3 Out of the Box Techniques for Beating Depression, Anxiety and Epic Surliness
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Sometimes you have to try something totally different
Excerpted from “unGlommed, The Guerrilla Approach to Beating Depression” by Lev Metropol.
Technique 1. Go Zombie
What?
At times you can feel so stressed out that you just need to check out for awhile. Like, completely. You can always come back later.
Going zombie means letting go of caring about everything in order to de-stress rapidly. You do it in your mind when you are alone and life is crushing you.
You do it because you can’t seem to handle another second of anxiety.
It works like this: Imagine that you’re a mindless, newly dead creature just risen from the grave, walking with your arms stretched out, with a face lacking all expression — in other words, someone from whom nothing is expected, who doesn’t give a sh*t, who has no future nor cares.
Going zombie means allowing yourself to say f*ck it all. Because you’re gone. Zombeism is a great foil to stem the gathering storm of a catastrophizing mind. You just don’t care.
How do you do it, exactly?
Easy. Simply act “as if.” Repeat the mantra: F*ck this. F*ck that. F*ck everything. You do that because, for some reason, caring is extremely burdensome.
And, it hurts.
Zombies are impervious to the pull of depression and anxiety. There’s no way to be sucked in, since you’re technically you’re not there. Zombies, being inanimate, offer no perch for the depressive demon — the embodiment of your condition — to alight.
Going zombie means advancing through each moment as unenthusiastically as possible, sans emotion, taking one slow step at a time.
When you’re feeling stronger — whether that’s in a few minutes, hours or whenever — you drop the pose. You rejoin the land of the living. You start to take responsibility again, because, well, you can.
Like the mortally-wounded soldier we’ve seen in countless war movies, the guy who’s riddled with bullets and gushing blood, whose buddy is cradling his head lovingly and saying, “Don’t close your eyes,” so as not to succumb, the same goes for you as a zombie. All that’s required is keeping your peepers open so that you don’t become enraptured by the darkness. Hold the blank-stare, dead-zone detachment, doing only what’s in front of you. Let everything else go. Come back when you can.
Technique 2. Paradoxical Intention
Oh, no, not again.
Yep, again. The clock says 3:45 a.m. and you’re lying in bed enduring volley after volley of negative thoughts. Your reaction to it is equally troubling. If I don’t get back to sleep, I’ll be exhausted and tomorrow will be shot all to hell. And I have so much to do. Now I’m too worried to sleep!
Such inner dialoging is the last thing you need right now, is it not? If you engage what your depressive demon is urging you to do, you’ll just be adding more kindling to the fire.
Don’t take the bait.
Instead, try this: Be OK with not sleeping. In fact, try to stay awake.
What?
It’s called paradoxical intention. It’s one of those judo moves that can trick your depressive demon and give you the upper hand. I tried it for the first time years ago while, oddly enough, waiting in line to ride a roller coaster at an amusement park. Don’t ask. I have no idea how I found myself in that situation. I just knew I was scared out of my wits, and not wanting to lose face in front of my friends.
Using paradoxical intention, you wish for exactly the experience that you don’t want. In this case, it was for the car I was in to do what roller coaster cars generally do, which is to go blazingly, terrifyingly fast.
The technique was developed by the Austrian neurologist, Dr. Viktor Frankl, who defined paradoxical intention as “the deliberate practice of a neurotic habit or thought, undertaken to identify and remove it.”
Sound f*cked up? Indeed.
Dr. Frankl, who wrote the perennial bestseller, Man’s Search for Meaning, about his experience surviving imprisonment in several Nazi concentration camps, probably knew a thing or two about getting through tough situations.
So, there I sat, along with my friend, ascending the lift hill, gripping the bar with white-knuckled pressure. As we rounded the top, I took a deep inhale, squinted my eyes down to slits, and as the car began to accelerate, wished it faster. I desired this with my full intention, per Dr. Frankl’s instructions. If paradoxical intention worked, then my fear would be overtaken by, well, disappointment. I’d be bummed out about how slow the car was going.
Well, that’s just what happened! Instead of staying google-eyed-scared, it was meh. The 60 mile-per-hour speed felt slow. Of course, intellectually and sensorally, I knew that wasn’t true. It just didn’t matter.
When the car coasted to a stop, I was grinning, victorious, enjoying a true shiny, happy moment. I realized then and there that Hamlet’s pal Horatio had been right. There was much about this world — and myself — that I didn’t understand.
But back to you, lying awake at night or just being stressed out, caught up obsessively thinking about [insert your worry du jour here]. Go counterintuitive. Be OK with not being OK. Try paradoxical intention.
Without the added burden of worry about what hasn’t happened, and which very well may not, who knows — you might stop caring and fall back to sleep. But even if you don’t, your sorry state may turn out to be no problem at all. Anything could happen the next day. Nuclear war could break out, making all of your worries moot.
Fighting what-is makes you an enemy of, well, what is, which is life — what’s happening right now in the real world, not in the illusory, depleting Matrix.
Technique 3. Photo Review: Mining Sadness
Like algae growing on a pond in summer, depression thrives in the warm, stagnant waters of unfelt emotion. Sometimes, all you need to do is move that water to break a bad cycle. The following technique shifts energy by awakening and stoking suppressed emotions provocatively. It uses sadness in a way that may come as a surprise.
Find a photo album or click into the family folders on one of your devices. In particular, seek out the ones that bring up the heavy emotions of nostalgia, grief and sadness. If you have kids, revisit shots of them when they were young — you know, when they liked you and acted in ways that made you feel good. When they regarded you as human and relevant. Those were the salad days, eh? Perhaps now they’re grown and gone. Do you miss them? Home in on the feeling.
Keep your attention focused on those old snapshots that make you feel. Let the longing come over you. Loll in the loss and the pain on purpose. Yes, this is the opposite of what we usually do, but you’re feeling the opposite of what you want to feel, right?
Dive in. Swim around awhile. Sink down into the depths.
Move on to pics of dear friends and places you love and miss. Relive a few frames in the film of your glorious past (or inglorious past, as the case may be). Focus on those indelible, joyous times that you had no idea would be the good ol’ days until they had passed out of view in the rearview mirror of your life. Funny how that works.
Sense the place those loved ones hold in your heart. If any have left their mortal coils, visualize the chair they once sat in, now empty. The world is not the same without them.
If tears come, that’s fine. Hey, you’re just sitting there. Just don’t disappear into them, nor into the story. Keep one eye on the prize. The prize is connecting with your heart, which means breaking free of the mind, also known as home to the depressive demon and the worry loop sh*t show.
This idea may seem indulgent and counterproductive, but so what? You’re taking the focus off your churning worries. Energy is moving. You’re pulling yourself up out of the swamp, making space for release and relaxation and, if you’re in bed, possibly for sleep.
The depressive demon lives wholly in the mind. Emotions reside in the body. If you can shift your attention to the body, you can break the demon’s grip. It’s even possible that troublesome old emotions may resolve, and if so, you may feel a pleasant sense of lightness. Lie or sit quietly and let that feeling sink in. A tiny cleansing has taken place. Turn off the light. You may fall right asleep. Or, if you’re up and around, get back into the day.
Look for more excerpts from “unGlommed” on Medium.com. To learn more, visit:
