How do you focus?

There's an old saying about the glass being half-full or half-empty. It's true that some of us opt for seeing the bad side of experiences and events forgetting about the good things.

What people do (some people)d is to focus unhealthily on one negative detail, excluding a host of positives that surround it. That kind of person is usually more prone to depression and you don't need a Psychology graduation to see why.


Our contemporary way of life doesn't help. Being more about having than being, underligns appearances and tends to make us blind to small and pleasureable details in our lives. The ancient Greek philosophers were aware of this nasty tendency and took pains to caution people about it.

If you don't feel like reading Plato or Aristotle - and they can give you great moments of reflexion - there are contemporary authors who write about the same issues in a more modern way. Alain de Botton and A. C. Graylings come to mind immediatly. Both can be found in Amazon.

 

Finding moments of happiness (note I wrote "moments of happiness" and not happiness) is not a question of being merry and oblivious to reality. It's a question of intelligence.

 

DEPRESSION AND ITS EFFECTS ON OUR SENSES

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/dec/01-how-depression-dulls-the-world-literally?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverMag+%28Discover+Magazine%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

This recent study shows how depression really dulls our senses. What a shame some people still think depression is just a "state of mind" that will just go away.

The sun is glowing outside

Summer is here, and for most of us it is great, it means beaches, light clothing, fresh drinks and ice creams. But for some of us it is aggressive, it makes us down, which for those in the first case seems very strange… What happens, in simple words, is a kind of excessive contrast between the person state of mind and the state of mind of the whole world… one feels depressed and grey, and outside the window there is a burning yellow strong sun and people are talking loud, very happy, full of plans and parties, when all one wants is to go through this day feeling the best one can. Friends would think a sunny day would help you feeling better, would cheer you up, a therapist could easily understand it, and help to figure it out.

DEPRESSION

Depression is about loss. Loss of someone or something, or the love of it, that makes you fear for another loss... and another...and another... for all your life.
It's as if you are encapsulated in time: better said, in the past. The present is unbearable, there's no future. This may be more than depression, it can be melancholia, a Greek word meaning black bile. The Greeks knew it had to do with humour and Aristotle thought it could help creativity. Great thinkers, poets and artists, he used to say, are usually prone to melancholia bouts.
Some say that melancholic people have an ideal within themselves so strong that their ego cannot ever reach that perfect model and keeps punishing itself.
The thing is: how can there be such a strong omnipotent and tyrannical ideal that makes you crawl whenever you feel you are not corresponding to its demands? Think about it and the extraordinary power you might have given to someone or something.

The photo is quite a depressing one. It's a bunker from WWII part of the so-called Atlantic Wall that the nazis built on the Atlantic shore. Many of these huge and ugly constructions can  still be seen there. Paul Virilio published a book on them (http://www.infoamerica.org/teoria/virilio1.htm).