Depression

Symptoms of  depression:

We all become sad from time to time, experience holiday blues, and feel overtired or overworked. However when sadness becomes frequent and persistent over a period of time, something you feel unable to shake of, that can be defined as depression.

Different people will have different ways of seeing or feeling depression. However there seem to be some significant common denominators:

1. Your focus is constantly on you and what you don t have or are unable to do
2. You don’t believe that there is any future purpose for you.
3. Physically you don’t seem able to do things – even get out of bed – many people experience a feeling of physical heaviness in their bodies.
4. A voice in your head is giving you negative messages about the futility of your life or situation.
5. You have developed an inability to see or imagine a positive short or long term future.
6. Feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness to change things.
7. You might close of from people not taking their calls or seeing friends or relatives.
8. You feel unable to cope with work and may take time off from it.

People have lots of different reasons to be sad, the death of someone close, the end of a relationship, however there may be times when there appears to be no reason and every individual is different with different reasons.

As human beings we are allowed to be sad, however if sadness turns into  long term negativity that is what we would call depression. There is a natural grieving period that we all go through; indeed we have to go through. When we stay in that grieving period and it becomes a part of our identity our lives and the happiness we experience within our lives can be seriously muted.

It is useful, though not essential, to be able to recognise the root cause of the depression or when it began.

Depression can be kept alive by many things for example if we are constantly thinking that there is no future one negative thought feeds into another and another and another.

When we think, feel, see and talk to ourselves negatively we transform the way our body feels and create strong responses in our bodies and minds.

You can make yourself depressed quite easily try this simple exercise:

1. I am a useless individual – say this with feeling and conviction a few times

You can un – depress or inflate yourself

1. I am a wonderful person able to create a wonderful life – say this lots of times!!

Some people can feel themselves feeling worse and better.  You might notice how your mood shifts and your body in turn reflects that both negatively and positively. Be sure to finish on the positive sentence.

This is just a little example of how you can shift your mood – however  with ongoing depression we can really get stuck in a space and of course if it was as easy as talking to yourself positively we would all get out of depression quickly, which of course people don‘t.

Can cognitive hypnotherapy help heal depression?

With cognitive hypnotherapy  we can talk to the deeper part of our mind that thinks feeling depressed is useful.

I understand the challenge of depression and use both mindfulness mediation techniques combined with cognitive hypnotherapy to support your mind in relaxing and healing.

As a practitioner of yoga, shiatsu and reiki I also use physical yogic practices as physical movement has been shown to support healing depression.

Hypnotherapy supports your brain in connecting with doing the things that will help you move towards a happier you.

Some people hold onto pain in order to hold on to the person e.g. someone I worked with in their seventies could only recall their husband by remembering his death and her loss.

I worked with her to support her in recalling when they had first met and the times they had really enjoyed being together so that she could connect with the joy of having been in a wonderful relationship, rather than the pain of losing her husband some ten years earlier.

We all experience depression differently, some people hear an ongoing negative voice, some experience feeling of heaviness and hopelessness some folk are unable to connect with a visual image or  idea of a positive future and usually it will be a combination of these things.

When we connect with your deeper or unconscious mind (UCM) we can have a chat to see if the depression is serving you or whether there might be some other way of serving your needs better.