Feel good, think better: Using positive experiences to aid cognitive work

A couple of days ago I posted about how positive experiences, including watching DVDs or performances, can lift your mood and help your thinking. Apart from helping you feel good this approach also has another use. Some people I’ve talked to avoid challenging their depressing thinking because focusing on it makes them feel bad. I’ve found one way to get round this is to watch a funny or uplifting movie first or see a friend. Then when I’m feeling better, 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.

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.

Unless I control the dog the dog controls my moods - or does he?

I have discovered the secret to controlling Barney barndog. It is by doling out miniscule portions of wet cat food (known in the vernacular as ‘jelly meat’) whenever he behaves as I desire. World domination is mine, provided I keep up stocks of Gourmet cat food. (Manufacturers please note, I’m ripe for a sponsorship deal here.) It occurred to me last night that I write about my dog so much in this blog that it’s a dog blog more a happiness blog. Maybe I should retitle it Bringing up Barney? Authentic Obedience? The How of Dog Training? Hmmm. It’s a thought. (I didn’t say a good one.)

The reality is that Barney’s behavior has a huge impact on my moods. When he is bitey, on days when walking round the yard is made difficult by having to drag behind me the creature attached by the teeth to my trousers or boots, when my hands are bleeding and sore from his nips – I really experience a lot of negative emotions. Anger, hatred, frustration, shame, rage, misery, despair. All my old feelings of failure and inferiority come rushing back. I have to work extra hard not to take it personally, not to project it into the future as a never-ending failure, not to feel my whole life is crappy. In fact as I write I realise it’s about the three p’s of learned optimism – personalization, permanence and pervasiveness. The four p’s when you add in Barney’s accidents on the carpet. (Not the kind of p Martin Seligman had in mind I suspect.)

Now that I’m fully implementing the Dog Listener method life is much happier, and so am I. Today we’ve only had a couple of bitey episodes, strictly confined to the blanket, which soon ceased when I ignored him. Other than that he has been a sweet, playful, loving little dog. Right now he’s sound asleep on one side of the fire while my white cat sleeps on his blanket on the other side. Even Barney’s attempts to take over Bowie’s blanket have been so half-hearted that a look and a raised eyebrow on my part put an end to them. (Barney has a bad case of blanket envy.) Today I feel happy, even light hearted, playful and elated (it’s good to get full value from my thesaurus). It’s easy for me to assume this is because Barney is good. But I know it’s much more to do with how I’m thinking. While it’s tempting to believe that good dog = good mood, I have a lot more control over it than that. It is situations like this that make me glad I know so much about identifying the thoughts that make me feel bad and modifying them. And that I have a copy of The Dog Listener!