Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
PART 6 - Be Individual
PART 7 - Be Constructive
PART 8 - Balance (+)(-)
CONCLUSION
Happiness is within each an every one of us; you have the power to heal yourself from emotional maladies all it takes is a little bit of insight and the commitment to beat depression.
The key to finding lasting happiness is to stop doing things that are dragging you down and to start doing things that will build you up. The problem that most people have is that they don't realize all of the little things that are dragging them down. With depression, you MUST come to the realization that NO ONE can help you except yourself. Friends, family, and other well-wishers all have pure motives and desire to help you, but without full knowledge of your life, your goals, your ambitions, your personality, etc. they cannot make good decisions for you and cannot offer purely beneficial advice. The only person who knows you well enough to help you is you, and out of all of the people who hold a stake in your life and what you do with it, YOU are most dependent on your own success--more than any other person in the world.
Just to recap and reexplain, a few things that might be dragging you down are: people close to you such as friends and family, your desires and wants, your perceptions of life, and your values.
Humanity is both individual and collective--our survival requires us to work with other people and give up part of our independence to fit in with groups. The internal problem occurs when our groups (family, friends, society, etc) push on our boundaries and we lose too much of our independence to fend for ourselves.
Your wants and desires can drag you down as well. If you want things that you shouldn't have, getting them won't make you any happier. If you want things you can't have, the attempt to obtain them can make you unhappy as well. Lastly, if you try to obtain your wants in the wrong ways, no matter how hard you try to get them if you're doing it the wrong way it'll never happen.
I have observed that with the latter, it isn't that we do the wrong things to reach our wants, it's that we have too many conditional wants and the conditions compete with one another. For example, wanting to find a job that pays well and gives plenty of free time is a lot harder than finding a good paying job or a job that offers plenty of free time. The conditions compete with one another and can trick you into thinking that there is no hope of finding a job with free time or a job that pays well--sometimes the solution is to pick one or the other but not both.
Perceptions of life are huge deterrents to happiness. If you think life is supposed to work a certain way that it isn't, or that happiness is something that it isn't, then you're bound to have a lot of internal turmoil. For example, if you think that getting a job or promotion is about what you know, you'll incredibly frustrated to learn about times that you got passed up for a promotion because someone else knew somebody. You will think that they didn't deserve it or that you aren't getting what you deserve and it can contribute to your long-term depression.
Once you are able to look beyond the things that you are doing to drag yourself down, you can start to replace them with good things. Negative emotions aren't bad, they are your subconscious recalling a pattern of experiences in order to help you make good decisions in the future. If you try to stifle your emotions rather than let yourself experience them you risk making them return for the wrong reasons. Instead of feeling sad when something sad happens, you'll start to feel sad when things are sad AND whenever you feel the need to suppress your emotions, because that is how you are training yourself--whenever you need to be scared, you'll feel sad, whenever you need to be angry you'll feel sadness. Instead of suppressing your emotions, try acknowledging them, contemplate what sort of message your subconscious is trying to tell you, and then make intuitive decisions based on those feelings. Much of our emotions are simple messages from our subconscious saying: "don't do it this way again, look for a different solution to this problem."
Aside from emotions, a lot of people suffer from boredom and confusion. We've made life too easy for ourselves in some regards by inventing means of being more efficient, and in other regards we've made life more complex. It's easy to become confused, even flustered, by having to make so many decisions in a day. A good habit to form is to default your decisions to what is most constructive (as opposed to destructive). If you feel bored, think of something to improve your life or others' lives. If you feel confused, do something to improve your life or others' lives. Being focused on decision making is synonymous with being stagnant--so is being bored! A few common, constructive activities are: exercising, learning, writing, home improvement, gardening, and cleaning.
Balance balance balance. Balance being an individual vs being a part of social groups. Balance time spend on negative emotions just as much as you do positive ones. Balance being constructive and pushing yourself vs relaxing and taking time to recover. Life is a balancing act. You don't have to be happy all the time, and a brief period of depression never hurt anyone but instead helps you to enjoy the good times more.
You have it within you to heal yourself.
My grandmother could do it. I did it. You can do it too.
Happiness is within your grasp, you just have to reach out and snatch it.
Showing posts with label change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label change. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Sunday, November 3, 2013
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
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
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Modern Marriage: Part 3
------Part 3: Change in Marriage -----------
What is it about the word Marriage that conjures strong emotions for everyone? Some people look at it with anxiety, as though it is a burden in their life. Others look at it with hatred, thinking that it somehow ruined their life. Some look at marriage with fear, because the thought of taking responsibility for another person threatens their very way of life. Then there are those who see marriage as a happy thing. No matter who you are, hearing the word Marriage puts you in an emotional place.
The truth of the matter is that marriages don't work for one reason and one reason only: One or both people change and one or both people decide not to work it out. No one who seriously begins a marriage expects their marriage to fail at some point, yet many marriages so fall apart. Those who have been through divorces will give you an unlimited number of reasons for why their marriage didn't work, but in the end, their reasons fizzle down to one argument: they decided they were done--either because the other person was done first, or because they choose to be done before their spouse.
We live in an age where free will and agency ought to be respected. We have it in ourselves to make any kind of decisions we want to so long as we are comfortable with the outcomes and possible outcomes. Some people might argue and say, "he started it" or "she started it when he/she did X" and will tell you that it left them no other option than to leave. But even that is a very narrow perspective of what really happened and it is an attempt on one or both people to avoid the consequences of their action. On the other side of the spectrum, we hear comments like, "our marriage ended because we both have problems." But this response refuses to confront the real issue: that the speaker's ignorance (or selfishness) saw the other person's problems as too burdensome to accommodate or their own problems too personal to ask for help from their partner.
Change
Marriages--or relationships for that matter--don't end until you choose to let them. Instead, they morph and change. Human beings have the greatest potential for adaptation out of any other living organism, and their relationships are evidence of it. If we are to understand the workings of a modern marriage we have to study change because marriage implies sticking with the other person whether we change or they change (isn't that the premise of the marital vows?).
The decision to divorce is really simple: Do you want to compensate for the changes you make within yourself and/or the other person, or do you want to try to manage internal/external changes on your own?
Change happens both internally and externally to one's self. Internal change is any change that occurs because we make or fail to make a decision. External change happens when other people, the environment, society, or anything else makes a decision that triggers a chain of events that affect the marriage. One example of internal change would be overcoming a long-crippling fear [such as of heights] that ultimately brings you more confidence in yourself and your own decisions to the point that you no longer need to rely on your partner for assistance in making decisions. Your partner would then experience external change, because s/he has no control over this decision you are making to handle your own affairs on your own. He or she is effected when s/he suddenly senses less involvement and inclusion in your life and feels less appreciated because you no longer involve them in your life. The logical pattern is as follows: 1. you overcome your fears and become more confident. 2. your partner's role in your life diminishes because you don't need his/her input or support as much. 3. S/he is forced to change as well to compensate for their diminished roles.
[This is why having a baby (I.e. gaining new responsibilities) can cause conflict in a relationship. Or why when one partner returns to school and then the work field can cause strain on a marriage because of the changes in the relationship dynamics.]
Collaborative Change
Does Modern Marriage require one individual to yield to the other when he or she changes? This logical question flows naturally when you pair change with marriage: if marriage means staying together regardless of how the other person changes, then in every instance of conflict triggered by change either one side will accept the change in the other person and/or ignore it and go along with it, or the marriage will fall apart.--I am thinking of the example of when one spouse gets a promotion at work that would require them to move and the other has to give up their career in order to go with them.
The problem with this question is that it is strictly black and white and not easily answered.
People tend to focus on the upper layer of their lives rather than the foundation. The spouse above might be thinking they are taking a loss by giving up their career for their spouse, but that is only on the surface.
Underneath, there is more to this story: The conflict isn't really about person A gaining a better job and person B losing theirs, the things that are at stake are Person A sees an opportunity to make more money and improve the quality of life for A and B, they also see an opportunity to gain greater purpose in life for themselves because the new position puts them in an important role in the company; the list goes on... Person B really isn't facing a loss of a job, they are facing the fear that they will have to change, they are facing the fear that they won't find another job equal or better in the new place. They are facing feelings of insignificance because their present job provides them with a sense of purpose and if they lose their job they lose something to invest themselves in; person B's list also goes on...
When we crack open the outer layer we discover that the inner layers are much more easily managed. If person B can confront their fear of not finding an equal/better job in the new location, can find new things to make them feel significant (which might be other pursuits, like humanitarian efforts, new projects, etc), and whatever else they are facing, then the opportunity for a promotion suddenly isn't so bad. The change isn't so daunting when we realize that there are more decisions on the table than we initially thought in our black and white world. Alternatively, person A can remain in their position, find other things to feel more purposeful, and other methods to improve their quality of life without additional money, such as taking up a new hobby or expanding their network. The options are endless.
In a marriage, yes, both partners agree to stay together--till death or till forever, it doesn't matter.--but what they are really agreeing to is that when change happens they will collaborate together on how to manage that change. Collaboration implies that both parties find a solution that works for both of them. Sometimes this is a long, frustrating, even maddening process, but in the end both spouses walk away from the situation satisfied. And really, the frustrating part of collaboration isn't the other person, it's within ourselves--it's when we get so set on the black and white that we refuse to exercise our creativity enough to realize that there are other things at stake under the surface. This is bad. This is the one and only cause of divorce: when one person in the marriage decides that their perspective is all white and their spouse's perspective is all black.
Marriage is the agreement to make decisions together. Along with everything from part 1 and part 2, if the marriage is to last, it will require collaboration when making decisions and openness about changes that are occurring. Most divorces are unnecessary when you realize that they are caused by conflicts on the surface that never touch the root of the problem.
If you haven't read them already, read: PART 1 PART 2
Part 4 Coming soon!
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