Overcoming Depression and Anxiety
A renowned boxing trainer, Gil Clancy, shared the following story about one of his fighters. Throughout the preparation for the upcoming bout Clancy emphasized to his trainee that he should guard against the opponent’s left hook. The fighter seemed to understand the importance of this warning. However, on his way into the ring the fighter experienced significant anxiety, and while in that state he heard someone from the audience yell “Look out for the guy’s right hook”. The effect was that the fighter jettisoned all the knowledge Clancy gave him and instead latched onto the lie. So, as the story goes, the fighter neglected to guard against the left hook, because he was looking out for the right hook, and he got knocked out in the first round.
This story reminds us that, at times, we act on ideas based solely on our emotions and neglect to balance our decision-making process with our intellectual and spiritual perspective. This occurs when people confuse their feelings with facts. If they feel it, they assume it is a fact. So often, however, that is not the case. The message here is that when we discover the truth, we must hold onto it even when our emotions are sending us another message.
As indicated in the Clancy story, the truth becomes elusive when our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual capacities are not in balance. All three components perform a crucial role in the pursuit of truth and health. Our emotions contribute to this process through the release of instinctive energy, our intellect contributes through the use of acquired knowledge, and our spirituality assures balance by giving us faith. Faith in our own capabilities, in the support that we will receive from others, and a trust that God will intercede on our behalf in various ways. To illustrate this point, the following demonstrates how the lack of balance can interfere with the pursuit of truth and undermine our psychological health.
Bill woke each morning with the feeling that life was not worth living. That feeling was summed up in an attitude of why bother, life is lousy, and nothing ever works out. Bill found every effort exhausting and the only thing that made sense to him was to stay under his blankets and sleep.
Bill’s sadness and depression were so powerful that he was virtually immobilized by the weight of that feeling. What he did not know was that the behavior of staying in bed was strengthening his depression and reinforcing the lie.
Many people do not realize that they are always doing a behavior, and that their behavior is reinforcing or feeding one line of thought or another. Generally speaking, there are two lines of thought: a healthy thought process and the other is the unhealthy perspective.
The unhealthy view is the lie, and the best way to undo the lie is to engage in healthy behavior that contradicts the lie. In Bill’s case the lie was telling him that staying in bed was the only option. To recover, however, Bill needed to contradict that message by doing the opposite, and eventually that is what he did. He began by throwing his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat up and then started moving. He walked himself into the bathroom, did what he had to do in there, and started his day. Meanwhile, the depression and unhealthy feelings were not giving up so easily, but Bill and I had discussed how that would happen, so he was prepared for that added challenge.
Despite the forces that were conspiring to pull him back to his bed, Bill stuck to the plan and kept moving. He got dressed, ate some breakfast, and drove to work. These behaviors nourished his healthy side, and as he was driving in to work, Bill noticed that the depressive feelings had diminished markedly, and he felt life coming back to him.
On the above occasion, Bill fought off the lie by doing the behavior that contradicted the lie. He energized his life drive by not allowing his gut sense, that life was worthless, to dictate matters. He used his intellect to recall our prior discussions on how to overcome depression. Furthermore, he retained the faith and hope that gave him the feeling that a positive outcome was possible.
Then there was Vanessa, a young woman of 20 years, whose panic began as she was boarding a plane. As the aircraft was taxiing before takeoff she was in full panic. She then got onto her cell phone and cried to her mother that she needed to find a way to get off the plane.
The reason for Vanessa’s panic was simple: She felt threatened. That feeling triggered a fight-or-flight instinct. She knew, in retrospect, that the degree of fear she felt was not warranted, but she could not stop herself and that caused her to buy into the lie that something tragic was likely to happen, that most people are incompetent or evil, and that God had abandoned her.
Vanessa was more vulnerable to intense anxiety than most people. She had experienced that state often and the trait runs in her family. In this situation her anxiety was running rampant because her intellectual and spiritual perspectives were not fully utilized as a means of overriding her emotional panic.
Vanessa did use her intellect to some extent as evidenced by the phone call to her mother. That move served to take the edge off some of her anxiety. In our session I also commended Vanessa for taking the flight home as scheduled. On that return trip she experienced less anxiety than she had on the initial trip because, unbeknownst to Vanessa, the act of enduring the initial flight served to debunk some of her irrational fear about the risk of flying.
In the counseling visit with Vanessa we also practiced relaxation exercises. These techniques help one to gain a healthier mentality because they contradict the anxious mindset. For example, when the client’s fight or flight instinct is activated due to an unjustifiable and irrational level of anxiety, their situation can be remedied if they can do the opposite—by relaxing their body and slowing down their breathing and heart rate. If that behavior is achieved, then one will experience a calming of their emotions. This happens because relaxed behavior supports the truth that needless anxiety is unwarranted and that goodness will prevail.
It is also worth noting that a person with anxiety may be able to use that condition to his advantage. To illustrate my point, let’s recall the story of the hyper vigilant person who lived hundreds of years ago. Always on guard for the innumerable threats in the environment, this person would be viewed today as one with an anxiety disorder. Yet, he would have been better prepared to respond to a stampede of elephants or a surprise attack from the opposing clan than his counterpart; that being the very laid-back person with a devil may care attitude. In our modern society, however, we laud the easy-going approach and deem the highly alert and very energized individual as emotionally imbalanced.
To understand this phenomenon, we should remember that our civilization has evolved faster than our physiology. So, given the fact that our physical makeup may be primed for a fight-or-flight response, this translates to mean that there will be instances when highly charged emotions kick in when they are not needed.
What to do? The answer lies in understanding human energy and recognizing that anxiety is best understood as mismanaged energy. The hyper-vigilant jungle dweller of the past expended energy around the idea of how to respond to a mortal threat. The modern-day person, on the other hand, who has more energy/anxiety than most, is not in a position to be constantly warding off threats to survival. Considering that, the person must make a conscious decision to direct the “anxious” energy toward other productive and life-affirming pursuits.
Freud identified two fundamental types of energy—a destructive energy and a life-promoting energy. He explained further that our energy is unrelenting in its demand to be discharged. People, therefore, must know that if they fail to make a conscious decision to discharge energy toward positive pursuits, the energy will be expressed in destructive or unhealthy ways.
For those vulnerable to depression, the risk is that the destructive energy will take over. When that occurs, negativity predominates and the energy may be turned inward and become self-destructive. The person vulnerable to anxiety, on the other hand, is susceptible to expending energy in a fruitless, counter-productive and self-defeating manner.
When dealing with depression or anxiety, the key is to be able to flip the situation around and use it to one’s advantage. Toward that end, one must realize that the world needs people who are vulnerable to depression or anxiety. We know this because their calling from God is to perform much of the work that makes the world go round. We can draw this conclusion because, to remain emotionally healthy, people susceptible to depression and/or anxiety must remain busily involved in productive pursuits.
This means that individuals vulnerable to either or both of those conditions need not feel trapped in a negative, uncomfortable, or debilitating state. On the contrary, that state is best understood as nature’s way of informing these individuals that they need to get their life back on track by problem-solving and achieving. This is the truth that such people must follow. That by engaging in activities that give them a feeling of fulfillment and a sense of control over their life, their vulnerability to depression and anxiety will be greatly diminished, and in the process, they will make invaluable contributions to humanity.