Am I telling myself off just for having normal human imperfections? Connie’s response: ‘Hey, at least I’m good at beating myself up! If I stop a second and think about it, everyone has their flaws. Ten pounds of extra weight isn’t exactly the very worst thing I could imagine.’
Where is it written that I should have done something different? Connie’s response: ‘I use that word should on myself a lot. Maybe I should, oops, I mean maybe it would be better if I replaced that word. Although diet books don’t exactly recommend eating chocolate and drinking wine, most of them advise modest indulgences and say that there are hardly any foods falling in the “absolutely never” category.’
We hope that you also are going to seriously review the Guilt Querying Questions and come to Connie’s conclusions about healthy indulgences. We believe that you really do deserve a reasonable amount of pleasure in your life. You don’t need to earn the right to pursue happiness – indulging in a few enjoyable activities can be a powerful tool for fighting depression, if you give yourself the permission to use it.
If you answer the Guilt Querying Questions we list earlier in this section and guilt is still blocking you from seeking enjoyment, please read Chapters 3, 5, 6, and 7. These chapters give you more information about tackling the guilt that accompanies depression and robs you of the ordinary pleasures of everyday life. It is up to you to grant yourself the right to experience pleasure.
Tackling self-fulfilling prophecies
You may find after selecting a few enjoyable activities, you then dread the thought of doing them. You start seeing them as a burden. Depression creates a fog that obscure your ability to think clearly about the future.
Lucas graduates with a degree in architecture and immediately finds work he loves with a small firm in Northampton. Then the economy takes a nosedive, his firm restructures and he’s made redundant. Around that time, Lucas breaks up with his girlfriend of four years standing. Understandably, he feels miserable, has less energy, and his sleep’s disturbed. His counsellor suggests Lucas lists activities he found pleasurable in the past. He comes up with:
Cycling
Clubbing
Badminton
Spending time with friends
Negative thoughts then flood Lucas’s mind. He predicts his friends will get fed up with him – he’s dull and boring since his depression. He’ll hate cycling now he’s so unfit. And he decides he can’t afford to go out clubbing.
If you’re experiencing even a mild depression, beware. Your predictions of the future are most likely to be unreliable. Because pleasure seems impossible when you’re down, anticipating enjoyment is particularly difficult to do. Press on and try to ignore your mind’s pessimism.
If you find it difficult to pay attention to your negative predictions about activities that are meant to be fun, you can combat your mind’s gloomy forecasting with an activity called Firing Your Mind’s Faulty Forecaster. SIt down, grab a pen and paper, and make a chart like the one in Table 11-1. You’ re going to be surprised how helpful this activity can be.
1. Pick three or four small, potentially pleasurable activities.
You don’t have to view these as truly pleasurable – yet. Just try choosing easy(ish) ones to tackle, or some that you enjoyed in the past.
If you have good, valid reasons for not engaging in a particular activity (other than low expectations of pleasure), don’t select that item.
2. On a point scale of 0 to 10, rate the amount of pleasure or fun you expect to get out of the activity.
Zero represents expecting absolutely no fun, 5 is anticipating moderate enjoyment, and 10 means expecting the activity will be utterly fantastic. We don’t predict many 9’s or 10’s while you’re feeling depressed.
3. Perform the activity – just do it!
This is the hard part. Even if you rate an activity as 0 or 1 on the pleasure scale, push yourself to do it anyway. Your mind may resist with negative thoughts. Short circuit those thoughts and move that body of yours.
4. After doing the activity, rate how much pleasure you actually experienced and briefly describe your reaction in words.
If you complete this exercise, you’re likely to find that you experienced more fun and enjoyment from activities than you predicted. Invalidating your predictions may encourage trying some more pleasurable activities. The more pleasure you experience, the less depressed you’re going to be.
Checking back in with Lucas, he has four activities on his pleasure list. None of them sound particularly exciting to him, so he tries the Firing Your Mind’s Faulty Forecaster exercise. Table 11-1 shows Lucas’s results.
Table 11-1 Firing Your Mind’s Faulty Forecaster
Activity
Forecasted Fun
Experienced Fun
Cycling
2
4 – I wasn’t quite as unfit as I’d feared. Being outdoors felt good.
Clubbing
4
2 – the music was loud and lousy, and the drinks were too expensive.
Badminton
3
5 – I was pretty rusty, but it felt good being back at the old club.
Spending time with friends
3
6 – I had a surprisingly good experience.
While in three out of four cases, Lucas experienced significantly more fun and pleasure than he anticipated, in one case, he actually did have a pretty rotten time. Experiencing less pleasure than anticipated can occur for many reasons – Lucas,’ financial concerns turned out to be quite realistic.
Also notice that Lucas didn’t have the greatest time in the world with any of the activities; this is normal, because depression seriously dampens the experience of joy and your ability to have fun. However, if Lucas continues to pursue pleasurable activities, the amount of fun he has is very likely to increase slowly over time.
Like Lucas, you may have less pleasure than you anticipate occasionally. For example, you arrange a walking weekend, only to find it’s rained off. Or, you go to a party and find that you feel uncomfortable or awkward. But be aware that the more pleasurable activities you try, the greater the probability you’ll start experiencing pleasure.
Depression is a formidable enemy. Adding pleasure to your life is a small but significant step in fighting your depression. Give fun a chance. Remember that finding out how to have fun once again takes time and patience. Start with an activity that’s going to give pleasure but doesn’t isn’t too demanding Your very favourite activities can wait until you are stronger.
Chapter 12
Handling Life’s Headaches
In This Chapter
Developing an effective problem-solving game plan
Applying problem-solving skills in your life
Depression has a nasty way of slowing down and clogging up your brain’s problem-solving machinery. When you’re depressed, your problems can quickly grow from molehills to mountains, paralysing you and filling you with hopelessness. This then increases your depression, clouding your ability to find a way out of what is troubling you.
But despair not – here’s the good news. Developing more effective problem-solving strategies helps defeat depression. This chapter shows a new approach to problem–solving - one you can easily apply to real-life problems.
We give you an all-round game plan for tackling problems that come in all shapes, sizes, and colours. Adele’s story is typical of the problems that people with depression face. But getting the hang of a new game plan is much easier if you have examples, so we use Adele’s story throughout this chapter to help you follow the game plan and hopefully score a victory over your problem.
Adele married Eddie, a self-confessed computer geek, when they were both 19. Come their 25th wedding anniversary, Adele realises that she’s seriously bored with the marriage. She and Eddie don’t talk to each other much any more – their life together feels boring and stale. Trying to discuss her feelings with Eddie, he’s simply not interested, becoming inc
reasingly distant and evasive the harder she tries. The months pass by, Adele slowly slides into a deep depression. She thinks seriously about divorce or having an affair - neither option appeals to her. She feels stuck, and can’t see a way out.
Read on to see how Adele takes up CRICKET to help tackle her problems . . .
Devising Life’s Problem-Solving Game Plan – CRICKET
In recent years, the problem-solving approach to fighting depression has gained wider popularity owing to research showing its effectiveness. The aims of the problem-solving approach, when applied to depression, are to:
Uncover life problems that may be contributing to depression
Figure out how depression lessens chances of finding solutions
Develop effective problem-solving techniques
Prevent relapse by improving coping skills
To make our problem-solving plan easy to remember, we give it the acronym CRICKET. The CRICKET game plan guides you through a series of steps. These steps help you to find effective solutions to your problems and then try them out.
C stands for the central core, or the problem itself. The core includes how you see the problem and its cause(s), your feelings about the problem, and your beliefs about trying to solve it. For example, you may believe that the problem simply can’t be overcome. That belief is part of the core of the problem.
R stands for running through the routes – these are all the available routes or options you can take to approach the problem creatively.
I is for investigating the outcomes that carrying out each option creates.
C involves committing to a choice about which option you want to try.
K refers to not kidding yourself by saying you ‘can’t decide’. Remember that no decision is still a decision – you’re deciding not to change.
E stands for your emotional plan for carrying out your option, because some choices may need courage.
T stands for the test match – testing out your option. You carry out your plan, review the outcome check if it produced the desired result, and work out what to do next, if your plan proved unsuccessful.
The CRICKET problem-solving game plan doesn’t guarantee success. But the approach does give you a better way of thinking through your problems. A thorough analysis helps improve your chances of discovering and putting in place the best possible solutions. CRICKET helps ease your depression by increasing confidence and building problem-solving skills.
In the following sections, we examine each of the steps in your game of CRICKET. Like many of the exercises throughout this book, most of the steps require putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), so get out your notebook or switch on your computer.
If the problems in your life seem utterly hopeless and overwhelming, and you can’t imagine even attempting to tackle them, please seek professional help before attempting to make use of our problem-solving game plan. The plan may still help you, but you’re likely to need professional help in carrying it out.
Identifying the Central Core (C)
The first step in CRICKET involves a careful examination of your problem:
1. Come up with a description of your problem.
Carefully consider what your problem is actually about. If has several strands, try to home in on which is the most important. Focus on the first key issue, then write down all you can about what’s relates to it.
Adele (who we describe at the beginning of the chapter) decides the quality of her marriage is a bigger problem than her boredom – though boredom plays a big part in her life. So she decides to initially focus on her marriage. Adele realises she and her husband haven’t any common interests. Lovemaking is practically non-existent- their evenings are usually her slumped in front of the TV while husband Eddie plays on his computer. Adele wants a change, but doesn’t know what to do.
2. Reflect on your feelings about the problem.
Reflecting on all the feelings you have about a given problem is important. Doing so helps you to understand the impact the problem is having on your life.
Adele identifies the overpowering feeling of boredom as a major problem in her marriage. Identifying other feelings is tough, because she tends to think that she doesn’t deserve much from life and that she has no right to have particular feelings, such as anger. (Refer to Chapter 7 for looking at different ways of viewing the world). Adele decides that as well as boredom, she also feels resentment and anger towards her husband, plus anxiety at the possibility of her marriage breaking up and facing a life alone as a 44-year-old divorcee.
3. Consider the likely causes of your problem.
Depression may mislead you when you’re working out the possible causes of your problem. Depressed minds often assume that the person who has the problem is also the cause. Although that person often bears some responsibility, considering all other causes is important. Sometimes understanding the whole range of causes points towards solutions.
In Adele’s case, she first blames herself for being an inadequate, uninspiring wife. But thinking things over she realises actually she’s been trying to improve things, but Eddie’s always rebuffed her. She decides another cause may be the emptiness they’ve both felt since their second and last child left home for university six months ago. Finally, she realises she and Eddie have few friends or a social life, even more so since their friends Natasha and Sean moved to Torquay last year.
4. Search for information about your problem.
The chances are that you’re not the first person experiencing your particular problem. Read around the subject. Whether the problem’s to do with finance, relationships, career, sex, in-laws or difficulties with your children,, there’ probably a wealth of information and advice on it. In Chapter 4 we suggest ways to evaluate trustworthy sources. Consider talking to an expert in the area of your problem for further advice.
Adele picks up Making Marriage Work For Dummies by Steven Simring, Sue Klavans Simring, and Gene Busnar (Wiley), and Relationships For Dummies by Dr Kate Wachs (Wiley).
5. Consider the importance of your problem.
Ask yourself how much this problem really matters Will solving it actually help? If so, how much? Rating the problem on a scale of 0 (no importance to you whatsoever) to 100 (nothing in the world is more important).can indicate what effort to put into solving your problem.
Adele realises that the quality of her marriage matters to her a great deal. She rates the issue as 75 on a 0 to 100 point scale. She decides that it’s most certainly worth putting in considerable effort to get her marriage on a happier footing.
6. Check out solution-interfering beliefs.
After following the preceding steps, you need to ask yourself if you have any beliefs that may be interfering with your attempts to solve the problem. The beliefs you are holding can even stop you from taking action and become part of the problem itself.
Adele realises that she has five major beliefs that may getting in the way of her problem-solving. You may be experiencing similar ones.
Table 12-1 lists the five beliefs we’ve identified which most commonly interfere with problem solving. We offer positive alternative ways of considering those beliefs, to help finding solutions.
Table 12-1 Common Solution-Interfering Beliefs and Positive Alternative Views
Solution-Interfering Belief
Positive Alternative View
My problems are too huge to solve.
Overcoming Depression For Dummies Page 27
