February 3, 2015
The challenging part about clinical depression is finding ways to change your thought patterns. Thinking negatively about your self-worth can become your comfort zone. That is that as long as you are being negatively critical about your life, you find yourself at home. After all, it is what you are used to. Thinking that you are going to be successful in life, and that you are going to overcome any hardships that may come your way, is not within your comfort zone.
If you, for example, try to change your thought patterns to portray a positive attitude, is very uncomfortable because you will feel vulnerable. There will be those who may stop talking to you because you are not being yourself. Others may ridicule the fact that you are faking your positive attitude. Thus, you may eventually choose to give up feeling more positive and decide to go back into your shell. As such, the cycle of negative thoughts that will contribute to your depression will continue to perpetuate.
Perhaps a better approach is to learn to regulate the traffic of your negative thoughts. That is that whenever negative thoughts begin to haunt you, you will label them as unrealistic and as something not worth spending one second thinking about. You can consider your negative thoughts the stalker that you will manage to keep away by restraining accessibility to you.
Your positive thoughts, on the other hand, will be worthy of your time. You don’t have to act on them but you can cherish them until you are able to do that. The more you entertain them the more comfortable you will feel about them. Once you make your positive thoughts your comfort zone you may not feel as vulnerable acting on them because you know that, that is the price you must pay to achieve a sense of peace.