How Not To Be Depressed

Beat the Blues – With Natural Optimism

One of the most common causes of people today failing to achieve their best potential is a tendency to become depressed. With global recession, manmade and natural disasters wreaking havoc every day, and the many irritations of living your life in an increasingly complex world, no one can be blamed for occasionally heaving a sigh and wondering if things will ever improve. Fortunately, for most, something comes along to distract you from such gloomy thoughts, you get back on track, and life goes on.

For some people however, they seem to have had too many blows, too many things go wrong all at once, and they feel the classic symptoms of depression – locked in a place that they feel will never improve, they feel worthless, hopeless, guilty and sometimes angry at the situation they have got themselves into.

Perhaps everyone has had this type of feeling on occasion, but most will somehow pull through, and find for themselves, in the midst of the gloom, something positive and useful to do.

It is this ability to find the worth in a negative situation, and to be able to turn a bad experience into something from which you can learn and grow that will separate the world’s survivors, from those who will simply become depressed and go down in the undertow. 

People have different ideas about what is depressing and what might be a disaster for one person might be easily managed by another. That in itself gives a clue to the fact that all experience of depression is in fact subjective – there are no universal events or factors which will give you depression – only your attitude to them. Even events such as bereavements, job losses, loss of your home, major injury or illness do not need to cause you to have depression. You might have grief, and anger or pain, but you will find that depression is not the same as these most natural emotions, depression happens when you get stuck in a place where how you want things to be, simply is not going to happen.

People such as sportsmen, entertainers, salespeople or anyone who is focused on a goal, will often feel depressed if the goal cannot for one reason or another be achieved. If that failure continues to be the only focus of a person’s life, then they will continue to feel a failure and depressed. When a person meets with a failure, in order not to become depressed, they need to move on from the moment, and look for what they can do next. It has been said that it is not how many times a man is knocked down that forms his character – but how many times he gets up. That is the key to beating depression – no matter how low you feel, reach out to others, take what help you can get, realize that life is not about what happens to you, but how you deal with it, and you will start to get your life back on track.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com site. This article originally published on the above website on Feb 4, 2010