Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, think and act. Fortunately, it is fully treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease your ability to function congruently at work and at home.
The usual symptoms of depression are:
- Feeling sad, desperate or lonely
- Loss of interest or pleasure in activities you once enjoyed
- Changes in appetite — weight loss or gain unrelated to dieting
- Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
- Loss of energy or increased fatigue
- Increase in purposeless physical activity (e.g., inability to sit still, pacing, handwringing) or slowed movements or speech (these actions must be severe enough to be observable by others)
- Feeling worthless or guilty
- Difficulty thinking, concentrating or making decisions
- Thoughts of death or suicide
In one sentence, this condition appears as a direct result of self neglect by overly focusing on external world, as oppose to being aware of own thoughts and emotions. When exposed to such harsh self treatment, one loses the sense of self worth and starts to compare oneself (needlessly) to everything in the environment and in almost all cases contrary to own personal interests. One of the reasons that could contribute toward creation of this condition is continuous self neglect, which was amplified by overly low self esteem that was almost never questioned for validity.
So what is the solution? The first thing that will help you start the process of change is for you to reach the point in which you are no longer prepared to tolerate this condition. When at that stage, you must learn to calm your body and mind completely, thus being able to effectively reduce your brainwave activity to alpha levels in where you will become aware of your predominant thoughts and emotions. When so, you will start to “feel” your predominant moods and with slight correction of your thoughts, you will be able to make immediate corrections in your emotional states, thus changing your moods accordingly.
The next step that follows this one is effective observation of your habitual behaviours, which are directly responsible for your dominant thoughts and emotions. So in order to help you master this trait, you must become aware of your thoughts and emotions first, because it will not be too difficult to notice your habitual behaviours and how they affect your thinking and emotional states. All this is important, because these subtle faculties (that operate below your conscious awareness) drive your external experiences and for as long as you’re witnessing the same external reality – you will find it difficult to grasp other “possibilities and options in life” apart from the ones you see, feel and touch in your present reality. It is for that reason that you must become conscious of what is going on within your inner world of thoughts and emotions and aim to change them in order to experience changes in your external reality.
The next step that follows your ability to influence aforementioned faculties will be to learn to challenge your predominant beliefs or what you think is possible. This is the hardest part and yet it is the most rewarding at the same time. This is because when you learn to observe the world around you from a 360 degrees viewpoint (as oppose from a fixed perspective from which you currently observe your external reality), you will realise that nothing is how it appears and that everything is fluid and in direct correlation to the perspective from which you observe those events, situations and people.
In other words, if you observe a river from a certain fixed point – it is very likely that you will see certain things and features, but not others. However, if you change the position from which you observe (that river) and go to a different place, it’s very likely you will see things you haven’t seen before, whilst at the same time you may not see things you have seen previously. This is because everything is related to perspective from which something is observed, which is also known as location or perception. The main reason as to why people become mentally disoriented is due to their rigidly fixed observation of the world, which in most cases is detrimental to their own interests. As they continue to observe the world from that fixed position, they neurologically condition their subconscious mind that such outcomes are the only possibility, which are false and unacceptable statements. If such observations are allowed to roam within their conscious awareness unchallenged, they will over time be accepted by their subconscious mind as facts and from there will become their belief.
In order to shake such rigid perception or fixed observation of the world, one is always best served to regularly practise the 360 degrees mental observation exercise. This is one of many cognitive reframing exercises, but in essence it is very useful tool to dispel any falsely set beliefs with the view to question them first and then reframe them with new and more empowering beliefs. In fairness, there are many good cognitive reframing exercises and whichever one you choose should help you make required personal changes. But before you start, you are always best served to create highly effective process without taking short cuts, because in such cases you will not achieve required levels of change and in some cases you may even not many any progress at all. So before you start, you must perform good self evaluation and then find the right programme to help you eradicate 100% of your old habits, behaviours and memories. Otherwise, you will always re-experience same outcomes.
If you wish to learn more on how to heal yourself from devastating effects of depression on your body and mental states, please visit our website: www.energy-savvy.com and in particular we would recommend you to try our 20 weeks energy and mental healing programme, in where we will teach you in some depth various energy generation exercises, mind reframing techniques and routines. Alternatively, you may contact us via email on: info@energy-savvy.com and we’ll be more that happy to assist you in any way we can.
