Books | Selfhelp | Nonfiction

Sit, close your eyes and think of someone you love or someone who loves you. This person must be someone whose mere thought warms your heart. They could be alive or no longer with you—it doesn’t matter.

As you start thinking of that person, you will feel a change of emotions in your heart.

Photographs are feelings caught in motion. Go through your gallery today and pick one picture to reflect on.

Think about the memory it stirs up in your mind. Write down how you feel. If it is a photograph that sparks joy, observe it for at least a minute longer. Hold it close to your chest and be grateful for that moment.

Emotion beats logic. When it comes to the pleasure principle, your feelings tend to overshadow rational thought. You might know that doing something will be good or bad for you. You’ll understand all the reasons why it will be good or bad. You’ll get all that. But if your illogical id is so intent on satisfying a certain craving, then it’s probably going to win out. And if your id drives you to think that doing something useful will cause too much stress or temporary dissatisfaction, it’s going to win there too.

Denial is one of the most classic defense mechanisms because it is easy to use. Suppose you discovered that you were performing poorly at your job. “No, I don’t believe that report ranking all the employees. There’s no way I can be last. Not in this world. The computer added up the scores incorrectly.”

When it comes to tackling low mood, we have to focus on making good decisions, not perfect decisions. A good decision is one that moves you in the direction you want to go. It doesn’t have to catapult you there.

But something we must do is keep making decisions, however small. In any survival situation, making decisions and moving is essential. If you find yourself in deep water in the dark, with no way of telling which direction leads to safety, what you do know is that if you don’t choose a direction and start moving, you won’t be able to keep your head above the surface for long. Low mood wants you to do nothing. Therefore, doing anything positive, however small, is a healthy step in the direction you want to go.

All those self-help books that told the world to just think positive didn’t account for the fact that you can’t control the thoughts that arrive in your mind. The part you can control is what you do once they appear.

One of the most important skills for learning to deal with thoughts and their impact on our mood is getting some distance from them. Sounds difficult when those thoughts are inside your own mind, but humans have a powerful tool that helps us to put thoughts at arm’s length and give us the distance we need. It’s called metacognition, which is a fancy name for thoughts about your thoughts.

We have this ability to think. But we also have the ability to think about what we are thinking.