Stop depression 90 percent or more part 4.....

Today's post:  Tuesday, 2-21-2017

The drugs now given for depression don't work or barely work; they are as addictive as hard drugs; and they have recently found to help cause Alzheimer's disease.  Most doctors still know little else to try.  Some even think these drugs work; but they don’t.

But depression is a hardware and software problem of the brain.  

1.  We now know:  how to use cognitive therapy to fix the software; 

2. We now know how to fix the hardware;

a) We know what drugs directly harm the hardware and reliably cause depression.  So knowing never to take them even once and to stop them as fast as is safe to do so helps.  Knowing what to replace the drugs with instead also helps.

b) We know things that repair or replace nerves and brain cells and their connections. Successful talk therapy changes the part of the brain used and has this effect!  And, when people do the things that grow new brain cells enough to show on a brain scan, most cases of depression and many cases of PTSD ALSO show dramatic improvement

3.  We know a few things that make people feel better right away.  The best two are low tech and people can simply do them.  One high tech treatment and one drug have been shown to work right away but may not be available for many years yet.

So, most people get harmed by treatment when at the same time, we do know safe and effective ways that cure depression for over 90% of the people who use all the parts." 

Our first post and second one the following Tuesday and the third one on Tuesday last week had the details of 1. “how to use cognitive therapy to fix the software” and 2. “how to fix the hardware;”

THIS post has an expanded version of:

3.  We know a few things that make people feel better right away.  The best two are low tech and people can simply do them.  One high tech treatment and one drug have been shown to work right away but may not be available for many years yet.

The most powerful one is to be working on a plan to build a worthwhile life.  Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten who I learned this from.  But the therapist who began to use it found that it was extremely effective.  Once a client went through to process of creating the key parts of such a plan, they became far less depressed and their chances of stopping depression completely went way up!

That’s partly because having such a plan that you set and keep working on makes a key good thing in your life permanent.  That’s because you see yourself as building something that you can do and are doing.  So it helps you see yourself as competent and in control.  That’s because even if something goes wrong or some actions to build it fail, others may work when tried or you can overcome what went wrong by continuing to work to build it.

Note that this returns this to this that was in our posts on how to beat cravings for sweets and stop ingesting things that make you fat and sick:

“People who succeed at anything we now know take consistent action and keep doing it;

-- and they use what Reverend Bob Schuler called “experimental persistence”: They not only keep at things until they get the results they want, they take action and test things; they scrap the things that fail but learn from what happens, they look for new things to try and try them, they put in the time as a priority increasing their abilities and trying again. 

A new book describing this is called “Grit.”  “

Setting up to create this in your life is a way to get both parts of what the book Grit describes.

You have something that you care about that you persistently return to again and again no matter what else happens.

And, because you keep doing this and care about the results, you become able to try new methods and work very hard at things that will work or are working.  This is the second of the two methods that the author found are the components of Grit.

How do you create such a plan?

Many people find it difficult while others already have personal mission they already care about and have the key part of it done already.

So, if you don’t have that now, how do you create such a plan?

There’s two ways that work and doing first one and then the other is very effective:

*People who find themselves drawing a blank on what to set as the goals of the worthwhile life research found CAN list things that they DON’T like and wish they could stop.

In fact, they can often list a dozen such things or more!

Then though the list may be shorter, most people can remember a few things that happened that they liked or tend to like the few times they do happen.

Most people can list at least one or two. And most people who list one or two often remember others when they revisit their list.

Of course at that point, you can make a list of things that you want to stop happening and a list of things you like that you want to happen more often.

Do that first.

That gives you some of the plan of the worthwhile life that you can build.

*The next step is from Peter Drucker and Tony Robbins.

   In his book, The Effective Executive, Drucker found that effective people—not just executives-–focused on contribution to some worthy goal.

What worthwhile thing are we working to achieve?  Am I doing all I can to make sure we achieve it?  What else do we need to do?  What else might help achieve that?

Drucker himself learned this from the pattern set by a nurse Bryan.  The hospital where Drucker learned it operated by what they called “Nurse Bryan’s Rule.”  Everyone in that hospital from orderlies to Nursing administrators went by it. 

It was a simple practice, every time they saw a patient or the patient’s records, they asked themselves:  “Are we doing all we can for this patient?”

They did this because of how extremely effective it was when Nurse Bryan used it.  Fewer patients on her floor died.  More patients recovered fully.  And most of her patients were able to go home sooner.

Tony Robbins found that people who were unable to set goals or find solutions when asked to found that when they were asked to think up what “might” work almost always could list several things that might work.

So, going over your list of things you want to stop happening and things you did like you want to happen more AND things you care about enough they might be something you could include in building a worthwhile life.

THAT will give you a list of things that might work!

Then decide which ones you like best or think most important.

Each step of this is doable.  And, almost everyone who gets this far feels better.

The second step is to find the steps that will achieve these things or increase them or remove things that block them.

THAT does take work.  So the next step is to boost your ability to do that work.

So, our next step in this series is the things you can do that work even faster to give you that ability AND make you feel better immediately.

Many of them are quite easy to do.