How to Avoid a Stroke? Don’t Get Depressed

If you are elderly and depressed, you have a 3 times greater chance of having a stroke.

A Swedish study tracked a group of depressed 85 year-olds including some who had dementia over a 3 year period; and found that the chances of them having their first stroke were triple that of people who weren’t depressed.

The researchers also found an association between high blood pressure and first stroke. However “analysis …of depression revealed that depressed mood was the only predictor of first-time stroke.”

Once again, these results demonstrate how devastating depression can be to your overall health; and the urgency with which this chronic and sometimes progress illness needs to be addressed.

For more see Depression One of the Planet’s Most Devastating Diseases.

Little Things Can Make Your Mood More Positive

An article in the Huffington Post offers some tips to cultivate personal happiness.

A tip from one of the happiness gurus is that you be aware of what you are grateful for. Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, author of the book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want suggests you make a daily list of things that you are grateful for. This is important to people with depression become more conscious of positive things in life.

I would take Professor Lyubomirsky’s suggestions are couple of steps further. I would also

• Focus on small incidental things such as maybe a pleasant conversation with somebody you don’t really know such as a store clerk, some driver stopped and let you pull into traffic. If something fabulous happens great put it down but also focus on the little things
• LIst acts of kindness that I extend to others; holding a do for someone, taking the time to help somebody carry something to their car.

Kindness is just as important as graditude.

Here is the full article from the Huffington Post.

Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part III Being Mode

Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part I Seeing the Pattern described how sad or depressive feelings in the present moment can trigger depressive thoughts and feelings from the past which cycle us downward. Part II Doing Mode explains how we react to this emotional problem by trying to think our way out of it.

So if we can’t think our way out of despair how do we respond? How do we deal with these depressive feelings, memories, and thoughts in the present moment?

We respond to this negative inner reality through mindful awareness. The Mindful Way Through Depression defines mindful awareness as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and non-judgementally to things as they are.“

The authors point out that mindfulness is:

1. Intentional – Mindfulness is a skill that we can develop to be more aware our “of present reality and the choices available to us.”
2. Experiential – Mindfulness focuses on present experience.
3. Non-judgmental - Mindfulness enables us to see things as they are and let them be.

Mindfulness is the “being mode”. Most of us have spent a lifetime building up our thinking skills but have paid little attention to developing our capacity for mindful awareness. It is a way of opening ourselves up to the world and creating a space for ourselves.

We can use the practice of meditation to develop mindful awareness. By gently being patient and persist, we can create a more constructive relationship with our emotional selves.

Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part II Doing Mode

In Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part I Seeing the Pattern, we discussed how present depressive feelings can trigger depressive thoughts and feelings from the past which make us feel much worse. Knowing this pattern exists enables you to respond rather than react when it happens to you.

But first let’s talk about how a person reacts when this downward depressive cycle starts to take over.

1. Once these feelings and thought patterns from the past capture our attention, we have no awareness that they come from a prior experience. All we can see is that we are feeling bad and frustrated.
2. We then react by trying to fix the problem. What’s wrong with me? Why does this happen to me? Why am I so weak? We try to think our way out of depression and it doesn’t work.
3. When thinking doesn’t work we get even more depressed and because we’ve been here many times before we take our depressive thoughts and feelings as truth.

The authors of The Mindful Way Through Depression call this application of critical thinking the “doing mode” Our ability to think critically has helped be successful in the external world however rumination is the wrong tool for the job when it comes to our emotions.

So how do we respond rather than react? Checkout the Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part III Being Mode.

Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part I Seeing the Pattern

The book The Mindful Way Through Depression has a great chapter called ‘The Healing Power of Awareness”. A summary of the main points begins this post while other points are summarized in Mindful Awareness and Depression: Part II Doing Mode and Part III Being Mode.

The authors of the book explain how our reaction to negative feelings in the present drag us down to where hurtful memories and feelings from the past takeover.

Here are the downward steps:

1. We experience an afflictive emotion such as sadness.
2. Powerful feelings of deficiency or inadequacy from the past come into the present.
3. We are unable to switch our attention back to what we were doing.
4. This negative state has 2 effects on the mind. A.) They make us more unhappy and ; B.) our perceived deficiencies and inadequacies take on an urgency which demands that we fix them.

People with depression are now entangled in such a way it’s nearly impossible to think or feel any differently.

If we are able to see this pattern at work in ourselves, we might be able to let the depressed thoughts and feelings drift by and bring ourselves back to the present. We also might see ourselves in a more compassionate light.

In order to begin to unravel ourselves from this mess, we must first pay attention to the depressive thought pattern we automatically get caught up in.

Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?

Here is Dan Gilbert’s 20 min video lecture Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy? at the TED Symposium. He’s another Harvard professor. Cambridge, MA must be one happy place.

Gilbert is a very entertaining speak. And presents empirical data which shows that our brain is wired in such a way that we tend to overate our longings and fears. He also demonstrates that we have the ability to create our own happiness but often our emotional overreactions can get in the way.

After his lecture it occurred to me that two of the foundational elements of our modern day society can -if we let them- be obstacles to our sense of wellbeing. The combination of the personal freedom that we have and an economy built on buying the next shiny thing are catalysts for a person to overate how the fulfillment of their own desires can make them happy.

The whole purpose of marketing is to elevate our longing for stuff while the idea that “I can choose this or that” or “I should have chosen this or that” can easily make us take our eye off the ball when it comes to taking in the experience of what we already have.

Perhaps I am being to philosophical. Anyway Gilbert’s lecture is fun to watch.

Harvard’s Highway to Happiness

Here is video of Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shar’s lecture on Positive Psychology: Science of Happiness: How to Get Happy.

He begins by briefly explaining the philosophy behind the positive psychology movement followed by a detailed exploration of his 6 tenets of happiness. My notes from the lecture gives you good idea of the content.

Philosophy Positive Psychology

1. Discipline began by Dr Martin Seligman in 1998
2. In 1998 ratio of articles the psychological pathology to articles about wellness was 21:1
3. Health is not the absence of disease
4. Positive psychology strengthens the immune system

Six Tenets of Happiness

1. Give yourself permission to be human
2. Simplify your life
3. Finding meaning and pleasure
4. Have meaningful interpersonal relationships
5. Work the mind-body connection
6. Focus on the positive.

See the video.

What the Most Satisfying Moments in Life Have to Do with Depression

Can the psychology of optimal experience help people with depression?

In his book Flow, psychologist Mihalyi Csizkezentmihalyi identifies the 7 universal qualities of personal optimal experience, those that people find most satisfying.

1. Challenging Activity That Requires Skills

2. Merging of Action and Awareness

3. Clear Goals and Feedback

4. Concentration on the Task at Hand

5. Lack of Worry About Losing Control

6. Loss of Self-Consciousness

7. Transformation of Time

He has studied people from all over the world who’ve described what it was like to do something they loved.

Our attention is key to the optimal experience. Of all the internal and external stimuli we are exposed to in any given moment, it is attention that selects what is brought into our conscious experience.

The author calls attention psychic energy. Life is great when our attention aligns with our intention. If they are misaligned, we’ve got problems. Csizkezentmihalyi calls this psychic disorder.

“We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, anxiety or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.” – Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Sound familiar.

Back to the 7 qualities of optimal experience, all of them involve the capture/direction of attention. In an optimal experience, a person’s skills that he enjoys using are being challenged and developed. He is one with the test. Focus is on the skill and not the outcome. The experience has a game-like quality; the activity an end in itself.

There is no self; no worry; no time; no extraneous thought.

See if there are any activities in your life that capture your attention this way and look at your experience. Can you apply it to other aspects of your life.

Csizkezentmihalyi is saying that attention determines the quality of experience. This principle has enormous potential to help people with depression.

If we can refine our ability to direct the focus attention we will be in a better position to control the quality of our experience. Could we apply the principle to even the most mundane chores of daily life?

There will be a lot more posts on the subject of attention.