I’ve been MIA for a while, but back now and straight onto my hobby-horses. Minimizing and prioritizing.

There is a book from way back called “Tyranny of the Urgent”. I haven’t read it myself, but about 20 years ago I read a series of companion studies. The lessons have stuck with me. I am constantly sizing up the urgent and comparing with the important.

This year I’ve enjoyed throwing out, culling and recycling, in the first major purge of my life. I’m amazed at how much I appreciate the things that I’ve kept, now that I can see them.

An interesting post on Becoming Minimalist draws a parallel to our priorities. Being minimalist is more than removing physical belongings. It includes deciding what is important and takes priority every day, and decluttering the urgent distractions.

Read the full post here.

I’ve used affirmations in the past, as a form of self-help, but I don’t think they worked. I’ve read self-help books – some classics, others more questionable – and I’ve repeated a thousand times that everyday in every way I am getting better and better. But I admit I lacked belief, and belief is core to an affirmation being effective.

Many people view affirmations favorably, including some readers of this blog. There are others who take the opposite view. I’ve read one or two articles recently that say they are detrimental, to the extent that falling short of an ideal, over and over, will impact a person’s self-esteem.

Scott Adams takes up the subject on his blog today, and it gave me reason to smile.

I have a long-time friend who is always full of energy, enthusiasm and goodwill. It sounds sickening but it’s not; without fail he’s a pleasure to be around. Whenever I ask him how he is, he always replies “fantastic”, “brilliant” or “top of the world”. Does he use affirmations? I don’t know. But after reading Scott Adams I think he has a chicken-and-egg thing going!

There are many terrible things that people say to those with depression. Most of them are rooted in myth. Misunderstandings abound, outweighing real knowledge when it comes to correctly understanding the illness.

Let’s look at the worst. Readers of this blog have shared some of the very cruel things that have been said to them:

• All you need is a gun and some time alone.
• You must not be living right.
• Yeah, I know how you feel, but that’s nothing…
• You just need to wake up in the morning and decide, ‘I’m going to be happy today!’
• And you don’t even work – you have NO excuse not to have a clean house!
• My boss said to me, ‘Sounds like a personal problem. Deal with it.’
• She thinks she’s going to live forever and has time to be depressed.
• It’s a matter of MIND OVER MATTER: If you DON’T MIND, it DON’T MATTER!
• If you’d just stop thinking like a victim, you’d get over this. You control your life! Act like it!
• At least you have your health!
• Put your big girl panties on and deal with it.

These are real things said to real people.

Those speaking the words don’t recognize depression at work or they lack understanding of its nature. Or that it is a real illness. And if it’s not real, then there is no treatment. If it’s not there, then the “sufferer” is someone who just can’t deal with the stresses of life that we all face. If it’s not real, it will go away when the person learns to smile and pick themselves up.

In the words of one reader:

“The problem with depression is no one can see the wheelchair or the crutches. If they could, they’d be more careful about what they say.”

There are other myths floating around:

Only women get depression. It’s a normal part of aging. Kids can’t get it. It only happens after something bad. Antidepressants change your personality. Talking about it makes it worse. It’s a normal part of life. It will go away on its own. You can snap out of it. It’s all in your head. You choose to be depressed. It means you’re weak. It’s a character flaw. You can psych yourself out of it.

How do we respond? We must start with education.

FACT: Depression is a serious medical condition. Most people get better with help.

If you want to read some more positive, helpful things to say then take a look at “Helpful Things to Say to Someone with Depression”. And please leave your comments below!

Depression brings with it plenty of worries.

“Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.” Swedish proverb.

I like to think of worry as a weed. Unless it is dealt with, it can infiltrate every aspect of thinking and be all consuming. Chronic worry can paralyze the ability to make decisions, produce fear about the future, about health, relationships and other peoples’ perceptions of you, and cause prolonged periods of stress. It is a common feature of depression, and also the basis of anxiety disorders that are separate from, and also coexist with, depression. Worry, anxiety and depression are close friends.

“Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.”
Mignon McLaughlin

Worry predicts the bleakest results, the least desirable outcomes. And sometimes worry is a mind-set without a target; we’re not really sure what there is to be so uneasy about.

“Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.”
Author Unknown

The positive news is that you can challenge worry. A good technique is mindfulness.

During the day our minds constantly make decisions and weigh up options – everything from the mundane to the most important. A good healthy thought in response to an option empowers us; worrying about the option is unsettling. Worries aren’t normally realistic but powered by imagination and fear. We imagine ourselves in all sorts of unpleasant situations, like being rejected by someone we respect, not measuring up, fearing that someone we love will be in an accident, or that our work is not up to scratch. This is worry, and needs to be identified as such.

Being mindful of worry simply means that we realize it is there, it is affecting our thoughts, and influencing our actions.

Challenging worry is what we do once we are mindful of it. This is when we take our thoughts back – you can’t cut out worry from your thoughts without first challenging it. As with anything in life, from riding a bike, to cooking, to any kind of hobby – challenging worry takes practice. When you feel your thoughts being led by worry, begin to imagine all the millions of times that things worked out okay, when you succeeded at what you tried.

“Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn’t you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn’t most of them turn out all right after all?”
Dale Carnegie

If “what-ifs” are all you can think of, challenge those thoughts too. You can begin to actively “what-if” into the positive realm, where things are okay. What would it look like if things went the most ideal way? How would you look and behave?

Identifying your worries and challenging them will help you reclaim your mind, cutting out the weeds one worrying thought at a time.

“It ain’t no use putting up your umbrella till it rains.”
Alice Caldwell Rice

I spent 16 hours in a row to get an animated graphic to work properly on a website. That’s very sad. I’m a perfectionist, and on that occasion I was out of control.

Perfectionism is tricky. A little bit can make you strive hard; too much and you’re susceptible to stress, anxiety and even depression. Where is the line between the two?

Here is a comparison from the University of Texas Counseling and Mental Health Center.

A perfectionist:
- sets standards beyond reach and reason
- is never satisfied by less than perfection
- becomes dysfunctionally depressed when experiences failure
- is preoccupied with fear of failure and disapproval
- sees mistakes as evidence of unworthiness
- becomes overly defensive when criticized

A healthy striver:
- sets high standards, just beyond reach
- enjoys the process as well as the outcome
- bounces back from failure and disappointment quickly and with energy
- keeps normal anxiety and fear of failure and disapproval within normal bounds
- sees mistakes as opportunities for growth and learning
- reacts positively to helpful criticism.

Perfectionism is destructive and people seek and receive treatment for it. CBT is the norm. To me the hardest thing is seeing when aiming high is getting out of hand and becoming destructive.

Writing this post is a good case in point. I should have a stopwatch on.

There are questionnaires at the BBC and Discovery Health that can give you an indication of where you lie on the scale. If you do just one then I think the shorter Discovery Health is better.