New Thoughts: Changing Anxiety and Depression

Dorian Innes has talked openly about his own stretch of depression and anxiety, a period when several hard things piled up at once. He lost his job, his girlfriend, and a good share of his friends around the same time. He knew his thinking had turned dark and that he wanted to pull it back toward something more positive.

So he tried the usual routes. Books, motivational speakers, long conversations with family and friends, exercise, vitamins. He avoided drugs but gave almost everything else a shot. None of it moved the needle, and on some days he felt worse than when he started.

Then he changed the approach. Instead of chasing advice, he sat down and wrote out every reason he could think of for why he had no need to feel depressed or anxious. That one worked. Out of it came a list of 20 thoughts he now returns to, and he suggests others try the same experiment: grab a sheet of paper and see if you can name 20 reasons of your own.

1. Good things depend on bad things existing. One can't be felt without the other, so rather than mourning the bad and toasting the good, try celebrating both. Celebrate the bad, since it will turn into good eventually, and celebrate the good while it lasts.

2. You will never be perfect, and neither is anyone else. That imperfection is what makes people different from one another, and difference is where interesting ideas come from. Nobody expects us to be flawless. We tend to be the only ones demanding it.

3. When people act mean or angry or sad, it's because that's where they are in that moment. Emotions pass.

4. Too much of a good thing is real. Learn the limits and enjoy what's within them.

5. You cannot control everything or everyone. Yourself is the only thing you actually run. Events will happen the way they happen, but your reaction belongs to you.

6. Money and wealth are separate things. Money buys stuff. Wealth is family, friends, and love.

7. You are exactly where you're supposed to be at this moment, even if the reason only becomes clear looking backward.

8. You don't need to know the future, and you probably don't want to. Let it surprise you. Do the right thing now and the outcome will reveal itself in its own time.

9. That small slip you made at the office or at home won't stick in anyone's memory. Don't let minor mistakes trip you up.

10. Life isn't assaulting you or hurling curve balls. You tend to get back what you put out. Think you deserve better? Then give better.

11. When you dislike someone, or they dislike you, often it's because each of you catches a glimpse of yourself in the other.

12. Right this second you already hold what you need to be happy: air in your lungs, blood moving through you, and a mouth that can smile. Appreciate what's already here.

13. Things break and need fixing, which gives us something worthwhile to do. Tend to what needs tending.

14. Mistakes come to everyone. They're how we grow.

15. Success has no fixed definition. The nice part is that you get to decide what it means for you.

16. Life is pretty simple. We're the ones who complicate it, usually by getting in our own way.

17. You don't need a thing to be happy. You need a person, and that person is you. The power to feel happy or furious sits with you.

18. Just as you admire someone, someone out there is watching you the same way. Behave like it.

19. There's a lesson tucked inside everything. The work is finding it.

20. Other people have already faced your problems and come out the other side. You can too.

These lines are meant for moments when anxiety or low mood sets in. Innes says he still leans on them and still finds they help. He's also clear that if you're depressed or anxious, getting a professional evaluation matters.

A reader, Kim B., added her own take. She agrees with much of the list because the phrasing is built to encourage, to lift self-esteem, and to build confidence, and most of it falls squarely under positive thinking. She's a believer in that power and thinks we'd all benefit from more of it. A glass seen as half full makes for a more pleasant life than one seen as half empty. Still, she wanted to pick at one idea: that not every situation is good, but that doesn't force it to be bad.

The opposite of good is bad, and the opposite of positive is negative, sure. Her point is that a bad circumstance isn't automatically a negative one. Clear as mud, she admits. Some things in life are painful without being objectively bad.

Her example: a person is hit by something or falls and strikes their head, suffering a concussion. A doctor runs a battery of tests, maybe a CT scan, maybe an MRI, maybe both. In the course of that imaging, they find not only the concussion but a brain tumor, something that would have stayed hidden if the injury hadn't sent them in. What looked like a bad event has quietly turned useful.

The accident reads as bad. The tumor diagnosis reads as worse. But an undetected tumor left to grow ends in death, which is worse still. So even the diagnosis isn't purely bad, because now it can be treated. See the forest, not only the trees.

Her conclusion is that if she genuinely sorts most situations into good or not-so-good rather than good or bad, her life opens up and turns more positive than she ever expected.

Source: Innes, D. (2012, December 9). 20 Thoughts To Help Relieve Anxiety and Depression. Retrieved December 22, 2014, from tinybuddha.com.