The Most Important Thing I'll Write all Year. Really.

"Happiness is not  unlike the Emperor's Clothes; no one really experiences it. Yet everyone pretends to be it for fear of being the only one who doesn't have it, when in reality, it doesn't exist at all." 

-Anna Cvetko, 2013

Let me be clear on one thing, I am happy. Sometimes when I'm alone in my car driving or at work or even walking between classes, I'm so happy I can hardly even believe it. I'm excited about life. I love who I am. But this is 2016. And it hasn't always been that way.

In a way, I'm glad that I'm writing this with a real name. Because hopefully it will mean more this way, even if it's harder to type. This is going to be a back-space-less piece. 



I want to write about Depression, and some of my opinions may not be overly popular. And if you disagree, that's quite fine. I won't be offended if you say so in the comments. 




Depression crept in slowly for me. Little things stopped having value. My family and friends became unimportant and I lost them all. It was an intense feeling of detachment for the rest of the world, like I was watching my life unfold in front of me in a movie. And I was the only one in the theater.

Depression was grey skies on sunny days and the holidays were the worst time because it made no sense that I was so sad when everyone was so happy. Like what was even wrong with me?

For me, depression was silence. A disappearing personality-I lost everything about myself because how can you hold it all in when your skin is starved and frail? You can hardly hold on to life how can you be expected to hold onto your favorite music, political opinions, or friends? 

It was sleeping while being awake, and silently crying for an hour every day before I could get out of bed, praying to a God I was sure had abandoned me for the strength to go to school.

But I always went to school. And work. And debate. And symphony. And church. Even through the worst of it I never wanted anyone to know.

And it was bad. It was months of my theory and deep fresh cuts across my stomach and left arm every single night for months turning into years. Long selves on warm days. It was my therapist begging me to take a prescription and the constant phrase "I'm fine."


It was the very fact that I didn't even want to be happy after a while. Sadness was comfortable.


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That was a long introduction. The important thing I talked about in my title is how I beat it. Because that was a process that started as recent as 5 months ago.


I love nonfiction books. And I'm a left-brain, so none of this ooey-gooey "find happiness in your relationships and rainbows." I needed specifics.


***CAUTION- the next few paragraphs are science. If you don't want to read, skip down to the asterisks.

At this point I had stopped going to therapy. It wasn't doing anything for me to sit around and talk about my feelings. So naturally, I looked for an answer in science. Dr. Brian Hanson's "Hard wiring Happiness" changed my life.  His thesis was all about Cognitive Neuroplasticy in the Brain. He argued that evolution has created a human brain that is wired to focus more on the negative and ere on the side of caution. An overly reactive amydala and an implicit memory that takes in bad things naturally, are the result of the unforgiving world of early humans, where optimism got you killed.

Cognitive Neuroplasticity is the theory that the way you think can fundamentally change the biological patterns of your brain.
Your brain is composed of neurons, and a thought nothing more then a specific pattern of neurons sending and sharing a single electrical pulse. It's like an empty field. The more a specific path is walked, the deeper into the ground that path is dug, and the easier it is to follow that path over its alternatives. The biology of our brain simply makes it easier to think negative. Once those paths are dug, they are much easier to follow than paths of positivity, which in turn, only carbe the negative paths deeper. These paths are called neural networks.

His book was ultimately about how it's  easier to be sad than happy, but by changing the way we think, we can cognitivly shape our brain.

*****


Empowered with this new knowledge, I created a strategy. Literally, I mapped out a plan on paper of how I was going to fix this problem of clinical depression without the pills or therapy.
This was what it looked like:

1. Physical 
1. Get at least 5 hours of sleep every night 
2. Exercise at least 30 minutes every day 
3. Eat Healthy 
1. If needed, end vegetarianism to increase B12 vitamins in my body 
2. Mental 
1. Tell friends how you feel
2. Play music for at least 1 hour every day, (guitar and piano) 
3. Start talking to your family 
3. Misc. 
1. Start volunteering at the Family Crisis Center 
2. Hike all the time 
3. STAY BUSY- plan your week in advance so that you're always doing something productive. 

All helped, but it turns out 3.3 was the key. To this day, I have every moment of my week planned out, because I've discovered that the moment I feel like I have nothing to do, I become sad. The analogy I use is running on water. Because I always have to be moving, always have to be DOING SOMETHING, otherwise I plunge into darkness and it's hard to get back up.

But as a result, I became happy. Obviously everyday has its ups and downs, and that's normal. But as of January, 2016, I've stopped considering myself depressed for the first time in 3 years. And I never want to go back. 

And I'm not naive enough to think that anyone's depression can be fixed this way. But I don't think self-harm scars are "beautiful signs of strength" because I'm never going to show them to my 3 year old sister with pride.
But all I want to say, coming from my heart as honest and as empirical as possible, is that we have more control over our minds than we often give ourselves credit for.  And I think, in a both scientific and personal way, that it's beautiful.

See, they say the debate is between nature and nurture: the canvas you are given and the colors you have. But I've got to believe that even if that canvas is morphed, you hold the paintbrush, even when you can't pick your colors. 


And that's the most important thing I could write.


http://iheartintelligence.com/2016/01/22/stephen-hawking-advice/