Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?: The No 1 Sunday Times Bestseller 2022
Genres: Medical
Book Preface
Understanding low mood
Everyone has low days.
Everyone.
But we al di er in how frequent the low days are and how severe the low mood.
Something that I have come to realize over the years of working as a psychologist is how much people struggle with low mood and never tel a soul. Their friends and family would never know. They mask it, push it away and focus on meeting expectations. Sometimes people arrive at therapy a er years of doing that.
They feel like they’re ge ing something wrong. They compare themselves to the people who appear to have it al together al of the time. The ones who are always smiling and apparently ful of energy.
They buy into the idea that some people are just like that and happiness is some sort of personality type. You either have it or you don’t.
If we see low mood as purely a fault in the brain, we don’t believe we can change it, so instead we get to work on hiding it. We go about the day, doing al the right things, smiling at al the right people, yet al the time feeling a bit empty and dragged down by that low mood, not enjoying things in the way we are told we should.
Take a moment to notice your body temperature. You might feel perfectly comfortable, or you may be too hot or too cold. While changes in how hot or cold you feel could be a sign of infection and il ness, it could just as easily be a signal of things around you. Maybe you forgot your jacket, which is normal y enough to protect you from the cold. Perhaps the sky has clouded over and it has started to rain.
Maybe you are hungry or dehydrated. When you run for the bus you notice you warm up. Our body temperature is a ected by our environment, both internal and external, and we also have the power to influence it ourselves. Mood is much the same. When we experience low mood, it may have been influenced by several factors from our internal and external world, but when we understand what those influences are, we can use that knowledge to shi it in the direction we want it to go. Sometimes the answer is to grab an extra layer and run for the bus. Sometimes it’s something else.
Something that the science has been confirming to us, and something people o en learn in therapy, is that we have more power to influence our emotions than we thought.
This means we get to start working on our own wel being and taking our emotional health into our own hands. It reminds us that our mood is not fixed and it does not define who we are; it is a sensation we experience.
This doesn’t mean we can eradicate low mood or depression. Life stil presents us with hardship, pain and loss and that wil always be reflected in our mental and physical health. Instead, it means we can build up a toolbox with things that help. The more we practise using those tools, the more skil ed we get at using them. So when life throws us problems that hammer our mood into the ground we have something to turn to.
The concepts and skil s covered are for us al . Research shows them to be helpful for those with depression, but they are not a control ed drug that you need a prescription for. They are life skil s. Tools that we can al use as we go through life facing fluctuations in mood, big and smal . For anyone who experiences severe and enduring mental il ness it is always optimal to learn new skil s with the support of a professional.
How feelings get created
Sleep is bliss. Then my alarm o ends my ears. It’s too loud and I hate that tune. It sends a shockwave through my body that I am not ready
for. I press snooze and lie back down. My head is aching and I feel irritated. I press snooze again. If we don’t get up soon the kids wil be late for school. I need to get ready for my meeting. I close my eyes and see the to-do list lying on my desk in the o ce. Dread. Irritation.
Exhaustion. I don’t want to do today.
Is this low mood? Did it come from my brain? How did I wake up like this? Let’s trace back. Last night I stayed up late working. By the time I got into bed I was too tired to go back downstairs to grab a glass of water. Then my baby woke up twice in the night. I haven’t slept enough and I’m dehydrated. The loud alarm woke me from a deep sleep, sending stress hormones shooting through my body as I woke up. My heart started pounding and that felt something like stress.
Each of these signals sends information to my brain. We are not OK.
So my brain goes on a hunt for reasons why. It searches, it finds. So my physical discomfort, brought about by lack of sleep and dehydration, helped to create low mood.
Not al low mood is unidentified dehydration, but when dealing with mood it is essential to remember that it’s not al in your head. It’s also in your body state, your relationships, your past and present, your living conditions and lifestyle. It’s in everything you do and don’t do, in your diet and your thoughts, your movements and memories. How you feel is not simply a product of your brain.
Your brain is constantly working to make sense of what is going on.
But it only has a certain number of clues to work from. It takes information from your body (e.g. heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, hormones). It takes information from each of your senses – what you can see, hear, touch, taste and smel . It takes information from your actions and thoughts. It pieces al these clues together with memories of when you have felt similar in the past and makes a suggestion, a best guess about what is happening and what you do about it. That guess can sometimes be felt as an emotion or a mood. The meaning we make of that emotion and how we respond to it, in turn, sends information back to the body and the mind about what to do next (Feldman
Barre , 2017). So when it comes to changing your mood, the ingredients that go in wil determine what comes out.
The two-way road
Lots of self-help books tel us to get our mindset right. They tel us,
‘What you think wil change how you feel.’ But they o en miss something crucial. It doesn’t end there. The relationship works both ways. The way you feel also influences the types of thoughts that can pop into your head, making you more vulnerable to experiencing thoughts that are negative and self-critical. Even when we know our thought pa erns aren’t helping, it is so incredibly hard to think di erently when we feel down, and even harder to fol ow the rule of
‘only positive thoughts’ that is o en suggested on social media. The mere presence of those negative thoughts does not mean that they came first and caused the low mood. So thinking di erently may not be the only answer.
How we think is not the whole picture. Everything we do and don’t do influences our mood too. When you feel down, al you want to do is hide away. You don’t feel like doing any of the things you normal y enjoy, and so you don’t. But disengaging from those things for too long makes you feel even worse. The loop also occurs with our physical state. Let’s say you have been too busy to exercise for a few weeks.
You feel tired and low in mood, so exercising is the last thing you want to do. The longer you avoid the exercise, the more you feel lethargic and low on energy. When you are low on energy, the chance of exercising goes down, along with your mood. Low mood gives you the urge to do the things that make mood worse.
| Download Ebook | Read Now | File Type | Upload Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Download here
|
Read Now | Epub, PDF | December 26, 2023 |
How to Read and Open File Type for PC ?
