Back in 2002 when I was becoming a serious student of depression treatment I learned something that literally changed my life.  I found out that what was commonly understood about brain flexibility or neuroplasticity was incorrect.  For a long time, right up to the late ‘90s it was thought that your brain was only “plastic” or able to change in significant ways until a person was in their early 20s.  After that if you had a serious brain injury or tumor and lost some brain functionality you were thought to be out of luck.

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It’s amazing how the way we focus our lives can impact how we are feeling.  It’s like zooming in and out of a map on a smart phone with GPS.  If we zoom all the way in we can see exactly where we are sitting at the moment.  The focus is all us.

If we zoom out we can see the larger world around us.  All of the homes, stores, offices, streets, highways, etc. that surround us.  We gain a perspective about our world that can’t be appreciated when we are zoomed way in.

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In our most recent Quick Boost poll we participants about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).  We asked about it because there is a tremendous amount of research that shows that it is very effective for treating depression.  It has been made popular by a number of helpful books, not the least of these is Feeling Good by Dr. David Burns an psychiatrist.

The biggest response to our poll was "I don’t know what CBT is".  A third of our respondents choose this.  This is very sad because this is such an important technique for therapy and for self-study.  Countless hours of therapy and personal work might be wasted by depressed people because they don't know about CBT.

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Our poll last week asked about your use of meditation to help with depression.  It was interesting to learn that the two most frequent responses were that you do some meditation or that you tried it and it didn't work.  If we look at the research on the use of meditation for depression treatment we may understand the reason that we see these results.

There is a particular type of meditation, called mindfulness that has been shown to reduce the relapse rate of depression by 50%.  This is true for people who have had three or more bouts of depression.  That makes this result astoundingly good because the more experience you have with depression the more likely it is that you will have a relapse – 70% to 80% within a year if you have had three or more bouts.

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Sometimes, when we've had a great difficulty with depression in life, when we've had multiple bouts of prolonged depression or difficult to treat depression, we can become defined by our depression.  We might also start to describe ourselves in terms of our symptoms and focus a lot of our energy on trying to get out of the depression box.  Often though it's helpful to stop trying to break out of the box, step back, and look at what is the box we call depression and importantly what is the rest of our lives.

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