Lifting Depression

Recognizing Depression

Maybe you are feeling down or you have been anxious about the future, or you think there is nothing good in life for you. Maybe you don’t feel inclined to do things that used to please you and find everything a big effort. If you feel quite unable to cope and hopeless for a long time, you probably have a form of depression.

You can also feel overwhelmed by guilt or anger or shame and even think about death or suicide. You imagine that whatever you do, you cannot improve your situation.

You sleep badly, with lots of strange dreams, you feel exhausted in the morning and have difficulty in getting up. Because your sleep is not recuperative, you feel constantly tired.

You don’t know what you can do, you really don’t want to do anything, you just want to close your eyes and not move. You feel powerless and worry more and more – creating a mountain of negative expectations. You ruminate over and over again about the same thing, and you think there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The symptoms can persist for weeks or months and are bad enough to interfere with your work, social life and family life.

The cycle of depression

Depression has a dangerous tendency to build upon itself. When depression saps your confidence and motivation, it’s tempting to isolate or do the bare minimum. As a result, normal life tasks such as work and relationships start to fall by the wayside.

Eventually, doing the bare minimum creates new problems, which cause stress and worsening depression. You get more worried during the day and you dream too much during the night. It is impossible to have a reparative night. You wake up tired and without energy. The cycle continues, stronger than before.

To be deeply depressed is just about the most awful feeling we can experience, apart from pure terror. All types of depression are incapacitating, and the earlier you act to avert it the better.

Are your emotional needs being met?

To live a healthy life, we must be meeting certain primordial emotional needs.  Failure to have such needs met can quickly spiral us down into depression. Obviously, to thrive we need to have food, water and shelter. But there are many other needs, emotional rather than physical, that are equally crucial for our happiness. A healthy balance of these needs is essential for our well-being.

Nature gave us the drive to meet our needs and gave us several innated resources to do it. Getting your needs met is dependent on:

The environment where you live

Your coping skills

The health of your brain

Your internal resources are there to help you. You probably think you have no ability to deal with your situation but that is because your brain is foggy and in emotional mode. The emotional brain can’t rationalize and is very controlling. But you have within you some powerful skills that can help you to overcome depression and thrive in life.

Depression and Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy

When we are depressed, we are emotionally aroused. That means our rational mind is not working properly.

Like any strong emotion, depression fogs our thinking and leads us to a circle of constant rumination. Emotions have their place in emergencies and for survival purposes but tend to get in the way elsewhere in our lives because they narrow down our attention too much.

The rule is:

the more emotionally aroused we are, whatever the emotion – pleasant or unpleasant – the more simple-minded we are.

Our protocol consists of looking at how you are meeting your emotional needs and helping you fulfil those needs in healthy ways using your natural resources.

We are going to help you understand and accept yourself, see the events in your life from a different point of view, reframe circumstances and change beliefs.

Then we will guide you to set small, concrete and positive goals, so you can fulfil the unmet needs you have identified.

We will work with your rational mind but also with your powerful unconscious mind (hypnosis).

If you start to feel that your life isn’t worth living or about harming yourself, get help straight away.

You can:

• contact Samaritans on 116 123 for 24-hour confidential, non-judgemental emotional support
• call your GP and ask for an emergency appointment
• call 111 out of hours – they will help you find the support and help you need

Do you have questions? Feel free to contact me anytime.

When you email me, only I will read it. It comes directly to me and I will personally reply to you. You can be assured of the confidentiality and safety of the process. I will try and answer as soon as possible.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.