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