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    How to Change Your Thinking About Depression: Hazelden Quick Guides
    How to Change Your Thinking About Depression: Hazelden Quick Guides
    How to Change Your Thinking About Depression: Hazelden Quick Guides
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    How to Change Your Thinking About Depression: Hazelden Quick Guides

    By Leading Hazelden Experts Staff and Vangie Foshee

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    About this ebook

    Apply practical strategies from the latest expert research to change the way you think and react to feelings of depression.

    Apply practical strategies from the latest expert research to change the way you think and react to feelings of depression.Do you (or does someone you know) have problems with depression? Have you been told that you might be depressed? We all have bad days and feel down from time to time. It's common, and even healthy at times. But when these feelings linger to the point of keeping us from our responsibilities and affecting our relationships, we can feel helpless.Using the research of experts in the field of emotional health, this book outlines a basic understanding of depression and offers healthy ways to process and change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to better deal with it. These strategies are based on Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), a widely used method of examining our own thoughts to challenge and change irrational beliefs.In this book, you willDiscover the "anatomy" of depression and break it down into its basic elementsLearn the different forms of depression so you can better care for your ownUncover your own sources of depression and learn how certain coping strategies are often both a symptom and a cause of depressionDiscover how you experience depression through your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviorsKnow how and when to reach out for professional help, if necessaryReclaim your life from depression by making conscious choices in your thinking, feeling, and actingAbout Hazelden Quick GuidesHazelden Quick Guides are short, accessible e-books that draw on the original work and best practices of leading experts to help readers address common addiction recovery and emotional health issues. This first four-book collection applies the proven methods of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) to challenge and change the irrational thoughts and beliefs that contribute to the debilitating effects of shame, anger, depression, and anxiety.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHazelden Publishing
    Release dateApr 12, 2012
    ISBN9781616494339
    How to Change Your Thinking About Depression: Hazelden Quick Guides

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      Book preview

      How to Change Your Thinking About Depression - Leading Hazelden Experts Staff

      Depression Is Sadness—and More

      We can start by telling the truth about depression. It’s time to dispel the myth that depression is merely a case of getting the blues or an extended period of sadness.

      Sadness is actually a healthy emotion. It signals that we’ve experienced a loss. Going through a period of sadness helps us to absorb the loss. The sadness eventually passes, and we return to the former rhythm of our daily activities.

      Depression, however, is more than just sadness. In addition to a dark mood, people with depression can sink into a level of despair that lingers and colors every aspect of life. Depression is a combination of negative thoughts, feelings, and actions that keep us from our responsibilities, from doing the things we enjoy, and from spending time with the people who are important to us.

      Depression is one of the most common types of psychiatric illnesses, affecting about one in ten American adults.¹ Left untreated, depression may last for weeks, months, or years at a time. This affects not only people with the disease, but everyone who cares about them as well.

      To understand how deeply depression can reach into the human psyche, remember that it affects us in three dimensions—our thinking, our physical health, and our behavior.

      Negative Thinking

      You’ve heard that some people see life through rose-colored glasses. People with depression see things the opposite way. Their thinking takes a turn for the worse. They naturally put a negative spin on events. They tend to dwell on the past, fixate on failure, and blame themselves when things don’t work out. In addition, people with depression can have a hard time remembering things, making decisions, solving problems, and imagining new possibilities for the future.

      When we’re depressed, we tend to focus only on the negative events in our lives, and we forget the great people and opportunities in our lives. We blame ourselves for everything we’ve done wrong and give ourselves no credit for the many things we do right. This is a destructive way of thinking.

      Drawing on insights from REBT, Hazelden authors point to specific types of distorted thinking that do much to create depression—dogmatic demands, self-downing, awfulizing, and rumination. When repeated to ourselves over weeks, months, or years, these patterns of negative thinking become more than a symptom of depression. They can actually cause more severe forms of the disease.

      Dogmatic Demands

      These are rigid expectations that you must always perform perfectly, that people must always do what you want them to do, and that events in life must always be to your liking. None of these demands are realistic. But that doesn’t stop the thoughts from running through our mind. When our thinking is dominated by dogmatic demands, we are bound to feel disappointed, angry, anxious, or depressed.

      Albert Ellis, the psychotherapist who created REBT, encountered countless examples of dogmatic demands. He discovered that they have three basic themes:²

      I absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, perform well (or outstandingly well) and win the approval (or complete love) of significant others. If I fail in these important—and sacred—respects, that is awful and I am a bad, incompetent, unworthy person, who will probably always fail and deserves to

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