You don’t Catch Depression You Create It
If I had to sum up in two words what this article is about , I’d say: Producing results! Think about it. Isn’t that what you’re really interested in? Maybe you want to change how you feel about yourself and your world. Maybe you’d like to be a better communicator, develop a more loving relationship, learn more rapidly, become healthier, or earn more money. You can create all of these things for yourself, and much more.
Before you can produce new results, however, you must first realize that you’re already producing results. They just may not be the results you desire. Most of us think of our mental states and most of what goes on in our minds as things that happen outside our control. But the truth is you control your mental activities and your behaviors to a degree you never believed possible before. If you’re depressed, you created and produced that show you call depression. If you’re ecstatic, you created that, too.
It’s important to remember that emotions like depression do not happen to you. You don’t “catch” depression. You create it, like every other result in your life, through specific mental and physical actions. In order to be depressed, you have to view your life in specific ways. You have to say certain things to yourself in just the right tones of voice. You have to adopt a specific posture and breathing pattern. For example, if you wish to be depressed, it helps tremendously if you collapse your shoulders and look down a lot. Speaking in a sad-sounding tone of voice and thinking of the worst-possible scenarios for your life also helps. If you throw your biochemistry into turmoil through poor diet or excessive alcohol or drug use, you assist your body in creating low blood sugar and thus virtually guarantee depression.
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My point here is simply that it takes effort to create depression. It’s hard work, and it requires taking specific types of actions. Some people have created this state so often, though, that it’s easy for them to produce. If fact, often they’ve linked this pattern of internal communication as their natural state of living. Others have lived with it so long that it actually feels comfortable. They become identified with the state. We can, however, change our mental and physical actions and thereby immediately change our emotions and behaviors.
You can become ecstatic by immediately adopting the point of view that creates that emotion. You can picture in your mind the kinds of things that create that feeling. You can change the tone and
content of your internal dialogue with yourself. You can adopt the specific postures and breathing patterns that create that state in your body, and voila! You will experience ecstasy. If you wish to be compassionate, you must simply change your physical and mental actions to match those the state of compassion requires. The same is true of love or any other emotion.
You might think of the process of producing emotional states by managing your internal communication as being similar to a director’s job. To produce the precise results he wants, the director of a movie manipulates what you see and hear. If he wants you to be scared, he might turn up the sound and splash some special effects on the screen at just the right moment. If he wants you to be inspired, he’ll arrange the music, the lighting, and everything else on the screen to produce the effect. A director can produce a tragedy or a comedy out of the same event, depending upon what he decides to put on the screen. You can do the same things with the screen of your mind. You can direct your mental activity, which is the underpinning of all physical action, with the same skill and power. You can turn up the light and sound of the positive messages in your brain, and you can dim the pictures and sounds of the negative ones. You can run your brain as skillfully as Spielberg or Scorsese runs his set.
Some of what follows will seem hard to believe. You probably don’t believe there’s a way to look at a person and know his exact thoughts or to instantly summon up your powerful resources at will. But if you had suggested one hundred years ago men would go to the moon, you would have been considered a madman, a lunatic. (Where do you think that word came from?) If you had said it was possible to travel from New York to Los Angeles in five hours, you would have seemed like a crazy dreamer. But it took the mastery of specific technologies and laws of aerodynamics to make those things possible. Because in the end what is truly possible? Dream Big! Nothing’s Impossible!
