Free Out of the Blue: Six Non-Medication Ways to Relieve Depression (Norton Professional Books) by Bill O'Hanlon

and encourage positive psychology research, Seligman thought back on those dog experiments. He remembered that a few of those dogs never gave up. Those were the psychotically optimistic dogs—they seemed to hold on to the idea that things might change for the better at any moment, and every so often they would wander to the other side of the cage to find out if the shock was gone.
    And here was the thing: After some time, the researchers would turn off the shock on the other side of the cage. So the optimistic dogs were the only ones to ultimately escape the shock before the experiment ended. One of the things about optimism is that it prompts people to try things to change situations they don’t like, even if they’re deluding themselves about how much influence on those situations they actually have. But in the end, if there is something that will make a difference, the optimist will eventually find it, and the pessimistic, who gave up trying, often won’t.
    Seligman found that optimists, when confronted with something bad in their lives, tended to respond in ways that were much different from the way pessimists responded: (a) They considered the bad situation limited in time (“I’m just going through a bad patch at the moment”), (b) they considered the situation to be limited in scope or context (“This job sucks” or “I’m going through a depression” instead of “Everything sucks”), and (c) each of them considered himself or herself to be a good person going through a bad thing (“I’m okay at my core, but I’m overcome by what I’m going through”).
    Seligman, himself a bit of a pessimist, wondered if these natural leanings toward pessimism could be turned toward the more optimistic explanatory style and discovered that, indeed, they could. They were changeable. And they were surprisingly easy to change with just a few activities over a short period of time.
    He had people who scored higher on the pessimism scale do deliberate tasks to increase their happiness and well-being and reorient their attention for merely one week , and he found that these people were significantly happier when their happiness levels were measured six months later.
    What kinds of things did he have them do? In each of four different experiments, he gave them one of these activities:
    1.Identify and write down times in the past in which you were at your best
    2.Express gratitude to someone you have never properly thanked
    3.Write down your personal strengths
    4.Write down three good things that happen each day
    You might recognize that these positive psychology interventions all involve changes in The Doing or The Viewing. Doing those things for as little as one week shifted participants away from their depression (Seligman, Stern, Park, & Peterson, 2005).
    Could this kind of intervention really work with people who are severely depressed? The answer turns out to be yes. Seligman and his colleague Jeff Levy did another study with people who scored as severely depressed in a depression inventory. Participants were asked to recall and write down three good things that happened every day for fifteen days. Ninety-four percent of them went from severely depressed to mildly to moderately depressed during that time (cited in Seligman, 2002). An aggregate study of positive psychology studies has shown that these interventions can relieve depression (Sin & Lyubomyski, 2009).
    These positive psychology interventions are more formulaic then the individualized approach I have written about above, but they give us a sense that even severely depressed people can be moved to feel better by shifting their attention and their actions and interactions.
    CHANGING BRAIN GROOVING
    Depression keeps narrowing the depressed person’s thinking, perceptions, actions, foci of attention, interactions, and environment, until life becomes very small and repetitive indeed. Pushing back against this narrowing is one way to begin to take back power from