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I’m more able to cope with looking at thoughts I might find distressing, like ‘my life is a mess’ or ‘I can’t get on with other people’. Not only that, but because feeling positive emotions increases the ability to think clearly and creatively, I’m more able to see the holes in my thoughts and challenge them.‘Why bother looking at your thoughts at all?’ I can hear you asking. ‘If watching a DVD or doing something fun makes you feel better, why not leave it at that?’ My personal reason for continuing to challenge and change my depressing thoughts is that it protects me against future depression. While it’s great that I can feel good when I watch a DVD or live performance, I can’t spend every waking hour doing that. What I know from experience is that if I learn to identify the thoughts that get me down and change them for something that makes me feel better I’m more able to enjoy life even when I’m not able to watch a movie. Working on my thoughts gets at the cause of my bad feelings and helps protect my happiness in times when positive experiences are scarce.
Cameron uses this a lot - watching something funny to lift his mood and clear his thinking so he can then move forward. Now that we are together I get the benefits of this too - the watching the funny DVDs as well as the anticipated good outcome. Interesting to know that this works for other people. I mean most of us know that laughter is good for you etc but I didn't know that others also got the added benefits of clearer thinking and so on. It's a shame that 'outside' people can't see (or refuse to acknowledge) that these types of behaviours (i.e. watching funny DVDs) can have serious postive benefits for depression, and prefer to think that 'we' are lazy, or hiding away from the world, or whatever. I know Cameron has had that attitude againist him many times, and so have I. Thanks for writing about it so clearly, Kaye. You are an inspiration and a treasure!
ReplyDeleteThank you sweet pea. What lovely feedback. I hadn't thought of the laziness side of it. To me it's part of self-care, although I can see that some people might not see that lolling about watching videos is part of maintaining good health! But I don't care what others think cos I know it's good for me.
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