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...

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...

The Joy-Driven Life

In the midst of all the upheavals in the world today, it is easy to ponder the sobering reality of life and fall into a major funk. But there is a greater truth and a richer response to life and what it means to be human: Joy. G.K. Chesterton, an English Journalist, Novelist, and Essayist who died in 1936 knew well the undercurrent of joy in life. A person is fully human, he says,

"when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind;...Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live."

May all you labors this day be uproarious with joy

Deeper perspectives

When the US Airways plane with 155 people on board ditched into a chilly Hudson River, we knew who to thank for saving all on board.  It was captain Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, whose masterful skills navigated the plane to safety. 

But, imagine you are on a plane flying over two hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, when suddenly without explanation, the engines stop working.  The captain has tried everything to get them to reignite, but to no avail. You are in crash position and agonizing your demise.  Then, suddenly, without explanation, the engines burst back to life one by one, delivering you safely home.  Who do you thank then? read more>

Cherish this time...

Time marches on and there isn't anything we can do about it; except change our attitude and perception toward it.  One of my favorite scenes is the monologue by Billy Crystal to his son's fifth grade career day in the movie "City Slickers". Up to this point he has been pondering the unrelenting advancement of time and his meaningful(?) place in it.  His attitude and perception are not only humorous, but very evident:

Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening it deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do?

Draw out every cent, of course!!

Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours.

There is no going back. There is no drawing against the "tomorrow." You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success!

The clock is running. Make the most of today.

To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade.

To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.

To realize the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.

To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.

To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask a person who missed the train.

To realize the value of ONE SECOND, ask a person who just avoided an accident.

To realize the value of ONE MILLISECOND, ask the person who won a medal in the Olympics.

Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time. And remember that time waits for no one.

It's On

Southwest Airlines launched a new Ad Campaign on June 1st aimed at tough times. At the end of the ad a narrator intones that the airline doesn't fly around tough times. It's on, and they're ready.

It's on for all us... 

It's on every time our minds persist in discouraging thoughts.

It's on every time we think we can go it alone without the comaraderie of those who care.

It's on every time we stubbornly refuse to admit our fear and hide behind a facade of platitudes.

It's on every time we avoid nourishing our souls with silent listening, contemplation, and transcedent faith.

It's on every time our decisions preclude others who are in greater need.

It's on every time we become too enamored with our technology to solve our problems.

It's on every time we rely on massive military might to secure our happiness.

It's on every time we stop taking initiative for the health of our relationships.

It's on every time we live without grace.

This is the time of our lives. It's tough. It's on. Are you ready?

Embrace Uncertainty

This morning I was reminded of my propensity to be  "duped" by the illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control, or at least influence, outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.

I was stuck in traffic on a way to a meeting.  Traffic drives me nuts!  I feel trapped!  It makes me angry! So I began to play the jam like a game of chess.  I strategically made moves across lanes while measuring my progress in comparison to another randomly chosen vehicle on the road.  For a while, it seemed that my ability to maneuver through the morass of cars was working, when suddenly the car I'd chosen to measure my progress zoomed right past and well ahead of me on the road. By the time it was all over this morning, I was late for my meeting and realized once again that I had no more actual control over the predicament of that jam than I do over almost any other area of my life.

Recently the op-ed page in the New York Times highlighted new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.

The reasons for this gloom seem economically obvious, yet the author of the piece, Dan Gilbert, concluded that it isn’t a matter of insufficient funds. It’s a matter of insufficient certainty.   The fact that we don't know what is going to happen with the stock market, or predict with any certainty when this recession is going to turn around, or why traffic can be so constricting this particular morning is a root cause of our current malaise. 

Rather than try to regain sway over the events in life, a shrewd skill to develop for navigating tumultuous change is to EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY.  Resilience demands it.  To do so involves lamenting the passing of known illusions of control.  To deeply grieve the loss of control and a previously known world where it was once operative allows for healthy forms of personality development that are largely precluded in its absence.

Undoubtedly, lost opportunities and mistaken expectations are often unpleasant to think and talk about. But a seven year study by Laura King, a researcher at the University if Missouri, indicates that individuals who take time to stop, think, and mourn their losses are more likely to mature and a achieve a potentially more durable sense of happiness.

Grieving losses is important because it allows us to unleash energy that is bound to the lost experience—so that we might re-invest that energy elsewhere. Until we grieve effectively we are likely to find reinvesting difficult; a part of us remains tied to the past.

Grieving is not forgetting. Nor is it drowning in tears. Healthy grieving results in an ability to remember the importance of our loss—but with a new found sense of peace, rather than searing pain.

Healthy grieving is an active process, you can't "just give it time". One way of understanding the work to be done is to think of grieving as a series of tasks you need to complete (not necessarily in sequence):

1. To accept the finality of the loss;

2. To acknowledge and express the full range of feelings we experience as a result of the loss;

3. To adjust to a life in which the lost experience is absent;

4. To say good-bye, to ritualize our movement to a new peace with the loss.

Cognitive Distortions

I focus on four competencies to help people effectively navigate life's accelerating changes:

• Vibrant Imagination
• Robust Collaboration
• Potent Communication
• Persistent Adaptation

In this post I want to focus on Persistent Adaptation and the awareness of cognitive distortions. These are inaccurate thoughts or ideas which maintain negative thinking and help to maintain negative emotions. I'll admit that I default into one or more of these distortions more often than I'd like.

Eliminating these distortions and negative thought can improve mood and discourage maladies such as depression and chronic anxiety. Being aware of these distortions is a powerful first step to persistently adapt to discontinuous change and its discontents. Take a look and see if any of them are getting in your way.

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

• Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out.

• The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, "He's a damn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

From: Burns, David D., MD. 1989. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Quoted hope

The following are recent, hopeful contributions that were spoken into my life from a variety of sources. I'm pondering them now because I didn't have the best of weeks.  Since I explore quandaries that arise from accelerated, discontinuous change, and the subsequent angst they can sometimes create, I offer these to you as well:

• "Healing is the restoration of integrity to injured tissue."  This was emailed to me by a pastor after I crashed on my bike. My flesh was wounded, my ego was bruised, but after this timely contribution my spirit was restored. 

• "A stronghold is a mindset that is pregnant with hopelessness." This twittered statement resonated deeply within me because I was again struggling with the depression that has marked most of my life.  I am earnestly exploring the thought processes and patterns that keep me straight-jacketed in despair.

• "You can't think your way into good acting, but you can act your way into good thinking"  I over heard this in a bar and grill in North Carolina. I instantly interfaced it with the previous stated contribution on strongholds.  One of the more powerful molding factors for our thoughts is the simple child-like ability to pretend.

• "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" This was spoken into my life from a friend who was a Disney Imagineer.  It has ramifications across so many disciplines and vocations, but particularly for me now as I ponder the radiance of an authentic, creative life from a joyful core that is constantly nurtured.

• "In the end, the only thing you really own is your story" This was a line spoken by the character played by Hugh Jackman in the movie "Australia".  We're connected to the human race by the stories that arise among us.  In a commodified day and age where we are seen more as consumers than human beings, remember to develop a story for your life where love is truly exemplary.