by Arline Curtiss

Created on: February 27, 2007   Last Updated: April 18, 2007

Don't Be Bullied by the Blues

Depression is a bully you must finally face down. I'm a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist who was once diagnosed with manic depression. I'm one of those who went into the field of psychotherapy to help myself. I found out that, when forcefully encountered, depression lets you alone. Depression is like living in a room of pain. You can learn how to leave the room.

Depression only occurs in the subcortex, the feeling part of the brain. There is never any depression in the neocortex, the thinking part of the brain. You can learn to switch from one brain system to the other when depression hits. The use of simple mind techniques can thoughtjam depressive focus and keep it at bay. Then, neural activity will spark up in the neo-cortex while powering down the depression happening in the subcortex.

Depression is like the bully who terrifies you as long as you are afraid, but fades at any real resistance. When you focus your attention on painful feelings, your fear keeps triggering the fight-or-flight response which continues to pump stress chemicals like adrenalin (epinephrine) and norepinephrine into your brain, causing the chemical imbalance feeding your depression.

Simple mind exercises like singing a nursery rhyme, or repeating some mantra like "yes, yes, yes, yes, yes" for five or ten minutes immediately starts to lessen pain in the subcortex by enhancing cognitive focus in the neocortex. It absolutely works.

The hard part is to withdraw your attention from your pain and sing some dumb little song to yourself. But this will brainswitch the neural activity from the subcortex to the neocortex and give you some immediate relief. When you feel the blues hit, try imagining a penguin conducting an orchestra. He turns to you and says, "Okay, one and two and three, now sing!"

The latest new evidence of neuroplasticity is new hope for every kind of depression. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to re-wire itself as a result of changes in one's thinking and behavior. When you do dumb little exercises instead of doing your depression, you are actually building a get-out-of-depression neural pattern in your brain.

The book TRAIN YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR BRAIN by Sharon Begley, the science editor of Time, gives new credence to neuroplasticity and re-wiring your brain to get out of destructive neural patterns. Another book, THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF documents fascinating individual cases of the power of mental force.

The book BRAINSWITCH

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>