Ishtarr
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Joined: 4/30/2008
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FrostedFlake
This could be what Ishtar meant by, "Fake it till you make it.".
It is, though it's more than just that.
Just smiling will do a lot, but the most important thing I did was fake enthusiasm.
The hardest thing for me during my depression was not being able to be enthusiastic about anything. I just didn't care enough about anything to be enthusiastic about it.
So I would try to go through the motion of eating better, socializing, getting active and so on (all the things everybody constantly advices you to do) but it would suck, because I didn't feel enthusiastic about doing it, which just turned my mood even more sour, which in turn made the depression worse.
My turn around point came when I decided that I would fake being happy/enthusiastic about doing all the things I knew I should, but didn't want to do. I basically got an attitude that similar to what I assume an actor has when trying to realistically portray a role. I pretended the world was a stage, and I was playing the role of a happy person convincingly enough so that people would actually believe I was happy. (The irony about it is that I started doing it because I wanted people to stop bugging me with good advice, and just leave me along to wallow in my depression.)
The thing about it is though, that you can't play a role without trying to adopt the mindset of somebody who would actually feel whatever the role is meant to portray. That means that to convincingly "play" happy, you need to ban negative thoughts and focus on positive things in order to be able to keep up the part convincingly.
Playing happy and pretending to thinking positively in the end became such a second nature that I became happy and thought positively. The role I was playing became my reality, because -as other people have pointed out- the chemical imbalance that causes depressing is very much affected by not only what you do, but HOW you do it.
Changing the how, even if it's just forced and pretended, will affect your brain chemistry in the long run.
It took me about a year of faking it before I could feel good enough on my own to get of medication, though I started noticing positive changes before that. At the one year point, I was far from perfect, and still had occasional relapses, some of which could span several weeks of total despair, but faking it has helped me through those again.
Now, 6 years after getting of medication, I don't think I'm ever actually depressed again, not even for a moment. And I still use faking it as a tool to get me through occasional minor instances of the blues.
I don't know if a qualified therapist would recommend doing it this way - I know mine was very much against "faking it"- but it's worked for me, while I don't feel anything any of the several therapists I've had (I've been in a mental hospital from age 16 - 17) actually helped until I started "fake" applying the advice they actually gave me.
< Message edited by Ishtarr -- 12/11/2011 2:24:15 PM >
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RE: Are there any real dominant women into TPE? - 
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I wish there were a one size fits all fix. The exercise thing... utter bollocks. I was in the day hospital for a few weeks and they made us walk around the hospital grounds in the dead of freakin winter. If any of us had had the wherewithal there would have been an uprising! But, eating properly and being normally active make you PHYSICALLY better, so that's one less thing. 
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