Writing out your thoughts is one of the best ways to catch yourself in the act of thinking fallaciously. When you begin to feel depressed, write out your negative thoughts and conclusions about yourself, your situation, and the world. Call yourself the worst names you can imagine and paint yourself into the bleakest future you can conjure. Then go back through what you have written and pick out all the over generalizations, exaggerations, black or white statements, and labels you can find. List them on one side of a sheet of paper you have divided into two columns headed respectively, "Negative Conclusions" and "Counter evidence."
Next, try to remove your intellectual filtering mechanism and list in the column entitled "Counter evidence" all of the facts and considerations that tend to refute your negative conclusions. Finally, return to the statements under the "negative conclusions" heading and recast them as more limited and helpful points. For example, instead of, 'I'm a lousy interviewee," you might write, "I don't like the way I've been responding to questions about my last job. I want to come up with better ways of describing how I interacted with my boss and why I was terminated."
As you go through this exercise, you will discover two things about the majority of your negative thoughts. First, they make your future look much darker and devoid of hope than is actually the case. Second, they prevent you from identifying solvable problems and ways to compensate for actual weaknesses, thus effectively stopping you from taking actions that could make you feel better and improve your situation.
Staying active is another way to prevent depression from growing to devastating proportions. When you start to feel depressed, reread the suggestions given earlier, for staying out and active in the world during periods of unemployment. Then, formulate specific activity goals for the rest of today or for tomorrow (many people tend to feel most depressed early in the day or in the evening). Specific activity goals might be:
"Spend 2 or 3 hours at the library tomorrow looking through books and articles on interviewing skills; then write for 20 minutes about what I want to say if asked how I got along with my last boss." "Contact local 40 Plus Club to find out about membership and meeting times." "Make follow up phone calls to ABC, Inc. and the XYZ Co."
Good specific activity goals for combating depression consist of limited and readily doable actions actions you know you can complete successfully. When an action is open ended, like looking through materials on interviewing at the library, give yourself a time limit rather than thinking in terms of going to the library and spending however much time it takes to look through everything on interviewing. When you've reached your limit, stop: don't push yourself beyond it. Instead, reward yourself for reaching your goal: do something you enjoy take a walk, have an ice cream cone, read a murder mystery, give yourself a leisurely bath, buy your favorite food for dinner, make yourself a fresh cup of coffee.
Finally, as with the other emotions we've been examining, depression can serve as a source of important information about yourself. Many clients, for example, report feeling mildly depressed during the search for another job, even though their searches seem to be going quite well. If a sense of lethargy and lack of enthusiasm assail you even though your search is right on track and you have not recently experienced any particular disappointments, you might be aiming for the wrong vocational target.
Mid careerists who have lost jobs with which they were at least moderately satisfied often try to find a similar position in a similar organization. They define their vocational goal as resuming their climb up the same career ladder at a different company or institution. Often, if they seek coaching or counseling, they will reject exercises or discussions aimed at self exploration, insisting that they want or need to get a job similar to the one they lost. Frequently, they feel compelled to continue making an income equal to or better than what they were making before termination. They want to maintain their lifestyles and feel that heading in a new direction would not enable them to do so. Their psyches, however, may see things differently.
Depression for such people may be a sign of internal conflict. On the one hand, they feel pressured by a variety of internal and external forces to pursue jobs like the ones they just lost. On the other, they were not really satisfied with their former jobs. They may question (or fear allowing themselves to openly question) the value of their work or the desirability of the sacrifices they have heretofore made in the name of career advancement.
The best way to avoid a depression of this sort is to take time at the start of your job hunt to explore yourself thoroughly and to set vocational goals consistent with what you truly value and desire.
Books for Further Reading
- The Dance of Anger and Modem Madness. Excellent, for exploring sources, expressions, and the results of anger.
- Other books on anger. Anger, the Misunderstood Emotion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) by Carol Tavris counters the "Let it all hang out" school of thought about anger, A fascinating book that draws on a variety of sources, it is practical as well as thoughtful and well researched. Theodore Ruben's The Angry Book (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1969) popularizes the "let it all hang out" point of view. The book does not provide particularly helpful advice for changing angry behavior, but it presents a vivid, passionate case for direct, open, and forceful expression of anger. The Rage Within, by Willard Caylin (New York: Penguin Books, 1989) makes a case for viewing anger as an anachronism. It is not a self help book, but it is helpful in thinking about anger.
- Books on anxiety and depression. You will find a variety of books on these topics in just about any bookstore or library. One of the best in terms of providing truly self helpful exercises is Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David Burns (New York: Signet, 1980).
