Changing Your Thinking 6 - Depression

Change your thinking - beating the blues
Worrying is a cognitive process
Anxiety is more primitive - sometimes not conciously thinking about it. Muscle tense up and arousal.
Anxiety - perception of threat.
Depression -perception of hopelessness.

Stopping behaviour - helps us change ourselves.
Cognitive bias - mood affects thinking - sometimes we get caught up in our thinking
Cannot trust content of our thoughts.

Feeling down-
Lack of energy, heaviness
Majority of depressEd people may also have anxiety, but not the other way round.

(clinical/major ) depression: long term, hard to function.
Symptoms: lose appetite, depressed mood, lost interest
Melancholic depression - biological

What causes depression.
- Not always due to a reason.
- Biological
- historical
- psychological - personality style
- environmental

Black dog institute day high risk for these groups
- Anxious worrier
- irritable
- socially avoidant
- reserved - don't feel they are ok so pretend things ok, don't let people know what you are really feeling
- sensitive to rejection
- self critical.

Biological based depression :
-Melancholic
-Psychotic - delusional, paranoid, really agitated - use electric shock
-seasonal affective disorder -

Bipolar disorder
-Bipolar 1- very rare but psychotic, mania
-bipolar 2 - severe black intense depression.
-Bipolar - strongly correlated with intelligence.

Stress triggers depression
-Acute stress
-chronic stress

Rumination
- Self doubt, over analysing, others have better things.
- unproductive and not really solving problems
- feeling defective failure guilty

Strategies for managing depression
- Perceptions feel 100% true
- feels like no solution and permanent
- in reality, things change or our perception change

Mindful observation
-Observe and label the thoughts - worry, over thinking, Rumination

Behavioural strategies :
Activity scheduling
Achievement activity
Pleasurable activities
Goals are important
Social support
Long term plans
Exercise

Apps;
Mycompass
Head space
Mood gym
Worry time

Controlling Your Thinking 7 - Self Esteem

To avoid depressed state :
Exercise, do pleasure things, socialise, do something leading to accomplishments.

Core beliefs or schemas hard Wire or brain - causes wrong thinking like mind-reading

SELF ESTEEM
way we perceive ourselves, relative to other people
- Affects what we put up with., confidence, sense of belonging, affects who we marry or make friends.
- Affects mood and risk of depression.
- Could be a state or trait
- everyone who is depressed has low esteem
- leads to self diminishing behaviour - gives negative feedback. High self esteem leads to more friendly - more positive feedback
- comes from past experience, early childhood, adolescent
- temperament - eg introvert find harder to make conversation and like to be alone. Extrovert - talking to people is positive.
- Subsequent life experience -social interaction, negative experience
- can be: healthy, fragile, poor
- core belief of self
- cognitive bias is like prejudice, when there is strong belief - accept info that aligns with our beliefs, but make excuse of opposite evidence.
- High reserve, perfectionism, workaholic is related to low self esteem. People trying to prove themselves.
- At the end, relationship more important.

Comparing yourself
- When feeling down to see others more successful, then low self esteem
- better to compare ourselves with our own self.
- Can set goals for ourselves - for our own sake.
- Unfair to compare. Irrational, self defeating

Challenge
-Self acceptance
- setting goals

Labelling
-Making gross generalisations
-no point labelling because that gives us a single label.
- we are all a complex mixture of things
- think: I'm not dumb - I'm not good at statistics
- think: I'm not social misfit -I'm shy with people
- good to be specific, not good to label

Social anxiety
-tend to focus attention on ourselves
-avoid pre event planning - mind reading, analysing

Address cognitive bias
- Focus on skills, strengths, qualities

Acknowledging shame can be good, eg with weakness.
-Shame tired to self esteem

Tips:
Acknowledge reality -drop judgement
Self diminishing behaviours
Body language, eye contact,
Honest assertive communication -builds relationship based on equality