Day Eight: Explanations

Other than waking up still feeling ill, there's little to report about today. I've felt kind of spaced out as the day has meandered along, probably due to the diet of paracetamol and ibuprofen that I've been getting by on.

Regardless of my throat situation I'll be going into work tomorrow - I don't want to risk the job, and being a temp doesn't exactly put you in the safest position.

In the absence of anything happening today (anything of interest that is) I'm going to post this and maybe return to it later, see if I can't think of something to write about on the days when the battle to stay on top of my new way of thinking is working well....

To be continued?


Back.

Today did have an instance of my positive thinking changing the way I behaved. I needed to get a copy of my Passport made for Kat's visa application. The 'old' me would have rung around a few places, thought about it for a couple of days, then finally acted when there was no time left not to.

Didn't do that today, instead I walked into the first Solicitors I found and asked them to do it - no shopping around, no making appointments in advance, and guess what? It paid off - friendly staff did a great job and only charged me a tenner for it. They certainly made me feel more inclined to go back there in the future if I need anything further legal doing.

So there are other benefits to this new way of thinking - especially good as I've had (since I was very small) an unusual amount of anxiety at the thought of asking for help in shops or other businesses. I've been able to fight my fears for a while now, but today I didn't even feel them.

~*~

I realise I've not really explained what it is I'm actually doing to change my state of mind. It's time for an explanation, or the nearest I can manage to one.

A few years ago I was sent to a psychiatrist by my doctor. The Irish chap I saw was the first person who ever said to me that he felt that the 'confident Alex' was the real me, whereas I thought it was just a mask I threw up over myself. He told me about exercises that I had to do that would slowly fix things.

His explanation of how these worked seemed to make sense to me - he told me that the brain makes synaptic connections every time we do anything, and if we do something regularly those connections become effectively 'hard wired'. Once depression starts we start thinking in negative ways, and our brains being the super efficient machines they are, we swiftly find it easier and easier to think in those dark ways. Effectively the thing about our brains that enables us to develop 'muscle memory' when we do things such as driving, writing, typing, or playing a musical instrument, blindly works away to allow us to do this 'new' way of thinking more efficiently - that the thing it's just allowed us to do so well is harmful to us doesn't register, the brain keeps making and strengthening those connections.

After a while we reach the point where it becomes hard not to think that way - everything we do gets filtered down the paths of least resistance in our brains, often via the 'life is shit' route. The brain, being the machine that looks for patterns and reinforcement it is, sees this as confirmation that the original routing was correct - so we get trapped in a self generating and supporting cycle of depression.

My psychiatrist told me that, every time I find myself thinking dark things, I should stop and concentrate on the one thing that's good in that moment - even if it's as insignificant as my socks being warm. Anything that can be concentrated on that's positive, he told me, will cause the brain to have to create a different connection. Do it for long enough and the negative connections will start to break.

I tried this, and had a whopping headache for a couple of weeks, but it did work to a degree.

This time I'm using that technique in concert with elements of REBT. According to various sources I've read I can 'rewire' my brain into becoming less prone to instantly expecting the worst. By acting like 'confident Alex' even when I don't feel it inside it should become easier to actually be like that more often.

So far it seems to be working. By being more confident and outgoing I'm noticing that people are reacting more favourably towards me which, in turn, causes me to feel more confident. It's working in exactly the way I would have (logically) expected it to, which is rather reassuring.

That's what I'm doing, that's what's going on.

No scores today, as I've been pleasantly neutral for the duration.