It seems like everybody’s depressed these days. It’s quite trendy and popular. People compare their shrinks, talk about the latest anti depression medication, and fill their bookshelves with self help books. But what is depression? Yes, I know that there is “chemical depression” which is when your brain doesn’t put out the right balance of chemicals and hormones which allow you to feel good.
But are people depressed because their brain chemicals are off, or are their brain chemicals out of whack because they’re depressed? Hard to really prove, and I’m sure that just suggesting that our own thoughts are the cause of our depression will completely outrage some people. You are entitled to be depressed in our society, and no one has the right to take that away from us! I think it’s even in the Constitution.
I’m always amazed when I see TV commercials advertising anti depression drugs, so you can go to your doctor and demand them by brand name, even though you’ll have to deal with the obligatory flatulence, loss of bladder and bowel control, seizures and possible sudden death.
It occurred to me that although I’ve met tons (if you measure by weight, thousands otherwise) of depressed people in my life, but I’ve never once met someone on a personal mission who was also depressed. This was an eye opening discovery. You’ve met those people who can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning because they’re working on something that is bigger than themselves. They’re hard to miss, because you can’t help but get wrapped up in their high energy.
The main difference between them and the rest of the population is that they don’t have time to think about themselves. They’re too busy working on something big that helps a much larger number of people. It could be bringing water to third world countries, saving abused kids, rescuing endangered species……
So what can we learn from this? What I’ve learned is that except for the very small percentage of people with true physical chemical or structural brain imbalances, most people can instantly cure their depression using a simple 3-step process:
1. Quit thinking about yourself and your problems all the time.
2. Find a cause (purpose, mission, whatever you want to call it) that’s important to you, and helps other people.
3. Take action that helps your cause every day.
That’s pretty much it. The more time you spend helping other people, the less time you have to wallow in your own “miserable” life situation. Once we get involved in helping people who are much more worse off than us, it sinks in how good we really have it.
