Find Out If You’re Susceptible To Depression

June 9th, 2007

Find Out If You’re Susceptible To Depression

It’s commonly known that you should go to the doctors for regular checkups. Depending on what your getting checked for, you might need to go every 4,6, or maybe even 12 months.

Why do people go for checkups? Because they want to know if there’s a possibility they might be coming down with some type of disorder, cancer or disease.

Unfortunately, there are few tests that can tell you whether or not you’re about to come down with a bout of depression. You have to go for expensive and nerve-wrecking blood tests to see if you have the genes that make you more susceptible to it, but since it’s usually caused by the events in your life - there is no way to catch it before it starts.

However thanks to a man named Martin Seligman, a famous psychologist, just by observing your life a bit more closely you can tell how easily you can fight off a bout of depression.

Optimist Or Pessimist?

By paying attention to the way we think and act, we can gain further insights as to our inner cognitions. By understanding them we can figure out how easily our body can deal with stress - which is what causes depression.

Research has proven that optimists have the ability to fight off bodily stress much easier than pessimists. This stress includes physical stress from exercise, internal stress, mental stress, and all other kinds of stress.

Here are 3 things you can look at to see if you are less or more likely to develop major depression in your lifetime.

Rumination - This is simply ruminating over things that have already happened. Do you mull over events that occurred a few days ago, even if there’s nothing you can do to change the circumstances? If so, you have a much greater chance of developing depression.
Helplessness - How easily do you give up on projects or other things you’re trying to accomplish? If you show helplessness, that is, if you learn to become helpless after failing at something a few times, you have a much greater chance of developing depression. An example of this would be starting a blog and quitting after 2 months.
Pessimism - Do you find yourself looking at the bad aspects of every situation? If something bad happens, do you focus on how bad it is or do you try to find the positives in the situation? Do you complain a lot? Do you feel as if you’re never going to achieve your goals or complete a task you want to complete? If you find yourself doing any of these things, you have a much greater chance of developing depression.

Throughout the next week, try to keep these ideas fresh in your mind. Come back to this post and refresh every other day or so. Then live the next week without trying to change anything, and see if you display any of these qualities.

If you do, there’s a good chance of you developing depression if you go through a rough patch in your life. You should then start to develop systems for what you should do in each scenario.

If you catch yourself thinking negative thoughts about your future, immediately turn that image into something positive. If you feel as if you want to give up on exercising, a project your working on, or anything else, please don’t. By sticking with it you may actually be strengthening your self-esteem and lessening your chances of developing depression.

At this website I try to teach you about things that will improve your life to the maximum. I think learning how to combat depression is a very important thing because the opposite of having the perfect happiness is being depressed!

Please take the next week or so to see if you have these qualities. If so, don’t be upset that you do - it’s part of who you are. Instead of being upset that you weren’t born with an optimistic view of life, be optimistic that you found this website and know how to change yourself!

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