. For others, doing something enjoyable that takes their mind off of the emotion helps them release the emotion. Sometimes verbalizing or talking about the emotion with someone else can help you release the emotion. You may even have to try all of the above depending on what emotion you are feeling. The key here is to make a conscious effort to do these things. You want to allow yourself to feel sad, you want to allow yourself to feel angry, you want to allow yourself to feel scared, because after you have had the time to feel the emotion, (in other words to address it) you will no longer feel that emotion.

Addressing your emotions can take time. We don't always have consecutive time to address our emotions and so sometimes you might find that you can only squeeze 10 min of time here and 10 min of time there to focus on that emotion, but if you make a conscious effort to resolve the emotion and you come back to that conscious effort at every earliest opportunity, eventually you won't feel that emotion anymore. Once you no longer feel the predominant emotion, you can start focusing on doing the things that will make you feel happy.

NEXT: Part 4

All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Intro

INTRODUCTION

I am writing this series of articles because I want the world to know that you don't have to get on pills, you don't have to have a therapist, and you don't have to be miserable in order to deal with your depression.  I am living proof that humans have the ability to heal themselves. I have changed my life 180 degrees from being suicidal at age 13, and again at age 20, and finally reaching where I am now: perfectly happy with life and informed of the tools necessary to keep myself in this state.
I have had a couple people tell me that unless you've had severe depression, suicidal depression, you really don't understand depression. Those people have dismissed my claims that I have made a transformation, accusing me of not having as severe a depression as they do. If at the time I had been in that depressed state, it probably would have brought me down again into thinking that my own problems aren't as bad as other peoples' and that I was pathetic for thinking otherwise. --that's not the case. This formula I use is very real, even if it seems skeptical, and it has healed me from years (10+) of emotional baggage.
My claim is simple enough: that you can heal yourself without medication or therapy--just you dealing with yourself living a normal life. You don't need drugs, you don't need religion, and you don't need to see a therapist to heal yourself, the capability is within you and once you tap into it you will feel a sense of power that will one day beat out the skepticism you feel. Coming to the realization that I am about to share with you over the course of these articles will potentially be the most invigorating thing you have ever experienced in your life.

RESOURCES
By and large, I am going to explain my all-natural remedy for depression through my own experiences, however, I couldn't have made it here on my own. I read a lot of material--literature and self-help books--in order to get here. Unfortunately, not everything you read in the field of self-help is proven or even helpful, so I had to weed through the garbage/heresay by testing it out and finding what works for me.
Since I am speaking from my own perspective and experiences, I can't guarantee that these things will work for everyone or every circumstance. The way I respond to depression, I know, was different from the way that other people respond to it, but I have tried to narrow down my basic points to those that I believe apply to everyone. Take what I say as you will, try out the things you aren't sure about and don't do anything you don't think will work because you are the only person who knows you and at the end of the day you are the only person responsible for your happiness and well-being.

WHY THE TITLE?
I chose this title because I have been on a natural-food, healthy living jive lately and I think it's becoming cool to use holistic remedies. The premise behind all-natural remedies is that anyone can make them and that they take an "outside of the box" approach to personal health. This is my "outside of the box" remedy--you can make it yourself, it doesn't require you to purchase or pay for anything, and it's the methods and tools that professionals don't want you to know about because they'd be out of a job!
Interestingly, I heard a quote recently from Vandana Shiva, premier quantum physicist, that explained how many scientists and doctors look at a world perspective from the scope of a petri dish and they apply what they learn to the larger world, without the understanding of causal relationships between the smallest of components and the world around them. I think this applies to society's present approach to dealing with depression: they look at the individual and say that he or she has a problem and that it can be cured with therapy or medicinal drugs. What they don't realize is that life is more than a singular perspective looking at the individual, but is instead three perspectives looking a the individual, the influences of the world around them and the impact and influence they have in turn on the world around them and how that impact circles around to affect them again.--more on this later!

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "DEPRESSION"?
This might seem like a silly question to bring up in the introduction, but throughout the years I've dealt with this I realize that not everyone thinks the same things are "depression" some people say depression is merely sad feelings they can't shake, others say it's an overall feeling that is comparable to the feeling of lack of energy. Others say it's a feeling of being crazy and isolated/distant from others. Even others will tell you it's a state of mind rather than a feeling, and that it circles around logically to where they can't escape. I will be using the term "depression" very loosely. Depression is all of these things and more. To me personally, depression was lonliness, it was sadness, it was fear of my future and hopelessness; it was guilt and sorrow, it was a deranged, crazed state, it was occasionally anger at myself or others. For me, depression is both a feeling and a thought and is associated with a circumstance, and once I realized that it became easier to remedy.

WHAT TIMEFRAME ARE WE LOOKING AT?
My personal journey to recovery took me 9 years--I had to learn everything from scratch because no one told me where to look for answers and I internalized everything and didn't want to tell anyone I had a problem. I would get feeling better because some of the things worked, but without the finishing touches I would consistently slip back into depression. I lacked those finishing touches because I hadn't learned them yet. Hopefully this process will go much quicker for readers because I'm giving you access to a whole lot more information, all in one place, than I ever had.
With that in mind, my all-natural anti-depressant can only work as fast as you can. It requires a learning process unlike what they teach in school--there isn't necessarily memorization and regurgitation, you have to actually understand it in order for it to work, and no two people learn at the same rate. Along with learning comes application--none of this stuff is easy; you have to make sacrifices, you have to make hard decisions, you have to make changes to your life and way of thinking and way of approaching problems. If you're serious, I have no doubt that you'll pick all of this up easily, and the best part is that you HAVE to pick this stuff up, you have to adapt and change out of necessity instead of mere want and desire.

Next: PART 1

If you have any questions, comments, or experiences you'd like to share about this, you can direct your emails to consutdz@live.com or leave a comment on this page. I'd be happy to help you if you want some free assistance, but just remember: free advice may be just that...worth nothing.