If you read my musings you will know I often say how something is my ill-informed opinion. This one is something I know loads about and might surprise a few. I am going to talk about how what is made out as hard does not necessarily have to be and how the insurmountable often isn’t. I am going to shake a theory and some duff diagnosis with some reality and maybe you might find something in here that will help you if what I talk about affects you.

There are millions of people in Britain and all over the world diagnosed with ‘depression’. Many, or maybe even most of those people do not have depression. Depression is a chemical imbalance causing many people much pain and suffering. These people need serious medication as they cannot function without it. I’m not talking about that one. I am talking about the one that most people who get diagnosed with depression actually have. This is people who have got a bit down because things aren’t working out as they might. They might also get anxious and even panicky from time to time because of this. This is not something to be taking drugs for. This is lack of confidence.

Confidence is key to how your day pans out. It is crucial to how you look at who you are and how you take on the world. Some people struggle with confidence in their ability to do things. This is because they are concerned about measuring up to what they believe to be the bench mark for acceptable performance, be it parenting or sales, sports or cooking, whatever. If we think we aren’t good enough at what we do. We lose confidence in ourselves and this gets us down. It causes us to be anxious and maybe in extreme cases even have involuntary panic attacks about something we cannot see or describe. One just feels panicky. It is unpleasant.

Sadly though the massive lobby of the drugs companies and the lack of resources in medical care means if you explain these feelings to a doctor he will tell you that you are depressed and prescribe some anti-depressants. Which are mind altering drugs to give you some sort of feeling that it’s all ok. Even though your circumstances have not changed. How can that possibly help? What you need to do is look in the mirror and understand what you are, who you are, what you are good at and what really matters. Are you actually so rubbish or are you just uniquely you?

I am not talking about things of which I have no knowledge. Due to the poisonous actions of a vile creature I once worked with I had a breakdown and spent years on anti-depressants and so on. Very much wondering every day, what is the point? Just trudging from day to day with no great desire to see another one. While all that was going on I was also feeling very homesick. I just wanted to go back to New Zealand.

One day though I started to get things right in my head. I stopped taking the pills and stopped trying to do things I was not able to do and do things I could do instead, sort of. I know people don’t hang around blogs for long so will keep the details brief. What the simple point is though is that what you need is to get perspective and understand what is important and what is not.

Get things and circumstances right in your brain and do not take drugs to mask a reality. When I decided to stop taking the drugs I read the potential side effects of doing so. It turned out that many of the issues I had been battling were side effects of the pills!! I always read the pamphlet in boxes of drugs now.

We all have things we are good at and crap at. I am all thumbs when it comes to DIY for example. You could send me to a cabinet maker’s college and I would churn out poorly fashioned timber products for ever. I do not have an eye for DIY and I never will have. Luckily I can pay tradesmen to do the jobs I can’t. I don’t have a knack for throwing things a long way. My arm action doesn’t work like that so no point me fielding on the boundary in a game of Cricket.

I have no patience for delicate operations like, as a kid, making kit-sets or anything that takes any attention to detail. You cannot teach it to me. I have other skills. I celebrate those. You will have things you are good at. Don’t try to be good at everything because you aren’t, no-one is. Don’t beat yourself up about things you can’t change. Change the things you can.

I get back to the confidence thing. If you are confident you have no need to worry about depression as you are happy and confident. “But Sandy I lack confidence” you might be saying to yourself. Well sort it out. Get your confidence back. Do it in little steps. Don’t try and do things that you feel you will fail at. Do things you know you can do, things that are second nature. You can do those alright can’t you? Then do a little more. Celebrate your success.

Do not bite off more than you can chew. You maybe think you are worthless or a doormat or weak or ignorant, or whatever. You may well be some of those things but that is easily fixed with little steps. By that I mean don’t look at problems as a whole. Address one thing at a time, like taking down a wall one brick at a time. Every single thing can be dismantled; as do all problems have a solution. It’s figuring it out that is the challenge. Do it in bits, address things one thing at a time Little steps.

Take a moment to enjoy getting something right. Don’t do things that make your life a misery, do something else. It’s not being lazy or avoiding the issue. It is understanding what is getting you down and back stepping a bit to look at things a different way. This applies to work as much as your private life.

I earn a lot less than I could doing what I do, but I do what I do because I can do it without people monstering me for more than I am able to contribute on my own ability. I work with nice people who appreciate what I do rather than people who see me purely as a means to generate profit. I’ve done that as well and it made me ill. It’s more lucrative but it makes your life worse.

We can actually do anything we want to do (within reason) just by understanding things properly. Not by accepting the status quo and believing hype or accepted thinking. My best example of this is stopping smoking. The accepted public thinking is that stopping smoking is one of the hardest things you can do. Well actually it is not. It is easy. I know it is easy because I did it.

I stopped from 40-60 Red Marlboro’s a day to none without any patches or medication. I just stopped. It was not particularly unpleasant and certainly not hard. I just understood my motivation for stopping in my head and stopped smoking. I read a book. It is a good book. I do not read usually motivational books because I am a cynic. But this book made me realise that I could not make any plans in my life without making arrangements for my cigarettes first, which is ridiculous.

I was not all that bothered about health or cost. I just decided that I hated the fact that I was completely beholden to a ciggy. So I changed my circumstances. I stopped smoking, simple. However, society tells us, including the very people who staff the clinics, that stopping is so hard you will suffer. So guess what? You start out on a process you believe will be hard and unpleasant and you will use replacement therapy to swap one thing for another.

You will battle against your will power and mostly you will fail because you had the wrong mind-set from the start. Start believing stopping smoking is no big deal and you have a million times more chance of success. I rang my local NHS stop smoking clinic to offer to talk to people who are struggling to stop smoking. They weren’t interested as they supported replacement therapy. So that was a bit rubbish. I know stopping smoking is easy. I have convinced some smoking people I know of this and they have found it to be so. So there you go

So much about who we are and what we are good at is in our minds. To throw in a Kiwi example, The All Blacks are the best Rugby team because that’s what everyone thinks. We don’t have a conveyor belt of supermen in New Zealand. Just lots of self-belief in our rugby from the day we are born.

In conclusion if you think you are battling with depression maybe you are just battling the wrong enemy. It may well be that you are down because you have lost confidence. Your confidence is crucial to your ability to face things. Get some confidence back, get some self-belief and your day will get better.

Little steps.