Reverse Thinking

Schopenhauer - a philosophy for grumpy people?

In my last article - Can feeling grumpy be good for you? I mentioned one of my favourite philosophers - Arthur Schopenhauer - who was a grumpy old man already by the age of 19. I first read him at 15 and developed a 'bah humbug' attitude which was delicious and self-indulgent while it lasted although I no longer think it is clever - or even profound - to be pessimistic about life. Even so, I still think that Schopenhauer possessed a genius for philosophy. (He also wrote a lot about sex).

Here are a few gems:

After your death you will be what you were before       your birth.    

Everyone takes the limit of his own field of vision for the limit of the world.

The conscious mind may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells within the body.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the sight of a letter/email from that person.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

There is no absurdity so obvious but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to introduce it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

The closing years of life are like a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Compassion is the basis of all morality.

Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.

The greatest of mistakes is to sacrifice health for any other kind of reward.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome.

In my next article I will write about the advantages - and disadvantages - of pessimism for life.

Can feeling grumpy be good for you?

I receive a mischievous communication from my very good friend Mark McGuinness who wants me to comment on a research article he has looked into, written by some 'Australian psychologists', which claims that being in a 'bad mood' can be 'good' for you.

Now, some of my best experiences in life have been prompted by my 'bad' moods. With the aid of those I have got rid of countless annoying relationships, irritating jobs and pointless activities. So my first thought was that - yet again - a bunch of overpaid academics were being subsidised to announce discoveries most of us learned in primary school. And that Mark had forgotten our many rambling midnight conversations about emotions and the meaning of life.

Yet I realised immediately that these gorgeous, Bondi-beach seeking academics have made yet another category mistake: While bad moods can, indeed, be 'good', those are not the same as 'bad emotions'.

To remind you: there is no such thing as a bad emotion. Emotions are an expression of Bodymind
intelligence. A mood is different. It is a  Headmind attitude. It expresses a relationship between our attitudes and the world as we find it. You can read more about moods here.

A grumpy mood, for me, is a relationship based on suspicion. It means that I no longer trust that experiences, situations, people, or the Lord God himself are doing me any favours. And that, in turn, is a cue that I need to revise my trusting attitude towards these entities. I need to retreat, stand-off, complain, and have a moan. I may even need to disengage - permanently.

So yes - a grumpy mood can be good for you if it helps you get rid of your intellectual garbage.

The funny thing is that I actually find grumpy moods enjoyable. Entraining my suspicion and pessimism on the planet gives me a god-like sense of detachment and playfulness. It also gives me a playground for wit.

Rather like one of my favourite philosophers - Arthur Schopenhauer - who once wrote:

"If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."

Come to think of it, Schopenhauer deserves an article all to himself, so I will write that next.

10 best ways to stay out of depression

First, understand what depression actually is.

Depression is not an emotion like sadness. It is an empty, numbed-out sensation which comes up when Headmind despairs and gives up on experience. It then starts suppressing emotions on the grounds that they are too painful to deal with. The result is that inner feeling of emptiness that makes life seem pointless.

To avoid getting into that state, here are some things to watch out for:

1. Recognise the symptoms

1. Lethargy
2. Loss of concentration
3. Apathy
4. Loss of interest in people and activities
5. Deterioration in sleep patterns
6. Changes in eating and appetite

N.B. You need to have at least FOUR of these

2. Understand that de-pressing is something you do rather than something that happens to you. You de-press your emotions when you:

• Bury your head in the sand when difficult situations come up
• Run away instead of speaking up about your emotions
• Stay too long in dead-end jobs and relationships
• Give away your personal power to other people
• Talk like a victim
• Bury your anger or your frustration for too long instead of doing something about it
• Live a tedious, monotonous, stuck-in-a-rut lifestyle to the point where your personal Bodymind goes crazy with boredom
• Fail to forgive and move on from people who have hurt you in the past

Start reversing these patterns now.

2. Eliminate Anxiety from your life. Anxiety is the number one most common precursor of clinical depression. When the panic gets too much your Bodymind will try and numb it out by triggering chemical releases that slow the system down. Use Reverse Thinking to eliminate those Head fucks now.

3. Don't give any air time to depressive thoughts. That includes ideas like: 'I might as well die', 'Nobody cares', 'There's no point trying to...'. Don't fight these thoughts   - just ignore them. Turn your attention to full-on activities that completely absorb your attention. It takes practice, but doing this every time you notice a depressing thought eventually drives them away for good.

At this point I refer you to my previous article on Effective Thinking Skills.

4. Do the endorphin-releases.

Because it is physically impossible for someone to feel depressed while their body is full of endorphins...

5. Invest as much time as you can in your community.

Clinical depression tends to be more severe and longer-lasting in people who live alone or who are in someway isolated from the community. People who keep their friendships alive are also at lee risk.

6. Practice the art of love.

Again, research shows that many depressed people are in unhappy relationships. If you can't show more loving, or if it is not reciprocated, then it may be time to move on.

7. Keep talking

In my work as a therapist I am constantly amazed by how very few people have learnt the art of speaking up about their emotions, needs and dissatisfactions. The more you bottle things up, the more overloaded with frustration, anger, and fear you are going to get. Until there comes the point when Headmind will try and de-press them.

8. Avoid procrastinating

I see this problem very clearly in people who get depressed over work. The work-load, the problems and the deadlines build up until they get overwhelmed. Or they put off talking to the boss, the ass-hole colleague, or the lazy employee until their behavior is out of control. Eventually, they give up and start de-pressing their fears. They even give up on finding a new job.

9. Revitalise.

This essentially means making the most of your personal genius. If you are constantly elated by new directions in your life you are going to maximise your joy and excitement, not your anxieties. As well as that, you won't have time to get depressed, and, if you do get down, you will have plenty of alternatives to turn to.

10. Don't exaggerate your depressed moods.

It's a little known fact that depressed people are only in fact 'depressed' for - on average - one hour a day. The rest of the time they are sleeping, having a crap, eating, dreaming, getting annoyed at someone, reading low-rent blog sites....

The fact that you are blue for half an hour doesn't mean you have stay that way. Get working on one of the previous 9 tips right away.

'A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying it needs work.'

Geoffrey Norman.

Control the Movie

Joy Division were always one of my most favourite bands. But I had to give up listening to them as something awful always seemed to happen after I played their records. My girlfriend would sack me, or my boss would dump me or whatever. And I would get really, horribly depressed.....not surprising when the lyrics were suffused with despair and the backbeat sometimes sounded like a military funeral. And that the frontman, Ian Curtis, killed himself at 23.

Ian Curtis was just a few weeks older than me. I see how he was mesmerised by the same despair that I knew too well at the time. Which may be one reason why I thought Closer was one of the greatest albums ever made. The only difference was that he had to take lots of awful drugs for his epilepsy, which tipped him over the edge into suicide.

The film Control is a really cool movie (with brilliant acting by Sam Riley as Ian Curtis). And how could it not be with tracks by Roxy Music, The Velvet Underground and Bowie?

But I still don't think I will listen to Joy Division again, even though they are part of my personal history. For the simple reason that you are, in part, what you look at and what you listen to. And I don't want to end up in the same place Ian did again. And - no - he didn't kill himself because he couldn't choose between his wife and his girlfriend. Let's not go mixing up effects with causes. He killed himself because he had already created some great works of art and because it seemed easier than to struggle on,

For if you spend too much time looking into the abyss, sooner or later the abyss looks back into you.

Depression, the brain, and letting the monster out

Here is what a brain scan for a depressed person looks like (strange how it looks to me like an angry face). The front of the skull is at the bottom of the image. The orange and yellow flare-ups show increased activity in the limbic system in the centre of the image. The amygdala (arousal) and hippocampus (emotional memories) are both involved. At the bottom of the image we see increased activity in the frontal cortex - the so-called 'thinking' centres.

Since the limbic system governs the production of emotion we can see immediately that the depressed person is more emotional than the average. Yet the subjective experience of depression is the total opposite.

The language of depression that reflects this subjective experience is:

'Numb - nothing touches me, 'Just going through the motions', 'Lifeless', 'Dead inside,  'I just want go to sleep', 'I wish it were all over - now', 'I am empty, Life is empty', 'Pointless', 'Same old thing, again and again', 'Death - how I long for it...'

This tells us straight away that depressed people don't feel the emotional storm that is actually being created in the brain. The thinking centres are not processing emotion! So what are they doing instead? Well, if you listen to depressed people talking you soon get the answer: they are thinking about failure. About loss, about pointlessness, about the past, about the catastrophic future. About what 'bad' people they are. You can get more information about the link between the brain, emotion and language here.

By the way, 'positive thinking' won't make any difference, despite what some Cognitive therapists might positively think. And here's why: the problem is not negative thinking but the fact that the person's thoughts are not dynamised by passion. A 'positive' thought is just one more empty idea to add to the log-jam that already exists in the depressed brain. A dynamic idea is one that brings you alive again. An empty idea is just a thought.

At some stage the depressed person has (without realising it) suffocated her own passion. She has de-pressed it because she has bought into the idea that her passion is bad, destructive, evil, selfish. Those ideas deny her permission to live. But because emotions belong to life, to emotional truth, to the growth of the organism they have to be suppressed and denied. Hence the numbness, emptiness and longing for death.

To become free again she has to let the 'monster' out. The 'bad' thoughts, the 'bad' emotions and the 'bad' desires.

For Reverse Therapy we take the necessary steps in this order:

1. The first step is to treat depressive symptoms as a signal that emotion is not being allowed expression.
2. The second step is to connect to the emotions (these are usually the ones that were there are the start of the depression and are connected to some significant life challenge going on at that time).
3. The third step is to talk to someone you can trust about those emotions - and the desire, the love, the excitement, the need for comfort, the longing for fulfilment or connection that comes with them. This is the first stage in letting the monster out.
4. The fourth step is to start acting on those 'bad' desires or hopes. This is the second stage in letting the monster out.

Next post: I will give some examples of how this process works in real life.