Defeating Depression

in

Just Minutes A Day!

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Copyright 2006, by Emotional IQ Institute, LLC. The contents of this book
may be copied, reproduced or redistributed in any manner, so long as the
ENTIRE contents of the book is copied, reproduced or redistributed, without
editing of any kind. Editing of this document will constitute a violation of
this copyright, resulting in possible fines and/or civil prosecution.

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 Table of Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................. 4
The Bad News About Depression................................................................ 5
The Good News About Depression!............................................................ 6
The Box We’re Stuck in Emotionally.......................................................... 7
The #1 Mistake People Make Emotionally Everyday!................................ 9
Changing the Channel on Your Emotions!............................................. 13
A Universal Law on Dealing With Difficult Emotions .......................... 13
How Bob Keeps Shooting Himself in the Foot When It Comes to His Love
Life!............................................................................................................ 16
Another Way To Look At Pain............................................................... 18
The Skill of Integrating Feelings ............................................................... 19
The Exercises So You Can Begin To Practice The Skill........................ 20
Sadness.................................................................................................... 20
Anger....................................................................................................... 21
Fear.......................................................................................................... 22
Practical Magic: How To Make Feelings Disappear!............................... 23
The Five Minute Emotional Secret! ............................................................. 24
The Integration Exercise ............................................................................ 26
The Number One Emotional Skill ............................................................. 30
Three Important Perspectives on Depression ......................................... 30
How Feelings are like the weather! ........................................................ 32
How to Depress Yourself Out of Depression!........................................... 33
The Uplifting Exercise:.............................................................................. 34
The Depressive Exercise............................................................................ 36
The Depression Killer Movement! ......................................................... 41
Is There A Message In Your Emotions??..................................................... 42
The Secret Message of Depression!........................................................... 42
One Easy Step to Dealing with Emptiness and Meaninglessness!............ 44
Change Your Circumstances! ................................................................. 45
A Common Food You Eat Everyday That Causes Depression!................ 46
Brain Food – It Really Works!................................................................... 50
Summary .................................................................................................... 52

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Introduction

Depression is an interesting phenomenon, affecting millions of people

around the world. In the last twenty years the prescription of anti-
depressants has gone up twenty fold and it is a many multi-billion dollar a
year business.

So, obviously, a lot of people are depressed. It is a serious and important

issue that deserves special attention and care.

Now, to begin with, I am not a doctor or psychiatrist. This book is not

offering medical or psychiatric advice. If you have feelings of depression
that get in the way of your functioning, your ability to work or get out of
bed, then please see a doctor or therapist and get support. There is good,
quality help available for people suffering from depression. Reading books
or articles like this one on emotional intelligence is good, but direct one-on-
one coaching and support for any serious issue in life is almost always a
wise course of action.

If you are dealing with depression and have already gotten medical support,
are already taking drugs and/or getting therapy, good for you. If you are
currently taking prescription drugs for depression, or are considering doing
so, then good for you for doing something about a serious psychological
condition.

And, in this book, I’m going to describe a few approaches to dealing with
depression that do not involve drugs or psychoanalysis. You can simply try
this out and discover for yourself if it makes a difference in your life. This
book offers some lay opinions that you may or may not find useful.

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 The Bad News About Depression

There are several different kinds or forms of depression. From manic

depressive to listlessness, there is an assortment of types of this illness. This
book can help with most feelings of depression. But there are some forms of
the disease that will need medical or psychiatric care. For that reason, I
recommend that you see a doctor or therapist if you haven’t done so already.
Get professional help.

This book can support you in managing your moods and defeating many
forms of depression in just minutes a day, within just a few days. So while
you are getting professional help, you can help yourself and learn some
valuable tools for feeling great no matter what kind of depression you may
suffer from. Sure, read the book and enjoy practicing the tools and
developing lifelong emotional skills. And, see a therapist and get one on one
support. You will win and come out ahead both ways!

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The Good News About Depression!

First off, depression isn’t “bad.” As far as I can determine, all human beings
get to deal with depression. It happens, it comes up in life. Depression isn’t
bad or wrong, it is simply human. It actually goes with having an emotional
body, and it ain’t bad and you aren’t wrong or broken for feeling it.

Depression is generally described as feeling listless, empty, devoid of

energy, unhappy, deficient, bad and wrong. So I’m saying that feeling bad
and feeling an unpleasant sense of “wrongness” is often a part of depression,
but you aren’t bad or wrong for feeling depressed. Feeling deficient - not ok
- is part of depression, but you aren’t deficient or not ok because you have
those feelings.

Obviously, we all feel some of the symptoms of depression from time to

time. We all occasionally feel unhappy. We all feel like we don’t want to
get out of bed at times. We all feel like we aren’t getting pleasure anymore
from things that gave us pleasure. Depression is generally diagnosed when
we have these feelings often and repeatedly - lasting about two weeks or so.

To feel unhappy, listless, lethargic, gloomy, despondent, hopeless, downcast

and wrong is human, we all have to deal with those feelings. But when
those feelings seem to stick around for longer than a few hours, a few days
or a few weeks, depending on our perspective, we diagnose ourselves as
depressed, or go get a diagnosis of depression.

So depression is quite serious, because it is all these feelings that we don’t

want to have for a few minutes, let alone a few weeks. You could even say
one of the major features that goes with depression is resistance, we don’t
want it. Which is why taking drugs to numb those feelings is so popular.

You aren’t bad or wrong for feeling depression!

Depression is called a mental “illness” or “disease.” Are you bad for

catching a cold or the flu? Of course not. Just so, you aren’t bad or wrong
for feeling the illness of depression. And, just like the flu, it feels bad,
sometimes awful, like you are going to die. But you aren’t “wrong” for
feeling like you are going to die when you have the flu, and you certainly

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aren’t bad when you feel miserable from depression. It happens, and there
are ways to make it go away quickly!

So the “good” news about depression is that it isn’t bad, and you aren’t
wrong or “not okay” for having it. In fact, you are only “bad” if you do
nothing about it and let it run or ruin your life. But if you can look at it as a
learning experience, an opportunity to heal yourself and move forward
powerfully in life, then you are ahead of the game!

Depression can even be looked at as an exciting step in your personal growth

and development. It is an opportunity to learn a lot about yourself, how you
work, what turns you on and turns you off, how to deal with the difficult
emotions that come up in life, and what you need to know to actually thrive
emotionally. Depression can actually lead to self awareness at a very
impactful and rewarding level. So let’s dive in and explore this experience
right now!

The Box We’re Stuck in Emotionally

One of the first obvious things to discuss around depression is unpleasant

feelings. Difficult emotions. And if you look, it’s easy to find that we all
operate from a box around our emotions. A very simple, obvious box.

What are some emotions you like having? The usual list is
• Love
• Joy
• Happiness
• Excitement
• Contentment
• Inspiration
• Enthusiasm
• Gratitude
• Exuberance
• Hope
• Etc.

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These we call “good emotions.” We all like having them and want them as
often as possible.

What are some emotions we don’t like and don’t want to have? See if most
of these qualify:
• Sadness
• Anger
• Fear
• loneliness
• Hate
• Depression
• Hopelessness
• Anxiety
• Shame
• boredom
• Humiliation
• Emptiness

These are what we call “bad emotions” and we try to avoid them as much as
possible. If we can’t avoid them, and can’t help but feel them, we try to get
rid of them as quickly as we can.

So what is this simple box we operate from around emotions? The box is
that there are “good” emotions and “bad” emotions. Pretty obvious, right?
We all seem to just “know” that when it comes to emotions there are good
ones and bad ones, and the game in life is to feel good and not feel bad.
This is so obvious that it goes unexamined. Of course this is the way you
deal with emotions!

And, of course, all the feelings that go with depression we classify as bad
emotions, to be avoided or gotten rid of as quickly as possible and at all
costs. But there is a big problem to this approach of trying to get rid of all
the feelings associated with depression, and it begins with a common
mistake we make all of the time.

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The #1 Mistake People Make Emotionally Everyday!

To begin with, let's take a look at emotions. What is an emotion? It's a

feeling. Like all feelings, it is going to be centered somewhere in your body.
And, like all feelings, we generally work hard to hold onto emotions we like
and avoid the ones we don't like, right?

Now, let's look again at these favorite emotions of ours. What feelings do
you personally like and try to have as often as possible?

The feelings I like to have often are

(If you can’t be bothered to write it down, at least think of a short list in your
head!)

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

Now, let's look at the opposite side. Which feelings do you personally
dislike and try to avoid?

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

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___________________________

___________________________

Now, what do we do with feelings we don't like? (Okay, now we're

beginning to get somewhere!)

If you don't like something, whether its Difficult Emotions or Lima Beans or
Horror Movies, you will try to avoid it.

The interesting thing to consider for a moment is this: What do you

personally do to try to avoid your negative emotions?

What do we do to avoid or resist our negative emotions? Go ahead, take a

moment now and think about what you do to get rid of your negative
feelings. The kind of things I do to stop feeling bad are:

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

Review this list of common answers and see if there are any you’d like to
add to your list:

Go for walk
Drugs
Music
Call a friend
Play games/sports
Alcohol

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 Get busy doing something else
Eat
Party
Garden
Watch tv

When you look at it, there are only three basic ways we have figured out to
deal with difficult emotions. The first way is that we

1. Anesthetize

If you eat enough chocolate ice cream and junk food, you soon won't feel
anything but a kind of sugar coma/sleepiness. Food is one of the most
common tools used for anesthetizing feelings.

How many of us have used doughnuts or chocolate cake or ice cream to

narcotize our feelings? You’re home alone on a Friday evening, feeling
lonely, so what’s to do? Eat a bunch of junk food!

A higher level of anesthetizing feelings is to drink or do drugs. A few

margaritas or a few joints and we sure ain’t feeling no pain!

The problem with anesthetizing feelings is that when the food or sugar coma
or drugs or drinking wears off, the feeling seems to "come back" or you feel
even worse.

So what you then want to do is eat more or drink more or do more drugs. It
becomes a vicious cycle. And, as we'll soon see, I'd like to suggest that
when you anesthetize your feelings you aren't making them disappear, they
just go below the surface for a while then come back up.

2. Acting Out

A second way we all deal with difficult emotions is to project them onto
others, to dump them onto the people around us. It's also called ACTING
OUT. How many of us have ever had a parent do something like this? They
come home from work, maybe they've had a bad day, and they say:

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"GET YOUR SORRY ASS OFF THAT COUCH AND TURN OFF THE
TV AND GO GET YOUR DAMN CHORES DONE!"

Raise your hands, how many of you have had a parent or seen a friend's
parent do that? Okay, good, now how many of you as parents or adults have
done something similar?

Another way of acting out is if you're sad or depressed and a co-worker who
is in a good mood comes up to you and you demand:
"WHAT ARE YOU SO HAPPY ABOUT? You messed on up on
page 3, 6 and 8 of the report and it needs to be fixed NOW!"

How many of us have ever seen anyone do that to another person? Or we

punch the wall or kick the dog or throw something. These are all ways of
trying to get the feeling away from us. We all have a tendency to project our
unpleasant feelings to those around us.

What do you think of this way of dealing with difficult emotions? What do
you think of acting out and projecting as a way of coping? So where most
anesthetizing behaviors damages our bodies, projecting and acting out
damages our relationships in life. Kinda like “misery loves company.”
Not very healthy or very kind, is it?

3. Change The Channel

The third way human beings have to deal with difficult emotions is to
CHANGE THE CHANNEL, kind of like going from an AM radio station to
an FM radio station. Going for a walk, playing sports or games, gardening,
putting on some music you love, getting lost in work or a project are ways
that we all already know of and practice to deal with difficult emotions.
You should already have a few favorite ways of changing your emotional
channel, like taking a bubble bath or dancing. Please think for a moment
and list your preferred ways of changing channels:

___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

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___________________________

___________________________

___________________________

Changing the Channel on Your Emotions!

This third method of dealing with "bad" emotions is good! These are
generally healthy ways of dealing with difficult emotions. They don't
damage our bodies, like with anesthetizing behaviors, and they don't damage
our relationships, like with projecting our feelings onto others.

Changing the channel on your emotions is an essential skill to mood

management. If you feel sad at work, it is probably going to be
inappropriate to start crying. If you wake up feeling hopeless, it isn’t going
to work very well to just stay in bed, you’ll probably get fired. So we all
need to develop our talent at changing our emotional channels so that we
aren’t run by our emotions. In fact, if you don’t develop this skill, you will
often get stopped by your emotions.

So, one of the skills you can develop to support you in thriving emotionally
is to get even better at changing the channel. Particularly if you are dealing
with depression, which can be very heavy and thick and feels like it will
never go away.

Look for what works best for you in changing the channel. If a bubble bath
really helps, that’s good to notice. If cleaning the house helps, very good to
notice. If going to a movie does it for you, great. Keep trying new things
and notice what works best to switch your emotional state. Over time, see if
you can increase your repertoire of channel changing methods.

A Universal Law on Dealing With Difficult Emotions

Now we don’t want to take away from the healthy ways you have (or will
develop) of changing your emotional channel, but there is another approach

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to dealing with difficult emotions you can try on and add to your emotional
tool kit.

To understand this new way of dealing with emotions, you first have to learn
A UNIVERSAL LAW, a kind of rule about how things work in the universe.

You have to do a 10 second exercise to learn this universal law. Now, when
you do this exercise you have to really get into it, so you can learn this
universal law for yourself.

Ready? (Read through this once to get the idea, then take the 10 seconds to
actually do it.)

Hold up your left hand in front of your face. Now grab your left wrist with
your right hand.

Then I want you to resist your left hand with your right hand. With your left
hand try to touch your face and with your right hand try to keep your left
hand away from your face.

Got it? Okay, for 10 seconds really get into it, go!

(Please do that exercise now before reading further. It will be worth the ten
seconds!)

***********

Okay, so now let's see if we can figure out what universal law we just
demonstrated.

When you resist something, what happens?

When you resisted your left hand, what happened to your awareness of it?

YOUR LEFT HAND GOT "BIGGER" IN YOUR AWARENESS. It

became very noticeable.

Now let's say that your left hand was an emotion like sadness, and your right
hand was just you resisting that sadness internally, trying not to feel it. And
instead of for ten seconds, it was for ten hours, days or months!

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Resistance causes the feeling to do what?

RESISTANCE CAUSES PERSISTANCE!

Can you begin to see that? This “truth” has been recognized for thousands
of years, the Tao te Ching is an example of an entire philosophy built around
it.

So, if you're feeling a difficult emotion and you start to resist it, what will
happen?

It will get bigger & it will last longer!!

Now what was true about your left hand before the exercise?

It was just there, you didn't even think about it, no big deal. And as soon as
you stopped resisting it and started reading about resistance causes
persistence, what happened to your left hand?

It went back to being no big deal! It’s just there.

It disappeared from your awareness, didn't it?

Because the universal law is always working, and that is if you resist
something it persists, and if you don't resist something it doesn't persist and
will disappear!

So let's look at the emotions you listed earlier. We've got the good ones and
the bad ones. Now here's what's true about being a human being:

Human beings have emotional bodies. Your emotional body is going to feel
all of these feelings, not just the good ones.

Your emotional body will feel anger, sadness, happiness, excitement, joy,
fear, worry.

That's what the emotional bodies of human beings do. They feel. It is what
our emotional bodies are designed for. It is similar to your skin. Your skin

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will feel all physical sensations, hot, cold, warmth, silk, sand paper, itching,
pain, the pleasure of a caress.

Try on this idea about your emotions:

You can't cut off the bad ones and only have the good ones. When you cut
off the bad ones you shut down or suppress your emotional body.

EMOTIONS AREN'T GOOD OR BAD, THEY JUST ARE.

This is a radical idea for most of us! We are so used to thinking of emotions
as good and bad that it is automatic. We don’t even think about it. Of
course you should try to cut off or kill or avoid bad emotions, what else is
there??

Meanwhile, we have an emotional body, and it is just doing its job, feeling
your feelings. The more you try to kill off the bad feelings, the more you
distance yourself from your emotional body and choke off feelings of any
kind. Trying to only feel good emotions is like trying to only feel silk on
your skin, and not feel hot, cold, feathery, wind, sunshine, etc. It takes a lot
of effort and it won’t work anyway.

Not only that, our emotions often contain lessons for us, they are
communications.

How Bob Keeps Shooting Himself in the Foot When It Comes to His
Love Life!

Take the story of Bob and Sue: Sue broke up with Bob because Bob didn't
treat her very well. So what Bob does instead of feel the sadness and the pain
of the loss of that relationship, he anesthetizes the feeling by going to bars
and drinking and trying to pick up women. He can't stand being alone at
night in the house all by himself so every night he goes to a bar and drinks
and meets women until he starts another relationship.

Now if Bob had allowed himself to feel that sadness, he might have realized
that he didn't treat Sue very well. That sadness, that emotional pain, might
have caused Bob to learn to treat women better.

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But instead, by avoiding the loneliness and the sadness and just picking
another woman up at a bar, he will likely repeat the same problems he had
with Sue and lose this relationship as well. And that's exactly what Bob
did. After six months this woman dumped him too.

Do you see how by anesthetizing the pain rather than feeling it he missed an
opportunity and doomed himself to repeating the pattern? Supposedly
painful feelings, when we allow them, can inform and change us. Sadness,
fear and anger can add to who we are and who we are becoming.
Sometimes (not always!) our “bad” feelings have “messages” we simply
need to dwell on for a few minutes so that we can “hear” what they are
saying. And in the listening we get added to, we become more whole.

Good feelings, on the other hand, usually tell us we're on the right track.

If you're playing sports and you feel happy and excited, you feel good. Your
emotions are telling you that you're on the right track, doing something that
is right for you. If you're dancing in your living room with the music turned
up loud or you're singing in the shower and you feel joyous, your emotional
body is telling you that you are on the right track, doing something that is
right for you.

But when you feel angry or sad or depressed or afraid, your emotional body
is trying to tell you something else. If you feel angry about something, say
someone disrespected you, your emotional body is trying to say something
like "Don't let that happen to you again!" The anger helps you to focus on
what you don't want in your life.

If you feel sad because you argued with a friend, that emotion might be
trying to tell you to learn from that, to try not to argue or fight in your
relationships. The sadness can help you to learn.

If you feel afraid your fear might be telling you need to watch your well
being, what you're doing or thinking of doing might not be safe, or you
might not have the skill for what you're about to attempt to do…

But if you resist the difficult emotion, you won't get the message
or learn the lesson.

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Emotions are not good or bad! They are just part of your emotional body
that can guide and support you in life.

Another Way To Look At Pain

Try on the idea that pain is just a communication that something's happening
that you may want to change. Consider this for a moment:

Painful feelings are neither good nor bad!

Look! If you're having headaches a lot, you can anesthetize the pain by
taking aspirin, right? But what if you're getting headaches because you're
constipated? Or because you need glasses?

The pain isn't bad, it's a communication.

If you're the one having the headaches, you're the one who has to listen to
the pain and figure out what it's telling you.

Painful emotions aren't bad either, they are often guides in life, saying pay
attention to something.

So if you have a lot of anger in your life you can avoid it by kicking the dog
and getting into fights, or you can start to look at what the anger is about and
what it might be telling you about your life.

When you resist and try not to feel difficult emotions, you can get away with
it, but you'll probably miss the message and only cause the feeling to keep
coming back! You can easily get stuck in the same cycle of repeating
circumstances in your life, like Bob will until he learns from his sad feelings
and changes the way he deals with women.

We're not saying that sadness means this and anger means that and
depression means that…

What we're suggesting is that you are a human being and you have a
physical body and a mental body and an emotional body and just like pain in
your physical body can teach you not to touch a hot burner on a stove, pain
in your emotional body can be a message as well.

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 Now, painful emotions don't always have messages.

And you don't have to figure them out or do analysis. Sometimes, they are
just negative patterns and habits we get into! If you always go around
blaming others for your problems, you're going to be angry a lot or feel like
a victim a lot. But that’s an issue for a different lesson.

The Skill of Integrating Feelings

For now, we’ve come to a fourth way to deal with difficult emotions, and
that is to Integrate them. Integrating an emotion is allowing it, accepting it
and honoring it so that it adds to the quality of your life.

How do you integrate a feeling? You begin to integrate feelings when you
actually feel your difficult emotions, when you allow them and notice what
part of your body they are centered in. It’s as “simple” (once you get
practiced at it) as:

“I’m angry and it feels like a burning in my jaws and tightness in my neck
and shoulders.”

“I’m sad and it feels like a heaviness in my gut.”

“I’m afraid and it feels like a bowling ball in my stomach and my knees feel
weak…”

When you actually feel your difficult feelings, you will notice that generally
they are located somewhere specific in your body. And if you can notice
where in your body an emotion is located, and what it feels like in that body
part, you can accelerate the integration of that feeling.

The emotion will become part of you. Like your left hand not resisted, they
will simply be there. Sometimes you are sad. Sometimes you are angry.
Sometimes you are afraid. When you can let these feelings be there in your
body just as they are, you can learn from them, you can be added to and
enhanced by them, you can become more than you were before.

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What’s that you say? You already feel your feelings?

Actually, rather than just feel our feelings, most of us conceptualize them, as
in “I feel awful”, or wallow in them as in “woe is me,” or suppress them as
in “I’m not going to feel bad!” None of us were taught in school the simple
skill of locating where in your body they’re centered and how they feel
(“bowling ball in my gut”).

For the purposes of this discussion, we say that you feel your feelings when
you locate where specifically in your body they are centered, and how
specifically they feel (tight, hot, heavy, icy, empty, crushing, etc.)

In the exercises below you will take some simple steps to actually begin to
feel your feelings and integrate them. Try it, you’ll like it!

The Exercises So You Can Begin To Practice The Skill

Now we're going to do some exercises so you can begin to practice feeling
your feelings rather than resisting them. Just try these exercises out and
take what you get. There is no “right answer” to get in any of these
exercises. Whatever answers come up for you are the “right” answers!

Sadness

To do this exercise correctly, remember that Sadness is neither good nor

bad. Even so, if you are a human being, you have a history of resisting the
heck out of it. For this exercise, try to look at your sad feelings calmly.
Take a few minutes and complete this phrase again and again:

Sometimes I feel sad when __________________.

Sometimes I feel sad when __________________.

Sometimes I feel sad when __________________.

Sometimes I feel sad when __________________.

Sometimes I feel sad when __________________.

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Sometimes I feel sad when __________________.

Keep struggling with this, keep looking at where you feel sad… The point is
to get that we all feel sad at times about various things. This exercise is
simply to note some of the places where you feel sad.

Sadness is okay!

See if you can notice these sadness areas without judgment or avoidance. It
is okay to feel sad sometimes when you watch the news on tv, its very
human. It's okay to feel sadness where ever you feel it. Begin to notice that
sadness is part of your emotional repertoire. Allow it.

Now, think back to a few of those sad feelings and observe where in your
body sadness seems to be located and what it feels like. For example,
Sadness for me seems to be located in my belly area and in my jaws, and it
feels like a heavy weight in my gut and a slack emptiness in my jaws.

Sadness seems to be located in my _________ area and it feels like

____________.

Anger

Sometimes I feel angry when ________________.

Sometimes I feel angry when ________________.

Sometimes I feel angry when ________________.

Sometimes I feel angry when ________________.

Sometimes I feel angry when ________________.

Sometimes I feel angry when ________________.

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This exercise is simply to note some of the places where you feel angry. See
if you can notice these angry areas without judgment or avoidance. It is
okay to feel angry sometimes when you watch the news on tv, its very
human. It's okay to feel anger wherever you feel it. Begin to notice that
anger is part of your emotional repertoire. Allow it. Appreciate it some.

Now, think back to a few of those angry feelings and observe where in your
body anger seems to be located and what it feels like. For example, Anger
for me seems to be located in my facial area and in my gut, and it feels like a
tightness in my gut and a burning and tightness in my face and jaws.

For now, just get a sense of where anger seems to reside in your body and
what it feels like. Feelings are always going to be located somewhere in
your body.

Anger seems to be located in my _________ area and it feels like

____________.

Question: How do you recognize the difference between anger and sadness
in your feelings?

Answer: Because they feel different ways in different parts of your body!

Fear

Sometimes I feel afraid when ________________.

Sometimes I feel afraid when ________________.

Sometimes I feel afraid when ________________.

Sometimes I feel afraid when ________________.

Sometimes I feel afraid when ________________.

Fear seems to be located in my _________ area and it feels like

____________.

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Acknowledging Resistance

When I feel sad, sometimes what I do to deal with it is _________________.

Another thing I sometimes do to deal with sadness is _________________.

When I feel angry, sometimes what I do to deal with it is
_________________.

Another thing I sometimes do to deal with anger is _________________.

When I feel fear, sometimes what I do to deal with it is

_________________.

Another thing I sometimes do to deal with fear is _________________.

Notice that when you take the negative labels and judgments off your
feelings, you can begin to simply have them or allow them and that they feel
certain ways physically. This is an ENTIRELY different approach to
resisting them, avoiding them, and doing your best to project or anesthetize
them.

Practical Magic: How To Make Feelings Disappear!

Now we come to the final part of this new skill on how to deal with difficult
emotions.

WHEN YOU DON'T RESIST THEM, EMOTIONS COME AND GO.

KIND OF LIKE WAVES ON THE SEASHORE, OR THE WEATHER IN
COLORADO.

If you are in a rage and really angry at a friend, you can't stay at a peak of
rage for very long. After a day or two whatever you were so angry about
will lose its charge.

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If you are sad because a relationship broke up, and you don't resist that
sadness, after a while that sadness will disappear.
The more that you allow your feelings, the more quickly they will integrate
and stop persisting for days or weeks.

But we all have a basic subconscious fear that if we let ourselves really feel
sad or really feel afraid that we will get lost in it, that we will get stuck and
feel that way forever.

"oh, woe is me…" and we're afraid we'll get even sadder and more
miserable.

But as we've been suggesting, if you can stop resisting your feelings and
start letting them just be there the way that they are, they will disappear or
lose their charge just like when you don't resist your left hand it isn't a
problem.

The Five Minute Emotional Secret!

So when you feel your difficult feelings for just a few minutes, they will
begin to shift and integrate and disappear.

To help yourself to feel your feelings fully, what you can do is notice
where feelings are located in your body.

As we've discussed, if you feel fear, for example, you might feel it as a
weight like a bowling ball in your gut.

Or maybe like a tightness in your chest and inability to breathe.

But whatever the feeling is, it will generally be located some particular
places in your body.

How do you know the difference between happiness and anger?

Because anger feels one way in your body, and happiness feels another
way.

And when you can locate where the feeling is in your body, as close as
possible, and then allow yourself to feel that bowling ball in your gut or

24
tightness in your chest rather than try not to feel it, it will begin to dissolve
and integrate and lose its charge.

YOU HAVE TO TRY THIS OUT TO UNDERSTAND IT. It's all

gobbledygook until you experience it. We are all set to try to resist our
negative feelings. We want to make them go away by resisting the heck out
of them. We try to ignore the fear, the feeling of a bowling ball in our gut,
to make it go away.

This is exactly the "wrong" way to deal with bad feelings. As you
discovered when you resisted your left hand, what you resist often gets
bigger. To make feelings "disappear" you have to have the courage to feel
them. Just for a few minutes. That's all it usually takes to begin to
transform and shift most feelings.

For just a few minutes, you have to do the exact opposite of what feels
"natural." For just a few minutes for the next week, each day when you feel
a "negative" emotion relax for a few minutes and simply allow it. Stop
judging it, stop beating yourself or others up for it, simply acknowledge it
(i.e. "I feel angry right now!") and then notice where in your body it is
located. If it feels like a bowling ball in your gut, feel that. Don't think
about it, just explore the feeling for a few minutes.

Then see what happens. Does it shift? Do you feel more relaxed? Does it
get worse? There isn't any right thing for the feeling to do, but it will shift.
Feelings you don't resist begin to integrate, they become simply a part of
your experience, as they are not resisted they lose much of their power.

Kinda like "Oh, I just saw two people kissing, and I thought of my recent
breakup, and I feel somehow ashamed and lonely and sad all wrapped up in
one."

When you feel that feeling, allow it, explore it for just a few moments, it will
begin to transform and integrate. Sometimes you as a human being will feel
somehow ashamed and lonely and sad all together, that's just the way it is.
Just like you have a left hand, sometimes you will be aware of feelings like
that. When you don't resist them, when you stop trying to positive think
them and/or argue with them in your head, they move from the shadows of
your psyche to become part of your strength.

25
And all it takes is a few minutes! In two to five minutes of exploring and
allowing a feeling you can begin to change everything! You can start to
accept and allow and shift a lifetime’s worth of emotional damage,
avoidance and repression. Often times, I do this exercise at the end of the
day, just taking a few minutes to note any unpleasant feelings that came up
and seeing if I can allow myself to just feel them at a time when I can relax
and focus on the emotion. So I end my day with this exercise and it feels
good.

The Integration Exercise

This exercise should be available on our website so that at any time you
have five minutes you can go and click and be talked right through it. This
is an exercise that will empower you to begin to integrate any difficult
emotion.

Now, to put this all together for yourself, do this simple exercise.

Close your eyes and take a deep, relaxing breath. Recall a time you felt a
difficult emotion recently. Picture that situation in your head. What was
happening? Were you alone or with others? Who was doing or saying
what?

Good. Now, step into that feeling a bit. Allow yourself to feel that feeling
again. As best you can for now, step back into that feeling…

Thank you. Now, give that feeling a name. As best you can describe, What
would you call that feeling? Sadness, anger, shame, fear? Name that
feeling as best you can.

Good. Now, notice where in your body that feeling is located. Does it feel
like a bowling ball in your gut? Does it feel like heat and flushing around
your head? Coldness? Tension across your upper body? Tightness in your
jaw?

See if you can notice the places where that emotion is located in your body.
It might be one place, like your gut, or a few places, like your jaw and your
chest. It might be one feeling, like coldness in your belly, or it might be a
few feelings like heat and tightness in your jaw.

26
See if you can notice where the feeling is located in your body.

Good. Now, just let that feeling be there. Just notice it and allow it to be
there.

Good. Now, PUT that feeling there. HAVE THAT FEELING BE THERE.
If its heat, put that heat there! If it is tension in your jaw, put that tension
there.

Good. Now, take a moment and emote that emotion! RADIATE THAT
FEELING OUT INTO YOUR SPACE! Whatever that means to you,
radiate the feeling or emote it. Give it out to the world around you. Do this
for ten seconds!

Great. When you can emote an emotion, you are definitely not resisting it.
Now, acknowledge yourself for doing such a good job of feeling that feeling
and let the feeling go.

Good. Now, take a deep breath and relax as you breathe out.

Good. Now, take another deep breath in and out and begin to be aware of
your surroundings.

Okay. When you’re ready, open your eyes!

*****

How was that for you?

Summary. That's it for the basics of dealing with difficult emotions and
feeling your feelings.

Integrating difficult feelings is one of the most powerful things you can do in
the journey of life. Instead of striving ceaselessly to change the outside
world so that you never feel bad, you can now begin to strive to allow the
full range of your inner feelings, integrating rather than suppressing them
only to have them recur again and again.

27
When you can actually feel a specific feeling in a specific body location for
just (usually) a minute or two, it will shift.

It will either get better or worse!

If it gets worse, explore for a few minutes longer then change the channel. If
it gets “better,” it has begun to integrate. If you are sad and you do the
above exercise, we’re not saying all of a sudden you’ll be happy. You may
just feel more somber. If your sadness “shifts” to sobriety then it has
integrated, or begun to integrate. It has begun to become an accepted aspect
of your emotional makeup. Over time, sadness, fear, rage, shame can all be
integrated. It may not happen the first time you do this process, but the
process will begin in fairly short order.

Keep working with difficult feelings until you feel a shift towards
acceptance and peace. That’s a sign of integration.

Sometimes it may take a few days of working on the same feeling, for five
minutes a day, but usually within a few days to a week most feelings should
have moved clearly towards more integration. You will feel them fully, but
with acceptance and with less resistance. You may still find them highly
uncomfortable but as they integrate they will become nothing to run from or
make yourself wrong about.

When you can feel your feelings instead of resist them, you can begin to
learn the lessons they may offer and you can begin to make them
“disappear,” just like your left hand disappears when you aren't resisting it,
its just there.

We suggest you take baby steps with this skill and practice it every day next
week with different feelings that come up.

Don't wallow in your feelings! We aren't saying if you feel sad to dive in
and start seeing the whole world through dark-colored glasses. Just take a
few minutes to locate the feeling in your body and put it there, have it be
there.

Notice if the feeling is about anything, relationship or job issue or an

unpleasant experience, and see if the feeling suggests you change some

28
behavior or whatever. But then just put the feeling there where its located in
your body and let it be there.

Don't wallow. Just explore it for a few minutes then change the channel and
go on with your life. You don't have to get to the bottom of it or have some
big realization or anything. Just feel it for a few minutes then let it go and
get on with what's next in your life.

If when you do this exercise the feeling intensifies, that is not bad! Since we
have spent lifetimes avoiding and suppressing some feelings, when we open
up to them they can come on with an overpowering surge at first. This is ok.
Again, you’re only going to allow yourself to feel it for five minutes at the
most! At any time you feel too uncomfortable, you can step out and change
the channel. Don’t worry, it will be there the next day to work on some
more!

And as with all skills, this takes practice. Every day, different feelings come
up, see if you can begin to work with them for a few minutes a day in this
way and see what happens. Over time, you'll notice a shift from resisting
feelings to exploring them and honoring them!

When you can allow yourself to feel the way you feel, when you stop
running from some feelings, you can just relax and let your emotional body
help you through life rather than stop you.

This is a very basic and important emotional skill. This most basic of skills
can be called FEEL YOUR FEELINGS, or Integration, or EMOTIONAL
APPRECIATION. When you can begin to feel your feelings instead of
anesthetize or project, you can begin to integrate and strengthen your entire
emotional body.

Feelings are a process. You don’t need to “solve” them. Enjoy the flow!

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The Number One Emotional Skill

Feeling your feelings is a way of telling the truth to yourself. Tell the truth,
acknowledge what you really feel, and then feel where that is located in your
body. You will feel more whole, more centered, less split and scattered or
caught up in useless anger or worry about people “out there.”

This skill truly is one of the deepest, healthiest and most transformative
emotional talents you can ever develop. Learn it, practice it, share it with
friends, it'll give you a warm fuzzy most every time. Simply follow the
bouncing ball and you'll master this in almost no time!

And remember, it is just the first, most basic emotional skill. There are
many other powerful emotional skills to come, but they all build off of this
one. There is whole series of lessons that deals with this, which you can get
for free on the website www.emotionalskills.com. We won’t go into all that
material here, but it is useful and valuable and will help you build your
emotional iq, which is something they never offered to teach you in school.

Three Important Perspectives on Depression

So the very first perspective to consider to have a shift in dealing with

depression is simply this: there are no good and bad emotions, there are just
emotions. We are all wired up to want to feel love and joy and enthusiasm,
and we call those good emotions. And we all don’t want to feel hopeless
and sad and afraid, and we call those bad emotions. But however we label
them, consider that maybe there are no bad emotions, there are just
emotions.

You have an emotional body that feels emotions. That is what it does. You
have a mental body that thinks thoughts, that’s what it does, a physical body

30
that feels sensations, and an emotional body that feel emotions. They are all
connected, but that’s a story for later.

Your emotional body doesn’t know good emotions from bad. It just feels
emotions. Like your skin just feels sensations. Your skin doesn’t just get to
feel silk. You may want your skin to feel soft and silky feelings all the time,
but it feels burlap and hot and cold and rough and hard as well as soft.
Well, your emotional body works the same way. It is designed to feel all
emotions, not just the ones you want.

The Second Perspective on Dealing with Depression for you to consider is

that when you stop trying not to feel the difficult emotions, when you start
opening up to them and allowing them, your relationship to difficult
emotions transforms, and difficult emotions become much less difficult.
When you resist sadness it becomes a big deal, when you allow it it becomes
something else, a part of you, something that can strengthen and sober you.
So please consider this very radical idea for dealing with difficult emotions,
which is to allow them, to appreciate them, to open up to them rather than
try to keep them away. It creates a shift in your entire emotional body that is
healing and energizing.

Don’t do the obvious!

So a very radical perspective about depression that I want to make sure you
try on is this: there is value in allowing rather than resisting difficult
emotions like sadness and hopelessness. Further, I suggest that if you can
allow and explore your difficult feelings for just five whole minutes a day
you will experience a huge shift in your emotional well being within a few
weeks.

Now, most people I know have no difficulty in dealing with difficult

emotions if its only for five minutes at a time, they can handle that, and in
the work we’re going to do on depression it won’t really be for more than
five minutes at a time.

You don’t get to go thru life, none of us do, not feeling difficult emotions
like sadness, despondency, gloom, and hopelessness. And if you go through
life resisting these feelings, trying not to ever feel them, you will just create
more problems for yourself, a kind of constipation in your emotional body.

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How Feelings are like the weather!

And a third perspective that is vitally important to dealing with depression is

to understand that all feelings change. Feelings are like the weather. They
move in and move out. Emotions don’t ever stay the same. And you know
this is true from personal experience, because you’ve been happy and it went
away, didn’t it?

We’ve all been happy and excited and thrilled at times in our lives, and we
wanted to stay on that high, but we couldn’t, it went away. That’s because
you can’t get happy and stay happy. You can’t get happy once and then live
happily ever after. It doesn’t work that way for you, and a key thing to
understand is it doesn’t work that way for anyone else either.

We all are happy at times and sad at others. But, what is unsaid about
emotions is that we believe that if we can just figure out the answer, or get
what we want, that we’ll be happy forever. That it won’t change. That we
can conquer or do away with negative feelings.

And the quick answer here is It Don’t Work That Way. Nobody finally
figures out life and gets happy and stays that way forever.

Now, here is an important point: if, as much as we all want happiness, it

doesn’t stay, the same is true for difficult emotions like sadness and gloom.
You can’t get gloomy and stay that way forever. Even if you wanted to.
Emotions don’t work that way.

So what I’m suggesting is that, for the vast majority of human beings,
depression is going to occur, but it will also pass, you can’t get depressed
and stay depressed forever, just like you can’t get happy and stay happy
forever.

To carry the analogy of the emotional body a bit further, the job of your
emotional body is to feel and process emotions. All emotions, the good ones
you like and the difficult ones you don’t like. When you get happy your
emotional body processes it, eats it if you will, and it goes away. Like your
physical body eats food and processes it and you get hungry again and want
another meal, good feelings work the same way. You feel them, you process
them, they go away, you want more of them later.

32
But when you feel difficult emotions like fear and gloom and hopelessness,
if you resist them, try not to “eat” or process them, then you get kinda
constipated emotionally. One of the ways this constipation can show up is
depression. Depression is generally not one solitary difficult emotion, like
sadness, it can be more the result of several difficult emotional experiences
“unprocessed.”

So a viewpoint for you to consider, not like its true, but just something to try
on, is that depression is “constipation” in your emotional body. Things have
been jammed up and suppressed and avoided for so long that your emotional
body is constipated. And that once you begin to open up and appreciate all
of your emotions, once you begin to process your difficult emotions and
integrate them, depression will shift and begin to move through you rather
than stick around for days or weeks.

So to deal with depression, I’m suggesting that you simply begin to process
the emotions you’ve been resisting or avoiding like the plague. But the key
is, for only five minutes at a time! Explore your dark feelings for five
minutes at a time and you begin to process them and they move through you
and your emotional body starts working properly again and depression can
shift dramatically, within a few days to a few weeks.

Just because I’m saying you need to appreciate your difficult emotions, you
don’t need to wallow in them at all. And usually, five minutes is more than
enough to feel an unpleasant emotion. So to have a major shift in
depression, all you may need to be willing to do is feel the emotions that go
with it for five minutes at a time, once or twice a day, and within a short
time, a week or two, you should notice a significant shift.

How to Depress Yourself Out of Depression!

Enough theory. Let’s start some anti-depression exercises! And the way to
start is going to seem crazy. I’m going to ask you to do the exact opposite of
what seems natural. The Anti-Depression Exercise consists of two parts that
take a total of ten whole minutes. First, depress yourself on purpose for five
minutes. Then uplift yourself for five minutes on purpose.

That’s right. Depress yourself for five minutes on purpose! Why? Because
you “learn” how you personally do depression. You will understand it from

33
the inside out. When you depress yourself on purpose, you are Allowing
and Appreciating your depression. You are most certainly not suppressing
or trying to avoid it! This has MANY benefits, you simply have to do it to
begin to understand them.

Then, once you’ve spent five minutes doing that, you spend five minutes
uplifting and enthusing and inspiring yourself. This is a very powerful way
to change your emotional channel. It’s fun and can be very exhilarating.

Melt away your depression!

And that’s it. I could give you a bunch of theory, but it doesn’t matter. This
exercise works for most people, it begins to inoculate you from unconscious
depressive forces in your psyche. Do those two things for ten whole minutes
a day and within a few days to a few weeks you should notice a significant
shift in your emotional states. Your depression may seem to “melt away” all
by itself. And when depression starts to come up in the future, you should
notice that you move through it quickly, in hours or minutes instead of
weeks and months.

However, to begin with, we are going to reverse the process and have you
practice enthusing and uplifting yourself first! Because depression is so
heavy and thick and enveloping, you want to first insure that you can change
the channel successfully before you step into it for five minutes on purpose.

In other words, until you can do the Uplifting Exercise successfully, don’t
do the Depressive Exercise. You need to prove to yourself that you can
switch your emotional channel before you spend any more time being
depressed!! So, practice the Uplifting Exercise by itself for a day or two (or
as long as you need) until you feel confident that you can actually make
yourself feel pretty good, then start the full Anti Depression Exercise of
Depressing yourself first then Uplifting Yourself.

The Uplifting Exercise:

For the next five minutes, I want you to consciously enthuse yourself. Read
through this, then close your eyes, do this exercise, and see what happens.

• Straighten your spine

• lift your shoulders,

34
 • breathe a few deep breaths,
• hold your head up high.

Now, imagine a great future. (It can be any great future, like a great
vacation or winning the lotto or being a rock star or whatever) For now,
focus on the lotto.

Imagine that you’ll win the next lotto. Not the million dollar lotto, but the
50 million power ball lotto. You win all that money for yourself. What
would you do with 50 mil? Think of how much you’d give away. Who
would you donate money to? Whose life would you brighten and make
happy?

How big a house would you buy? Where would you go first on vacation?
What toys would you buy? Where would you buy your first vacation home?

How much would you give to family members and friends? Imagine the
smiles on their faces as you give them that money.

Go ahead, take five minutes, and ponder these questions. Really step into it.
How would you spend the first million on yourself? Imagine yourself
spending it and getting whatever that is. How would you give the first
million away? See the faces of people as they receive your gifts.

Very good. Finally, whatever this means to you, there is no right way to do
it, put that feeling of vibrance there. Have it be there in your body just the
way it is.

Great. Now step back out of that feeling of vibrance and exuberance. Stop
imaging all those good things happening to you. Let that go for now.

******

That’s it. You should feel somewhat uplifted and pleased. Pretty much
everyone daydreams and finds it pleasant and fun to think of what they’d do
with ten or fifty million bucks. All you did was “daydream” on purpose.
Sure, you don’t have the 50 mil, but the mind doesn’t have to have
something to get excited and inspired. Just imagining or daydreaming you
can tap the power of your mind to get Very, Very Excited.

35
If you successfully enthused yourself, lifted your mood, then good for you.
You are learning that you can use your brain, imagery, visualization, to
quickly change your emotional state. This is a powerful emotional skill!

If you didn’t successfully uplift yourself, not to worry! Some of us aren’t as

visual, and that is a more visual method. It takes a while to really imagine
ourselves getting and spending 50 million bucks. You may need to try it a
few more times to really get into it.

If this exercise didn’t work for you, you can try “daydreaming” about
something else that you like, such as a favorite vacation spot or receiving an
award in your field and getting the admiration and acclaim of thousands (or
millions!). Writing a book and having it published, or becoming a rock or
dancing star and performing in front of thousands. Whatever lights you up!

And finally, if that doesn’t work for you, you can try a more kinesthetic
exercise, like remembering one of your more delightful sexual experiences
or some other sensual delight, like flying in a glider or snorkeling in the
warm Pacific or getting a great massage. It’s all simply a way to use your
“imagination” on purpose to change your mood. This is a basic emotional
skill using the power of your brain to change your emotional state.

So, practice this until you can make yourself feel pretty good with just a few
minutes of “daydreaming.” Once you can, then you are ready for the
Depressive Exercise. Here it is:

The Depressive Exercise

Think of a negative situation in your life. Read through this, then close your
eyes and for 5 minutes

• think negative thoughts.

• Slump your shoulders.
• Breathe shallowly.

Think of all the reasons why it ain’t going to work out. Whatever you’re
concerned about, imagine it not working out and how bad you’ll feel. It
could be a concern that you’re depressed and it will never lift. It could be

36
that you’re alone and will never get a lover. Or that your lover leaves you.
Or that you end up broke. Whatever you tend to be concerned about. Get as
depressed as you can. You’re only going to do it for five minutes, so let
yourself go. Step into it.

At this point you should be sitting there fairly depressed. Shoulders

slumped, head hung, woe is you, life sucks, it all sucks kinda depression.
Have you stepped into it as fully as you can?

Now, notice how the depression feels in your body. Explore it some. Where
does it mainly seem to be located? In what main body parts? Is it a
heaviness in your gut? An empty feeling in your abdomen? A weight in
your jaws? For each of us, it will show up differently, just see if you can get
a sense of where the major feeling of depression resides in your body.
Depression is a feeling, your body feels feelings, so it’s got to show up in
some body parts. Explore it and see if you can find out where.

Next, what main sensations are you feeling in those body parts? Is it a
heaviness? An iciness? An emptiness? A sharp pang? Again, depression is
a feeling, you will feel it in certain parts of your body, and it will have
particular sensations in those body parts. Take a minute and explore those
body parts and see what kinds of sensations go with your feeling of
depression. You’re just an explorer here, go ahead and explore for a minute.

Finally, just sit with your feeling of depression. And now try something
radical, which is to take 30 seconds and put that depression there. There is
no right or wrong way to do this, whatever that means to you, as best you
can, put that depression there. Have it be there just the way it is for you.

Very good. Now step back out of depressing yourself. Thank yourself for
creating and exploring depression and step back out.

Try any and all of these approaches until the sense of depression has gone:

• Straighten your shoulders.

• Breathe deeply.
• Think of something positive in your future. It could be the next meal
where you’ll give yourself a great treat. It could be of a fun place
you’re going to travel to soon.

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 • Move your body. Play a dance song on your stereo.
• Stand up and shake off the depression.

**********

How did that go? Were you “successful” at making yourself feel bad?? If
so, very good for you. Here, you daydreamed on purpose again, just using
the power of the mind to make yourself feel awful. The mind can be used to
depress or uplift yourself! Once you learn this viscerally, from experience,
you are well on your way to inoculating yourself against depression!

And just to check, have you been able to shake it off, or do you still feel
rather listless and deficient and empty? This is very important to notice.
The problem with being depressed is not that there is something wrong with
you, the problem is that we tend to get stuck in it. It is heavy and weighty
and sucks us down like quicksand. We get depressed and then it seems to
hang around and linger for hours. Just notice how much your sense of
depression lingers.

As we’ve been discussing, an important secret in dealing with depression is

being able to change the channel. So now go ahead and do the Uplifting
Exercise again.

******

Ok, so let’s look at what happened here. You took five minutes to
consciously feel depressed. To make yourself depressed. You brought it on.
Congratulations! That in and of itself is a great thing. Lots of good results
will come from this.

First, you stopped resisting depression for five whole minutes. That is very
powerful. You started to explore it and allow it and witness it and all of
those things begin to shift the way you relate to all of your difficult
emotions. You started to process the glut of emotion rather than resist it.

What did you learn? Where is depression mostly located in your body?
What does it feel like in those body parts? How did it feel to actually put the
feeling there, have it be there?

38
Instead of depression slaying you, you “did” depression. Instead of being
victimized by it, hit over the head and heart by it, you graced yourself with
it. You made it happen.

Now, if you can do that every day for the next two weeks, something
remarkable may begin to occur. Depression may entirely begin to lift or
loosen its hold on you. When you can do depression some, rather than be
done by it, you can become a bit of its master!!

[Remember, I’m not promising that this will occur. And you can only
find out by doing this exercise. But if it does occur for you, you win big
time. You are on your way to thriving emotionally! If you do these
exercises for a week or two and notice no effect, you still feel
significantly depressed a majority of the time, then by all means get to a
doctor if you haven’t done so already!]

And another very powerful thing you did was to enthuse yourself. To
consciously change the channel and leave depression and reach for
exuberance. Adults need to develop skills at managing their moods, and
when dealing with depression this is vital. So spending five whole minutes
imagining winning the lotto is a great start. You can also spend five minutes
planning a vacation in your head. Or plan the perfect date with your perfect
mate. It all tends to powerfully lift your mood!

Now, this being the first time, maybe these exercises didn’t impact you
much. Maybe you found it difficult to step fully into depression, or even
more difficult to actually get a little turned on by imaging winning the lotto.
Maybe this didn’t happen very strongly for you. Maybe it seemed rather
silly or fake at first. Whatever you got was ok. This is just a start.

Consider this idea. There is no intellectual secret or set of words of wisdom

that can make depression go away. Depression is not really a mental body
phenomenon. It occurs in your emotional body and depresses your physical
and mental body. It is an emotional body issue.

So while I could talk to you for hours and tell you lots of interesting things
about feelings and thriving emotionally, it really is going to come down to
you processing your emotions. You doing the emotional body work to begin
to heal and integrate the difficult emotions that have backed up and
combined into depression for you. You’ve got to exercise the muscles and

39
develop the skills to deal with the most difficult of emotions. You’ve got to
become an explorer and healer of your own emotional body so that
depression begins to break up and move through you rather than stick
around like a dark cloud.

These two five minute practices are a powerful way for you to exercise your
emotional muscles, to build your skills at dealing with difficult feelings. I’m
asking you to practice them for two weeks, once or twice a day. Can you
give yourself ten or twenty minutes a day to build your emotional muscles?
If, at the end of two weeks, you feel it has made no difference, then drop it
and look for another solution.

In no case should you need to do this exercise for more than two weeks!!

My recommendation is that if this Anti Depression Exercise doesn’t melt

away your depression within a few weeks, please go see a doctor or therapist
and get professional, personal, one on one help. There is nothing wrong
with getting help, whether it is information like this from a book or seeing a
specialist. In my own experience, when depression starts for me I have
never had to do this for more than a few days, five days at most, and that
was it.

The Anti Depression Exercise is not a lifetime thing where you have to
spend 10 minutes a day for the rest of your life to heal depression. A few
days here and there when depression starts to strike and you can be
“inoculated.” We are each individuals with different biochemistries and
bodies and psyches and circumstances in our lives. What works for you may
not work as well for your neighbor. I simply want to be clear that I am not
giving you a lifetime exercise. If this doesn’t work for you within a few
weeks, drop it and explore other approaches to your emotional well being.

But the solution to depression is not likely to be some ideas or new

“information.” Depression is an emotional body issue. To deal with it
effectively, in most cases, you must learn some ways to deal with difficult
emotions and to manage your moods.

One of the most powerful things you can do to dissolve depression is to

begin to deal with your difficult feelings by spending at least five minutes a
day appreciating them.

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Emotional appreciation is a basic skill that is unfortunately not taught
anywhere in our school system. And it is as simple as feeling your difficult
feelings for five minutes at a time. And not just wallowing in them or
getting overwhelmed by them, but actually noticing where in your body your
sadness or fear is located, and what it feels like in those body parts.

Depression, as I’m sure you have noticed, has a quality few other feelings
have, and that is it can suck you in and quickly color ALL of your
experience. You feel depressed and hopeless and no energy and no life and
it seems endless and pervasive and PERMANENT, like it will always be this
way.

Depression is a very powerful set of feelings to begin to process. Treat it

with great respect. The way to do this is to be very rigorous about changing
the channel after you’ve explored it for five minutes. DO WHAT YOU
NEED TO DO TO SHIFT YOUR ENERGETIC STATE. Here are three
favorite methods of mine for changing your energetic state. You can use
one or all three as often as you need to:

1. Body Shifting: Get up, stretch, stand tall, move your body, breathe
deeply. Engage in a physical activity like biking or gardening or hiking or
cleaning your house.

2. Sharing! Call a friend to chat about their life. Converse with a coworker.
Volunteer. Have dinner with a family member. Do something with people.

3. Imagination! Use the power of your mind. Think about nice things,
going on vacation, falling in love, winning the lotto. Again, do this only for
a few minutes, til the feeling of depression has lifted. And recognize that it
is simply a visualization exercise, intended to lift your spirits. Otherwise
you will start getting depressed because you can’t go on vacation or don’t
have a lover or whatever…

The Depression Killer Movement!

So as you work on dealing with depression, one of the main skills you will
develop is your ability to change your emotional channel. We never got any
training on this in school, and yet it is vital skill for thriving emotionally in
life.

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A final point on changing the channel is this secret depression killer
practice: if nothing else seems to work, in the privacy of your own home or
room, turn on a favorite rock song, turn up the volume, and dance like a fool.
Let yourself go and move with the music. No one is watching, so dive in! If
that doesn’t lift your depression, then you had better be under a doctor’s
care!

Is There A Message In Your Emotions??

Another perspective that helps to deal successfully with depression is the

fact that emotions often contain messages for us, which we referred to earlier
with the story of Bob and Sue. Emotions don’t always contain messages,
but they often do. So if you are feeling sad, it is worth exploring the feeling
for five minutes, and part of the exploration can be “is there anything this
sadness is trying to tell me?” In other words, what is the sadness about?

I am not recommending getting “all intellectual” about your emotions, that

just gets you into your head and causes the emotions to stick around longer.
But you can always feel out an answer to the question: Is there anything this
emotion of sadness is trying to tell me?” When you do, just sense if there is
an answer. Sometimes there will be. “Well, really, I think I’m sad because I
feel lonely. My best friend has been busy lately and we haven’t been able to
get together and I feel out of the loop…”

Very useful information, right? You often don’t just wake up sad in the
morning for no reason. If you explore it and find yourself feeling lonely or
out of touch with a friend, then you can call the friend or make a new friend
or whatever. Not always, but often, emotions contain messages that we are
not consciously aware of.

The Secret Message of Depression!

So what is depression trying to tell us? What message might it contain?

Well, there is no one message, the answers are as varied as the people
feeling depression. But there may be a few broad strokes we can consider
that may or may not apply to you personally.

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Depression is painful. Now remember, pain is neither good nor bad, it is just
a message that says “pay attention!” Pay attention to what hurts. Well,
depression hurts, and it is saying pay attention to this feeling of emptiness.
This feeling of hopelessness. The feeling of meaninglessness. This feeling
that nothing I do matters or counts.

These are some very powerful feelings and potential messages to pay
attention to. But if you are feeling empty, maybe it is because your life is
empty! Sure, maybe you’ve accomplished the American Dream, you have
two kids, a nice house and a dog, but you have this persistent feeling of
emptiness and meaninglessness.

Maybe depression is saying to look elsewhere for meaning! Look elsewhere

for richness and satisfaction. Fulfillment doesn’t live in possessions. You
can be a billionaire and feel very empty and dissatisfied. Recall Elvis
Presley and his addictions.

So perhaps depression and massive feelings of deficiency and emptiness are

a message saying something like “Look elsewhere for satisfaction!”

That one message can give you a lifetime of great fun and work and
discovery:

• Where does meaningfulness live?

• How can you get more of it?
• How do you fill yourself with the opposite of emptiness?

Look, if you feel depressed and like your life doesn’t count for anything,
nothing wrong with that strong emotional message. Start making your life
count! Do the work of finding out what gives you a sense of meaning and
fulfillment and instead of sitting around moaning and whining get busy and
start making your life count, however that adds up for you.

We won’t go into it here but there are hundreds of books on finding your
purpose and mission and living it in your life. Hundreds! There are courses
you can take and much to discover about what lights you up and turns you
on and gets your juices flowing.

Consider this. If emotions contain simple messages, when you are singing
like a soprano in the shower and feeling great, or when you turn the music

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up when you’re all alone and dance like a fool, you quickly begin to feel
energized, happy, turned on. Those feelings of exuberance are telling you
that you’re doing something good, something right for you. If you pay
attention to that feeling, you will try to work more things into your day that
give you that kind of a lift and positive emotional state. It’s very obvious
and natural, we all want to do more of what turns us on.

One Easy Step to Dealing with Emptiness and Meaninglessness!

And, if you are having feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness, one

message could be that you simply need to find something meaningful to you
in life. Something(s) full of meaning. Maybe it’s doing something creative,
like art or writing. Maybe it’s doing something nurturing, like mentoring or
helping homeless dogs. It could be getting into a new relationship or
whatever. You have to do a little witnessing, self observation, a little work,
to find out what kinds of things give you meaning.

But if you are depressed, it could be because you aren’t doing anything in
your life that gives you meaning. It could be because of several other
reasons, but something to look at in broad terms is that if you are getting the
painful feelings of hopelessness and emptiness and meaninglessness in your
life, you can certainly explore what you can do to give your life hope,
fullness and meaning.

Maybe we all come here to sing our song in life, to add our thread to the
weave of life. Maybe depression is just a sign that you aren’t singing your
song, you aren’t living your purpose, you aren’t making the difference you
sense can be made.

Look, if your life has been spent making a living and trying to raise a family,
good enough, but those are not the only games in life, and they will show up
as meaningless and empty at some point. But if you can add something to
your life in addition to those things, something that gives you a sense of
making a difference or a sense of individual expression - like maybe
coaching a little league team, or making crafts to sell at the flea market
because you love being artistic, or leading aerobic dance classes because you
love to dance - your life will start to fill with meaning and richness.

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What I’m pointing out is that if you feel depressed and empty and deficient,
it might simply be the obvious, because something is missing and lacking in
your life. You can take drugs to make that feeling go away, but it won’t deal
with the underlying cause.

As we’ve already pointed out, you can get a headache and take aspirin,
right? But what if the headache is because you are constipated? The pain of
the headache is a message from your body to pay attention to something! If
you don’t discover the message, you’ll end up taking aspirin for a long time
instead of dealing with the cause, which is constipation!

Just so depression! If there is a message that your life is empty and

meaningless, pay attention! Start the journey of finding meaning and
passion and fulfillment. It’s a journey! You can enjoy it! It is much more
exciting and fascinating than doing nothing! Use the depression to motivate
you, the pain to get you going!!!

Now, that journey of self fulfillment is well beyond the scope of this
discussion, but if you are dealing with depression, it may be a journey that
you need to make, or continue making.

So that’s it for this discussion. There is much, much more we could discuss
related to depression, and please realize that this is just one cut, one way or
approach to dealing with it. I AM NOT saying that your depression is due to
lack of purpose or mission in your life, but it may be. We get no training in
school on finding our life purpose, connecting our head with our heart. It
MIGHT be something worth looking into, along with whatever other
approaches to depression you are using.

Change Your Circumstances!

Another common message depression delivers has to do with the

circumstances in our lives. If you get fired from your job, that circumstance
can lead to “situational” depression. If you get a divorce or lose a loved one,
the same thing can occur. There are situations that come up in life that can
depress us and have us feel badly about who we are and where we are at in
life.

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If you ask yourself “why am I depressed?” and you keep getting an answer
related to a circumstance in your life, the message is probably as simple as
change that circumstance! So, for example, if you feel depressed and what
comes up associated with that is that your relationship sucks and you are
with the wrong person and you don’t feel good about the way you are being
treated, that is a strong message! Your depression is telling you – “Hey, pay
attention, this relationship isn’t working!”

So, if you want to get rid of your depression, you will actually need to heed
the message and change your relationship. Either get rid of the offending
mate or get into counseling together to make things start working for both of
you.

It may seem obvious as I write about it, but the messages in depression can
sometimes be a simple call to action, to change your life, to risk something
new, to move forward in spite of your fears and get outside your comfort
zones. Comfort zones often can turn into depression zones!

So what is the secret message of depression? It is for you to consider and

reflect on and find out for yourself. And, if it is a message to find meaning
in your life, or to find a new friend, or get a job that doesn’t insult your
dignity, then use the pain of the depression to motivate yourself to get into
action, to at least take a few steps towards a new future. Getting a life coach
can often help you with this process, and they are available online with a
simple google search.

A Common Food You Eat Everyday That Causes Depression!

Another important piece of managing one’s moods has to do with food and
nutrition. Brain chemistry and biochemistry are obviously key, important
aspects of how we feel physically and emotionally.

When I was 21 I was very depressed. And I couldn’t figure out why. I was
in college, had friends, life was pretty good, and there were several nights a
week where I’d feel very, very bad about my life. At the time, I thought it
was because I didn’t have a girlfriend, but I suspected these terrible, heavy,
dark feelings were about something much more than that.

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It was awful, and scary, and I didn’t know why it was happening to me, I
didn’t have any terrible things happening in my life, I had a good childhood,
parents who loved me, enough money to live on, so why was I having these
dark, hopeless, gloomy feelings? I had a few times when I couldn’t imagine
living on like this! Why live if it feels like this???

Then, an interesting thing happened one day on my drive to college. After a

full nights sleep of eight hours I was driving on the freeway and started
nodding off. I couldn’t seem to stay awake! This had been happening to me
more and more often in the last few months. At 21 years old, after full
night’s of rest, I was nodding off while driving my car in the morning!

Well, on this morning, I nodded off and ran into another car! Oouch! Now,
the car I hit was going in the same direction on the freeway, I just bumped
into him in the next lane, but it scared the Bejeezus out of me (and him)! No
real damage to either car, just damage to my self esteem.

So like any good American young male I went to a doctor to see if there was
something wrong with me. The doctor said I had classic symptoms of
hypoglycemia. I had low blood sugar! That’s what was causing me to nodd
off!

Up to that point I didn’t even know what low blood sugar was, and that it
could possibly be a problem. The doc told me to stop eating sugar and
sweet things, and to go on a healthier diet of protein and veggies and vitamin
supplements. Again, up to this point, I had never even thought that sugar
could be bad for you. They never told me that in school!

So I stopped eating sugary foods, and it was a MIRACLE! In three days, not
only did I have more energy, but I no longer felt depressed! At all! I had no
more nights of deep misery feeling empty and hopeless and dark!

I still had worries and concerns but they were “normal.” They didn’t send
me into dark depression.

The conclusion? Sugar was a major culprit and cause of my depression.

Who’d a thunk it? I had thought it was some deep psychological issue or
failure or lack that was the problem. I became convinced that there was
something wrong with me, John, and I felt very ashamed. But no, it was
sugar!

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So biochemistry is a very clear component of many depressions and doctors
obviously realize this as they try to balance people’s brain chemistry with
anti-depressants.

I’m not suggesting you are depressed because of sugar, we are all different
and that may or may not be a cause of your mood swings and dark feelings.
But you must pay attention to brain foods and nutrients. If you eat junk
foods that rob your body of nutrients, that steal your energy rather than add
to it, stop it!!!

A lot of people don’t need drugs for depression, they need a healthier diet
and lifestyle! At least discuss this with your doctor. Read the classic book
“Sugar Blues.” From my personal experience, white, refined sugar can
SIGNIFICANTLY exacerbate negative feelings. It can cause mood swings
that can make you feel manic then depressive.

Some causes of depression are “situational.” You get a divorce, lose a job,
lose a spouse, these situations can trigger feelings of sadness and
worthlessness that are related to a temporary situation. Using the Emotional
Appreciation exercises can help you more quickly work through these
feelings.

And some causes are related to your body’s biochemistry. Sugar creates a
sharp rise in energy for about 30 minutes as the amount of sugar in your
blood rises. Then as your body pumps insulin into the blood stream you
burn off the sugar and swing into low blood sugar, and for the next few
hours you may feel lethargic, sleepy, irritable or sad.

Low blood sugar affects not only your body’s energy level, but your body’s
emotional state. Now, it affects everyone differently, and some of us are
much more susceptible to the effects of low blood sugar than others, me
being a case in point. I am so susceptible to low blood sugar that I can nodd
off while driving on the freeway in the morning after eight hours of sleep!

So it is no surprise that for me, blood sugar levels significantly affect my

emotional states as well. I can feel sad or ‘low’ for no reason. And until I
connected sugar intake with emotional swings it often seemed like there was
no reason at all for how I felt. I had no reason to feel bad and yet I was
feeling awful!

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The other issue to point out with sugar is that it doesn’t just affect your
emotional state for an hour or two after you take it. I have found that if I eat
sugar on Monday, I can have “unexplainable” mood swings for up to two
days afterwards.

Now, as I said, I am highly susceptible to blood sugar swings in my body.

You may not be as susceptible, but EVERYBODY is affected by sugar
intake. And today, in our society, it is common for people to literally
OVERDOSE on sugar Every Single Day.

People stop at convenience stores and get 64 oz soda pops, sometimes just to
start their day! 64 ounces of flavored sugar water! (Soda pop is basically a
candy bar in liquid form, in case you haven’t figured that out!) And then, at
lunch, it will be a Big Mac and a Milk Shake! Then, a candy bar or cookies
before dinner, and cake or ice cream for dessert!

Just one candy bar can cause mood swings for days for people like me.
People less susceptible may notice no effect from one candy bar, but drink a
couple cans of soda pop in one day and you are pumping an extra 100 grams
of sugar into your body in a day. Add in a doughnut and a candy bar and
cookies and ice cream and from the perspective of your pancreas, which
creates insulin, you are OD’ing on sugar.

Oftentimes, people then must drink coffee so that the caffeine can cover
their energy swings. The only way some people can keep going with all that
sugar in their diet is caffeine or drugs!

You don’t have to cut out sweets altogether, your local health food store has
lots of alternative sweeteners that can satisfy your sweet tooth without
putting your pancreas and insulin production into overdrive. At any rate, if
you feel depressed, and it seems like it is for no reason, then sugar may be
the culprit. You owe it to your health to cut down on your refined sugar
intake. And if you cut out sugar altogether for a few days, you may notice a
significant improvement in your mood.

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 Brain Food – It Really Works!
Your local health food stores will have a whole shelf full of supplements that
are generally called “brain foods” or “boosters” or “mood management.” If
you are experiencing depression because of a biochemical imbalance, it can
be fun and interesting to try some of these “just in case.” I myself take
several supplements specifically to fuel my brain and balance out any mood
swings.

Supplements that help with mood management are

L Glutamine. B vitamins. Brewer’s Yeast. Lecithin. Chromium.

Sometimes you can find all of them in one tablet. There are several others
listed on “brain booster” supplement bottles, that I haven’t tried, but that
may help. Try some when you start to feel down and see if they make any
difference!

Now, everyone’s biochemistry is different. A supplement that works for

seven out of ten people still leaves three people feeling ripped off. Another
that works miracles for one person may not have any noticeable effect on
nine others. How well supplements work depend on a lot of variables,
including what other supplements you take and your diet and genetics and
whether you exercise and other environmental factors.

For these reasons you need to explore brain food for yourself and see what
gives you a lift and what doesn’t. Here is a supplement cocktail I
recommend you try to see if gives you a lift:

L Glutamine 200 mlg

A One a Day B Vitamin Complex Supplement
Brewers Yeast, three tablets.
Lecithin in liquid gel cap form, one tablet.
Phenylalanine 25 mg

Take all of those at one time when you are feeling down, and see how you
feel within thirty minutes. (I have not been able to find all of these in one
tablet at the health food store). This cocktail is something I take most every
day to fuel my brain. It may work for you as well.

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However, if you are OD’ing on sugar, or pumping yourself up with caffeine
and other stimulants, then this cocktail will probably have no noticeable
effect, so it all depends on other dietary factors. Still, there are brain foods
that can give you a lift, and if you explore you may find some that work for
you!

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 Summary

The main approach emphasized in this book is to take five to ten minutes a
day to feel your feelings and explore difficult emotions on purpose. This is
the exact opposite of what feels “normal,” which is to try to avoid and resist
all our deeper, darker feelings.

The revolutionary key presented here is to take only five minutes to do this!
Instead of getting sucked into difficult emotions and flushing our mood
down the toilet right along with them, take just five minutes as an explorer
and check them out then Change the Channel. None of us want to get lost in
negative emotions, and the “five minute then change the channel” rule will
help you to begin to integrate and heal all of your emotional ills.

If you are dealing with depression, you are on a challenging part of the
human journey. You have a great opportunity to explore and understand a
lot more of your inner workings and come to a much deeper understanding
of your self and how to manage your moods and deal with difficult
emotions. The other side of depression is worth getting to!

This book is not THE ANSWER to depression. Every person is unique and
every person must discover what works best for them in optimizing their
mood and emotional well being. I hope you have found some of these
perspectives useful.

These are not the only approaches to dealing with depression. These are not
the only methods for thriving emotionally. As I’ve repeatedly said, we got
no schooling on how to deal with difficult emotions. For more information
on the subjects of joy, exuberance, depression, hope, etc., please go to
www.emotionalskills.com to get a free course on Developing your
Emotional IQ. It’s free, everybody should have it, and you deserve to give
yourself this gift.

Please feel free to drop me a line at john@emotionalskills.com to let me

know how the journey is going for you.

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