Steps for Change

Coaching and resources to raise your emotional intelligence

  • Home
  • About
  • Get Tested
    • The EQ-i 2.0
    • Myers Briggs Step II
  • Blog
    • Latest Posts
  • Members
    • The 12 Skills Videos
    • Relaxation Training
    • Worksheets
  • Contact
  • Login
You are here: Home / Thoughts and Tips / How to Overcome Depression When it is Just Beginning

August 8, 2011 By Dr. Greg Hamlin

How to Overcome Depression When it is Just Beginning

A single bout of depression can often be a person’s friend because it stops them in their tracks to consider some sorely needed changes.   Chronic depression and recurring depression requires a different perspective.  But if you want to know how to overcome depression in the best way possible, then take the lesson that it may be providing you.  Clearly, life is not working well for you in it’s present form, so take the opportunity to make positive changes, one at a time.

The steps for how to overcome depression deserve an entire book, but here I want to highlight the importance of changing your thought patterns as soon as possible.  In particular, if you tend to think in all-or-nothing terms, then you are a ticking time bomb for depression.  How can this be?  Life does contain black and white, but it has much more gray.  In fact, situations and relationships are filled with various shades of gray.  One of the first steps for how to overcome depression when it is just beginning is to catch yourself each and every time you make a negative, all-or-nothing conclusion about something.  The next step is engage in a mental exercise to answer the question, “How can I see this as a continuum instead of rigid categories?”  If you can’t do this then most of your life is like trying to force a square peg in a round hole:  frustration, disappointment, and depression.

Filed Under: Thoughts and Tips Tagged With: how to overcome depression

Free Membership

Get access now to the 12 Skills Course, Relaxation Training and more when you register!

Register Now!

Follow Me on Social

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Hamlin Coaching

hamlin-coaching-logo

Are you looking for coaching with any of the contents of this site. Look no further! I'm here to help!

Start Now

Blog Categories

  • Emotional Intelligence

Recent Posts

  • Focus on Therapy Shifts to the Steps and Tools Website
  • Reducing Stress Using 12 Skills and Tools
  • Follow Me on Twitter
  • Robin Williams Teaches Us
  • How to Speak to a Narcissist

Choose Your Steps Wisely

Making life changes requires effort. It's as if we all have a stack of "effort chips" that we can spend on a problem.

People who say they have "tried everything" to change usually mean that they have spent all their effort chips on the problem.

The key is to spend your effort chips strategically. When you find leverage, the problem gets fixed before your effort chips run out.

The 12 skills are about spending your "effort chips" wisely.

Copyright © 2023 · Gregory E. Hamlin

Web Design & Development by Hire Jordan Smith