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3 Ways to Find Positivity When Feeling Depressed

When feeling depressed, one tends to often overlook the positive moments that one experiences because negative irrational thoughts make one disqualify the positives in one’s life. However, we can home in on positive feelings and experiences even when feeling depressed by reflecting on and reliving moments of joy and well-being. The three ways you can accomplish this are below:

Track What is Working Well

You may use a well-being diary for this strategy. In the diary, you monitor the thoughts and events surrounding periods of well-being for the last 24 hours and record them every evening. This active recording of moments of well-being serves four purposes (Otto & Smits, 2011):

  1. With depression making you focus on what is not working well in your life, keeping a well-being diary makes you adept at searching out the good moments.
  2. It helps you relive the good moments and feel the pleasure again when you review these moments in the evening.
  3. It helps you to consider on how you can have similar moments again the next day or in the future.
  4. You can look back and reflect on the valuable periods of joy and well-being you have experienced when you start to feel low.
Another approach to find out what activities lead to most satisfaction and a feeling of well-being is to keep track of what you are doing during a day in a journal or an Excel spreadsheet for two weeks and assign each day an overall rating as below (Peterson, 2006):

10 = it was one of the best days of my life
9 = it was an outstanding day
8 = it was an excellent day
7 = it was a very good day
6 = it was a good day
5 = it was an average day
4 = it was a subpar day
3 = it was a bad day
2 = it was a terrible day
1 = it was one of the worst days of my life

Having recorded your daily activities and overall ratings for two weeks, review your record and look for any patterns. Compare the good days with the bad days to find out how they differ in terms of what you were doing or not doing. If you discover, for example, that on a good day, you exercised, finished a project, or spent more time with your family, then by all means increase these activities. This simple exercise has very practical ramifications in improving your sense of well-being. Of course, use your common sense to find the right balance between what is pleasurable and what might be an overindulgence.

Track Your Accomplishments

In the previous strategy, you tracked your days to find out what “good days” entail for you. This section talks about tracking your successes, achievements, accomplishments, winning, and mastery over your entire life. Accomplishment for the sake of accomplishment without pursuit of happiness, pleasure, or a deeper meaning is considered as one of the elements of well-being (Seligman, 2011). In other words, sometimes you want to win just for the sake of winning. These could be mundane things that you have forgotten (e.g., your first school recital or science project) or things that you take for granted (e.g., raising your kids). The threshold of what constitutes an achievement or accomplishment is defined by you and not others, but be cautious that sometimes depression may make you underestimate this. This exercise will also help you balance your negative thinking that tends to sway you to focus more on your failures. This strategy is, however, in no way a directive to now focus your life on “winning.”

Look for “Positive Exceptions”

When feeling depressed, you are more likely to dwell on your failures or what has not worked well for you. A technique that will help you break this tendency to “disqualify the positives” in your life is to proactively look for positive exceptions. This tool will be particularly helpful if you are facing a problem but are not confident that you have a solution for that problem. Positive exceptions are those times when the expected problem could have occurred but did not occur or was less severe. The very fact that you are aware that there is a problem suggests that you are making a comparison to another time or situation when the problem did not exist. Focusing at that time or situation, ask yourself the following questions to amplify the positive exceptions (Lutz, 2014):
  • Was that time or situation different?
  • How was it different?
  • Was it helpful?
  • How was it helpful?
  • How did you do it?
  • How else did you do it?
  • Did others notice a difference?
  • Were things different between you and others when this happened?
Responding to these questions in this specific sequence will help you recognize not only the pattern of the problem but also your own strengths, competence, and the level of hope while tackling that problem. This then reaffirms and validates your resolve that you can make beneficial changes in your life.

To learn more about evidence-based self-management techniques that are proven to work for depression, check out Dr. Duggal's Author Page.

HARPREET S. DUGGAL, MD, FAPA

REFERENCES

Lutz, A. B. (2014). Learning solution-focused therapy: an illustrated guide. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Otto, M. W., & Smits, J. A. J. (2011). Exercise for mood and anxiety. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. 

Peterson, C. (2006). A primer in positive psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
 
Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish. New York, NY: Atria Paperback.

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