Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?

Author: Dr Julie Smith

• While longer-term, more in-depth therapy is appropriate for some people, there were so many who simply needed some education about how their mind and body work and how they could manage their mental health day-to-day.

• Something that the science has been confirming to us, and something people often learn in therapy, is that we have more power to influence our emotions than we thought.

• 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 smell. It takes information from your actions and thoughts. It pieces all 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.

• 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 smell. It takes information from your actions and thoughts. It pieces all 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 Barrett, 2017).

• Lots of self-help books tell us to get our mindset right. They tell us, ‘What you think will change how you feel.’ But they often 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.

• Everything we do and don’t do influences our mood too. When you feel down, all you want to do is hide away. You don’t feel like doing any of the things you normally enjoy, and so you don’t. But disengaging from those things for too long makes you feel even worse.

• Spending time with negative thoughts makes it highly likely that I will feel low in mood. But feeling low in mood also makes me more vulnerable to having more negative thoughts. This shows us how we get stuck in cycles of low mood. But it also shows us the way out. Adapted from Greenberger & Padesky (2016).

• The first step to begin getting a grasp on low mood is to build our awareness of each aspect of the experience. This simply means noticing each one. This awareness starts off with hindsight. We look back on the day and choose moments to look at in detail. Then, with time and practice, that builds our ability to notice them in the moment.

• Take your time getting to know the details. When I am feeling this, what am I thinking about? When I am feeling this, what state is my body in? How was I looking after myself in the days or hours leading up to this feeling? Is this an emotion or just physical discomfort from an unmet need?

• Using the cross-sectional formulation (see Figure 2, page 16) helps to increase awareness of what is impacting on our mood and keeping us stuck.

• Low mood gives us the urge to do things that can make our mood even worse.

• We numb or distract ourselves, and push the feelings away. For some that is via alcohol, drugs or food. For others it is watching hours of TV or scrolling through social media. Each of those things are so inviting because they work – in the short term. They give us that instant distraction and numbing that we crave. That is, until we switch off the TV, close down the app, or sober up, and then the feelings come back.

• Use these questions as journal prompts to help you reflect on your current coping strategies for low mood. When feeling low, what are your go-to responses? Do those responses provide instant relief from the pain and discomfort? What effect do they have in the long term? What do they cost you? (Not in money, but in time, effort, health, progress.)

• You might notice that you feel the need for more reassurance from others when your mood is low. If you don’t get that extra reassurance you might automatically assume that they are thinking negatively about you. But that is a bias, and it is quite possible that you are your worst critic.

• When we are struggling with low mood it only takes one thing to go wrong, and we have that tendency to write off the whole

• When we are struggling with low mood it only takes one thing to go wrong, and we have that tendency to write off the whole day.

• When times are hard and you’re not feeling at your best, this tends to narrow our focus. It becomes more difficult to consider other people’s opinions and perspectives, or that they might hold different values.

• For example, we set ourselves a rule for living, something like, ‘I must always be on time for everything.’ We then apply that rule to others and feel offended or hurt when they fall short of that. That might make us feel less tolerant of others, disrupt our mood even further and add relationship tensions into the mix. This equates with trying to control the uncontrollable and inevitably sends our low mood spiralling down further.

• Emotional reasoning is a thought bias that leads us to use what we feel as evidence for something to be true, even when there might be plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. For example, you walk out of an exam feeling deflated, low in mood and lacking in confidence. Emotional reasoning tells you this means you must have failed. You may have performed OK in the exam, but your brain takes information from how you feel and you’re not feeling like a winner right now. The low mood could have been created by the stress followed by exhaustion, but the feeling is influencing how you then interpret your situation. The mental filter The thing about the human brain is that, when you believe something, the brain will scan the environment for any signs that the belief is true.

• Emotional reasoning is a thought bias that leads us to use what we feel as evidence for something to be true, even when there might be plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

• So during hard times, when you may be feeling low and believe that you are a failure, your mind will act like a sieve, letting go of all the information that suggests otherwise, and holding on to any indication that you have not lived up to expectation.

• So watch out for those musts and shoulds. When you are already struggling with mood, expecting yourself to do, be and have everything that you are when you’re at your best is not realistic or helpful.

• Also known as black-and-white thinking, this is another thought bias that can make mood worse if we leave it unchecked. This is when we think in absolutes or extremes.

• If we can acknowledge that each of our thoughts presents just one possible idea among many, then we open ourselves up to the possibility of considering others.

• Our ability to not only consciously experience the world, but to also then think about and reassess the experience we had. This is a key life skill that we make use of in therapy.

• The most effective way to resolve a problem is to understand the problem inside out.

• For those who are using a self-help approach, journalling is a great place to start. There is no pressure to write huge amounts or to write in a way that makes sense to anyone else. The aim is to build on your ability to reflect on your experiences and how you responded to them.

• The power of using metacognition is that it opens up our ability to be accountable to ourselves and to examine the part we play in staying the same or making change. It reveals the big influence that seemingly small behaviours can have, both positive and negative.

• Dealing with emotion is much the same as standing in the waves. When we try to stop feelings in their tracks, we easily get knocked off our feet and find ourselves in trouble, struggling to catch a breath and work out which way is up. When we allow the emotion to wash over us, it rises, peaks and descends, taking its natural course.

• Emotions are real and valid, but they are not facts.

• If we know that thoughts and feelings are not facts but they are causing us distress, it makes sense to check it out and see whether it is a true reflection of reality or whether an alternative would be more helpful.

• I followed a long gravel track through the woods and listened to the sound of my feet hitting the stones. I allowed the feelings of anxiety and stress to be with me. I didn’t try to push them away. I didn’t try to plan or problem-solve. Every few seconds my mind would be off, telling me about the things I should be doing instead of this, offering up worst-case scenarios of missing deadlines, failing assignments and an email I needed to send when I got back home. Every time, I let the thoughts come. And every time, I let them pass behind me and returned to the sound of my feet on the gravel.

• Every time we say no to something because of fear, we reconfirm our belief that it wasn’t safe or that we couldn’t handle it.

• When we feel anxious about something, the most natural human response is to avoid it.

• But avoidance not only maintains anxiety, it makes it worse over time.