Super Brain (9 page)

You feel safer in the world. You see that the world is as you are.

You feel less isolated and alone, which shows that you are basing your happiness on yourself, not on others.

Fear is no longer as persuasive as it used to be.

You see reality is a rich field of possibilities, and you are eager to explore it.

You escape the clutches of “us versus them” thinking in religion, politics, and social status.

You do not feel threatened by or fear the unknown. The future is born in the unknown and nowhere else.

You can see wisdom in uncertainty. This attitude allows life to flow naturally, without the need to make things black or white.

You see being here as its own reward.

Heroes of super brain aren’t the same as super heroes. They are realistic models for change. We believe that the continual development of super brain will lead to a healthier and more highly functioning brain. You will allow your emotions and thoughts to serve their intended purpose, to create the reality in which you deeply desire to live. You will no longer identify with repetitive cyclic patterns in the brain or the limited behavior that they lead to. You will be free to experience higher awareness and a more powerful sense of who you really can be.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
DEPRESSION

In this chapter, we’ve taken another step toward showing you how to use your brain instead of letting it use you. Applying this principle to depression, which afflicts millions of people—it is the leading disability among Americans between fifteen and forty-five—will result in a world of good. There is no more painful example of people being used by their brain. As one former patient described it, “I felt as if I was falling just before I hit the floor, only instead of lasting for a second, the panicky feeling lasted for days and days, and I didn’t even know what I was afraid of.” Sufferers from depression feel victimized by a brain gone awry.

Even though depression is classified as a mood disorder, traceable to the brain’s inability to react properly to inner and outer stress, it affects the whole body. It throws off bodily rhythms, in terms of sleep irregularity. It causes a loss of interest in sex and decreases appetite. Depressed people meet eating and making love with fatigued indifference. In social situations they feel disconnected. They cannot clearly understand what other people are saying to them; they can’t express to others how they feel—being with others is a disturbing blur.

The brain is involved in all these full-body symptoms. The brain scans of depressed people show a unique pattern in which some areas of the brain are overactive and others underactive. Depression typically affects the anterior cingulate cortex (involved in negative emotions, but also empathy), the amygdala (responsible for emotions and for responding to novel situations—depressed people generally don’t respond well to new things), and the hypothalamus (involved in drives like sex and appetite). These interconnected areas link into
a kind of depression circuit—the network we want to affect positively in order to return to normal.

Depression is caused by a trigger, but the trigger can be so small that it passes unnoticed. Once it has been triggered the first time, the brain changes, and then in the future it takes smaller and smaller triggers to enter depression, until finally almost none is needed. When that happens, the person becomes a prisoner of the runaway emotions that can lead to mood disorders.

Are you depressed? We all use the word casually, but being sad or down isn’t the same as being depressed. To be diagnosed with depression, either acute (short term) or chronic (long term), your moods stop the normal pattern of swinging back and forth. You cannot shake a feeling of sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness, or become interested in things around you. Everyday activities feel overwhelming. Freud connected depression to grief, and the two conditions are similar. In many cases, just as grief naturally lifts after a time, so can depression. But if it lingers, the person faces every day without hope of relief. The person sees his life as a total failure and may see no reason to keep living. (Around 80 percent of suicides are caused by a bout of major depression.)

People who have long-term depression often cannot pinpoint when their symptoms started, or why. They may feel that the key is genetic if depression runs in their family, or they may have a loose recollection of when they first noticed that they were sad all the time or felt hopeless for no apparent reason. Depression, along with autism, is considered the most genetic of psychological disorders; up to 80 percent of sufferers have someone else in the family who is or was depressed. But in most cases, genes merely predispose a person to mood disorders while not ensuring onset. To bring on a psychiatric illness, genes and environment work in concert.

Many depressed people will tell you that their problem is not the feeling of depression itself but the overwhelming fatigue they experience—as someone said, the opposite of being depressed isn’t
being happy, it’s being vital. Fatigue, in turn, leads to more depression. Once you decide with conscious awareness and unwavering intent that you are not your brain, you can be one with your emotions and reactions to the outside world. Acting as the leader of your brain, you can actively reprogram your own neurochemistry and even genetic activity, no longer indentured to mood disorders.

The key is to get the stuck or imbalanced parts of your brain to move again. Once that happens, you can go on over time to bring the brain back into natural balance. That’s the goal we’d like to help advance, and it’s also the most holistic approach.

Three Steps in Depression

Once the brain has been trained, its responses feel normal. Sometimes depressed people have adapted so well that they are surprised when a friend, doctor, or therapist tells them that they are depressed. Various theories about genetic influence and chemical imbalances in the brains of depressed people are still widespread, but such explanations have fallen under a shadow of doubt. (Basic research has revealed that depressed patients don’t differ genetically from others. Nor is it clear that antidepressants work by correcting a chemical imbalance. But when depressed patients get the right psychotherapy, talking through their feelings, their brains change in a way that resembles the changes produced by drugs. So another mystery is added: how can talking and taking a pill produce the same physiological result? No one knows.) If you met a young person with bad table manners, what would you ascribe it to? Most likely you would suppose that this behavior started somewhere in childhood and turned into a habit. If the habit persisted, it’s because the person saw no good reason to change it. What if depression shares the same profile? We could retrace the steps of how depression developed and then undo them.

So let’s look at depression as a fixed behavior. Fixed behaviors have three components:

1. An early outside cause, often since forgotten.

2. A response to that cause, which for some reason is unhealthy or unexamined.

3. A longstanding habit that becomes automatic.

Let’s rid our minds of calling every kind of depression a disease, particularly the mild to moderate depression that most sufferers experience. (Certainly severe, chronic depression should be approached like other severe mental disorders.) If you get depressed after a bad divorce, you’re not sick. If you grieve over a loss or feel down after losing your job, it’s not illness. When someone loses a beloved spouse, we may say, “She’s out of her mind with grief,” but grief is natural, and the depression that comes with it is also natural. What this tells us is that depression is a natural response that can go terribly wrong.

When depression goes wrong, all three components are to blame:

1. Outside causes
: Outside events can make anyone depressed. During the severe 2008 economic recession, 60 percent of people who lost their job say it made them anxious or depressed. The number is much higher among workers who had been laid off for more than a year. If you subject yourself to enough stress over a long period of time, depression is much more likely. Long-term stress can be caused by a boring job, a sour relationship, prolonged stretches of loneliness and social isolation, and chronic disease. To some extent, a depressed person is reacting to bad circumstances, either now or in the past.

2. The response
: An outside cause cannot make you depressed unless you respond in a certain way. People who are depressed learned long ago to have a skewed response, such as the following, when something went wrong in their lives:

It’s my fault.

I’m not good enough.

Nothing will work out.

I knew things would go wrong.

I can’t do anything about it.

It was just a matter of time.

Young children who have any of these responses feel they make sense. They are reporting to their brains with a viewpoint on reality. The brain conforms to the picture of reality it is trained to see. Small children have little control over their lives; they are weak and vulnerable. An unloving parent can create any of these responses, and so can a disastrous family event like a death. But when adults have these responses, then the past is undermining the present.

3. The habit of being depressed
: Once you have a depressed response, it reinforces the next response when you face a new stress from the outside world. Did your first boyfriend dump you? Then it’s natural to fear that the second one might, also. Some people can manage this fear, but for others it looms large. Instead of daring to find a second boyfriend who is more loving and loyal, they turn the blame and fear inward. They keep having depressed responses, generated from the inside, and after a while these responses turn into a habit.

Undoing the Past

Once a person’s depression turns into a habit, which probably happens years earlier than their recognition of being sad and hopeless, it no longer needs an outside trigger. Depressed people are depressed about being depressed. A gray film coats everything; optimism is impossible. This defeated state tells us that the brain has formed fixed pathways, and that perhaps—or probably—genetic output and neurotransmitters are involved. The person’s whole support system for creating his or her personal reality comes into play.

When the depressed response is internalized, it’s like smoldering
hot coals that will flame up with only a small stir. A minor incident like a flat tire or a bounced check leaves the person no room for deciding “Is this going to bother me or not?” The depressed response is already wired in. Depressed people can even feel sad about good news; they are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, because they are trapped in the habit of depression. The brain’s imbalance can be traced to mental activity. Brain scans of depressed people appear to support this connection. They show that the same areas that light up due to the beneficial effects of antidepressants also light up if the person enters therapy and successfully talks through their depression. Talk is a form of behavior.

If behavior can get you out of depression, it’s only reasonable to suppose that behavior can get you into it. (For the moment we’ll set aside the kind of depression that has physical—or as doctors term it, organic—causes, such as many diseases and senile dementia as well as poor diet and environmental toxins. When the physical cause is corrected, the depression usually goes away automatically.) Since this explanation sounds reasonable, the key questions are how to avoid getting into the depressed response and how to reverse depression once it sets in. We can approach the issues of prevention and getting better using the same three categories that we have been discussing.

Outside events: People will say, “Did you see the evening news? I’m so depressed about the state of the world.”
Or “I was depressed during the whole period around 9/11.” Outside events can make us depressed, but in fact they are the least powerful ingredient in causing depression. Losing your job can be depressing if you are prone to the depressed response, but if you are not, it can spur you to rise even higher. Bad things are unavoidable, but some factors make them worse:

The stress is repeated.

The stress is unpredictable.

You have no control over the stress.

Consider a wife whose husband is an abusive rage-aholic. He has hit her repeated times; she cannot predict when he will fly into one of his rages; she cannot find the will or the strength to leave him. Such a woman will be a strong candidate for depression because all three elements of a major stress are present. The abuse being directed at her is repeated, unpredictable, and beyond her control.

Her whole mind-body system will start to shut down if she remains in this situation. That happens when mice are given mild electric shocks. When researchers space the shocks at random intervals, give them over and over, and provide no way for the mice to escape, it doesn’t matter that the shocks are harmless. The mice will soon give up, act lethargic and helpless, and in time die. In other words, their induced depression is so extreme that it has destroyed the will to live.

What does this mean for you, the person who wants to avoid depression? First, stop exposing yourself to stresses that occur over and over. This could mean a bad boss, an abusive husband, or any other stress that is reinforced every day. Second, avoid unpredictability of the stressful kind. Yes, life is uncertain, but there’s a limit to what uncertainties are acceptable. A boss who unpredictably flies into a rage isn’t acceptable. For many people, a sales job, where any customer might lash out or slam the door in your face, is too uncertain to bear. A spouse who may or may not cheat is unpredictable in the wrong way.