Quick Facts
-Depression can result in a vicious cycle – a nasty thought appears in your head, you believe it, it makes you feel negative, you act out the negative emotion, and reaffirm the belief.
-This process can happen subconsciously!
-One of the best ways to break it is to ask yourself, “which beliefs are making me feel depressed?” When they appear you can write them down, ‘disidentify’ from them, and stop acting them out. Then you can create better, more positive beliefs!
Intro
I wrote a post about depression on my website already… Even though it’s helpful I want to go in a different direction with this post and leave the old one as it is, there’s another perspective I will adopt while writing about something as deep and dark as this!
The Cycle of Depression
A fundamental fact about depression is that it’s psychological and biological at the same time. Whether or not a depressed person’s depression originates from a psychological or a biological source should be analyzed on an individual basis but psychological problems breed biological problems and vice versa.
Let’s think this through – in a hypothetical scenario, I have 20 negative beliefs that I’ve completely identified with and act out. Since I’m acting out these beliefs I will probably slump my shoulders, unnecessarily tense my muscles (especially my neck and face muscles), chew my food improperly, have a sedentary lifestyle, accidentally injure myself because I’m not paying attention to where I go when I’m walking… My body definitely suffers whenever I act out detrimental beliefs, and when my body hurts more detrimental beliefs will form, and the cycle continues until something terrible happens.
Let’s go the other way – if you genuinely have a biological root for your depression (genes, a low serotonin production, etc) you will feel and act in a certain way. Feelings and actions often influence beliefs to form, and if you feel depleted or if you don’t feel good a lot of the time you may form detrimental beliefs from that state of being (although maybe not), and the cycle continues.
I have seen people who were so, so deep into the cycle. So deep you guys. Their mind was warped, their body was warped, and they were genuinely beyond repair unless the entirety of humanity came to the rescue all at once. I’ve been in a pretty bad spot myself, and I successfully climbed out of it by dealing with my detrimental psychological beliefs and by taking some physical substances!
How To Fix The Psychological Part
From what I’ve observed, most of the depression in most of the people who are depressed come from psychological sources. Usually, this means acting out detrimental beliefs and the suppression of one or more emotions.
It’s important to write down each and every detrimental belief that you hold, even if you don’t act it out. I say this but it can be easier said than done, it took me a long time to figure out each and every negative belief I picked up over the years. It doesn’t have to be all at once.
How you figure out what you believe is you either ask yourself, pay attention to how you feel, or open your 3rd eye and see the playing out of the belief as an image or a movie. When you’re paying attention to a feeling/image/movie you can ask yourself, “Why is this here? Which belief (or beliefs) brought this into my being?” You’ll use your intuition to answer yourself and then you can write the belief(s) down.
Once you’ve written your beliefs you can begin the self-analyzation part of it. I encourage you to take one belief at a time and disidentify from it, which essentially makes it so that the belief isn’t part of your ego, or worse, possessing you. You can keep expressing that you’re letting the belief go until you feel like you can objectively criticize it.
Then, objectively criticize it. I like asking questions such as, “why did I believe this? What purpose does it serve? What are some better beliefs to believe that get me what I want in a better way?” Once I understand why the belief is there and which beliefs can replace it I go ahead and throw the old belief away and replace it with the new ones. Sometimes I won’t even replace the old belief, I’ll just throw it away.
If you do this and you still feel depressed you still have some negative beliefs that you haven’t written down and disidentified from yet. Negative beliefs have a nasty habit of hiding from you when you look for them, so a bit of searching (in my case, years of searching) and a lot of patience is the key. However, once you have truly disidentified from every one of your negative beliefs I wouldn’t be surprised if your depression simply ceases to exist!
How To Fix The Biological Part
So, what if your depression stems from a biological source? What if you’re physically suffering from depression even if it started as a psychological issue?
This part is a lot easier to fix because we greatly value the physical world as opposed to the subjective world. You can go to any kind of doctor for any kind of pain and they will probably be able to treat you effectively, SSRIs do wonders for many people, and there are even ways to heal many chronic injuries.
I personally vouch for psychedelics, cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, and DMT to be exact. The chemical psilocybin acts similarly to serotonin and it’s a better long-term solution than SSRIs since they tend to lose their effectiveness over time and psilocybin does not. The only reason they’re illegal is because they work, as I’ve explained before, but since they’re illegal you may have trouble finding/growing these things on a consistent basis. Thankfully, cannabis is easy to find/grow and you probably won’t have to take a whole lotta mushrooms before your biology becomes rewired for the better. DMT, of course, is a natural chemical that we produce so smoking it doesn’t do any harm to our biology whatsoever – quite the opposite.
Other Things To Know
If you’re in a depressive state I suspect that the most prominent belief looks something like, “it’s hopeless. It’ll never get better. No matter what anyone says I’m just going to suffer. Nothing works, nothing helps.”
I’ll address the last point and say that it simply isn’t true. It’s factually, objectively incorrect because even if you hold onto that belief as much as you possibly can, I know that 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms will force you to let it go and heal anyways. Please keep in mind that just because you believe something doesn’t mean it’s necessarily an accurate reflection of reality.
Also, bringing yourself out of your depressive slump may not be that difficult. It may be very easy! However, I write this post for those who are like I was, extremely depressed with little to no hope of recovery. I’m writing this post for my past self because this is what I needed to hear, and so I wonder if it’s what you need to hear as well.
And one last thing, you can do it. No matter if someone in your family died, you had a terrible life, you have PTSD, it doesn’t matter – you can heal yourself from your psychological bullshart and become the healthiest person you know! I recommend doing the psychological work first and starting on your physical ailments right after 🙂
Conclusion
Thank you for reading! I hope that following the steps above will work for you, and I’ll see you in the next article!
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