When we’re depressed, it’s so easy to become a “couch potato”. We turn on the television just for background noise and then find ourselves aimlessly watching anything on the screen. Pretty soon the day is gone.
We go to bed frustrated. It never occurs to us that maybe we had something to do with it.
Sometimes we don’t see the connection between the seemingly innocent things we do, like watching tv, and the final outcome in our mood.
If we’re choosing to watch a television show and it doesn’t impede us from getting on with our lives, that’s ok. But it needs to be a conscious decision. We need to be the ones calling the shots, not our old nemesis, depression.
Depression has a voice, a really big voice.
So back to the tv. We hear stories of “other people’s lives”. We are bombarded with commercial messages telling us we need more than we already have. This only adds to our already pervading feelings of “less than”. Why do we do this?
We simply don’t want to be alone with our thoughts. It’s scary.
If we’ve fallen victim to depression in the past, we have every reason to be afraid of being alone with our thoughts. It’s what got us here in the first place, right? So we fill our lives with non-constructive busyness.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
- We can be alone with our thoughts.
- We can endure the silence.
- We can learn to choose what we allow into our lives, into our minds.
We might even find that our thoughts become clearer and not nearly as frightening as we thought they would be when we turn off the outside “noise”. We may feel very uncomfortable with silence at first. But it’s a good idea to include some of it into our lives every week. We don’t need to regularly expose ourselves to television’s “junk food”.
Here’s an interesting quote to finish this post. It’s from Horatio W. Dresser, author and one of the earliest and most distinguished contributors in the field of mind, body, and soul interaction.
“We all find ourselves in particular circumstances that may appear to be holding us back for whatever reason, but we still have the awesome power to decide how to respond to those circumstances with our thoughts and actions. We can always affect the outcome. We always have choices. Often we forget just how much power that fact truly gives us.
And in another part of his book:
It is universally known that there is a natural healing power resident in the body……Many people have learned to relax and keep quiet like the animals, giving nature a free opportunity to heal their maladies.”
So far today, let’s eliminate the “junk” we allow into our lives. It just adds to the garbage it’s already there. Only so much ‘junk” is recyclable.
God bless and have a good day.
