My Five-Stroke Depression Cure
How I stumbled on a simple technique that changed my life.
“I have been one acquainted with the night.” -Robert Frost
It all started for me when I was in psychology grad school, many years ago. For a long time I had struggled with depression. But being in a very difficult graduate school program in psychology and living, nearly broke, in a large city away from home for the first time in my young life was more stress than I’d ever experienced before.
The depression and anxiety had usually been a constant background ache. But now it was much worse. I had never before had these fleeting and terrifying thoughts of taking my life. And nothing I could do at that point made things any better.
This went on for months until one snowy evening after the Christmas break. That was the night when I realized what I was doing all wrong. And this realization led me to stumble upon a way to feel better. At the time (the mid-1970s) most psychologists would not have believed that what I did would work as well as it did. But we now understand how such “self-cures” can dissolve many cases of depression.
It was after a Friday evening dinner and movie out with some other grad students. I was walking through a softly falling snow back to my apartment. That was when I realized that there was something wrong with my thinking.
One of my classmates had said something as we were all splitting up to go home. We had shared the exact same evening of dinner and a movie, then grabbing a beer yogether. As we were was putting on our coats, he said something about how pleasant the evening had been. He listed the good dinner, the good movie, the good friends.
A little speech like that may sound kind of trite. If you are feeling depressed, you may think these are not things you usually feel.
Which was exactly what I thought.
But then I started to wonder about that. He and I had been through the same evening. But we were remembering it so differently.
He focused on the good parts of our evening out. Meanwhile, I had focused on my own miseries and on what I had thought was missing.
I realized that much of the time my thinking patterns seemed to be very different from his. For the first time, I got a kind of overhead view, an outsider’s view of my thinking patterns. Of my habitual way of summarizing an experience to myself. My thinking was negative, even dark at times. Could this “mental habit” have been making me more depressed — literally making me ill?
While reading research for a term paper, I had just learned that our thinking patterns can be viewed simply as habits. And habits don’t change much day to day. Our minds mostly run on “automatic pilot.” We see the world, experience what happens to us, in nearly the same way, day after day, year after year. Most of the time, we think the same basic things over and over again.
Unlike my always happy friend, I seldom focused on the pleasure I got from things. The question was, if that was true of my thinking, and it was making me sick, could I change it? Could I break the habit of making myself unhappy?
I decided to do an experiment. It was not going to involve finding a therapist who would try to help me “get to the bottom of things.” It wasn’t even going to involve talking to anyone about my stress, my problems. And it was not going to involve medications.
Instead, I wanted to see if I could just make myself build different thinking habits. I aimed to do this by focusing my attention on the positives. In particular, I thought I would try focusing on, remembering, the pleasure experiences I’d had that day. To perform a simple act of focusing on memories, but only on the positive memories.
First I did a small mental test run. I confirmed that even in my worst moods, I could at least remember something pleasurable from the day. It might have been something almost too trivial to notice. The feel of hot water on a washcloth when I washed my face in the morning. The first taste of my morning coffee. Little stuff like that.
This idea excited me. I wanted to do this. To remember deliberately. To think of the good, pleasurable things I had experienced, and to do it several times during my day. To make it a habit.
To make sure I actually did it, I needed to set it as a goal. And that meant keeping track of how much I did it. We did not have phone “apps” in those days (or smart phones, or even daily access to computers.) Instead, I bought a cheap golf stroke counter. It was a little plastic thing for recording golf strokes. I started to carry it in my pocket.
The next morning, I made my first mental list of five things I had gotten pleasure from that day. Things like “I enjoyed the hot shower I had” and “breakfast toast and butter with coffee was good.” Birds singing. A pretty woman had just smiled at me. The sun glimmering on the water of the Mississippi River as I walked to class.
I tried to remember each of these experiences as vividly as I could. To re-experience the pleasure. And to hold my mental focus on each of them for five or ten seconds.
Every time I conjured up my mental list of pleasures (a different list each time), I added one “stroke” to my golf counter. The goal was to click the counter at least five times a day. Five clicks would show that I had immersed myself mentally in 25 pleasure experiences that day. I thus aimed to have five “doses” of my “mental antidepressant” by the end of the day.
Basically, (as we now know), this amounted to forcing my brain to strengthen 25 emotionally, physically pleasurable memory circuits in my brain every day. It was deliberately using my memory as a drug.
Did it help? Long story short, yes!
Within a week I was feeling better. Within two week I felt much better. So much so that stopped counting. It only took two weeks for me to get depression free. I have no further memory of struggling with depression during that period of my life.
I would say that for me, this worked as well as antidepressants would have. It might work as well for others. We now know that mental techniques like these can be very effective at managing depressions.
Forty years after my walk home that snowy night, such techniques have much more scientific backing than they did then. Thousands of research studies have shown that such simple “cures” really are “cures.” People can use a wide range of mental and physical techniques to treat not only depression, but anxiety, panic attacks, personality disorders, and PTSD. Some of these approaches have names such as cognitive-behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, etc. But even the health news section carries stories that show how simple actions tend to improve moods. Doing something simple can help a lot with moods. Taking walks, mindfulness meditation, decluttering your coffee table.
Not everything works like magic for everyone, of course. But we know that more people manage to treat their own moods effectively than therapists tended to believe. And most often, the person who has done this can tell you a few things that tend to make them feel better.
In fact, there are now so many books, articles and treatment approaches to these “simple cures” that a person might not even know where to start! One book may say “keep a gratitude journal” and another may say “develop a support network” or learn “mindfulness meditation.” All of which are good.
For some people, especially people who are struggling with a painful depression, so many sources of advice may be overwhelming. But you don’t have to try them all. Just pick what appeals to you.
My suggestion, for now, would be to see if the five-stroke cure helps. If not, try something else. For the next few days:
Think about five pleasant things you have experienced so far today. Remember each of them for a moment. Relive them in your mind. Focus on what was pleasant, delicious, beautiful, juicy, or just nice about them.
Write down a number, put a star on a chart, or keep mental count each time you do this. One check mark for every five nice memories. At the end of the day, try to make sure that you have recorded five “strokes,”. That means you’ll have practiced 25 pleasure memories that day.
If you get even a ten percent improvement in your mood that day, I can almost guarantee you that you’ve gotten some genuine benefit from the technique. Maybe even more than you would have gotten, on average, from taking a daily dose of antidepressant. I’ll explain why in an upcoming post.
Just enjoy the experiment.
(Note: Greg Korgeski, Ph.D. is a Vermont licensed psychologist (“Psychologist -doctorate ) and a free range writer. He is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Your Social IQ, and of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Phobias. The above article is not a substitute for professional advice or medical, psychological or other care that you may need. Use any suggestions here at your own risk and after consulting with your own care providers, if need be..
