Managing thoughts. Metaphor 2.

Ignoring our negative thoughts is tough and can be very difficult to do. Using a metaphor can help. Why not see if this one helps?



Do you ever feel you are being carried away by a swirling river, struggling to stay afloat among mud and debris? The stuff in the river is our thoughts, sensations, events and feelings. The river is our distress as we drift helplessly downstream. But that's not the only option. We can get out of the river and stand on the bank, watching as those thoughts, experiences and feelings go by, disappearing into the distance. It might be helpful to note individual items as they pass - a log representing some thoughts, a rubbish bag of bad experiences which you can throw away.

Looking at things differently. Metaphor1.

How do you make yourself see things differently? How do you see light when it feels dark? How do you see a clear way forward, when everything feels confusing? How do you change your mood?

An approach common to every culture and religion is to use stories, analogies and parables to illuminate understanding, make points more memorable and help us make positive changes.

You can use metaphors to create alternative ways of looking at things, to see the world in a different light. Just that alone, seeing your thoughts differently, will help you to create a distance between you and your thoughts that will help you to stand back, observe more objectively and make wiser decisions about how to react.

Today and over the next few days we explore 3 metaphors that people have found useful to manage their thoughts. Here's the first one.

Picture yourself driving a bus which is full of noisy passengers (your thoughts), doing their best to distract you with comments about your poor driving and giving you competing instructions on where to go. Does that mean you can't drive the bus safely and in the right direction? Of course not. You concentrate on the road ahead (the task in hand) and let the passengers chatter away. As you focus on your task, their voices fade into the background.

Your flexible friend.

When Mark introduced himself a couple of days ago, he referred to his good friend Sarah, another Moodscope user who also kindly wanted to contribute to the Moodscope messages. Here's Sarah's first message. I do hope you enjoy it. Best wishes. Caroline

I have several friends who use Moodscope, and we each do so differently. One or two find simply reading these daily emails provides sustenance enough. Some do their chart occasionally to touch base with they're at. Whilst others, like me, find regular scoring most useful.

Since I joined two years ago, I've flipped the cards 352 times. My score has ranged from 7%, on a day I felt so hellish my every thought seemed to hurt, to 90%, the day I got married. (If the 7% had been for the day I got married then I really would be worried.) My moods swing from periods when I score in the 30s and 40s to – thankfully longer – periods when I score much higher. When we're down, one of the worst aspects can be feeling we'll never get out of that hole. Here I've found seeing my history heartening – it reminds me I won't be there forever.

I've also shared my chart with others – my doctor, for instance. It provided something tangible to demonstrate what I meant by 'very up and down' and helped him get a picture of my overall mental health. Someone else I know found doing the test regularly revealed her dips were unmistakably linked to her monthly cycle – one week in four, she'd drop from 60% to 35%. Now she's opted for hormone treatment, and lo, her scores are over 60%, 100% of the time. That she's happier thanks to a few cards is flipping wonderful.

If you're someone who only ever reads the emails, perhaps doing the test occasionally might help boost your mood even more. Though feel free to ignore this suggestion. The real joy of Moodscope is its flexibility – it's a tool that adapts to every user. How ingenious is that?

Tricks with quicksand.

Language is always revealing. We talk about being mired in our problems. A mire is a swamp or bog. The image is of being trapped, sucked in, impossible to extricate. Quicksand is the most terrifying form of mire.

Steve Hayes, an eminent psychology professor in the US, uses a metaphor about quicksand to introduce an approach to healing he calls acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).

When we're stuck in quicksand, our immediate impulse is to struggle and fight to get out. But that's exactly what you mustn't do because as you put weight down on one part of your body (like your foot), it goes deeper.  So the more you struggle, the deeper you sink – and the more you struggle. It's a no-win situation.

With quicksand, the way to survive is to spread the weight of your body over a large surface area by laying down on the quicksand. It goes against all our instincts to do this - to get into as much contact as possible with the very thing that is threatening us. But that's exactly what we have to do.

It's the same with distress. We struggle and fight against it. But perhaps we've not considered just letting it be, of being in direct contact with the distressing thoughts and feelings. If we did, we'd find that we'd get through it and survive more effectively than if we'd fought and struggled.

Knock knock…

Something different for you this morning... I'd like to thank everyone who has offered to contribute to the Moodscope blog and I'm very pleased to be able to publish the first one today. I hope you enjoy it. Best wishes. Caroline.

We don't know each other but I'd like to introduce myself, I'm Mark.

I've been a Moodscoper (a description that surely deserves a cape and an ability to fly) since my friend and fellow Moodscoper, Sarah, told me about it a couple of years ago.

I've always loved Moodscope's simplicity. And I've always loved Jon's daily emails. Like a friendly neighbour's knock on the door, his thoughts were a welcome interruption to my morning.

Often, his missives offered a much-needed crumb of comfort on an otherwise grey day. Sometimes, Jon's words inspired me to throw a stick for that damned black dog to make it go away. But mostly, his messages of empathy were a gentle reassurance that I'm not alone in how I feel.

Whether you religiously read every email or opened just the odd one or two, no doubt the news that he was moving on came as quite a surprise. It did to me. Actually, more than that, it left me feeling really pretty sad.

So much so that I shunted the so-called important tasks of the day down my 'to-do' list to write and let Jon know how important he'd become to me – even though we'd never met.

I know wasn't the only one who'd felt compelled to write to Jon that instant. Sarah has done the same. And given that we both write for a living, we felt we could do more. So we offered to help with these Moodscope emails. This is my first – Sarah's will be another day soon.

The truth is, I'm honoured to carry on Jon's work and check in with you now and then. Because it's good know someone cares, isn't it?

Even if it's someone you've never met.

What is happiness anyway?

One view of happiness, often called hedonism, is that happiness is simply a matter of subjective feeling. A happy life is one that maximises feelings of pleasure and minimises those of pain. But it can't be as straightforward as that.

Professor Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness and pioneer of positive psychology, offers the following insight.

In happiness studies, researchers contact people at random during the day and ask how much pleasure or pain they are experiencing at that very moment. The researchers then extrapolate their data and calculate an approximate total for the amount of happiness experienced by that person over the week.

Afterwards, they ask the same people 'how happy was your week?' Time and again, people's retrospective view of their happiness differs greatly from the extrapolated total of experienced happiness. How was your holiday? 'It was great,' you reply, honestly. Yet if the researchers had contacted you at various times on your vacation, you would have reported all sorts of miseries - the sunburn, the squabbling kids, the overpriced drinks, and so on. Which is the more meaningful measure of happiness - what you feel at the time or the retrospective view?

As Seligman points out, when we wish someone a happy life (or a happy childhood, or even a happy week), we are not merely wishing that they accumulate a pile of pleasurable moments, irrespective of how they are distributed across one's life-span. We can imagine two lives that contain the exact same amount of momentary happiness. One life, however, is a story of gradual decline from blissful childhood to miserable old age. The other is the reverse  - a tale of gradual improvement. The same amount of happiness but vastly different lives. The difference between the two lives can only be discerned by a retrospective examination of the the life pattern as a whole, not simply by the total in the happiness ledger.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's was by all accounts a miserable man, whose life was full of negative emotion, yet his last words were: 'Tell them it was wonderful!' Whose life is it anyway?

Breaking the worrying habit.

'Normal' worrying serves a useful purpose. It can spur you into taking action and dealing with problems. But when you become weighed down with 'what if' fears and worst-case scenarios, unrelenting worrying can become paralysing. Non-stop doubts and fears can drain your emotional energy, elevate anxiety and get in the way of everyday activities. It can keep you awake at night and make you tense and edgy during the day. No wonder we get worried about worrying.

But remember, chronic worrying is, after all, only a mental habit and like every habit it can be broken.

The starting point is to realise that anxious thoughts are driven by the beliefs, negative and positive, you hold about worrying.

On the negative side, you might believe that your constant worrying is going to drive you mad or make you physically ill. You might even believe that you will eventually spiral out of control and that worrying will take over your life.

More positively, you probably believe that worrying is a form of self protection, helping you to avoid bad situations and preparing you for the worst. Ultimately, you believe that worrying is the first stage to fixing things. Worrying, in this view, leads to solutions.

Clearly, your negative beliefs add to your anxiety. But your positive beliefs about worrying can be equally damaging. The point is that it's extremely hard to break the worry habit if you believe that your worrying is protecting you in some way. To put a life of chronic worry and anxiety behind you, the key is throw away your belief that your excessive worrying serves a positive purpose. You need to accept that worrying is in fact the problem, not in the solution.

Who can I talk to?

We know how powerful talking can be at lifting our mood. Here are three qualities associated with people who are especially good to talk with.

Are they non-judgmental? Some people just can't resist sitting in judgment on what you say. You are right or wrong. They agree or disagree with you. Sometimes, they express their criticisms explicitly, other times by giving unwanted advice, often starting with 'If I were you, I'd ...' People who are non-judgmental make good conversational partners.



Do they share? We all know people who'll happily listen to what we say but rarely share the details of their own life in return. They may be good listeners as such but it's a one-way street. This sort of one-sided conversation may be satisfactory while you 'unload' but ultimately it's like talking to a tape recorder rather than a human being. It's good to share.

Do they challenge you? For a conversation to have therapeutic value, your partner must feel free to challenge you when you say something that deserves to be reality-checked. For example, if there's a discrepancy between what you say you believe in and how you behave in practice, then they should point this out to you and you should respond with honesty and openness. Remember, change comes from challenge.

Smiling inside and out.

We smile because we are happy, but do we feel happier when we smile? A spate of recent studies suggests that our emotions are reinforced - perhaps even driven - by their corresponding facial expressions.

No one yet fully knows why our facial expressions influence our emotions. Nevertheless, our faces do seem to communicate our states of mind not only to others but also to ourselves.

More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that emotional responses influence our feelings, writing 'The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it.' The pioneering 19th century psychologist William James went further. He said that if someone does not physically express an emotion, he or she has not felt it at all. Although few scientists today would go this far, there is plenty of evidence that emotions involve more than just the brain. The face, in particular, appears to play a big role, acting as a feedback loop. The theory is that the facial changes involved in smiling have direct effects on certain brain activities associated with happiness.

So the moral is, smile even if you don't feel like it. The results may just surprise you.

Different strokes for different folks.

Advice on how to cope with depression and anxiety isn't in short supply, but it's unrealistic to think that everything works equally well for all people. This isn't just true for self-help of course, but for a huge range of human experiences.

Take sport, for instance. A coaching tip that connects with one person might have no impact on another. As our friend told us, after years of struggling, his skiing was immediately improved when his instructor explained that turning required the same shift of weight you use to dodge around an opponent in rugby. It worked for him but not for anyone else in the group.

The moral is, try lots of different things until one connects directly with you. You don't know what it's going to be until you give it a go. One Moodscoper told us that for her, the best coping mechanism is a particular form of exercise, not exercise in general. Her guaranteed antidote her is circuit training - a gym session where you go through a prescribed set of exercises, moving from one routine to another without break, followed by a period minutes of stretching and relaxation.

She's tried many other forms of working out but none came close as a mood-booster. She's not exactly sure why circuit training is her thing. Perhaps it's because you have to follow a set routine, with no room for decisions. In a way, it doesn't matter why it works so well. She's just glad that she discovered an infallible method of lifting her mood.