How Limiting Beliefs Contribute To Depression

What keeps most people stuck in a life that feels smaller than it should? Almost everyone carries some large ambition through their teenage years, and then it fades. Ask around and you tend to hear the same explanation: reality caught up with them. I don't buy that as the whole story. More often what happens is that people run into limiting beliefs the moment they grasp how much effort a big goal actually demands. That sense of being overwhelmed feeds anxiety, anxiety tips over into depression, and you start to understand part of why mental illness keeps climbing. What follows is a look at how to push back against those beliefs and build a steadier, more productive life.

The mind may be the strongest organ we have. Nearly everything that happens inside us starts there. Yet the typical person draws on only a fraction of what their mind can do, maybe a tenth of it. Stretch the mind and your awareness stretches with it, and you become capable of carrying more. There is a cost. The further you grow, the more you attract resentment from people who would rather tear down a success than go chase their own. Condemning someone else's achievement is simply easier than earning your own.

Learn to govern your own mind and the ceilings start to disappear. The trick to not spiraling into panic and depression is accepting a plain fact: you cannot do everything. You can decide what matters most and what you care about most, and then move on that. There are seven billion of us here, so the whole burden was never yours to carry. Picture how much lighter things would feel if each person did their small part to improve the place. We might see far less corporate greed, and far less need for a government safety net to catch the people who fall.

Discipline begins with training your attention toward the positive, and that is genuinely hard work, because human wiring leans toward the negative. It gets harder still when the people closest to you think in negatives. Manage it anyway and you will feel something like the Law of Attraction kick in: negativity bounces off you and more good tends to flow your way. One odd side effect is that you may need some new friends, since the old ones may decide you have gone a little strange.

Psychologists have a formal name for retraining your thoughts this way. They call it Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it is one of the tools used to help people climb out of depression. Antidepressants and other psychotropic medications can play a role in recovery, but they do not cure the condition. The real repair happens inside you, by reworking the patterns of thought and setting out on a kind of self-discovery. The people who seem happiest, or at least the least depressed, usually know who they are and what they actually want.

Those same people also tend to be the most "liberal," in the root sense of that word: open-minded and generous. Open your mind wider and you drift toward being a free spirit. The freer the spirit, the less confined you feel. You stop feeling trapped once you recognize that you are where you are because you chose it. That trapped feeling drives depression and anxiety harder than almost anything.

Depression seems to trace back to older wounds, sometimes as far back as early childhood. Anxiety has more to do with dread of what is coming. The two keep company because fear of the future nudges you into worse decisions, and the regret over those mistakes, made while anxiety slowed you down, circles back as depression. Another piece of CBT, Exposure Therapy, has you confront your fears a little at a time. Doing that builds confidence and lets you face the future with more nerve, which drains the anxiety out of your body. Because the two illnesses so often travel together, beating one usually means beating the other.

People abandon their dreams for a couple of reasons. One is that they never clued in to how much power their own thoughts hold, or how much they are capable of. The other is that they assumed the work would be far heavier than it is. Simplify and prioritize, and much of that imagined weight drops away. Even Albert Einstein held that genius came down to knowing how to make things simple. Keep your life simple and the depression and anxiety ease up, because everything reads clearer and causes less trouble. After that it is just a matter of deciding what you truly want. -Erwin Bishop