Depression and Negative Thoughts
Hara Estroff Marano argues that how we think and how depressed we feel are tightly bound together. She points to the sheer volume of mental activity we run through: estimates put our daily thought count somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000. If the default setting of your mind leans dark, the arithmetic gets grim fast. Thousands of those thoughts turn negative, day after day. According to Marano, that is exactly what happens in depression.
A person who is depressed tends to think pessimistically, and that pattern is one of the condition's defining features. The negative thinking, Marano says, is the depression talking. It is the sound depression makes. She notes that depression often shows up in negative thought patterns before it ever shows up as a negative mood. People in the thick of it may not recognize how far down they have sunk, or how much their own thinking is feeding the despair.
Negative thinking is not rare. It happens to almost everyone at some point, usually through what psychologists call thinking errors. There are many of them, but six come up again and again.
Filtering means you pick out the negative details of a situation, blow them up, and quietly drop every positive one. Polarized thinking, sometimes called black-and-white thinking, treats everything as either wonderful or terrible with no middle ground. Overgeneralization takes a single event and spins it into a sweeping conclusion about everything, even when the logic does not hold. Catastrophizing expects disaster behind every door; either the moment is already bad or something awful is about to arrive. Personalization is the sense that whatever is said or whatever happens somehow traces back to you. And blaming shifts the weight onto other people rather than examining your own part in what went wrong.
So what can be done? Marano makes a strong claim here. One of the most effective things you can do against depression is to grasp how much the quality of your thinking sustains and even deepens it, and to realize that the fastest route to feeling different is to think differently. You often cannot dictate how you feel. You can, however, decide how you think. The choice is available to you, provided you understand that your thinking is the thing worth changing.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one route for working on negative thoughts. CBT treats thought, emotion, and behavior as parts of a single system that act on one another. Change the thinking, the theory holds, and you shift the behavior and the outcome along with it.
There is a practical sequence that follows from all this. The first point is simply to accept that you can govern the quality of your thinking, and that this governs how you feel more than anything else does. Plenty of people believe you have to fix your feelings before your thoughts will budge. The order actually runs the other way.
Second, count your negative thoughts. There are several methods, but whichever you pick, give it two or three days before you try to judge how much and how intensely you are thinking negatively.
Third, keep a thought journal over those days. At the close of each day, write down every bit of negative thinking you can recall. "I thought I was too fat." "I hate my boss." "I hate traffic jams." Include the moments you called yourself an idiot, or wrote yourself or someone else off as worthless.
Fourth, add a second column beside each of those entries and write the matching positive version. "I'm too old" becomes "I'm getting better with age." Keep at it for a few days until the conversion starts to feel natural. The writer here agrees with the research: negative thinking pushes depression and depression pushes negative thinking, and learning to manage your thoughts, through CBT or otherwise, gives you some grip on your behavior and your mood.
Fifth, notice the content of your patterns. Which circuit are you wiring yourself into, the dark one or the bright one? "I'm too fat" against "I've never been more fit." "This plan will never work" against "I have a few ideas that could get this off the ground." Keep throwing the switch from down and dark to up and light.
Sixth, once you have a read on the kind of negative thinking you do and how often, find the situations that set it off. The act of writing these moments down is itself a focusing exercise that reveals the triggers. Certain events tend to kick off a chain of bad thoughts. For some people it is being rejected, ignored, or left without a reply. For others it is a critical comment about their work, or a genuine stumble on the job.
Seventh, the next time a trigger shows up, flip negative to positive on the spot. A visual cue helps. Keep a little switch plate, the kind with a real light switch, in your bag or on your desk, and look at it often.
Eighth, bring in a partner. Tell your spouse or a colleague you trust that you think your thinking has gotten too gloomy and you want to steer it toward optimism. Ask them to flag you when you sound negative and then prompt you to turn the statement around right there. These action steps come from Kim B.
There is a personal account that follows all of this, from a writer named Bergen. After a recent family dinner that her mother attended, she got an uncomfortable text: "If it would be more appropriate for me to stay away from family meals, I will oblige the family by doing so." Her reply was roughly, "What are you talking about?"
The mother explained. The room had been lively when she walked in, the children laughing and carrying on, but the moment she sat down everything went quiet. She was certain they had been talking about her. The writer set her straight: the kids had been telling a story about their school day, nothing to do with her at all. "I'm sorry you felt awkward," she wrote, "but if you did, it might have been your own paranoia. If staying home for dinner makes you more comfortable, that's your call." The mother's final text read, "Oh. Okay. I'll see you at dinner."
The whole exchange left her furious, and she wanted to say why. She has a long-standing dislike of arguing by text message. Texting is convenient and private, and in some situations it is the only workable way to reach people. Without it she might rarely hear from her own children, so she uses it most days and admits as much. Still, she misses spoken conversation, misses being in the same room, misses reading body language. Tone of voice does not survive a text. She made the same objections about email years back.
What she resents most is when someone picks a fight over text. Handling conflict is hard enough in person, hard enough in a formal letter or even over the phone, but by text it becomes almost impossible.
People who live steeped in negativity, she believes, often hide behind their own paranoia. They tuck themselves behind a screen name or a handle. They use email and texting to throw words around with a borrowed courage and a careless foolishness, giving little thought to how their words land on anyone else. It stuns her that negative people can hold so much sway over everyone around them. We all know who they are. So why do we let them steer our lives the way we do?
Her answer is that the people dragging us down most are usually the ones standing closest, our own family. Family is too often the source of the gloom. Her advice is plain: do not let relatives pull you under, and if you need a healthier emotional supply, turn toward your friends and other positive circles.
Reference: Marano, H. (2001, July 1). Depression Doing the Thinking. Retrieved December 21, 2014, from Psychology Today.