Play Mind Tricks With Yourself to Lift Depression

Since depression is all about thoughts and feelings you can use your mind to your advantage and trick yourself out of depression. While the drugs available to tackle depression have improved over the years a third of all depressed people find that anti-depressants have little or no effect on their symptoms.

However there are other alternatives to try when it comes to helping lift depression. Behavioral therapy is now thought to be just as effective if not more so, when it comes to dealing and overcoming depression. While the symptoms of depression are felt physically by way of feeling down, sad, blue, you cry more easily and your emotions are up and down, the solution is quite simple and all in the mind.

By playing mind tricks on yourself and getting your mind to change its way of thinking, you can lift yourself right out of depression. This doesn't of course mean that if you have been depressed and have been prescribed medication that you should ignore the advice of your Doctor and stop taking medication, but it is something that you can try alongside.

The simple answer is tricking yourself into thinking more positive thoughts and feelings. For example there is usually a reason behind the depression. While this reason is not to be trivialized it can be overcome.

If your depression stems from being in debt for example and you can see no immediate way out of your situation then every time you think about your problem you feel worse. However think about it, sometimes throughout your day you may see the light and the depression lifts by way of something unexpected which grabs your attention. Even if this is only for a few brief seconds, for those seconds your mood lifts and suddenly the world doesn't seem like such a bad place after all.

For those brief seconds or minutes when your mind was distracted, while your problem was still there you put it to the back of your mind and let other thoughts and feelings take first place.

This is the key to tricking your mind, by consciously making it think other thoughts.

If you are severely depressed and nothing seems good in the world then visualization and imagination will do for now. This of course won't be easy at first, but with perseverance and a little optimism it will gradually change your pattern of thought. Visualize changes in your life for the better and see yourself as escaping from the symptoms of depression and being the person that you want to be.

Be attentive to your thoughts and feelings and when you realize you have let yourself drift back into your old ways, turn to your new thoughts again. The more detail you can visualize the more real it will seem and the easier it will be to break from your depression.

You might think that this is only escaping from your problem, because after all, the problem that caused the depression in the first place is still there. That's true, but while the problem is still there you are able to see it in a new light.

Once you have felt what it feels like to feel happy again you are then able to think not about your depression and how stuck you are but how you can deal with the problem. So play mind tricks with yourself, after your mind has been tricking you into depression for so long, its time to get your own back.