Books that have helped me feel better

A lot of books have helped me feel happier and/or less depressed. The ones that come top of my list are:

1/ Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy/ The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns

It’s an interesting point whether less depression equals more happiness. I can say without hesitation that Feeling Good helped me feel less depressed, many times. I think it also helped me feel happier, although it wasn’t the total answer. I had a to look a lot further than the techniques Dr Burns teaches to achieve happiness. But these techniques helped me reduce my bad feelings and increase my good feelings, and helped me climb out of many a relapse. The Feeling Good Handbook helped me recover from a serious suicide attempt. Feeling Good has sold 3 million copies and I feel awed and humbled when I consider the number of people David Burns has helped, as well as profoundly grateful he wrote it. I wouldn’t want to be living today (and very possibly would not be) without the things I learned from his books.

2/ Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman

I cam across this book fairly late in the piece. Whereas I first encountered cognitive and behavioural techniques in 1982 after an episode of major depression, I didn’t find this landmark work until the late 90’s, when I largely had my depression under control. But it blew me away nonetheless. This book is about how thinking optimistically can not only make you feel better but help you be more successful in work and other areas of life. Research has since shown that optimistic thinking increases good health and life span. I found the book mind blowing and use the techniques it outlines to this day.

Accentuate the positive, minimize the negative

The dog situation gets me down, especially at night when I’m exhausted and my hands are sore and bleeding from his nipping. Then it’s easy to think of myself as a failure at dog training. But I need to stay focused on the positives – what I have achieved in the past three weeks. My single worst mental habit is focusing on the negatives and ignoring what’s going well. It’s not deliberate, just the way I was brought up to view the world. So it’s important to remind myself that this dog is now almost toilet trained, sits on command, comes when told (sometimes!) and has started to settle at night without sounding like he is dismantling the living room first. Those are real achievements on my part. So I will keep trying, repeating as I go ‘I am the alpha bitch, I am the alpha bitch, I am the alpha bitch…’

The single best tool I’ve ever found for countering my tendency to over-focus on what’s wrong in my life is making a regular note of what’s good. It was suggested to me by a psychologist I was seeing way back in 1984. As I already kept a journal to dispute my automatic thinking in, it was no problem to add a section at the back where I noted down what I had achieved, however small, what I had enjoyed and positive things that had happened. On the facing page I also wrote down what I called F+ events – things I was looking forward to in the future.

When I did the Authentic Happiness Coaching course with Martin Seligman and Ben Dean in 2004/2005 I was interested to find that making a note of ‘three good things’ each day was a technique developed by positive psychologists to increase happiness. At that stage I’d been doing this almost every day for 20 years. I still do it regularly because it makes me feel good. A recent study by Marty Seligman, Chris Peterson and colleagues shows that noting three good things each day can increase happiness and decrease depression significantly over a six month period (you can find a copy of this study at www.authentichappiness.com). Another study shows that it works just as well to note good things once a week*. I think it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve done to transform my depression into happiness and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon – certainly not before the dog is trained!

*Emmons R A and McCullough M E (2003) Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84: 377-389.