Depression: Is it a Snake or a Rope?

By A. B. Curtiss

Getting out of a depressive episode without drugs requires no belief system. It requires dropping a belief, the one that says you are the helpless victim of your moods and your emotions. Once you discard this useless idea, you can apply simple but powerful cognitive behavioral principles and techniques to depression with immediate results. The idea is not to become some glaze-eyed Pollyanna, but simply to avoid the painful paralysis that keeps you from living your life.

The first task is to dispel two widely accepted and dangerous myths. It is a myth that we have to think any thought that happens to bubble up in our mind, even the thought 'I am depressed.' It is a myth that some of our feelings may be so strong that we are compelled to act them out just because they 'chemical up' in our brain.

Not only is it not necessary to live this way, it is not healthy to live this way. Depression may be a slippery slope down to the very pits of Hell, but you can install handrails and footholds, even automatic step-in elevators in the form of simple mind exercises and techniques that change the direction of your 'downer' thinking and get you back on the upward path again.

Ancient wisdom has given us a clue that helps to dispel the myth that we are dependent upon our moods, the myth that we cannot think and act independently of raging emotions. The continual refusal to focus on the unreal ('we are helpless') is the necessary condition for seeing the real ('we can do something about it').

This principle is illustrated by the age-old parable of the rope and the snake. Walking up the stairs of his back porch at night a man is frightened by the sudden appearance of a snake coiled on the step ahead. He jumps back in horror and alarm; but suddenly someone lights a lamp, and he laughs to see the 'snake' is only a rope. The continual refusal to see the snake is the necessary condition for seeing the rope. Focusing on the 'snake' is called anxiety.

Living in a continual state of anxiety is the easiest thing in the world. We don't have to exert ourselves in any other way. We just collapse into anxiety and let it take us, mindlessly, wherever it is going. We can run away from the 'snake' in fear, and calm our nerves by picking up any one of hundreds of different addictions or medications to distract us or deaden our body so it doesn't feel the fear.

We can play the 'Ain't it Awful Game'and find a group of 'snake' survivors so we can tell everybody about our horrible snake experience and listen to the stories about their snakes.

Or we can light the lamp of our own awareness and see that the snake is, indeed, only a rope. We CAN turn on our awareness when we remember where the switch is. The switch is in our earnest desire to know WHAT IS. Most of our anxiety is very shallow because it is the fear of what isn't, an illusion, like the rope 'snake.' So what is reality then? Reality is giving a pure act of attention to the task at hand.

What seems like a snake may be a rope, but we will not know that it is a rope unless we refuse to succumb to our fear that it is a snake. We should question all behavior based upon the idea that the rope is a snake. As far as depression is concerned, we should question the overwhelming fear that our depression is more powerful than we are.

When we are suddenly overcome by depression, there are concepts, thought processes, and small mind-tricks that can get us out of the worst of it without dulling our mind and personality with drugs. These concepts are not just for the low-grade 'blues' and 'sadness' that dry us up and render us temporarily purposeless and stale on life. They are equally effective with the sudden onset of what I call the 'great chemical dump' that suddenly wrests our mind from the security of its normal moorings and pitches us headlong into the timeless agony and lifeless void of depression.

We do not have to stay there! As the old Chinese proverb reminds us: we cannot prevent the birds of sadness from flying over our heads but we must not let them build a nest in our hair. We can learn to distinguish between emotional impulse and a thinking choice; between feelings and principles, so that our fear remains a necessary wake-up call that ends in some chosen action instead of a negative neural feedback loop ending in itself, the condition of self-terror we call depression.

What can you do when depression attacks? One thing that can help is a cognitive behavioral technique called 'brainswitching.' Choose a word or phrase, such as 'green frog,' a nonsense song like Row, row, row your boat, or some 'mantra' to have 'at the ready' the next time depression hits.

Instead of acknowledging the pain of your depression, instead of thinking the thought 'I am depressed.' say the single thought, the poem, the nonsense rhyme over and over to yourself in your mind. Anything will do. Row, row, row your boat. One two, buckle my shoe. Even the single word, yes, yes, yes, thought repetitively. Concentrate on it. Insist! Insist! Insist on your thought.

This is such a simple, dumb little exercise that, at the outset, it must seem too trivial in the face of the horrors of depression. But it works miracles, as many simple things do. Any neutral (non-emotional) brain activity involving words or numbers start the neurons arcing in the neocortex, the thinking part of our brain, and lessens the activity of neurons in the subcortex, the emotional part of our brain.

This is important because depression only happens in the subcortex. Depression is never in the neocortex. By using brainswitching techniques you can actually escape temporarily from the subcortex to the neocortex for some immediate relief. You disconnect the 'thought' that depression is happening in your brain from the 'emotion' that depression is happening in your brain; and the depression itself will be fragmented and weakened by the schism.

A human being can only concentrate on one thought at a time. When we concentrate on any neutral thought, the anxious thought 'I am depressed' is temporarily blocked from our attention. When we cease to pay attention to our depression, it cannot think itself. This small mind trick literally disconnects the message that we are depressed from one part of the brain to the other and short circuits the negative feedback loop feeding our depression.

Even when people do this exercise out of spite just to prove that 'such a stupid thing couldn't possibly work,' it still works. Just the cognitive thinking that 'the dumb exercise won't work' is enough to distract our attention, even for a few seconds, from our concentration on the thought 'I am depressed.'

As you practice this exercise, your powers of concentration on your chosen neutral or nonsense thought will improve over time so that your depression will have less and less power to suck you in, and dismantle your equilibrium.

Here's what you do when depression hits. Bad feelings should alert you that it's time to use a brainswitching exercises such as 'green frog.' Then with 'green frog' thinking in place, thus blocking thoughts about feeling bad, slowly get busy with chores or regular duties, followed by more ambitious work.

Focus your mind on small physical actions: brush your teeth, straighten your desk, jog, etc., while accepting some temporary psycho-physiological discomfort in a detached way. The new activity will spark up neurons in the neocortex, and cause the slowdown of neuronal activity in the subcortex lessening the stress chemicals being poured into the brain.

When one is well into productive behavior and thinking, then the chemicals start to dissipate, and the edge of the emotional trauma will be taken off. You will start to notice some rise of your essential okayness.

There is no reason to endure agonizing feelings more than a few minutes. But no time should be spent on wondering why the bad feelings occurred. They are always the result of some pattern of thinking, some learned associations that have connected in your brain. Any maverick thought could be the trigger: cloudy day, the color purple, some sad song. It doesn't matter.

The obvious task is simply to change your thinking, and then your feelings will change to reflect the new thinking. If depression intrudes again, simply start from scratch with 'green frog.'

The brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought. With the exercises, you make rational thought more dominant than emotional thought. This is our only hope for combating depression because a human being has been scripted since caveman days to pay attention FIRST to strong emotions.

Emotions are our first line of defense, our greatest defense mechanism to alert us to danger. But emotions can be wrong because they can be triggered accidentally, like depression, like the rope 'snake,' when there is no real danger.

We usually don't place importance on the fact that what gets us down, and let's face it, our moods can change though our situations remain the same, is the fact that our brain is essentially a defense mechanism. As our faithful guardian it is always on the lookout for 'what could go wrong.' But too much looking for the negative can spark up old neural patterns of depression. When we find ourselves heading for the negative, it's time for a brainswitch exercise to head us back in the direction of the positive.