Crunch Time

Why depression will persist

I've often wondered what evolutionary purpose depression serves. Its been around as long as the human race has walked this earth. Because it has persisted so long and has not been phased out, it must be beneficial to our survival right?. But why?

When I'm in its throes, I don't considered my depression as beneficial to my life. Even its effects on my life have been challenging: It has stalled my life vocationally, strained relationships, and done a real number on my self-esteem. Yet reluctantly I believe it must persist. It must not be eradicated fully.  Here are my reasons:

1. In order to experience the full spectrum of human emotion, depression must be part of the mix. You cannot define happiness unless you can reference it to sadness. The reverse is also true.
2. It slows us down and causes us to ponder the deeper issues of humanity. Most of the great poetry and artisitic confrontation with the world has been birthed in the depressed heart of the artist.  It gives the existential questions of life an honest hearing.
3. Enjoyment of life is fully seized. Because of my depression, I am much more intentional about making my life truly significant. Time with my kids and wife and others is rarely squandered in my better moments.  I gotta seize the day.
4. Depression makes us empathetic to the pain of others. People who have experienced deep depression can resonate deeply with another's pain, no matter how intense. It provides comfort and consolation.
5. It inspires us to make the needed changes to make our world a better place. There is much about our society and world that is less than inspiring (you know intuitively what they are). In fact they can be downright depressing. Confronting the tough issues and helping to transform our world so they no longer drag down the heart is essential for a better world and a movement toward a meaningful future.

As much as I dread the moment of agony I know will come again, I persist in the belief that its gotta be good for my soul - and so I carry on...

Go easy on yourself

Like so many relational responses in our lives, we tend to put our best foot forward with others but rarely do it for ourselves.  We easily and readily beat ourselves up over our failings (real or perceived) and lambast the better part of ourselves for not living up to our expectations.

It's a bit understandable though. We face magnanimous change and our ability to navigate it competently is questioned. It's new territory requiring new skills. In that uncertainty it is very easy to berate ourselves for not knowing what to do or how to do it.

We need to go easier on ourselves. However, that does not mean we become self-indulgent or that we lower our standards. Self-compassion can be very motivating. It causes us to pursue healthier choices in order to take of ourselves.

So instead of bemoaning the fact that you skipped that workout or ate that extra donut, cut yourself some slack and believe you'll do better next time.  Know that in this time of change and challege you are capable to learn the skills you need and have the ability to do what is needed for yourself and others. You will learn from your mistakes and grow in wisdom - knowing you're not as flawed as you think you are.  A tough task I am still working on.

This is NOT meant to be a downer

The health club where I work out is in the basement of a medical office building. It was originally intended by the hospital to be a place of therapy for patients as well as a benefit to employees. It's quite nice. I leave feeling invigorated from the exercise. 

Yet, everytime I leave I can't help but feel a bit sanguine. You see, on my way out to the parking lot I have to make my way through the elderly and infirmed who are there to see their doctors. Many times there are vans with lifts helping down patients in wheel chairs. Walkers are ubiquous as the aging joints no longer seem as spry or lubricated as they once were and extra help is needed to walk and move forward.

I'm glad I encounter it all though. It keeps my life in perspective and gives me a renewed vigor for the present moment. Soon, much sooner than I would like, I will be in their shoes. My joints will be worse off then they are now (though mine do ache from time to time). I'm sure there will be many visits to the doctor just to keep the affects of old age under control. I already have a couple "liver spots" on my neck for goodness sake.

I also participated in a funeral service today for a dear friend who passed away at age 50 (50!) from melanoma. Talk about an event that keeps things in perspective and compels one to make the most of every moment.

All that is to say, we should wisely reallocate resourses from the future (whether it be money or time) and use it for the service of the present. There are a friends to see, places to go, and family to love. Time moves quickly and we never know how soon our life may end. What, then, is all that disproportionate worry about future comfort and security etc. going to do for us?

I'm not trying to be a downer here, but I believe the healthiest thing we can do is look in the mirror and admit to ourselves that we are aging and are going to die some day. It's scathingly honest and eliminates all kinds of dysfuntion and psychosis. It keeps us on our toes. It also helps us live today no matter what our age.

Maybe the most wonderful gift we can give ourselves and others today, is quite simply, today. Live it now, live it fully, and live it well - because for heaven sakes time is swift and unpredictable.  I'm not much of a philosopher (makes my head bust open), but I am passionate about life, and life becomes more meaningful and richer when I filter it through the lense of dying.

Boosting mood in a tough economy

Many people in our country are currently in survival mode. Even those who had high paying jobs find themselves either unemployed or underemployed.  Finances are tight. The general mood among the populace is pretty low.

Boosting mood in this tough economy seems like a daunting task. Washington is doing what it can, putting various spins on the reality and highlighting any gains we are experiencing. It looks like we are working our way out of the financial woods - but it will take awhile before we are out completely.

I am reading a very interesting book entitled, "Deep Survival: Who lives, Who dies, And why". In it the author, Laurence Gonzales, tries to determine the reason that some people are more hearty than others in surviving disasters. He discovered that one of the deeper emotions survivors mine is humor.  It a release of tension and fears that dangerous situations produce.

The author discovered that laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable. It's about being cool. It's about laughing with an attitude of bold humility in the face of something terrifying. The best humorists and comedians make us laugh at life because it is a deep way we can make sense and poke fun of the burdens of life.  Survival humor is not the surface "ha ha's", but a deeper understanding of how the brain works in discovering and facing the reality of the situation.

In this tough economy, when was the last time you laughed?

The Beatles and endurance

Ever since itunes acquired and released the Beatles catalogue, I have been a bit obsessive over their music (just ask my wife). It is incredible and I have not tired from listening to their songs over and over again. It has been forty one years since their break up and the quality and endurance of their songs remains.

I got to thinking what makes the Beatles such an enduring band. More specifically what has given their songs such staying power? I doubt in forty one years we will still be listening to Brittany Spears.

So here goes...

The very high quality of each song. I am discovering that listening to the Beatles is best done with head phones. There you pick up the variety of intruments layed over the various tracks. Very well done and worth listening to often. There is a richness to their delivery.

The vibrant creativity brought to the songwriting. Who can listen to their album "Revolver" without an awareness of the band's creative and imaginative experimentation. It propelled them from the "bubble gum" pop of their early years (still great songs by the way) into a more imaginative and experimental phase in their songwriting

The mature movement toward engagement with life. The Beatles told stories in their songs and narrated the exuberance (Ob -li-de, Ob-li-da) as well as the angst (Eleanor Rigby; A day in the life). What is music if it can't address the human condition?

I think there are lessons here for our lives and the leaving of an enduring legacy.

• Live life with excellence. For us this is really an issue of integrity; does your inside values match your outward actions and do you do everything with an incomparable example?

• Live life creatively. We are, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, sub-creators of the one Creator God. We were made to embed our unique contribution into the world.

• Live life fully and honestly. We must not shy away from the muck and the grime of life but rather to engage it fully with joy or sorrow. After all, you can't have one without the other. I prefer to hang out with people who have been wounded by life and have learned to bounce back and thrive with wisdom at their core.

The Beatles have endured and I believe will continue to do so because of their dogged pursuit of quality, their continued imaginative exploration in their songwriting, and an honest, straightforward engagement with life in all its complexity.

Okay, I'm sure I'm coming off as a bit eccentric or over the top in these insight from Beatles, but those are my thoughts. I think we can endure throughout the width and breadth and depth of our own lives with excellence, imagination, and an honest engagement.

 

The algorithms that rule our lives

This is a complicated blog and tough to understand exactly. But underneath all the big words and technical language lies some critical insights on how technology is shaping who we are and how we define what it means to be human.

It comes from a blog I follow by George Siemans, a professor in Canada who explores education and learning in the modern world.

Algorithms sound somewhat mysterious and complex. By definition, however, algorithms are basically a sequence of steps or activities, often directed toward solving a problem. The steps to solving a problem may be simple (how to bake a pizza or tie your shoes) or complicated (returning web search results based on an input term or recommending who you should follow on a social networking site). Jacques Ellul warned of the dangers of technique, and by extension technology, as a means to force humanity into states of conformity. No where is this more true than with algorithms. Google’s CEO recognizes the power of algorithms, offering a chilling and prophetic insight into the future role of search engines: “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next”.

Globe and Mail’s article on Programming our Lives Away reviews the growing dominance of algorithms in our lives

Increasingly, algorithms are used to determine whether we can get access to credit, insurance and government services. They are posing a challenge to human decision-making in the arts. They are being used by prospective employers to decide if we should be hired. They can determine whether your online business will succeed or fail, and they have revolutionized the world of high finance…
Some companies now use algorithms to make decisions around hiring and firing. At Google, which boasts that “almost every [personnel] decision is based on quantitative analysis,” engineers have developed an algorithm to identify those employees most likely to leave to work for a competitor or strike out on their own. Employee surveys, peer reviews, evaluations, promotion and pay histories feed into the algorithm. It helps us “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave,” a Google manager told The Wall Street Journal last year.
At IBM, programmers put together mathematical models of 50,000 of the company’s tech consultants. They crunched massive amounts of data on them – how many e-mails they sent, who got them, who read the documents they wrote – and used this information to help assess the employees’ effectiveness and deploy their skills in the most cost-efficient way.

The mind's two elevators

It always strikes me that we have yet to understand the complexities of our mind. We have been able to map out the physical components of the brain but we are uncertain as to where the various functions of mind reside. The brain and its corresponding contribution to our consciousness is a complex, magnificent, and wonderful dynamic.

One thing I have learned about the workings of the mind is its polarity. It oscillates between high mood and low moods. Think of it as having two elevators. One elevator takes you up and the other elevator takes you down. Like any elevator, we choose which direction we want to go and push the corresponding button.

The up elevator takes us to a top floor penthouse where a party is in full swing. The excitement there is wonderful (think of the birth of a child or the acceptance from a college). Conversely, the down elevator takes us to the bowels of the basement where our experience there is usually dark and dank (think of the loss of a dear one or the loss of a job). 

Taking both elevators for a ride brings us to the full spectrum of what it means to be human. Yet we know life is more than just the highs and lows. In fact, it seem to reside in the mundane, the first floor of existence.

On that floor are various rooms and hallways that we enter and walk every single day. The hallway of work leads us back and forth from our home to our place of employment. We walk it every single day for years. One room might be a marriage or other relationship that is lived in close quarters and can often erupt into challenges and frustrations. And so it goes.  It is our experiences in the room that leads us to wait for each elevator.

At that time we have a choice. We can choose to ride the elevator down to the basement or the elevator up to the penthouse. Often the situation dictates which one we will choose, but at other times we can intentionally choose to respond (push the button) to one or the other. Both bring us to different places and experiences. The problem comes when we allow our brain to leave the essential first floor of our lives and constantly live on the lower or higher floors.

Ride the elevators as you choose, learn the lessons that there at their destinations, but don't allow your choices to chronically ride the elevators.  That only leads to a diminishment of life on the first floor.  That is where the real life is lived, smack dab in the middle of joy...

Zero Tolerance

It seems there is zero tolerance for anything these days. No room for error. I'm reminded of the Soup Nazi episode on Seinfeld where the owner would tolerate absolutely no deviation from what he thought was acceptable. Hilarious.

I'm from Denver, Colorado. Though I'm not a huge Broncos fan, I do follow them and their exploits. Their second year coach, Josh McDaniels was fired after a mediocre season and losses that were unacceptable to the owners and the fans. I felt sorry for him in a way. I think you should give a guy a fair shake beyond just two years. Heck, it takes a good year just to ramp up to the expectations and demands of any new job.

Zero tolerance.  Beyond the pressure put on sports figures, I wonder how many of us use a zero tolerance policy toward ourselves. Do we give ourselves a fair shake, or do we berate ourselves for not living up to our expectations?  No soup for us. We won't put up with imperfections or mediocre results in whatever expectations we have for ourselves.

There is a healthy place for striving to be who we were meant to be and living a life of integrity. Those things need monitoring and the participation of others. But when expectations become unwieldly or irrational it's time to fire the soup nazi and hire a more equitable boss.

What's been on my mind

It's been a while since I wrote a post (three weeks). I've been working on a book that should be officially released in a month. That being said here's what's been on my mind lately.

The Incredibles: I just watched this movie last night and I never tire of seeing it. Now that I am in the throws of middle age (I never thought it would happen to me), I'm reminded of how fast time flies. I am also aware of the relentless changes that come with life. My body just doesn't do what it used to (heck, I take a walk around the park and my buttocks are sore for a couple days!). What strikes me everytime I see the movie is its honesty about being who you really are.

Through a series of lawsuits, the "supers" are relegated to living ordinary lives among ordinary people. Mr. Incredible thus begins to live a life of desperation. He becomes flabby. Deflated morale always occur when your gifts and talents are not being used for the better good. Today there are so many people who are underemployed, losing their home, or just scraping by. No wonder morale is so low today in our country. Too many people are not living (by no fault of their own) up to their potential. We, I, need what you have to offer the world. Part of knowing a gift is how energized you are when expressing it. You'll know you're being underused when you are drained most of the time. So, what energizes you and drains you?

Change or Die

If you had to make big changes in your life today in order to avoid death tomorrow, could you do it? Statistics say there’s a 9 to 1 probability that you can’t. How does lasting change happen?

Case in point: Heart by pass patients are told to change their life styles to incorporate much healthier habits like getting regular excersize and eating low fat, nutritious diets. They know they should do these things -they'll die sooner than later if they don't- yet within two years time 90% have not significantly altered their behavior.

What about us? Are we able to make significant changes and stick with them. Of course, we’ll say, “Yes, I’ll change.” And of course,we’ll begin to make those changes in lifestyle, eating habits, recreational pursuits and so on. But it’s not long before the enthusiasm tapers off, and we're soon back to square one. No change. No chance.

Changing people’s behavior isn’t just a costly health care issue. It’s an issue for businesses, where companies go belly-up every day still chanting the mantra, “We’ve always done it this way.” Corporations spend millions each year on consultants to bring in new practices and promote change, but any changes made are, at best, short-lived and, at worst, rejected out of hand.

It's not that we are uninformed. In a culture that inundates us with more that we can process about having a better lifestyle, advanced medical options, counselors and consultants, and a million other reasons to do so, change is just near impossible.

So how do we change and make it last? The answer lies in emotional resonance. We just can't cognitively think we are going to change, we need to be emotional persuaded to do so. In other words we need to approach change less from an informative and analytical left brain approach and begin making change from a right brain dynamic.  Change requires an emotional component in order to last.

If you really want to change people’s behavior, you need to give them a story, an identity, a relationship that is “emotionally resonant.”

What story do you want to live into? How is that narrative going to be lived out? See your life as story and yourself as the major character. This will create an emotional connection with your life that will create and sustain the changes needed to live happily ever after...