Rethinking Depression

Unhappiness happens.

It’s a natural part of the human experience. To pathologize unhappiness just because it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient and unfun isn’t a good idea.

In the first part of the book, Maisel *goes off* on how our bouts with unhappiness and any other uncomfortable emotion have been fabricated into disorders that greatly benefit the medical establishment but leave us all at a loss for how to best address the inherent challenges of life.

The rest of the book is all about how we can create happiness in our lives by rockin’ our existential program.

The book is PACKED with the how-to’s.

Here are a few of my favorite Big Ideas on to rock it.

Existential Intelligence.

We went from thinking it was all about IQ to embracing Howard Gardner’s ideas about “multiple intelligences” to Daniel Goleman’s “emotional intelligence,” but who ever talks about existential intelligence?

Fact is, it’s the most important intelligence out there.

As Maisel continues: “We may be capable in any number of ways, but we are just a bundle of capabilities until we apply our existential intelligence. Existential intelligence is the coordinating intelligence, the intelligence that all the other intelligences serve. You may be smart enough to build a very big bomb, a rocket to Mars, a cloning machine, or a two-hundred-story tower, but if you do not ask yourself whether you should build it, you have applied only your raw intelligence to the task and not your existential intelligence.”

How’s YOUR existential intelligence?

You good at creating meaning in your life?

This book is all about helping us become existential geniuses. Me likes. :)

Are you waiting for life to “finally settle down.”

Prolly want to drop that idea. :)

Fact is, life is *never* going to stop throwing us curveballs.

The question is: When are we going to get better at hitting them?

As we commit to living authentically with the day-to-day challenges life presents, let’s remember Joseph Campbell’s wisdom (see Notes on Pathways to Bliss): “The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”

Here’s to learning to hit the curveballs on our never-ending hero’s journey!

—> “If a thought serves you, you keep it. If it doesn’t serve you, you reject it.”

Well that makes it simple, eh?

Getting in control of our minds, as we know, is *essential* to our flourishing.

Here’s some more mojo in it:

So much goodness in there.

First, we’ve gotta realize that our thoughts create our feelings.

Remember: Thoughts —> Feelings.

Next time you’re feeling funky, see if you can observe the thoughts that are swimming around in your head and/or that were making waves right before the funk set in.

It’s easy to think we just get hit by emotional waves but as we look into it a little more deeply we can see the disempowering thoughts raining on our parade.

As Maisel asks: Where’s the hall monitor?!

Where’s the voice checking in and making sure those thoughts running around in our heads are actually serving us?!

Reminds me of Alan Cohen’s “thought bouncers” from his great book Why Your Life Sucks (see Notes): “Your real enemies are the self-defeating thoughts, paltry expectations, and beliefs that you must live at less than full throttle. You will experience as much pain as you are willing to accept. You do have control over how much you hurt. Pain happens; suffering is optional. You can choose thoughts that bring you relief rather than imprisonment. To find your freedom, stand at the doorway of your mind and monitor your thoughts. Notice which ones lift you and which ones drag you down. Then, like a bouncer at an exclusive party, admit only those on the invitation list and send the others back where they came from. Fate is not a net cast over you by capricious fortune; it is a garden you cultivate by the thoughts you attend to. Shift your attention and you will shift your life.”

Back to the hall monitor.

Maisel advises: “You may feel that your life sucks, but you are not free to unleash that thought and let it run through the halls of your mind like a banshee. The feeling may sit like a lump in your chest, but the thought is there for you to scrutinize and to interrogate. How do you interrogate it? By asking, “How does this thought serve me?” The question isn’t whether a thought like “My life sucks” is irrational or unreasonable. The question is whether or not it serves you. That is the measure of any thought you think — does it serve you in your efforts to earn the experience of authenticity?”

Here’s to monitoring our thoughts and getting rid of the ones that don’t serve us! :)

One of the Big Ideas throughout the book is the idea of making yourself proud with your moment-to-moment and day-to-day decisions.

I love it so much that it’s become a guiding mantra and question of mine: “How can you make yourself proud?”

Every moment gives us an opportunity to, as Abraham Maslow tells us, step forward into growth or back into safety and I can’t think of a better question to help guide us.

Begs the question: How can you make yourself proud today?

P.S. Here’s a little more mojo on making ourselves proud: “You are bound to take vacations from meaning, since every minute of the day can’t be made to feel meaningful. But you try not to take vacations from personal pride. In order to survive, you may decide to do things that do not make you proud. Out of fear you may fail to speak up. Out of sloth and carelessness you may waste a day, a year, or a decade. To save your skin you may harm another. But at least you will know that you are violating your own prime directive. You will feel guilt and know to do better next time.”

This is huge.

Let’s compare the two questions:

a) “How am I feeling?” vs.

b) “Where should I invest meaning next?”

Which do you think is going to more consistently lead to happiness?

* Insert Jeopardy music *

Seriously.

Feel into those two questions right now.

When we incessantly ask ourselves how we’re feeling we’re bound to feel craptastic at times.

And, as Maisel points out: “It is one of the universe’s ironic little jokes that human beings check in with themselves about their mood at exactly the moment when their mood might be at its lowest. Rarely do we check in on our mood when we are having a good time or working hard on something engrossing. At those moments it goes without saying how we are feeling — just fine — and so we don’t bother to announce our good mood to ourselves. We wait until we aren’t occupied and aren’t actively making meaning to check in. How brilliant is that?”

On the other hand, when we consistently ask ourselves how we can invest our energy in meaningful activities next, we’re put on a forward trajectory that is bound to create more happiness.

So, let’s stop asking ourselves how we’re feeling and start asking how we can make ourselves proud, eh?

You want a shortcut to making meaning?

Here it is:

Imagine who you would like to be—the person it would make you proudest to be.

Act like that person.

Repeat.

Yes, that’s a very challenging standard. Yes, we will often fall short of it. But by returning to this ideal again and again we make meaning and, in the process, we create our most authentically awesome lives.

So, let’s get on that.