“Are you a naturally positive person?” I was asked.

No, I am naturally negative and pessimistic. I am Eeyore. I can see the gloomy clouds that are hanging over every situation, ready to burst. You wouldn’t want to read my earlier writings describing my life with Asperger’s syndrome. It would just leave you feeling depressed.

That said, I’ve always gravitated toward those things that were wholesome, idealistic, uplifting, and caring. It is interesting to note that this life view is actually a special interest of mine and has been since I’ve been a young child. I tend to be very rigid in this way of thinking and have all kinds of rules that govern it. I have trouble accepting art work, stories, movies, and even the appearance of cities if the images they present lie outside my narrow boundaries. What my rigidity meant for me was that I was in constant distress because, as I’m sure you know, the world doesn’t operate this way most of the time.

But just the fact that I had these natural inclinations meant that there was a lot of potential for turning my negative mindset around. It would eventually be of great help to me once I learned how to relax my rules. Rather than push everything else away, I began to see my idealism as my specialty. I focused simply on finding fulfillment in the wholesome images I was so attracted to. By continuing in that way, I was eventually able to share those delights with others. That perspective helps me create the uplifting and tender moments I put into my fiction writings. It’s a perspective that’s brings encouragement to others. Everybody could use an idealistic image once in awhile.

So, how did I develop my positive nature? It came about by accident, I assure you. Being so negative as I was, I never would have pursued a positive outlook on purpose. I wouldn’t have believed it could do me any good, so why put forth the effort? Besides, I figured it would leave me feeling worse for putting on a fake attitude if I didn’t actually feel that way. I needed to feel I was being authentic in every situation. If I was seeing things negatively, I needed to be true to myself and continue to see things negatively. It wouldn’t do to try and act contrary to my feelings.

Unfortunately, I was growing more depressed by the day. Because I had no social life to speak of, I decided to become involved in an online support group that promised to help me out of my depression. At first the moderator of the group was welcoming of my depressing writings. She offered me understanding for the terrible things I was going through. But over time, her attitude toward me started to change and she became increasingly critical of my pessimistic thoughts. “Come on now,” she would write. “Don’t you think you’re being overly sensitive? You don’t have to be so negative about everything that happens to you.” Her constant rebukes were upsetting me. I began to feel as if my every word was under scrutiny. I couldn’t write anything that she didn’t disapprove of.

You may wonder why I didn’t just drop the group. It was too late for that. I’d already gotten addicted to it. I found myself running to my computer throughout the day to see who had responded to my latest post. It was heart wrenching to find another criticism waiting for me, but I didn’t know how to get out of it.

In order to survive the negative impact this was having on me, I started to fake it. I found that if I expressed my sad situation in a more positive way, it kept her from attacking me. So, that’s what I began to do. I wrote about my life as if I could see the silver lining in every negative occurrence. Of course, then I felt guilty for lying. I wasn’t actually lying. It wasn’t like I was making up my situations, but I was giving a false perspective of them, one I didn’t actually have.

Because I have a talent for persuasive writing, I became quite skilled at conveying this fraudulent positive attitude. It bothered me terribly for doing it, but it kept them happy with me and that was the point of taking this approach with them.

One day I was strolling through the aisles of the grocery store with my husband when I said, “What is this feeling? I feel so happy. I don’t know why I would feel happy. It seems like there is something special happening to me just by being in the grocery store. Don’t you think the produce looks especially bright today? It’s so wonderful that farms grow produce so that the stores can sell it? I can’t believe how happy it is making me feel.”

My husband gave me a strange look and said, “Who are you and what have you done with Katie?”

That stopped me in my tracks. What was I saying? Suddenly, my eyes grew wide with understanding and I said, “Oh my gosh! I’ve been affected by my own writings!”

This sort of thing began to happen more and more often. I would post a positive comment and later in the day, I would experience a rush of good feelings. The things I was writing about would get into me and make me feel differently about my situation. After a long time of this, I realized that I had grown more positive than everyone in my support group. Eventually I had to quit the group because they were too negative for me. They weren’t offended by my decision to leave. They realized they needed to work on themselves a little more before giving others advice. We parted ways on an encouraging note.

At first, my switch from negative to positive had come about unintentionally. I hadn’t meant to create this effect in myself. I didn’t even know it would happen like that. But once I discovered what it could do for me, I began to develop my natural sense of wonder, so that it could carry me even further. I had turned into Christopher Robin, always ready with a cheerful word for everyone. My words had become a soothing balm for those who were stuck in depression. This goes to show that a positive outlook can help anyone even if they haven’t yet developed this in themselves.

This change in my life allowed me to utilize my idealistic bent in order to create uplifting moments for my fiction writings. I must admit, most of the people who comment about my sci-fi story, Warriors of the Edge, mention only the adventurous aspects of it. I do bring a high amount of adventure into my stories, but my readers are also touched by the sweet elements I put in too. The “sweet element” gives them an emotional connection to the story, while the adventure keeps them turning the page. Switching from negative to positive can produce a better product no matter what you aim to create.

The moral of the story is, it’s okay to trick yourself into a positive mindset by faking it. If you’re feeling like Eeyore, you could try writing up some things that Christopher Robin would say to get Eeyore out of his grumpy ways. In the process, you just might end up removing yourself from beneath that stormy rain cloud.

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This article was written by Katie Bridges, a remarkable person and a skilled writer. Please visit her “behind the scenes” blog about her recently published (positive) futuristic sci-fi novel. Enjoy!

The RSA videos are very engaging, especially a group under the banner of RSA Animate. Instead of watching a person for 10 minutes, you are drawn into the content through a cartoon developed in parallel with the talk.

The one below is a presentation by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of “Nickel and Dimed”. It’s about unrealistic positivity (“keeping up appearances” in my parlance).

Much of the video is about the corporate workplace, where expressing pessimism can be a death knell. I know this from personal experience. My corporate career swung up and down in line with my moods. A long spell of unbridled, hypomanic optimism saw me climb the ladder with frightening speed. When the crash came I was immediately out of step with corporate culture and my shelf life was curtailed. Then new job, rinse and repeat.

To my way of thinking, reciting affirmations is a close cousin to unrealistic, unquestioning optimism. Barbara Ehrenreich touches on this in the video. I’ve tried affirmations many times, and given up just as many. Do affirmations change your world?

Depressed folk like me gravitate to the self-help section of Amazon. There is no shortage of advice on the power of positivity. As much as I wish I was a magnet for happiness, my life is more complicated and just thinking it so won’t make it so. That is why this video resonates with me.

If you can’t see the player then watch the video on YouTube. To watch more of the RSA Animate videos visit the RSA blog.

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!

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!

“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.

My computer screen is so busy. I often have multiple programmes open, the screen bright and distracting. I find it really irritating, so I make a change. I find this software programme that keeps my screen black and I can only see the programme I’m working on. Sorry, it’s Mac only. My toolbar is blacked out as well. Nothing but the program I’m using now. My thoughts slow to a reasonable speed. My little system is great.

Sometimes it’s just little things that we do routinely that we need to change. It doesn’t have to be major upheaval to make a big impact on your well-being. Think about the routine things that make you groan. Can you do these in a different way? I don’t read Lifehack, but plenty of people gather ideas there.

Anna hates unpacking the shopping. She has no problem spending 2 hours getting the things but hates the 15 minutes of transfer. She now brings bags in one at a time, and unpacks each one before she gets another from the car. It never becomes overwhelming. (We all have our peculiarities).

Our latest, greatest little system change has been forcing the kids to tidy their rooms before they can watch the computer or TV. Every day. Wow. We live in a different house.

Feel free to share your little systems below.

Genuine Hope or Cruel Hoax?

I’ve read plenty of motivational, self help, get rich books. So many, in fact, that not long ago I wanted to write my own book about these books.

Only recently it dawned on me why I’ve been so captivated by them. I was reading them before I knew that I was mentally ill and I was very unhappy with life. They provided an escape. I dreamed of a better life; they gave me hope that things would change. They promised me that everything I wanted would be mine if I purposefully set out to realize my goals. A powerful promise for someone who is depressed. Something that is impossible to put into action for someone who is depressed.

I spent many years keeping lists of things to do and goals to achieve. I revised them, laminated them onto cards, tried different applications to sort and present them in different ways. If I could get it all done and reach all my goals then surely my life would better. But it never materialized. There was a lot of hoping and dreaming, but hardly any action. This kind of compulsive goal-setting was always a recipe for disappointment.

If you are like this, constantly dwelling on the future but paralyzed with inaction, then like me you will probably experience disappointment.

An article on PsychCentral, Giving Up on Goals can be Helpful?, quotes recent research that found that letting a life goal go can be physically and mentally beneficial in some circumstances.

That has been my experience over the last few years. As I’ve stopped setting life goals (and sub-goals) I’ve focused more on my core values, and on living in the here and now. I think I’ve coped better with life.

Until now research on this issue has been thin on the ground. However a new paper, published in the August 2007 issue of Psychological Medicine, is a helpful addition.

In the study 10 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women who were finding work stressful during the period of research experienced their first episode of depression or an anxiety disorder. Women with the highest psychological demands from work were 75% more likely to suffer a first episode than women with the lowest demands. For men it was 80%. Psychological demands included long hours, pressure and lack of clear direction.

The study was conducted over a one-year monitoring period, with about 900 males and females aged 32.

By the way, which occupation do you think is most stressful?
Firefighter
Police officer
Train operator
Teacher
Librarian

Apparently librarian.