Have yo ever had a day where life just beats you down? When nothing goes your way and no matter how hard to try to stay positive you just keep falling back in to the pit? I’m willing to bet that most of you have. Research shows that during these times most of you will try to stay positive by any means necessary. It might be with a drink or it might be with meditation.
There is so much hype around positive thinking and trying to be happy. Doctors will even prescribe anti-depressants in an attempt to keep you happy.
But what if our whole relationship around positive thinking and being happy is wrong? What if by trying to stay positive and trying to be happy all the time the very opposite happens? Well this is exactly what happens, and I’ll get in to the why shortly. Now ask yourself this. What if you give yourself permission to think negatively? What if you even give yourself permission to be depressed? And what if negative thinking and falling in to depression is just as important for a balanced life as positive thinking and falling in love? Well actually it is.
But why? The irony of trying to stay positive all the time is that we suppress the part of us that is negative and this suppression can ultimately result in chronic depression and in extreme cases even suicide.
When you allow yourself to fall in to negative thinking because life gets challenging that is okay. When you allow yourself to get depressed and even wallow in self-pity that is okay too. This is an acute form of depression. It is basically allowing yourself to be miserable and depressed so that you can express and release that energy, which is a form of tension. Normally after a few days or maybe a week in this state you will start to feel better and more normal. Think of it like having an emotion flu where the emotional immune system combats the emotional flu with the emotional anti-bodies that are produced from acute depression. Another way to think of this is as mindful depression, where you know it is necessary for healing and rather that fighting the experience you embrace it.
All of your emotions, both negative and positive, are only transient. By this I mean your emotions are designed to fluctuate and change over time. When you are feeling happy it is only temporary, just like when you feel sad or depressed it is only temporary.
The problem with the hype around positive thinking is that if you try to hold on to the emotions that make you feel good and run away from or mask the emotions that make you feel bad then ultimately you will fail and end up feeling bad anyway, but it will be much worse. If you do this all the time you will get burnt out and fall in to chronic depression and anxiety which has all sorts of negative affect on the body, mind and spirit. Loss of appetite, lack of sleep, easy to anger, lack of energy etc. So why not embrace the negativity when it shows up? Give yourself permission to let the negativity have a breath of fresh air.
There is one more important element to understand and that’s inner peace. Regardless of whether you are thinking positively or negatively it is still possible to maintain inner peace. By giving yourself permission to feel and express the full range of emotions and thoughts, regardless of how good or bad they are, you will find that you can be at peace with the experience. This is because you are willingly allowing yourself to have the experience.
Remember that we live in a world of duality. This means that everything has a polar opposite. Light and dark, good and bad, positive charge and negative charge, up and down and so on. With out experiencing and understanding one it is simply impossible to experience and understand the other. This is why positive and negative feelings fluctuate. It’s the way nature was designed. If you try to only hold on to positive thinking you are essentially fighting nature and will ultimately do more damage to yourself that good.
If you’re struggling with chronic depression then please get in contact. We can work together to help you rebalance your life.