A need to connect with the real and meaningful
rom my experience working with people who suffer from depression, there are three core beliefs ... that there is no cure, that you can never get better and, even if there was a cure, it wouldn’t work for them because they don’t deserve it.
These beliefs make depression hard to work with, writes Your Time expert Gareth Fox. No other disorder rejects its cure so openly. So how do we work with it? We must understand it’s causes.
From my experience I have outlined three leading causes, each to be addressed separately over coming weeks: Harsh, hurtful, critical words we say to ourselves over and over again.
No one is born using the harsh, critical vocabulary we use on ourselves today. No baby ever said “I’m so stupid, I’ve yogurt all over my face and my clothes, I’m so fat, so lazy, I can’t do anything right, I don’t understand anything, I have such a bad memory, I look ugly.”
Babies are born with a supportive inner voice, a personal cheerleader, which tells them that they can do anything, reach anything, try anything, have anything, achieve anything. They have no concept of failure. So where does this concept come from?
We live in a society that is overexposed to ‘fake perfection’. We compare ourselves. We are constantly told from the outside that we are not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, and we are accepting these values and repeating them to ourselves, daily.
We live in a consumer world, whose fundamental teaching is that we must amass more because we are currently incomplete. We are not enough. The fundamental goal of advertising is to tell us we are missing something. We are taught that we are empty. Without exterior things we don’t fit or belong.
Philosophers have been saying it for thousands of years. If you overvalue money and possessions, if you think about life in terms of how you look to other people, you will be unhappy.
The way we live today is
Fcausing huge disconnection from real, meaningful values. Just as more of us are eating junk food, making ourselves physically sick, many are consuming junk values which are making us emotionally sick. The race to be perfect - whether that be what we own, how we look, who our friends are - has no finishing line. In fact when we get closer to the finishing line it is moved further away. It is the hamster wheel of consumer happiness. And as a result, we become our own worst critic.
Criticism withers selfesteem but praise builds it up. It is vital we understand that all thoughts have physical reactions in the body. Accepting criticism causes the release of cortisol - the stress hormone. Those hurtful, critical words you say to yourself over and over again go into your body and have a negative chemical effect. Accepting praise produces the release of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin
- the happiness hormones having a positive chemical effect.
Stop being your own worst critic. You are allowed to make mistakes, but you are not allowed to punish and beat up your own body for being human. Become alert to how often you criticise yourself - when you do that you are physically and chemically withering your own self-esteem.
And don’t wait for others to praise you. We all have a missing part waiting to hear something - “you are a good son/daughter, you are smart, you are loveable, I’m proud of you, you are enough.” Make a list of things you wanted your parents, your teacher, your friends, your loving partner to say to you, and say those things to yourself. Praise yourself. Start letting praise in. Make praise familiar and make criticism unfamiliar.