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 individuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label individuality. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Part 6
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
BE INDIVIDUAL
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
BE INDIVIDUAL
American culture is deep rooted in Independence, yet we often lose focus and trade independence for dependency. The social pressure and cultural desire to be independent often creates an internal conflict that contributes to depression. Furthermore, dependency--whether emotional, physical, or intellectual--can cause further conflicts as we try to juggle the desires of those who we depend on. Conflict with others we depend on can leave us feeling hopeless and can wear on us physically and emotionally. Worse still, conflict with ourselves can be the worst kind of conflict because we think we ought to have full control over ourselves and yet we realize that we do not.
As children, we are very dependent on our parents and caretakers to survive. The institution of the family provides us with our most influential learning experiences, it teaches us how to cope with our emotions, develop relationships and make decisions. The natural progression of a man or woman is to leave the confines of his or her parents and venture into the world on our own to ultimately start our own families and continue the cycle.
Venturing into the real world is a difficult process and many individuals struggle with integrating into it. When faced with difficult situations, we tend to revert back to what we know and what is familiar--this includes our family and friends. We give up our independence and our chance to learn independence in order to keep things the way they are, but we aren't meant to stagnate in life, we are meant to adapt and change and move forward.
Because we prefer to revert back to the familiar when life becomes challenging, I have found that depression and independence tend to be at odds. Instead of dealing with emotions on our own, we revert back to our childhood when we would cry and whine and our parents or other family members would take care of us--this is a familiar pattern that has worked for us in the past and so our instinct is to remain in that dependent state in hopes that it will continue working into the future.
The sixth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is to look at yourself as an individual. Individuals make decisions for themselves, by themselves. Individuals, although they may be apart of social units such as family and community, remain independent of those social units.
I originally planned to put this article in part 3, but I realized as I was writing it that I needed to refer to the previous parts in order to explain the importance of this ingredient.
The first ingredient to my anti-depressant may be to create space, but the space isn't an end, it is a means to an end. It is difficult to gain your own independence if you rely on your family, friends, religion, school, or other community membership to tell you whether you are living life correctly. If you use other people to gauge whether you are making correct decisions or you use them as a comparison to determine what happiness is, you will never learn what makes you happy--all you will know is what makes other people happy. Without experiencing things you cannot develop a refined enough palate to truly understand what is making you happy or unhappy.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, and I recognize that this is true for many other people, was learning how to comfort myself and deal with my own emotions. When I was angry, I always--ALWAYS--attributed them to other people. Sometimes I did this directly by telling myself that X made me angry or Y made me unhappy, and sometimes I would do this by saying I did this to myself because of what X has done. It took me a long time to realize that other people trigger emotions in me, and emotions are my subconscious' attempt to influence my decisions based on patterns of events in my past, however that does not make them good or bad. I used to always think loneliness was a bad feeling (I still do sometimes) but it isn't the feeling that is bad, it is how I react to it. If I embrace loneliness and it leads me to make new friends and break out of my comfort zone, then loneliness has served a good purpose. But if I resort to blaming other people for my sorrows, then I am merely slipping back into that dependent stage that I did as a child.
If you want to learn how to be happy and not slip into depression, you need to learn how to do it independently. Other people can't give you happiness, you have to learn it; and because each of us is unique, what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make another person happy. The only way you can know what makes you happy is to broaden your perspective of the truth: to experience many things that make you happy and many things that make you sad.
It took a long time for me to realize that other people were telling me what would make me happy and what would make me sad. Because so many people told me about things that would make me sad, I avoided those things only to realize that they made me very happy. Getting a degree in English was one of those things: many people told me that it was a useless degree and would not help me to have a nice career. --What those people didn't realize is that I don't value the same careers that they do, and now that I have obtained my bachelors in English, I know that it has made me more happy than not having a degree. I also think there is still plenty of time for me to have a "nice career," even if it doesn't lead me to be a doctor or engineer. If I would have listened to other people, I would have been limiting myself to a state of less happiness, it wasn't until I ventured out independent of other people that I was able to learn for myself what made me happy.--And guess what? My degree in English was a crucial component along my path to discovering this All-natural Anti-depressant.
As an individual I make decisions on my own rather than follow the decisions of others. Sometimes my decisions coincide with decisions others wish I would make, but most of the time I have to make decisions for myself because no one else knows my situation better than me. To be happy, you need to be an individual as well. You need to become less emotionally dependent on other people and discover ways that you can be physically and mentally independent as well. When you can embrace who you are because you made all of the decisions that lead you to where you are now, you will be less prone to feelings of depression, you will have more control over your happiness, and you will have a new sense of purpose in life.
NEXT: Part 7
As children, we are very dependent on our parents and caretakers to survive. The institution of the family provides us with our most influential learning experiences, it teaches us how to cope with our emotions, develop relationships and make decisions. The natural progression of a man or woman is to leave the confines of his or her parents and venture into the world on our own to ultimately start our own families and continue the cycle.
Venturing into the real world is a difficult process and many individuals struggle with integrating into it. When faced with difficult situations, we tend to revert back to what we know and what is familiar--this includes our family and friends. We give up our independence and our chance to learn independence in order to keep things the way they are, but we aren't meant to stagnate in life, we are meant to adapt and change and move forward.
Because we prefer to revert back to the familiar when life becomes challenging, I have found that depression and independence tend to be at odds. Instead of dealing with emotions on our own, we revert back to our childhood when we would cry and whine and our parents or other family members would take care of us--this is a familiar pattern that has worked for us in the past and so our instinct is to remain in that dependent state in hopes that it will continue working into the future.
The sixth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is to look at yourself as an individual. Individuals make decisions for themselves, by themselves. Individuals, although they may be apart of social units such as family and community, remain independent of those social units.
I originally planned to put this article in part 3, but I realized as I was writing it that I needed to refer to the previous parts in order to explain the importance of this ingredient.
The first ingredient to my anti-depressant may be to create space, but the space isn't an end, it is a means to an end. It is difficult to gain your own independence if you rely on your family, friends, religion, school, or other community membership to tell you whether you are living life correctly. If you use other people to gauge whether you are making correct decisions or you use them as a comparison to determine what happiness is, you will never learn what makes you happy--all you will know is what makes other people happy. Without experiencing things you cannot develop a refined enough palate to truly understand what is making you happy or unhappy.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, and I recognize that this is true for many other people, was learning how to comfort myself and deal with my own emotions. When I was angry, I always--ALWAYS--attributed them to other people. Sometimes I did this directly by telling myself that X made me angry or Y made me unhappy, and sometimes I would do this by saying I did this to myself because of what X has done. It took me a long time to realize that other people trigger emotions in me, and emotions are my subconscious' attempt to influence my decisions based on patterns of events in my past, however that does not make them good or bad. I used to always think loneliness was a bad feeling (I still do sometimes) but it isn't the feeling that is bad, it is how I react to it. If I embrace loneliness and it leads me to make new friends and break out of my comfort zone, then loneliness has served a good purpose. But if I resort to blaming other people for my sorrows, then I am merely slipping back into that dependent stage that I did as a child.
If you want to learn how to be happy and not slip into depression, you need to learn how to do it independently. Other people can't give you happiness, you have to learn it; and because each of us is unique, what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make another person happy. The only way you can know what makes you happy is to broaden your perspective of the truth: to experience many things that make you happy and many things that make you sad.
It took a long time for me to realize that other people were telling me what would make me happy and what would make me sad. Because so many people told me about things that would make me sad, I avoided those things only to realize that they made me very happy. Getting a degree in English was one of those things: many people told me that it was a useless degree and would not help me to have a nice career. --What those people didn't realize is that I don't value the same careers that they do, and now that I have obtained my bachelors in English, I know that it has made me more happy than not having a degree. I also think there is still plenty of time for me to have a "nice career," even if it doesn't lead me to be a doctor or engineer. If I would have listened to other people, I would have been limiting myself to a state of less happiness, it wasn't until I ventured out independent of other people that I was able to learn for myself what made me happy.--And guess what? My degree in English was a crucial component along my path to discovering this All-natural Anti-depressant.
As an individual I make decisions on my own rather than follow the decisions of others. Sometimes my decisions coincide with decisions others wish I would make, but most of the time I have to make decisions for myself because no one else knows my situation better than me. To be happy, you need to be an individual as well. You need to become less emotionally dependent on other people and discover ways that you can be physically and mentally independent as well. When you can embrace who you are because you made all of the decisions that lead you to where you are now, you will be less prone to feelings of depression, you will have more control over your happiness, and you will have a new sense of purpose in life.
NEXT: Part 7
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