Depressed people, perhaps naturally enough, all think in remarkably similar ways. Depression must be beaten for good and understanding these thinking styles and the reason they form a pattern, is the major key to unlocking this puzzle. Depression’s a bit like an engine. It needs fuel if it’s to be ongoing, otherwise it’ll simply peter out.

Unfortunately, depressives, obviously through no fault of their own, help to maintain their depression by thinking styles that encourage introspection and therefore emotional arousal.

What’s The Difference Between Depression and Prolonged Sadness? When something unfortunate happens to us; a loved one dies, or perhaps due to outside circumstances beyond our control, we have to move from a house we’ve lived in and loved for many years. Our energy level may well sink and perhaps we become more insular.

Someone who’s grieving, can suffer exactly the same chemical imbalance which is so often cited as the cause of depression. However, there are key differences between grieving, (sadness), and depression. The person who is not suffering from depression, but is simply sad, is able to see beyond the sadness. They know it’ll lift.

The poor old depressive, on the other hand, feels that life will always be the way it is now. There is no future for him or her and quite probably no past either, at least not one they are able to remember. There’s only the crippling misery of ‘the now.’ The old saying that time heals everything is true for the person who’s sad because of an unpleasant event, but it certainly doesn’t work for the depressive.

Depressive Thinking Leads To Depression, Leads To Depressive Thinking, leads to.. As we explore these thinking styles, you’ll see how each helps to maintain depression. It alters our perception of reality. It’s these thinking styles that make an end to depression a hopeless dream. We’re imprisoned by our thoughts.

This is why depression manifests different entities to different people. Some look on the illness as if a great wet blanket has been draped over them. Personally, I thought of it like a huge, grey brick wall, impossible to scale and far too long on either side to travel. In truth, in my mind, it went on forever.

Yet others see it as the eight hundred pound gorilla, except that he isn’t just in the room. He’s on their backs! The big problem is that once these thought patterns take hold, they cause emotional arousals that affect us physically.

We’ve mentioned before that depressives often suffer feelings of guilt. They feel either that the depression they suffer is their fault, or that they really should be able to heave themselves out from under, as it were. Both feelings are totally in error. The depression you’re suffering is quite emphatically not your fault.

Neither is it a weakness. Good grief, Sir Winston Churchill suffered from it. Was he weak? However, while at this stage it won’t do you much good, if you’re capable of thinking past your misery, to remember that there’s nothing so awful and terrible that can happen to you that someone hasn’t suffered before, without becoming depressed. People have been through the most terrible experiences, but their minds, their thinking, has retained its balance without a trace of depression.

We’ll have a look at why this should be in a future article