Not the Panacea

Almost 19 million Americans have periods where they feel a lack of pleasure or interest in what was once pleasurable and interesting. They feel tired and heavy, potentially overly emotional or numb, and experience an onslaught of negative and self defeating thoughts that can keep  invading the mind over and over again. The more periods of this depressed mood we have in life, the more likely we are to fall back into them again. Why does this relapse occur and how can mindfulness offer hope?

Falling into a depression feels traumatic and just like getting bit by a dog causes us to be fearful of and oversensitive to dogs, our minds and bodies become oversensitive to associations with the depression causing our brains to flinch at any sign of a relapse.

Feeling low mood is normal for everyone, but if we’ve experienced depression in the past, this may be a trigger for a relapse. If we feel tired or if we notice sadness, the mind pops up with the worry “uh oh, that is how I felt when I was depressed, maybe I’m getting depressed”. Our minds begin to go in overdrive with negative self judgments, “I am a failure” or “I am weak” or “I am worthless”. It then tries to solve the mystery as to why we are becoming depressed again and the more it tries to solve this puzzle, the deeper it sinks into depression. Think of a worried, judging person coming at you trying to solve your problems when you’re already not feeling well. Probably not what you’re looking for. You see, it’s not the low mood that’s the problem here, it’s the way we get stuck in habitually relating to it that pours kerosene on the fire, with our minds continuing to fan the flame rolling us into a full blown depression.

The practice of mindfulness teaches us a different way to relate to our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as they arise. It is about learning to approach and acknowledge whatever is happening in the present moment, setting aside our lenses of judgment and just being with whatever is there, rather than avoiding it or needing to fix it. It’s the mind’s attempt to avoid and fix things in this moment that fuels the negative mood.

With Uncomfortable Emotions

If sadness is there, instead of trying to fix it or figure it out, we might just acknowledge the sadness, let it be and get a better understanding of what we need in the moment.

With Self-Judgments

If self-judgments arise (e.g., I am weak, I am a loser) out of past sensitivities to having been depressed before, we can acknowledge that they are associations from the past, let them be, and then gently bring ourselves back to whatever we were doing. In doing this, we’re stopping the ruminative cycle that might occur between our thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and behaviors that can play off one another leading into another relapse (I call this “The Depression Loop” in the upcoming book Uncovering Happiness).

Now, this is easier said than done and it takes practice.

Confidence with Rumination Practice:

Let’s get our hands (or minds) into it. One way to practice mindfulness is to use the breath as an object of awareness. You can place attention at the tip of the nose or the belly and as you breathe in, just acknowledge the breath coming in and as you breathe out just acknowledge the breath going out. As if you were greeting and saying goodbye to an old friend. When the mind wanders, as it will always do, just say to yourself “wandering” and then gently bring your attention back to the breath just noticing it coming in and going out. Most of us catch the mind wandering and gently bring it back billions of times, so know that it is normal for the mind to wander often. You can do this for as little as 1 minute or as much as 30 minutes or more.

Practice this when you’re feeling well and you’ll be better able to recognize when your mind wanders off to ruminations and self judgments when you’re not feeling well.

What does this have to do with gaining confidence over rumination?

Like learning an instrument, you can develop more skill as you practice. When you’re not feeling well and the mind begins to ruminate, as you practiced with the breath, just label it as “ruminating” and then gently bring your attention back to whatever you were doing. Being more present may also give you the ability see the space between stimulus and response and see the “choice point” to  be more flexible and call a friend or do something that then gives you pleasure or connection with others.  This is what I’ve referred to as The Now Effect. 

Know that practicing is an act of self care and helps stop the cycle of rumination and cultivates more patience, compassion, and peace.  

Mindfulness is not a panacea for depression, but it’s a good foundation for preventing relapse.

As always, please write below with any comments, questions, thoughts, or additions that arise after reading this. Your comments below help provide a living wisdom for us all to share and benefit from.

Solutions with a Break-Up of a Relationship.

Going through a romantic break up can be a very hard and painful experiment. We feel rejected and abandoned.   We are not sure how worthy we are and why our love decided against us. We can feel lost and normally we go through the hardship of grieving; grieving the loss of our partner, our hope, our happiness.

Maybe someone came up to you and said that you might benefit from this experience. I am rather impatient with these warriors of anti-empathy – though I see their truth. It sounds like:  “I do not share your sorrow, but as a higher intelligence I show you the good way of handling pain!”

Being depressed, withdrawn, uncertain and sad is normal and even necessary for going forward. You don’t have to be ashamed by that! In order to fully experience happiness we need to know sorrow as well. We compare the best times of our life to those worst times – and break ups are definitely one of the worst.

But over the pain, you do have a lot to discover – as smart people can learn from everything.

First of all you will see how you handle the bad news. As you strive to learn how to get over a break up, investigate your feelings and reactions.  I know you feel hurt, rejected and maybe ashamed. You might feel yourself unworthy and you might believe that no one in the world would love you anymore. There might be some self pity involved. They are valid and understandable feelings – though the best if you don’t dwell too long in them.

Be honest with yourself, because recovery and the answer to how to get over a break up comes through experiencing those feelings.

Then you can investigate how you react: What do you do with this pain? Will you distract yourself? Will you ruminate alone? Will you share it with a confidential friend or with everyone? – You might learn new stress handling skills.

How will you rebuild your self-esteem? How soon and which way can you feel your strength again? You can strengthen yourself by achievement, friendship, or other activities – or you can stick in the position of being depressed. You might learn a new way of connecting to the world: new activities, new friends, or the new independent you who can conquer the world all alone!

Following a break up most people want to understand what happened and why. For example, if you realize that your partner simply was not reliable, you might be cautious about those signs next time. If you found you were way ahead in the commitment process, you can let the relationship deepen a bit slower next time.

There are millions of reasons why people split up from the personality differences to the different expectations and needs, from poor communication habits to being in different life stages and having different life assignments connected to it. While you give some time for this investigation, your self-knowledge and the knowledge about your partner and your relationship deepens. You might gain some noteworthy insight.

When you find out the reason of your separation, you can consider how you prevent it happening next time. You might come to the realization, that you behaved a certain way which caused problem – and you can decide to keep it or eliminate it. It is especially useful to uncover certain patterns that you have; for instance, if you come to the conclusion that “I always end up with liars”, ask yourself, what do you do that attracts liars? How come you did not discover their lies in earlier days?

In addition you might realize what was problematic in your partner’s behavior, and accordingly decide your values and preferences; for example, “I don’t like too adventurous (boring, self-centered, etc…) guys.”

At the end, when you are over on the worst days of sorrow, you will be aware of lots of connections which were not so obvious before. This experience might even change your opinion, world view and attitude towards relationships or towards yourself.

I know: this is sometimes a very difficult and painful process and you would rather choose the relationship instead. But if you don’t, at least have a chance to use the experience for expanding your own wisdom!

Significant Differences Can Repair Life.

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the term “Mindful Recovery?”

Is it Addiction? Trauma? Depression? Or maybe something else?

Maybe it’s all of those things, but I’m going to pose this moment to be a time to look back on the last year and ask yourself, “What afflictions have I suffered this year that I am in recovery for?” Maybe this last year you let stress get the best of you? Maybe your relationship slipped this past year as you got roped into more television programs or Facebook addictions. Maybe you did slip into abuse with drugs, alcohol, sex, work, or overly accommodating people in life who abuse you.

What’s going to be different in the coming hours, days, weeks and months ahead?

Perhaps the simplest path is to make the intention an awareness of the moments you get sucked into these destructive behaviors that you want to change. In this space of awareness we draw a second intention which is to get curious about what the feeling is that you’re trying to escape from.

I think where we make our greatest error is when we make those resolutions that say, “I’m going to go the gym more, meditate more, start playing guitar or bring the romance back.” This jumps the gun. There are so many steps that occur before taking action with any of these things. There’s already a built up resistance to them and to skip over that is a recipe for failure.

What if these changes you wanted to make were couched in less immediacy? It’s helpful to actually understand what going on with the auto-pilot that lives within each one of us.

Here’s 7 steps to get underneath the hood and give yourself the change of making real change last:

1. Set a date to do whatever it is you want to do. Whether it’s the gym, yoga, spending more time with family, or getting all the alcohol out of the house.
2. When that time comes, don’t do anything, just take a seat or lie down.
3. Open up to the body, what is being experienced? What’s the urge? What emotions are there? Just open up without judgment, exploring this with curiosity, as if this was the first time you were getting to know yourself.
4. Know you are the ocean, not the waves and urge surf. In other words, watch the sensations and emotions rise, peak and eventually fall.
5. Put your hand on your heart and thank yourself for taking time out of all your daily busy-ness for your own health and well-being.
6. Engage with whatever it is you wanted to engage with even if there’s only a few minutes left.
7. Repeat the practice several times over and over again.

See if you can release whatever judgments are arising in your mind right now about whether this will or will not work. Don’t let yourself be enslaved by the judgments, instead let your experience be your best teacher. This is your year for a mindful recovery