Tip #12: Stop Using Your “Depressed” Stance. January 31, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Life & Living, Positive Thinking, Tips.Tags: Charlie Brown, depression, happiness
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This is my “depressed stance.” When you’re depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you’ll start to feel better. If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this.
~Charlie Brown
Do you have a “depressed” stance? How about an “angry” stance? Or a “miserable” stance? Or a “stressed” stance? I bet you do. We all have certain mannerisms and behaviors that we use to reflect certain states of mind. When we’re happy, we stand tall, smile, move quickly, laugh easily; when we’re down we slump, move more slowly, and avoid eye contact.
As Charlie Brown says, “If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this.” When we are in a bad mood, we can actually accentuate our misery by taking on the mannerisms of a person in a bad mood. One suggestion for dealing with these moods, then, is to deliberately act counter to our negative emotions. If you feel angry, act nicer and calmer. If someone ask you how you feel, say you feel great.
“But,” you say, “I don’t feel great. Why should I lie and act happy when I’m not.” Because it can make you feel better, that’s why. It’s funny how we get attached to our emotional dramas. “I have a right to be unhappy,” you say. Of course, you do, but do you really want to be unhappy just because it’s your right? I think I’d rather be happy or at least do what I can to minimize those things that make me unhappy than claim my right to be miserable. Been there; done that.
If you get the chance to be unhappy today, try acting happy instead. See if you can fool the people around you. You might just find that things aren’t really so bad after all.
Have a great day.
Sign Up Today to Volunteer January 30, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Life & Living, Positive Thinking.Tags: giving, Volunteer
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I’m not asking you to commit your life to a cause, although there are worse things, just give your time to someone who needs it. Go deliver groceries for someone, babysit for someone you know, paint your church, donate blood, quit your job and work with the homeless — whatever works for you.
Just do something.
Why? Because you will help someone who needs it, and you will feel better about both yourself and your community. Self help literature keeps telling you that you should give because then you’ll get. I don’t buy that. Give because you should and you’ll feel better doing it.
I know, you’d like to volunteer, but you don’t know where to go. Well, here are a few ideas:
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Your high school, college, or university
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Work the polls on election day — research your own area
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Your local church
None of those float your boat? Try some of these volunteerism clearinghouses:
Okay. That should give you a good running start. Off you go.
Have a great day.
Tip #11, The Retro Tip: Carry 3″x5′ Cards. January 30, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Tips.Tags: 3"x5" cards, note cards, notes, to-do list
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I’m an information junkie, so I’m always running across books, movies, web sites, writers, phone numbers, e-mails, event dates, and software that I’d like to check out later. I know from experience that with as many of these things as I run across, I won’t remember all of them later. Of course, the one I can’t remember always seems to be the one I need, so I need a way to keep track of them. I also like to have my to-do list with me wherever I go. That’s why I carry standard 3″x 5″ note cards in my back pocket.
You’re probably saying that I can carry a phone or a Palm or a Blackberry. Those are all fine, and I’ve used them to varying degrees of success, but I don’t like carrying things around. Besides, I can scan my list or write down a movie title before you have had a chance to get one of those newfangled tools out. They are also great for making quick notes when you’re away from your technology.
Note cards are great for quotations and affirmations, and if you add a few foreign language words or financial terms or historic dates, you can learn virtually anything. I started carrying flash cards in college to help me memorize information while I was walking across campus. The worked beautifully, but I found myself writing notes on my flash cards, so I started to carry a few extra blank ones — just in case — and a habit was born. Today I don’t anywhere without a few in my pocket.
3″x 5″ Cards. Don’t leave home without ‘em.
Have a great day.
Photo: Robert Brook
Tip #11: Keep a Success Journal. January 29, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Positive Thinking, Tips.Tags: gratitude, happiness, optimism, success journal, tip
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We’ve already gone over the benefits of keeping a gratitude journal. In a nutshell: the more time you spend thinking about what’s right about your life, the less time you spend thinking about what’s wrong; the less time you think about what’s wrong with your life, the better you feel. Easy enough. Here’s a twist on that idea.
Photo: tomswift46
Before you go to bed, write down everything you accomplished that day. I mean everything, and that includes anything that could possibly be considered an accomplishment. Some are easy — you worked out, you went to work, you made X number sales calls, you made a sale, you wrote a draft of your paper, etc. The hard part, like with the gratitude journal, is digging deep and giving yourself credit for the little things — you got to work on time, you didn’t have that second helping, you didn’t say anything sarcastic to your co-worker Frank, or you mailed your rent check.How you do this is up to you. Since the benefit is in the doing, not the paper, I write my successes down and throw the pages away when I’m done. Of course, you could also keep a nice dated, leather-bound notebook and keep them all. Whatever floats your boat.
Like the gratitude journal — you’re doing one, aren’t you? — the success journal is about noticing lots of little things over a long period of time. Doing it once or twice won’t help. Try it, along with the gratitude journal, for a month or so. Yes, this will require some discipline and some time, but it’s well worth it.
Keep smiling.
A Little Serious Humor. January 29, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Uncategorized.Tags: blessings, gratitude, jealousy
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This is from a cartoon in The New Yorker from November 26, 2007. A man sits with his analyst, who is holding a note pad. The man is saying this:
I do count my blessings, but then I end up counting those of others who have more and better blessings, and that pisses me off.
Does that sound like you?
We Now Have a Subscriber. January 28, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Uncategorized.Tags: RSS feed, thank you
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Behold the Stars just passed another milestone on the way to one million visitors: we’ve gotten the first subscriber to our RSS feed. First it was a comment, now a subscription.
Thank you. I’ll try hard to make the posts worth your subscriptons.
Have a great day.
This Blog is a No Dilbert Zone. January 28, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Life & Living.Tags: cynicism, Dilbert, slave, slavery, success, Tom Peters, underchallenged, underemployed
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Look, I have gotten many laughs from Dilbert through the years, but as I laughed, and as I saw more and more Dilbert photocopies on cubicle walls, something began to gnaw at me. I didn’t know what it was at first, but it became clearer and clearer until one day I understood: Dilbert speaks for and to slaves.
I spent some time working on the campus of a major American university. While there, I ran into bitter and cynical people who were miserable yet unwilling to take any positive steps toward change. They were, by and large, well educated, yet astonishingly underemployed. The school was crawling with people with master’s and Ph.D’s doing data entry and low level administrative work. They were smart and under-challenged, and their bitterness and unused intellectual capacity combined to make them the worst employees ever. To make matters worse, they were all waiting for some outside force to make their lives better.
They saw themselves as trapped and underappreciated, and they were unwilling to show any initiative until they first got the respect or pay they felt they deserved. No matter how often I would explain to them that it works the other way around, they refused to change or find better paying work in the private sector. Their inability to see themselves as in control turned them into their own worst enemy. Each year, other people got the raises while they stayed put.
When I traveled in the high tech world, I saw the same sort of thing, only at a higher pay level. These were well-educated, highly-skilled, techie cubicle dwellers who thought that they were smarter than management, yet they too seemed to see themselves as unable to influence change.
What else did they have in common? Cubicles filled with the God of the powerless: Dilbert.
What is Dilbert’s message. First, it strokes you:
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Your bosses are half-wits, but you are brilliant.
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You are not appreciated for your brilliance.
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If only “they” listened to you, everything would be all right.
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The company, and the world, really should line up to your expectations.
Then it hits you beneath the belt:
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It’s okay to subvert the goals of the company and the efforts of other employees.
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You will probably never be management, nor should you aspire to be.
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Managers are losers.
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You are powerless (except to find ways to avoid work).
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You, my friend, are a slave.
The movers and shakers of the world do not have Dilbert cartoons posted all over their offices. So read Dilbert, laugh at Dilbert, but don’t buy into its message. As Tom Peters says:
Screw Dilbert: Cynicism is for whiners.
Let’s all do better than that.
Have a great day.
11 Ways to Make Your Life Suck January 28, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Life & Living.Tags: depression, happiness, ways to make your life suck
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Happiness is boring. To spice it up, we can learn from an old Chinese curse — May you live in interesting times – and make our lives more interesting:
- Isolate yourself. You feel bad. You feel unworthy. Others probably feel the same about you. Why go out and be confronted by their disrespect? Spending hours playing video games and watching soaps is good for your brain. Fresh air, human contact, and intellectual stimulation are all overrated anyway.
- Never help anyone else. Other people are lazy, and you’ve got your own problems. You’re the one who needs help, and nobody has it as bad as you. While you’re at it, don’t even notice that other people are suffering and could use your help. Geez, you’re trying to feel better. Why be brought down by all their problems?
- Let yourself go. Look, hanging around in sweats is comfortable, and being comfortable will help you feel better about yourself. Plus, no one can see the extra weight you’ve gained. And you don’t have any important meetings to go to, so why shave or put on makeup? You’ll feel tons better.
- Ignore your diet. Comfort food, by definition, makes us happy, so it must be good for us. If you try to eat a healthy diet, you’ll probably miss a few days, and that would make you feel guilty, and you could just call your parents for that. Who needs the negativity?
- Never exercise. This is too easy. If you exercise, you’ll only use up energy that you could have used being happy – the Law of Conservation of Energy or something like that. And don’t mention the humiliation of being seen in the gym. And then there is the risk of injuries…
- Never relax. Meditation is for hippies. Relaxing your guard will only invite attack.
- Never cut yourself any slack. You could always have done better. If you were smarter or better educated, you wouldn’t have made those mistakes. You were betrayed? You should have seen it coming. You were part of mass layoffs? The other layoffs were probably a cover for getting rid of you because they didn’t like you. The course of your life has been heavily influenced your two defining traits: you’re not smart enough, and you don’t work hard enough.
- Stop worrying about productivity. To-do lists are only an exercise in failure. Activity drains your batteries, so it’s best to wait. And don’t forget that your misery is a built-in excuse for not getting things done. Everyone must respect your angst.
- Focus on the negative; ignore the good. Putting all your attention on what’s wrong will give you the chance to correct or improve it, thus both making you a perfect person and giving you a perfect life. Besides, what’s good in your life just isn’t good enough for you, is it, Mr. Perfect?
- Never be grateful for anything. Whatever you have isn’t at all what you should have. If you appreciate what you have, you’ll start slacking off.
- Never forgive. To forgive is to let the other guy win. The angrier and more bitter you feel about what happened, the worse your enemy feels. Remember that obsessively thinking about how right you were or how wrong he or she was will always impact reality and bring you “justice.”
So there it is. The best ways for you to make your life (and probably the lives of those around you) suck. You can start following the list, which you are probably doing to some extent, or you can try something a little weird and do the opposite. It’s up to you.
Good luck.
A Brief Note Regarding the Dark Period January 28, 2008
Posted by beholdthestars in Life & Living.Tags: communication, depression, Lost in America: A Journey With My Father, Sherwin B. Nuland
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I’ve tried many times to explain to outsiders what the Dark Period was like. Simple descriptions can’t do it justice, so I would find myself rambling on and on in a useless attempt articulate its power and pervasiveness. Despite my efforts, well-meaning friends and family would see my depression as the equivalent of a bad day or a blue period — in other words, they would relate it to something they understood. But they aren’t the same, any more than a stick of dynamite is equivalent to an atomic bomb: they both blow things up, but dynamite seems harmless when compared with the raw destructive power of an A-bomb. So I’ve learned not to attempt.
Looking back on an extensive depression, I find that I still can’t articulate it to others — or even myself. I can no longer truly relate to those times. The pain is gone and as distant from me as suffering characters on a movie screen, and I wish it no other way.
For what it’s worth, Sherwin B. Nuland gives the best description of this inability both remember and articulate depression his book Lost in America: A Journey with My Father:
The solitary torment of a depressed mind eludes any attempt to make it apprehensible to those who have not experienced it. And even for those of us who have endured those desolate months or years, no matter the generalized similarities of the depression, each of us has suffered uniquely, and alone. Neither vivid description nor the empathy of others can pierce the darkness of the long night.
And yet, after depression lifts, it can only be remembered but not retrieved — thank God it cannot be retrieved! Just as physical pain loses its intense reality once it has been eased, the anguish of profound melancholia evades even the most determined attempts at clear perception when its dreadful grip has relaxed. It goes to some underplace where it can be seen through a glass, darkly—but not face-to-face. Depression resists being called up again, unless its own tortured purposes determine that a proper time has come to exert authority once more. Then, enveloping reason in a foreboding of ill, its all-pervasive fog rolls back as though it had never left, to suffocate undisturbed thought in its own terrifying, familiar way. Could a recurrence of depression give itself voice, it would speak in the muffled and mocking tones of a vengeful enemy.
So forgive me if I don’t dwell on what depression was like, but focus, rather, on what I learned and how to get through it, avoid it, and thrive.
Have a great day.
