What kind of soul and way of thinking do people with depression have?

According to the book "Emotion and Health": Depression is actually a stress maladjustment disorder. When a person encounters stress, the endocrine system will release a group of hormones called glucose steroids, or stress hormones, the most noteworthy of which is cortisol. Scientists believe that high levels of cortisol interfere with the balance and secretion of serotonin or norepinephrine.

Faced with the same thing, different people have different understandings and different responses. People who are prone to depression are relatively more sensitive, more difficult to resist stress, care more about other people's words, and are more likely to attack themselves emotionally. This makes these people more likely to be in a state of high pressure and unable to relax on weekdays. Then it undergoes quantitative change to qualitative change, causing the switch button of the body to adjust the pressure to be in a state of loss of control or high fatigue, which makes it easy to convert some psychological diseases into physical diseases.

Medication control will return the out-of-control parasympathetic nerves to normal, but if the regulatory valve facing pressure remains the same, or we say that the source of the disease has not been adjusted； Relapse is inevitable. For patients with depression, bad ways of thinking, or cognitive impairment, are the main causes of depression. So, from a psychological point of view, what are the main ways of thinking that can easily cause depression?

Way of thinking one: self-denial

Depressed people are good at denying their positive emotions and positive behaviors; on the contrary, they are particularly "tolerant" of their negative emotions and negative behaviors. They subconsciously allow their negative emotions to grow even though they don’t like them.

If a boy confesses his love to her, she will wonder how a girl as unattractive as herself can be happy, and this relationship will definitely not last. And when the boy finally leaves her, she will smile bitterly, "Look, I told you that I can't be happy."

This type of people generally feel a sense of incompatibility, which may be related to being neglected in childhood and having no confidence in themselves. In marriage and love relationships, there will be a state of downward searching, because the heart thinks that one is not worthy or unworthy. In an intimate relationship, the other person will constantly need to prove to themselves that they are worthy of being loved, which makes everyone very tired.

Behavioral therapy, or mindfulness therapy, is mainly aimed at people with such problems, hoping that they will think positively in everything and face various discomforts and pressures in life with positive emotions.

Way of thinking 2: Blame yourself

This unhealthy perception is the mother of guilt. The specific manifestation is: any negative event that occurs in your life, even if it has nothing to do with you, you will arbitrarily believe that the reason why it happened is your fault, or it proves your incompetence.

When some teachers or leaders scold some people, the scolded people are big-hearted and don't care much, while other people who live cautiously are wondering whether they are talking about themselves. Therefore, it is often the most well-behaved and obedient people who are more likely to take the blame and think it is their own problem.

Placing the blame on yourself will make you feel extremely guilty, and your overwhelming sense of responsibility will force you to carry the world on your back, leaving you breathless.

Thought 3: Either/or

People with this kind of thinking will tend to be absolute when looking at people or things.

For example, if you know a person, his advantages are very attractive to you at first. You will think that he is very good, very talented, and deified. If anything happens to him, you will find various reasons to deify him.； But when a few things happen, you find that he is also a very ordinary mortal. At this time, your heart is at a loss, so you think about him in the opposite direction, and you will feel that he is worthless.

This kind of either/or thinking is essentially a manifestation of perfectionism. It makes you afraid of any mistakes or imperfections. And this way of thinking is unrealistic, because there are rarely such extreme phenomena of polarization in life. No one is absolutely smart or stupid, and no one is absolutely beautiful or ugly. There is not only black and white in life, but also gray areas.

Way of Thinking 4: Generalize from Part to Part

This type of thinking pattern is: if something happens to you once, it will happen again, leading to the worst results.

People who think like this will have stronger reactions than ordinary people to beautiful experiences or sad experiences. Everyone may have had this deviant way of thinking in life, but if you think about most events in this aspect, it will have a huge impact on your life.

A blind man who touches an elephant thinks that the elephant is what he sees. If he overgeneralizes, it becomes absolute. People with this kind of thinking mode will only see one leg of the elephant when dealing with interpersonal relationships, but not the full extent of the problem.

Sometimes, we are not defeated by fate, but ultimately defeated by our own wrong way of thinking.

Way of thinking five: Selective filtering

There has been an experiment in psychology where patients with depression were presented with two faces at the same time, one of joy and one of fear and sadness.

The first thing people with depression notice is the sad face, and they rarely pay attention to pleasant faces, or even neutral faces.

Generally speaking, patients with depression will have such a psychological processing tendency: they will spend more time paying attention to negative emotions or events in life, and they will often recall some unpleasant and bad things.

This way of thinking will allow you to pick out negative information from any situation in life and dwell on it repeatedly, and then you will feel that the world is negative. It's like wearing a pair of tinted glasses that filter out any positive content. There is a lack of mindful thinking, or in other words, mindful thinking is too weak, and the balance of thinking is broken.

Way of thinking six: catastrophizing

The biggest characteristic of this way of thinking is "zooming in" and "zooming out". How do you say this? Specifically, you will habitually exaggerate or reduce certain facts too much.

Emotions that magnify one's own mistakes, imperfections, or fears and exaggerate their importance and disastrous consequences. If you magnify the good side, you won't create so much fear.

When you get along with such a person, others will stay away from you for a long time. The little heart can't bear the sudden shock. Extreme fear and catastrophic scene descriptions of things that may not happen in the future, living in fear all day long, making everyone scared.

Way of thinking seven: random labeling

Labeling yourself means using mistakes to create an entirely negative self-image.

It is an extreme form of generalization, and the idea behind it is that "when you measure a person, you should use his mistakes as the yardstick." ”Just use a sentence that starts with "I am a..." to describe your mistake, and you are probably labeling yourself.

In addition, labeling can cause you to use inaccurate words and be overly emotional when describing things.

For example: When you are faced with the temptation of a box of ice cream, but want to lose weight, you will think like this: I hate myself so much, I am such a pig. This kind of thinking will make you very upset, and then the most likely thing is that you will be emotional and sweep up all the ice cream.

Thinking style eight: Emotional reasoning

I feel guilty, so I must have done something wrong.

I feel broken, so my problem must be unsolvable. I'm not in the mood to do anything, so I might as well lie on the couch and just stare. If I feel inferior, then I must be a useless person.

This way of thinking is: you regard emotions as the basis for facts. Every time you feel down, there is almost always emotional reasoning at play.

A common consequence of emotional reasoning is procrastination. The reason why you haven't cleaned your home for a week is because you tell yourself: I'm so annoyed when I think about all these messy housework. It seems that it's very difficult to clean it up, so it's better not to do it and wait until later.

But in fact, the cleaning job at home is not as bad as you thought. You have been deceiving yourself because you are accustomed to letting negative feelings guide your behavior.

Thinking style nine: jumping to conclusions

Without investigation and evidence, negative conclusions are quickly and arbitrarily drawn. To put it simply, it is to make subjective assumptions, speculate on other people's thoughts, and turn them into negatives.

For example: When you have dinner with your partner after get off work and she appears unhappy, you will have this automatic thought: She is angry with me. Did I do something wrong?

But in fact, if you are willing to ask her more, you will know that she just had some unpleasant things with her colleagues in the company today.

This pattern of seeking trouble will form a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing disharmony in our interpersonal relationships. Although nothing happened at first.

Prophetic error is a bit like predicting the future, and what you predict must be your unlucky moments, not good luck. This mode of thinking makes you think that something bad will happen and makes you believe it.

Suppose you call a friend of yours and there is no answer.

You waited for a long time, but he still didn't reply. You will think that he just doesn't want to call you back or contact you. ——The conclusion of mind reading.

Then, you will get even more angry and decide never to call him again, because you will think: If I call him again, he will think that I am pestering him, and I can't afford to embarrass this person. ——Negative prophecy, prophetic error.

But in fact, this friend did not receive your call because he was traveling abroad. Only then did you realize that all the torture was caused by you.

Way of thinking ten: should law

Whether you are facing yourself or others, you will try to use "should" sentences to spur yourself or demand others.

You always say to yourself: I should do this, I must do that. But this way of thinking will only make you feel stressed and resentful.

In most cases, you will become depressed and discouraged. Because when your actual performance is lower than expected standards, your use of "should" or "shouldn't" will make yourself feel ashamed and guilty, and you will hate yourself even more.

And when you impose your "should rules" on others, you will feel even more frustrated, because this kind of thinking will only make you lose control, irritable and resentful. If the moral behavior of others falls below your expectations, you will see yourself as the embodiment of justice and become resentful.

At this time, either you lower your expectations, or you will always be obsessed with human behavior that does not meet your expectations, making your mood worse and worse.

The emergence of our way of thinking is closely related to what we have experienced and the people we have met. Past injuries have made my thinking negative, negative, and extreme. Limited cognition and vision have also fixed our thinking. People have always said that reading thousands of books and traveling thousands of miles is not unreasonable. Go see the bigger, broader, more comprehensive world outside, and look back at the things in front of you, and you will feel that it is not that important.

Some people say that depressed people are like children. To a certain extent, this means that their thinking is still at a relatively low-dimensional level. You will be more concerned, more entangled, and more unable to let go. It's like a fight between two children. It seems trivial to adults, but the children think it is very important.

Of course, not all patients with depression are like this. There are many patients who are extremely smart and have high-dimensional thinking. There are countless causes of depression, and the above is just a description of the possibilities. This is not to blame everyone, but more to see if there is such a situation. Analyzing the reasons behind it through such situations may allow us to let go of certain things and find our own high respect and sense of value in life. Live relaxed and comfortable. Let happiness dominate our parasympathetic nerves, eat well, sleep well, and be happy every day.

(The article comes from the "Youlai Psychology" public account, follow it to get more popular science. )