In another post, we looked at the vicious cycles involving thoughts, behaviours, feelings, memories, and physical sensation that contribute to depression. When you’re experiencing depression, all of these aspects of your life interact with each other, generating a downward spiral bringing you deeper into depression. Negative patterns of thinking often have a adverse influence on behaviour; distressing physical symptoms often effect our feelings, leading to sadness and despair; and so on.

Describing this downward spiral of depression in The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression, a workbook based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Kirk Stroshal and Patricia Robinson note that:

There are any number of reasons that people become depressed. Depression can arise in response to such as the loss of a relationship or job, or a loved one. Depression can also arise during a stressful period of uncertainty or transition in your life that leads you to questions what you’ve been doing and where you’re headed, leaving you feeling lost and without answers. And sometimes the reasons depression arises may not be clearly defined.

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The Mental Health Foundation in the UK has developed a Be Mindful webpage that is an excellent resource for information about the benefits of mindfulness. The following quote is from their webpage:

How you handle the way you feel plays a big part your mental health. In difficult times, it is not unusual to focus solely on negative thoughts and feelings and become consumed by them.

 

Mindfulness helps you change the way they think, feel and act. It helps you to break free from a downward spiral of negative thought and action, and make positive choices that support your wellbeing. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post, we looked at the vicious cycle of depression involving thoughts, feelings, behaviours, memories and physical symptoms. One of the first steps in overcoming depression is to put and end to this vicious cycle, and gain some momentum that can help you cycle in a positive direction.

Just as automatic negative thoughts result from and contribute to depression, by engaging in more neutral and balanced ways of thinking, we can begin to stop the vicious cycle involving negative thoughts and depression. Cognitive therapy provides an effective tool to help break out of negative patterns of thinking. As our thoughts become less negative, we begin to feel less depressed, and as we become less depressed, our thoughts about ourselves, our lives and our future become less negative, and so on.

One of the reasons that breaking out of depression can be so difficult is that depression generates vicious cycles involving a number of aspects of your life. Once you get stuck in these vicious cycles, they can be hard to break.

For example, when you’re experiencing depression, you will tend to have automatic negative thoughts about yourself, the world and the future. This pattern of negative thinking leads you deeper into depression. This leads to even more negative thoughts; which lead you to feel even more depressed; leading to more negative thoughts; and so on.

Other vicious cycles that arise from depression involve feelings, behaviours, memories and physical symptoms. These vicious cycles are depicted below (click on the image to view a larger version):

In a previous post, I mentioned the Be Mindful webpage developed by the Mental Health Foundation in the UK. Below are three videos from that webpage describing four people’s experiences with mindfulness and how mindfulness has helped them deal with their depression and anxiety.

In the video below, Kathy Andrews talks about how she found mindfulness to be the piece that was missing from other kinds of therapy.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is a relatively recent type of therapy that combines aspects of cognitive therapy with the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program created by Jon Kabat-Zinn. MBCT was developed to help people struggling with depression, and it is also helpful in treating anxiety and low self-esteem.

The following description of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and how it helps people overcome depression is taken from the MBCT webpage of Mark Williams, one of the developers of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. His book The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness expands on the information below.

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The benefits you can experience from learning to become more mindful are virtually limitless. Mindfulness allows you to relate to and deal directly with whatever is happening in your life. Instead of struggling to escape, suppress or avoid distressing thoughts and feelings, mindfulness helps you approach whatever is going on in your life, in your thoughts, and with your emotions, without becoming overwhelmed.

When you start being more mindful and start living in the present moment, you’ll experience your life more fully, and become more in touch with yourself, who you are, what is important to you, and what you want out of life.

There are many ways in which mindfulness complements traditional approaches to counselling and therapy. Counselling and therapy involve cultivating awareness and insight into your life and the issues you’re facing, exploring your patterns of thinking, and your feelings and emotions, how these are affecting you, and learning to handle difficult thoughts and emotions.

Mindfulness helps facilitate these processes by slowing down your mind, and using this calmer, clearer mind to allow you to get in touch with you inner wisdom and gain fresh perspective and understanding about your self, your life, and the issues you’re dealing with.