The Palace Or The Rats' Den?

So, you're feeling depressed, or at least not as good as you'd like to feel.

There are all the reasons that we know or can think of, or sometimes even for no apparent reason, why we're in this miserable space yet there seems no real answer. It's like we're living in a Dark Den full of Rats and Big Spiders and can't get out. We just know we feel bad and stuck.

We yearn to have the relief of feeling good, feeling able to participate in life fully, feeling confident and motivated, able to live well, embrace joy and feel it for real, deep within, don't we?

This is the exciting journey I guide people through when they come on my courses and that I'm going to share with you in this book. You need never know depression again! Instead you can learn to live well and `come home to yourself' so you feel good just because you're alive.

If it seems a little overwhelming, take heart. Once you understand the straightforward process and concepts laid out here and follow the simple exercises, the small Cut-Out section towards the back of this book is all you'll need to work with to assimilate everything here and create a life of lasting happiness.

How Your Mind Works

To begin our journey out of depression for good and into the dynamic place where we want to be, (and stay!) let's first understand what's going on in our brain, our own mind, which of course is where the depression is living. We can then understand how it is created and what we can do to rectify it.

The brain is an incredibly complex organ, in fact the most complex thing in the known universe, with immense power! The images of the brain shown below are purely for illustrative purposes and do not represent the scientific positioning of the parts of the brain mentioned; we don't need to get that technical to understand or overcome our problem. For our purposes simplicity is sufficient and, no doubt, preferable.

Figure 1 shows an oval representing your brain. You can see the grey oval inside it representing your prefrontal cortex. This is your consciousness, the part that you know as `you', your perceptions, interactions, awareness and so on. This conscious part can be positive, in the left prefrontal cortex, or negative, in the right prefrontal cortex. It makes up only about 10% of your brain. About 90% is subconscious!

The subconscious part of the brain on the left side has evolved since our caveman days, some 1.7 million years ago. This part of our mind is phenomenal! It has the incredible ability to think for itself and is called our intellectual mind; see Figure 2. It is very positive and, instead of freaking out or throwing our hands up in despair, we can make sensible assessments of things and be rational. It has a vast resource with all our answers and solutions and we naturally perform well and achieve meaningful results. We live well. It's like living in a splendid Palace, feeling good about our selves and our world, even if sometimes our world isn't quite how we'd prefer. We can cope with life's challenges and unexpected `lemons' without slipping into depression.

It's never `what happens' that is the problem, it's what we think about the problem that makes the difference between finding ways forward or being overwhelmed with misery. In the Palace part of our brain we can always make positive choices for ourselves.

The problem is that we also have the original caveman part of our brain, called our primitive mind, which is a very different story; see Figure 3. Imagine a caveman coming out of his cave in the morning. He has to be immediately on the alert for the potential danger out there, which is hardly a calm and relaxed feeling to start his day! If he sees a woolly mammoth he can't possibly relax his guard and think "I'll be ok - that woolly mammoth has probably already had his breakfast"; he must immediately anticipate the worst and run back in his cave for safety. His primitive mind then continuously needs to remind him the woolly mammoth is out there so he keeps guard and doesn't wander out ten minutes later to get snaffled up.

Essentially this part is all about our survival so is always very negative, looking for the worst possible scenario in everything and then constantly reminding us of any perceived threat, lest our survival be put at risk.

The worst thing, from our depression perspective, is that this primitive mind is not an intellect so it can't find ways forward; it can only use the negative data it's stored over the years (in your hippocampus) to remember how you've `survived' before and encourage you to do the same again. It can't work out that you have beliefs and patterns and behaviours that don't serve you; it just records what you've done before and encourages you to repeat these patterns and behaviours, because as you've `survived' before they must be good! This primitive part would be our Rats' Den.

Let's take the example of smoking. Everyone now knows that smoking can kill you and it says so on all the packets. The Palace intellectual part of your mind knows the sensible thing to do is to give up smoking because of all the reasons, including health, that would benefit you, yet your Rats' Den primitive part knows you smoked 20 cigarettes yesterday and survived, so encourages you to smoke another 20 cigarettes today - even though it's killing you! It doesn't have the intellect to realise that this is to your detriment, even though it wants you to survive.

This applies to all the negative programming and beliefs that we took on board right from birth. We are each made up of our mother's DNA and our father's DNA, thus we can look like them and have certain similar traits. Fundamentally however, we learn about our selves and our world from our environment and the people surrounding us. By the time we're just five years old we have developed a firmly ensconced `blueprint' from which we live. If we've had a difficult background it's easy to see where our negative data has come from. Yet even when we've had a very happy childhood it is likely we still received messages such as "When you're good you're approved of and when you're naughty you're disapproved of" or "You must always put other people first" or "Look at that terrible thing those other people did" or "You're only good enough if you get good grades in school" and so on. These lead us to believe our worth is dependent on external approval, to feel we're not as deserving as others, to be judgmental, or feel `not good enough'. None of these serve us yet are faithfully stored in the hippocampus without evaluation (the primitive mind not being an intellect) and we live by them and then experience the frustration of living by them!

To add to the misery further, this part of the mind, having only the capacity of a small child or an animal, is very good at `upping the ante' or even `throwing tantrums' to drag you back to where its stored data says you need to be in order to survive. Hence when you try to change habits or behaviours or do things differently, it is very good at pulling you back to your old ways - like giving you a big craving when you're trying to give up cigarettes or talking you out of doing something positive for yourself. Then you give in and get to beat yourself up all over again, all of this being stored in your hippocampus to then encourage you to repeat again! (Is this sounding familiar?) And, just like a small child who seeks comfort from `bad feelings' by hugging a teddy or sucking their thumb, as adults we seek comfort from this misery in the form of cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, comfort eating, chocolate, OCD, over-spending, self-harming, crying, staying in bed, or whatever else you've chosen. And we know these things only bring us temporary relief because it's not long before we need another cigarette, drink, etc.

What happens is that when we have a genuine positive experience we produce certain brain waves that trigger the production of serotonin (the chemical that makes us feel good). When you choose your `comfort' or `relief' option, your mind has the belief pattern this will make you feel better and that you'll survive (false positive experience), so the same brain waves are produced. However the brain is then fooled into accepting the substitute chemicals in the `relief' option instead of producing serotonin. Hence a genuine good experience can keep you feeling satisfied for a long time while the `comfort' choices only keep you satisfied for a very short time before you need another fix.

No wonder being in this part of the brain feels like living in that Dark Den with all the Rats and Big Spiders. You may be realising already just how many Rats you've been nurturing!

Often anxiety is associated with depression. The awful feelings of breathlessness, churning tummy, sweaty palms - right up to a full panic attack - are all the result of your amygdala stepping in. In the quest for survival the amygdala triggers a rush of adrenalin to enable you to react quickly in the event of threat. This is useful if you are in a burning building or in some other potentially life threatening situation to make good your speedy escape. However, when you're living in the Rats' Den, where you're constantly on the alert for the danger and assuming the worst possible scenarios, your anxiety levels rise. The amygdala consequently responds to this risen level of threat and triggers the `fight or flight' response, as it's known, in less and less serious situations; see Figure 4. Effectively, instead of the `threat alarm' being triggered by a real fire it gets triggered because you've burnt the toast! It's not a pleasant way to live.

Another relevant part of the brain for our purpose is the hypothalamus because it produces our chemicals. As noted, the chemical we want to be producing is serotonin. (When we're really happy we can produce chemicals all the way up to dopamine). When we're producing lots of serotonin we're very brave, coping, happy little souls. When we're in the Rats' Den we only produce anxiety chemicals such as noradrenaline and cortisol (which is very damaging to our health) or, in the case of depression, we don't produce any chemicals at all - and then we wonder why we're miserable! See Figure 5. (N.B. Many anti-depressants just keep any serotonin you are producing in your system a bit longer - they don't change anything).

With this new understanding, it is very evident the desirable place to live is in your Palace mind. So the question is, how did you instead come to be in your Rats' Den feeling low and depressed?

The simple answer is this: by having negative thoughts.

Every single time you have a negative thought you slip out of your Palace into your Rats' Den to a greater or lesser extent. The Palace is positive so you can't be in there with a negative thought!

We have some 60,000 - 90,000 thoughts a day. The question is, typically, how many of yours are negative? This can often be quite a revelation in itself.

I find many people think they're positive but actually are not as they're being positive about their problems. If we spend our lives fixing problems it's like being in the Rats' Den trying to exterminate all the Rats. We're still in the Rats' Den. Even if we were able to get rid of them for a while, we'd just be stood looking at a dark empty Den. Where's the joy in that? And more Rats (problems) will soon arrive because life is full of challenges. In the Palace we don't give the power to the problem. In the Palace we engage our wonderful anterior cingulate gyrus to enable us to move forward.

If you're feeling anything less than good, let alone depressed, your thoughts are clearly on the negative side to a greater or lesser extent and you will no doubt be experiencing at least some of the unpleasant consequences.

All our negative thoughts go into what I will call our `stress bucket'. If you have so many negative thoughts your bucket overflows, you may experience a panic attack or irritable bowel syndrome or various other unpleasant manifestations. It's a very unpleasant place, that Rats' Den!

We have a marvellous way of emptying our bucket each night in the part of our sleep known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) which makes up about 20% of our sleep pattern.

During this time the Rats' Den primitive mind and the Palace intellectual mind come together and the negatives and problems in the Rats' Den are transferred to the Palace where they can be dealt with, thus releasing them from our bucket. You may recall the old adage: `if you've got a problem sleep on it - you'll feel better in the morning' which is the result of this process.

Ideally we have just a little (healthy) stress in our bucket at the end of our day, we are able to go to sleep easily and sleep pleasantly through till morning, any negatives in our bucket being transferred in REM time. We awake feeling refreshed with a nice empty bucket to start the new day.

However, when we've had lots of negative thoughts and been languishing in our Rats' Den our stress bucket can be rather full. We go to sleep, sometimes with difficulty and then either wake up in the early hours and have a hard time getting back to sleep, or we go into a deep `comatosed' sleep from which it is difficult to wake and we struggle to get up. Sometimes we might experience a combination of both.

In the first case, once we've had our 20% quota of REM sleep, our mind has awoken us to avoid overdoing this quota. We often find our thoughts racing around as they were literally still in transfer at this point. We then have the remaining negatives left in our bucket before we even start the new day. This would be an anxiety pattern.

In the second case, we've stayed in REM sleep way beyond our 20% quota, desperately trying to empty our bucket, which is very hard work. We consequently awake feeling exhausted! This would be a depression pattern. The longer we sleep the more we exacerbate the problem in overdoing our REM quota, which is why even after sleeping 10 or 12 hours we can awake feeling more tired than when we went to bed. If you can relate to this limit yourself now to a maximum of 8 hours a night. You may be feeling tired all the time yet too much sleep is not the way to help yourself. It is making the problem worse.

To help you `empty your bucket', experience a healthier sleep pattern and awaken feeling more refreshed I recommend you play the `Relaxation for Sleep' track on the free audio download (or purchasable CD) that accompanies this book, available through www.demischneider.com Play it every night when you go to bed and allow it to send you to sleep. Clients often report significant improvement in just a few days or perhaps a week or two. If you are still awake at the end (it's about half an hour long) or if you wake in the night, play it again. You are re-training your mind. Keep using it for several months after you feel better and then periodically in times of challenge or when you have lots going on. I still do!

Given that your negative thoughts have put you in your Rats' Den with the miserable consequences, consider this:

Who is the only one who thinks in your mind? You are!

Therefore, who is 100% responsible for what goes on in your mind? You are!

Referring back to Figure 1, the good news is that the conscious part of your brain that you identify with as `you' is truly in charge! You have the choice to be in the left positive side or the right negative side of your prefrontal cortex. See Figure 6.

If you don't want to be in your Rats' Den any longer, there really is a simple solution: pack your bags and move into your Palace, which is waiting for you just next door in your own mind! And know that in your Palace there's a throne waiting for you. Isn't that where you truly belong? Isn't it your rightful place to be King or Queen of your own Life?