The human species is Homo sapiens. Sapiens means knowledge and wisdom. That is phenomenological if you ask people, what are you doing right now? It turns out more than 50% of the time you’re thinking about scenarios about the future. We are creatures who live in the future. Human beings are always conjuring up possible futures and evaluations. Depression is a disorder of faulty perception.
Example:
Psychologists divide 100 people into two groups. One group is given mental arithmetic task and the other group remains ideal. The researcher uses the fMRI technique to measure activity in the brain when people are doing the arithmetic task and when remains ideal. Their data has been collected and analyzed.
It turns out the results are shocking and remarkable. The brain is very noisy at the mental arithmetic task. But when people asked to just remain ideal, the same thing lights up all the time. It’s called the default circuit, and it’s the same circuit that lights up when we imagine the future.
Psychologists call this imagination circuit. It’s the circuit that imagines the future. So, it leads us to believe that psychology should be about the future and we metabolize the past and the present to create futures.
What psychologists are doing?
The great error of psychology, it is biased toward bad stuff. What makes life worth living? Of what the good life consists of. Psychology believed that we should study the past and the present and if we really understood the past and the present, then we could predict what people would do in the future. And perception is even worse than that. The perception seems to be a hallucination about the future.
Depression feeling
Depression is a disorder of faulty perception. Similarly, anxiety is clearly about expectations that bad things are going to happen in the future, yet the entire basis for the therapy of anxiety has been about the past and the present.
Many people overestimate normal ups and downs to depression. To know more read Am I really suffered from depression or it is my Overestimation
Depression feeling Example:
Suppose you are at work in office and boss yelled at you today at work. Then what thoughts came into your mind:
1 Boss scold me because I am incompetent and I cannot do anything
2. Maybe he had a hangover or some problem.
So you manipulate the past and the present to deal with depression and anxiety. But our perception tells us that depression is a disorder of the future, not a disorder of the past or the present. When you’re depressed, there’s something called the cognitive triad.
The cognitive triad is negative thoughts about the self, negative thoughts about the world, and negative thoughts about the future. A person who is suffered from depression the third thing, negative thoughts about the future that increased the level of depression.What is depression describe in brief.
The therapies that are oriented toward better planning and rosier views of possible futures that teach us to generate more scenarios of possible futures and to evaluate them better should be the key to therapy for depression.
Natural depression treatment
Mindfulness and yoga are ubiquitous. Many people practice both. Mindfulness is one of the fastest-growing interventions in health care. It is important to remember that mindfulness meditation was an originally religious practice.
There’s a lot of neuroscience research on this topic and a lot of psychology research linking it with well-being. Religious people in fact do experience more positive emotions and more tight net relationships because it’s been shown that people who attend religious services are generally in better health. How I defeat my depression
Depression and learned helplessness
Psychologists discovered learned helplessness in the year 1967 when they were conducting experiments on dogs. In the first stage of the experiment, electric shock was delivered to dogs in a cage, and three different conditions were assigned to them.
In one condition dogs were capable to escape shock by jumping out of the cage. In the second condition, it was inescapable to dogs from electric shock, and in the third condition, some dogs had no electric shock.
In the second stage of the experiment, it was possible for all three groups of doges to escape from shock by jumping. But it was seen that two groups of doges successfully escaped shock by jumping. One group which previously had no option to escape remained passive and neutral even if they could try they must easily escape from shock.
Researchers found that animals who had inescapable shock became passive and highly anxious, relative to animals who had no shock, or animals who had the same shock but could do something about it. Dogs learned they could not succeed to escape shock, so they stop trying
Animals and people could learn helplessness. They could learn that nothing they do matters and once they learn that when they got into new situations they would be more passive. The bottom line is that helplessness and panic is the default mammalian reaction to prolonged bad events.
Some people learned that noting could change their suffering. A depressive person sticks to a problem and stopped trying to overcome the ongoing state despite what he could easily can.
How to treat learned helplessness?
The cortex tells us that good things may happen in the future, that we can control bad events. That means that when bad events occur when trauma occurs in your life, you can never annihilate.
You can learn mastery, you can learn control, you can reframe the bad event to obviate the occurrence of helplessness. Therapies that try to undo the past are useless. Therapies that build mastery and control and perception are our best armor against bad events.
Role of positive psychology
Positive psychology is a science that sticks to what is measurable. That means that we’re looking at people’s reactions to things that people consider religious or spiritual. Positive psychology findings are broadly applicable to people regardless of their belief system.
So whether you’re religious, spiritual, or an atheist, the findings of positive psychology shouldn’t be influenced too much by that belief system. To know more about positive psychology read positive psychology and happiness.