Depression: Is it a Snake or a Rope?
Article By: A. B. Curtiss, board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist and author of the book BRAINSWITCH OUT OF DEPRESSION.
There is no reason to endure agonizing feelings more than a few minutes. Most of our anxiety is very shallow considering it is the fear of what isn’t, an illusion, like the rope ’snake.’ So what is reality soon after?
Here’s what you do when depression hits.
Living in a continual state of anxiety is the easiest thing in the world. that is our only hope for combating depression considering a human being has been scripted since caveman days to pay attention FIRST to strong emotions. But emotions can be wrong considering they can be triggered accidentally, like depression, like the rope ’snake,’ when there is no real danger. You disconnect the ‘thought’ that depression is happening in your brain from the ‘emotion’ that depression is happening in your brain; and the depression itself will be fragmented and weakened by the schism.
What seems like a snake may be a rope, but we will not know that it is a rope unless we refuse to succumb to our fear that it is a snake. They are equally effective with the sudden onset of what I shout the ‘great chemical dump’ that suddenly wrests our mind from the defense of its normal moorings and pitches us headlong into the timeless agony and lifeless void of depression. Curtiss is a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist and author of Brainswitch out of depression
Instead of acknowledging the pain of your depression, instead of thinking the thought ‘I am depressed.’ say the one thought, the poem, the nonsense rhyme by and by to yourself in your mind. It is a myth that we have to think any thought that happens to bubble up in our mind, even the thought ‘I am depressed.’ It is a myth that some of our feelings may be so strong that we are compelled to act them out just considering they ‘chemical up’ in our brain.
Focus your mind on small physical actions: brush your teeth, straighten your desk, jog, etc., while accepting some temporary psycho-physiological discomfort in a detached way. They are always the aftermath of some pattern of thinking, some learned associations that have connected in your brain.
The obvious task is simply to change your thinking, and thereupon your feelings will change to reflect the new thinking. Insist! B.
Ancient wisdom has given us a clue that helps to dispel the myth that we are dependent upon our moods, the myth that we cannot think and act independently of raging emotions. The notion is not to become some glaze-eyed Pollyanna, but simply to avoid the painful paralysis that keeps you from living your life.
The first task is to dispel two widely accepted and dangerous myths. We don’t have to exert ourselves in any other way. One two, buckle my shoe. Walking up the stairs of his back porch at night a man is frightened by the sudden appearance of a snake coiled on the step ahead. Any neutral (non-emotional) brain activity involving words or numbers start the neurons arcing in the neocortex, the thinking part of our brain, and lessens the activity of neurons in the subcortex, the emotional part of our brain.
A. As the old Chinese proverb reminds us: we cannot prevent the birds of sadness from flying by our heads but we must not let them build a nest in our hair. that small mind trick literally disconnects the notice that we are depressed from one part of the brain to the other and short circuits the negative feedback loop feeding our depression.Or we can light the lamp of our own awareness and see that the snake is, indeed, only a rope. depression is never in the neocortex.
A human being can only concentrate on one thought at a date. As our faithful guardian it is always on the lookout for ‘what could go wrong.’ But too much looking for the negative can spark up old neural patterns of depression. When we concentrate on any neutral thought, the anxious thought ‘I am depressed’ is temporarily blocked from our attention. But it works miracles, as many simple things do.
When one is well into productive behavior and thinking, soon after the chemicals start to dissipate, and the edge of the emotional trauma will be taken off. We should question all behavior based upon the concept that the rope is a snake. Anything will do.
Emotions are our first line of defense, our greatest defense mechanism to watchful us to danger. Insist!
We can play the ‘Ain’t it terrible Game’and find a group of ’snake’ survivors so we can tell everybody about our horrible snake experience and listen to the stories about their snakes. Reality is giving a pure act of attention to the task at hand. depression may be a slippery slope down to the very pits of Hell, but you can install handrails and footholds, even self-moving step-in elevators in the style of simple mind exercises and techniques that change the
direction of your ‘downer’ thinking and get you back on the upward path again. Even the singled-out word, yes, yes, yes, thought repetitively. We can run away from the ’snake’ in fear, and calm our nerves by picking up any one of hundreds of different addictions or medications to distract us or deaden our body so it doesn’t feel the fear. Just the cognitive thinking that ‘the dumb exercise won’t work’ is sufficient to distract our attention, even for a few seconds, from our concentration on the thought ‘I am depressed.’As you practice that exercise, your powers of concentration on your chosen neutral or nonsense thought will improve by instance so that your depression will have less and less potential to suck you in, and dismantle your equilibrium. When we find ourselves heading for the negative, it’s duration for a brainswitch exercise to head us back in the direction of the positive. Insist on your thought. By using brainswitching techniques you can actually escape temporarily from the subcortex to the neocortex for some instant relief. But no day should be spent on wondering why the poor feelings occurred. We can learn to distinguish amidst emotional impulse and a thinking choice; amoung feelings and principles, so that our fear remains a essential wake-up signal that ends in some chosen action instead of a negative neural feedback loop ending in itself, the condition of self-terror we shout depression. Focusing on the ’snake’ is called anxiety. B.
Not only is it not essential to live that way, it is not healthy to live that way. The switch is in our earnest desire to know WHAT IS. poor feelings should wired you that it’s moment to use a brainswitching exercises such as ‘green frog.’ soon after with ‘green frog’ thinking in place, thus blocking thoughts about feeling poor, slowly get busy with chores or regular duties, followed by more ambitious work.
We do not have to stay there! You will start to notice some rise of your fundamental okayness. Curtiss
Getting out of a depressive episode without drugs requires no belief system. When we cease to pay attention to our depression, it cannot think itself. Row, row, row your boat.
Even when humans do that exercise out of spite just to prove that ’such a silly thing couldn’t possibly work,’ it still works. We just break down into anxiety and let it take us, mindlessly, wherever it is going.
We usually don’t place importance on the fact that what gets us down, and let’s face it, our moods can change though our situations remain the same, is the fact that our brain is essentially a defense mechanism. These concepts are not just for the low-grade ‘blues’ and ’sadness’ that dry us up and render us temporarily purposeless and stale on life. With the exercises, you produce rational thought more dominant than emotional thought.
When we are suddenly overcome by depression, there are concepts, thought processes, and small mind-tricks that can get us out of the worst of it without dulling our mind and personality with drugs. whether depression intrudes again, simply start from scratch with ‘green frog.’
The brain always chases the direction of its most current dominant thought. The continual refusal to focus on the unreal (’we are helpless’) is the essential condition for seeing the real (’we can do something about it’).
This is urgent considering depression only happens in the subcortex.
By A. Once you discard that useless concept, you can apply simple but dominant cognitive behavioral principles and techniques to depression with instant results.
This principle is illustrated by the age-old parable of the rope and the snake. We CAN turn on our awareness when we remember where the switch is. One thing that can help is a cognitive behavioral technique called ‘brainswitching.’ Choose a word or phrase, such as ‘green frog,’ a nonsense song like Row, row, row your boat, or some ‘mantra’ to have ‘at the ready’ the next day depression hits. Any maverick thought could be the trigger: cloudy day, the color purple, some sad song. As far as depression is concerned, we should question the overwhelming fear that our depression is more dominant than we are. The continual refusal to see the snake is the essential condition for seeing the rope. The new activity will spark up neurons in the neocortex, and cause the slowdown of neuronal activity in the subcortex lessening the stress chemicals being poured into the brain. He jumps back in horror and alarm; but suddenly someone lights a lamp, and he laughs to see the ’snake’ is only a rope. It requires dropping a belief, the one that says you are the helpless victim of your moods and your emotions. Concentrate on it. It doesn’t matter.
What can you do when depression attacks?
This is such a simple, dumb little exercise that, at the outset, it must seem too trivial in the face of the horrors of depression.
Original post by Anxiety Insights
Article By: A. B. Curtiss, board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist and author of the book BRAINSWITCH OUT OF DEPRESSION.
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