What is Depression & what can you do about it?

Understanding depression differently and epigenetics

I am John Glanvill, author of The Calmness in Mind Process for mental wellness and more calmness in your life.

In this video we will be exploring depression and what we can do to help ourselves over and above the conventional medical advice and medication.

I have thought long and hard about how to approach this video because everybody has his or her own opinion. Each research paper tells a different story and we each have our own unique experience of it.

If you are experiencing low moods or depressive feelings I recommend you visit your Doctor to get all the help you can, I advise that you read every book you can (like I did) – and above all, I suggest that you try everything you can (like I did) – even though you won’t feel like doing anything any of them – because you are depressed!

However, it’s only by doing new things, in new ways – that you will get any realistic change in your emotions!

Don’t wait for motivation, because it is not going to come! However, knowledge, activity and “having had enough” are attitudes and perspectives that seem to get the ball rolling in a new direction.

I am a person who is very susceptible to depression. In my past I experienced long numbing periods of depression and in my 30’s I was diagnosed with bi-polar depression – where my moods would swing between almost suicidal, scary and psychotic – through to unrealistically optimistic and sometimes reckless.

The persona, the mask, I used to interface with the world was “mostly normal and competent” but on the inside I found life confusing, frightening, lonely, boring, hopeless and numb.

Back when I was 36 I decided that I wasn’t going to be a victim to it anymore – I decided that I would find out how to fix myself – Or – find ways to still have depression, but not have it stop me from living my life as fully as possible – and it was that decision that sent me on my own research crusade – for what might work for me.

I explored, sleep, attitudes, meditation, medication, mantras, drugs, I changed my career, my relationship, my friends, my goals, my beliefs, my values, I exercised, I journaled, I explored how our biology and chemistry worked, I studied energy, I did breath work – I went on retreats, I travelled – I tried everything – and in this video I want to begin sharing with you what I discovered to be true – for me.

I found that – my Anxiety is totally manageable and you can become a person who is not needlessly anxious, it takes work, but It’s possible!

And I know this is true because I did it.

OCD – can be parked “over there” and need not interfere in your life.

And I know this is possible – because my own obsessions and intrusive thoughts no longer control my life.

I know that, who I am, is susceptible to depression; however, it is possible for me to manage it in a way where it mostly doesn’t interfere with my life and importantly, my enjoyment of life.

However, learning how to manage my depression, turned out to be harder than displacing my anxiety and OCD!

In the beginning, I believed that by not having anxiety or OCD would be what would make me happy – but I was wrong – not feeling depressed and looking at life completely differently – were the things that changed my emotional experience of life, the most.

So, let me begin by outlining some perspectives that I feel are important to consider if you are looking to release the grip depression may have on you – and if you don’t have depression knowing this should enable you to at least understand those around you who do a little better.

Observation 1:

Unless I pay full attention to living, thinking and behaving in certain ways – my depression comes back, therefore I have to be fully aware of this at all times and live my life accordingly.

Observation 2:
I am not a naturally ‘happy’ person – so I shouldn’t compare how I feel, with how I “perceive” others to feel. For example, my partner is naturally happy, whereas, these days my normal state is naturally calm.

Neither is right or wrong, this is just the way we are, biologically we are different. These days I compare myself with how far I have come and how well I am regulating my own internal chemistry – rather than comparing myself against anybody else. I can look back over my journals and see how I saw things back then and how I see them now – this is why journaling is so important.

Observation 3:
Although not naturally happy, I am calm, contented and have love, desire and direction in my life. It is possible for me to move from calmness to happiness and back to calmness – and from the point of view of energy conservation this works well for me.

Observation 4:
My moods can change from feeling good, to sadness or feeling down in less than 24 hours – and for no apparent reason – however, by being aware of these moods I can respond immediately – to encourage my mind and body back into the right emotions for me, in that moment.

Observation 5:
The way I influence my body – is by engaging with more positive thoughts and running more gentle stories in my mind – rather than worry, fear and drama stories – so my body chemistry is fooled into remaining calmer and hence releases less stress chemicals in to my system.

Observation 6:
To be able to trick my mind – I have had to let go of many self-limiting beliefs, out dated opinions and my old programming of who I thought I “ought” to be – or what was the “right” thing to do in my life.

And this goes back to my statement in earlier videos – “do I want to be right, or do I want to be happy or calm?” – this process is about letting go of our old programming to find more calmness by staying out of worry, drama, guilt and fear.

Observation 7:
I found that, an attitude of optimism, gratitude and positivity has to be adopted – even if you don’t truly feel optimistic, grateful or positive – and of course, this is the beginning of learning about placebo and the huge rule it can play in regulating your own biology.

You could say “oh, there’s no point” or you could say “it would be great if I could make that happen” – regardless of what actually does happen – one story tricks your biology into sadness, the other, into optimism – remember – your body responds to all your thoughts as if they were true – patterns, patterns, patterns.

Observation 8:
By learning what my natural DNA personality type is – I could align my thoughts and behaviours with who I “felt” I was, rather than, who I was trained to “think” I was…

For example; the fun part of me used to think it was inappropriate to mess around in case I looked silly, now the fun part of me can come out just for the sake of feeling fun – this is a whole different paradigm of observation and behavior – and we will be exploring this in more detail in later videos.

Observation 9:
By recognising that other people’s behaviours, comments and energies do affect my thoughts, feelings and emotions – means I need to have strategies to protect myself emotionally from others – to keep my own batteries charged – and to be careful about who (and what) I choose to care about (or who I choose to let go of) for my own emotional wellbeing.

Observation 10:
Probably the most important thing I discovered was that releasing trapped trauma from within my body – from sad, dangerous, abusive or grief ridden past events – unearthing suppressed memories, venting stuck energy from within myself and using my own energy wisely – were the missing links in understanding and letting go of depression.

Although, this won’t be covered in this video, it will be explained later and this is the exciting part of the course that I am really looking forward to sharing with you.

As ever, keep an open mind, I am not saying everything I talk about here is the absolute truth – I am using metaphors and my experiences so we can see things in new ways – if there are things I say that you disagree with – that’s OK, I say go and check things out for yourself!

Be skeptical, but listen anyway and try everything before you shoot it down – or should I say, before your ego, OCD thoughts or anxiety shoot it down, unexplored! Test everything.

OK, lets get back to depression – I am talking about depression in a general sense, not clinical depression, psychotic depression or extreme bi-polar depression – if you are experiencing these please make sure you get the appropriate medical help, although I believe many of the things I will be discussing here may still help you.

So, depression – how might I describe it?

To me, it’s numbness, heaviness, lack of motivation, lack of desire, a fading away of goals, connections – a fogginess of the mind, an apathy, melancholy, despair, hopelessness, moodiness – a separation from yourself – it comes and goes, lifts a little then deepens in response to the events of our lives.

A quick note here on life itself – it’s hard, bad things happen, people die, we get sick, so many things are out of our control – I don’t think it is normal state for people to be calm or happy – I think its courageous if they are.

Many of the self-help books say, just let go, love everybody, death is just the shedding of our shell, we are all connected – calmness is within us, blah, blah, blah… well, maybe those things are true, but to believe them or to live that way takes a Herculean effort.

To find a way, that works for us, to navigate these challenges and still be optimistic and driven, to get up each morning and have the determination and desire to do what needs to be done for the best life we can have – truly heroic!

Depression is prevalent, debilitating and basically quite horrible, so, I would say don’t be afraid to take anti-depressants – for some people who have good jobs, are in good relationships, have life under control, yet still are depressed – the results can be quite amazing.

For others, after 3 weeks or so, their mood may lift just enough for them to set about changing their life. I would suggest that you don’t use “stories” like “well I don’t take drugs” or “I don’t want to get addicted to anti-depressants.”

If your Doctor suggests it, give it a try, work closely with your medical team – but, do everything else you can, as well – find a therapist to support you – if you feel down, speak to someone – don’t use anti-depressants with the view that they will fix you – without you having to change yourself too.

The next item to consider is – your life’s circumstances, its foundation, structure and its effect on your emotions – do you like your job, does it give you meaning?

Are you in a loving relationship, where your needs are met?

Do you like yourself; are you healthy, do you have friends, hobbies and a place to live where you feel safe?

Because, without many of these you ARE likely to feel depressed, of course you are – so, are you doing everything you can to rectify your situation?

Retraining yourself and those around you, learning to speak up for yourself, working on the confidence to ask for a pay rise, learning to say no, toughening up, fixing your relationship or even exiting your relationship?

Or, at least, learning radical new ways to accept your situation, if you are not prepared to (or can’t) do anything about it?

If how you have been thinking, behaving and living has led to depression, then doing nothing will give you more of the same – kind of obvious really – yet for some reason we seem to overlook this.

I hear everyday people saying, “well, what can I do, depression runs in my family?” or “I’m just not a happy person.” Or, my body just doesn’t release the right

chemicals” – the implication being, it is out of their control, they have this “biological defect.”

Well, maybe you do have some biological defect, however, there are ALWAYS things you can do – to improve your situation!

When we decide, enough is enough – the “well worn” old story in our head needs to change…

To, “What CAN I do, to help myself, regardless of my biology, regardless of my life situation or my financial means?” And, of course, that is what this video series is all about.

I keep talking about how programmed we are and how we need to reprogram ourselves – so, let me give you an example so you can see what I mean.

What if, from a very young age a child was brought up in an environment where a parent was over protective and every time the child went near water the parent would get all panicky and scream out “get away from that water” “Its dangerous” “you could drown and die” “be careful its deep and cold” “stop, stop, stop” – the child’s brain and central nervous system would get programmed – that water is bad, dangerous and by being near it displeases that Mum.

Each time the child nears water her brain unconsciously makes her apprehensive, anxious or nervous – which is appropriate from her parental conditioning, to keep her safe. 

Then at the age of seven Mum takes her to a giant swimming pool and says “go on, jump in, it’s safe, it’s fun” and the child just stands on the edge shaking with fear.

Consciously thinking “I should be able to do this like the other kids, what’s wrong with me?”
Whilst at the same time, her unconscious is just firing off the “conditioned” response – water is dangerous, I’m not going to let you get in there, I am going to flood you with stress chemicals, which inform you of my unconscious decision to stop you with fear and anxiety.

So begins the “fight” between our logical thinking conscious mind and our preprogrammed unconscious little 8 year old, both trying to do what each of them thinks is right for us.

So, let’s start with one of my favourite topics of research – Epigenetics, which is the study of what influences the expression of our genes – what is it that turns on or off our biological systems, initiates diseases and affects what our immune system does?

Because if we are going lessen depression, we basically need to be able to re- engineer our own chemistry wherever possible.

Our cells sit in complete darkness, not really aware of what is happening to us externally – they ‘read’ our blood, the chemical soup they live in, looking for clues for how they should respond, to give us what “they” think are the most appropriate responses to keep us alive and safe.

So, if we are looking to have less anxiety or depression within us – it makes sense to explore what can we positively and consciously do to influence the chemical soup we live in to minimize these stress chemicals?

Plus, how can we influence our cells to have more receptors for feel-good chemicals and less for stress chemicals?

Now, we produce over 300 types of neuropeptides which are the body’s emotional messengers that tell the cells what is going on in the outside world and instruct the cells to get ready for some sort of anticipated event – fear, love, food, temperature change and the like.

Each cell has hundreds of thousands of receptors for each type of peptide to “dock” into, like a key in a lock – and once they have engaged, a protein chain reaction is started and the cells kick into action.

However, if our chemical soup is full of fear peptides, because our anxiety has kicked off due to fearful thinking, then our cells are going to think a real danger is lurking out there – not that you are just having anxious thoughts about a situation that others may just take in their stride.

(Ref CP) So, you can begin to see that our mind really does influence our body!

Our cells, though, are reacting to our “story” about the external event – and it is this “story” that we can change – to help regulate our the chemical soup in our 

blood stream – to have more cheerful emotional peptides, that our cells, in turn, can read and respond to.

So, having a calm and positive story in our mind – is better for us (even if a scary event is happening) and even if we are fibbing to ourselves!

Overtime, long bouts of anxiety, worry or depression our cell receptors may become desensitized; they may literally shrink up or the cell gets conditioned to have more receptors for stress peptides than happy peptides – and, of course, we need to reverse that condition if we are going to lift depression – we will need more receptors for our happy chemicals.

This transition can take as little as 4 months – basically, you will need to trick your body into releasing less stress peptides and more happy peptides, even though you feel low, tired and won’t want to – and this is the tenacious mindset we need to adopt – “I am not going to be a victim to this anymore – I am going to control my emotions, rather than, have my emotions control me…!”

Due to living anxiously we may have unknowingly bombarded our cells with the same fearful attitudes and the same chemistry on a daily basis, over and over again for years.

When our cell decide to divide – that cell will have more receptor sites for those old particular emotional neuropeptides and less receptors for happiness peptides and

positive hormones – less receptors for vitamins, minerals, nutrients, fluid exchange or even the release of waste products or toxins.

Now all ageing, is the result of improper protein production. What happens when we age is, our skin loses elasticity, well, elastin is a protein, what happens to our enzymes? We don’t digest as well, proteins become brittle and stiff – our bones become thin.

Ageing is the result of improper protein production – so one important question that arises is….

Does it really matter what we eat – and does nutrition even have an effect – if the cell doesn’t have the right abundance of receptor sites after years of emotional stress – to even let in the nutrients needed for its health?

Our journey is going to pay a lot of attention to this – maybe there is enough serotonin or other happy chemicals in your body – for you to not be depressed, however, you are not accessing or releasing them properly – and (even if you were) do your cells even have enough receptor sites to accommodate and initiate their effects?

Back in the 1980’s we were told that 95% of our genes were inherited from our parents, so if they had a genetic predisposition to cancer, heart disease, obesity, stress, anxiety, depression or the like.

Then, poor us, and because these conditions “run in the family” there was very little that we could do to avoid them – it was a lottery.

However, as it turns out, after years of research and the whole human genome project – we discover, actually only up to 5% of your parent’s genes that control what outcomes you may experience.

Now, the learning of this fact caused a massive problem – because suddenly we couldn’t just blame our heredity, our genes, our parents – we couldn’t just say “well, poor me, it runs in their family” because, for the most part – it didn’t!

But there was still the “pattern” – certain conditions did run in families.
Now, this is thing I really need you to understand – what the researchers discovered

– it was the behaviours that ran the families.

The “behaviour” of anxious parents “trained” anxious children, angry parents, trained angry children, sad or stressed parents trained sad or stressed children – to think, behave, worry, eat and live in similar ways to their parents.

Therefore, the behaviours of worrying, stressing, eating, being angry etc. overtime, signaled the genes to either express (or not express) themselves – and hence, through similar behaviours they experienced the similar diseases or the similar conditioning of the mind and body.

This was, further proved by placing an adopted child (with her own gene set) into a family that had genes susceptible to certain conditions, such as heart disease and overtime, the adopted child often developed the same conditions.

So, what turns out to be happening, is that the “environment” that our cells live in, let’s call it our blood stream, our chemical soup – is actually the recipe for what determines which genes within us get expressed.

And if we take that further – our chemical soup is driven by our external life environment, what we eat, if we are stressed, our job, the toxins around us, smoking, medications etc.

And of all the negative external contributors to our chemical soup – it turns out that our thoughts are the biggest contributor, to releasing chemicals into our blood stream and hence guide the expression (or not) of the propensity of our genes.

Which means how we think mostly trumps, what we eat, or what is truly happening externally to us…

A happy person in a bad job may have a healthier chemical soup than a stressed person in a good job.

A person with a poor diet but a positive attitude may have a healthier chemical soup than a vegetarian who is eating well, but stressed about the plight of animals.

A calm person in an anxiety-ridden environment may have a healthier chemical soup than an anxious person in a calm environment.

Now, I don’t want you to take my word for this, I want you to read the books, check out what I am saying, because this knowledge is so fundamentally important to controlling how you feel, by taking responsibility for, and influencing (wherever possible) your own internal biology.

What controls the fate of your cells is mainly, not your inherited genes, it is your chemical soup – which is mostly controlled by your thoughts and your reactions to life and other people – you can see now how anxious or OCD type thinking can be so negative for your biology and can bring on depression.

Of course, this is not to say you shouldn’t eat healthily, exercise and stay away from toxins too, of course you should!

To make it even worse – this process is mainly controlled by your unconscious thoughts – and I need to explain this to you – because here is where you can make the biggest change within yourself to lessen your own anxiety, and by association, depression.

In my early videos I spent a lot of time explaining to you about how the conscious and the unconscious were on different systems – and here is where you’ll finally see why I put so much effort into this.

At least 90% of the decisions and strategies your brain makes in response to the external world come from your unconscious mind and most of its strategies were programmed into you before the age of 7 and refined until the age of 15!

These conditioned responses are the trained “family behaviours” I am talking about – you think you are consciously choosing how to respond but you are not….

Only about 10% of our brain is conscious, which gets bored in the now, so worries about the future or dwells on the past – yet, we spend about 90% of our day in this 10% of our brain.

The other 90% of your brain that is unconscious is just responding, in the way you were programmed to respond, in that current moment – your unconscious mind totally lives in the now, can only live in the now, there is only the now and responds to what is happening in the now – in the ways you were conditioned to respond!!

You almost, can’t not do it.

(reference BL in Slides) Let’s say, you have a very close friend – and of course you know your friends behaviours because you spent lots of time with her. Lets say you grew up with her, so you also know your friends parents.

So, you see your friend express the same behavior as her Mum – and you say “Sarah, you are just like your Mum.” But, she is mortified and consciously denies it like crazy – she consciously denies her own unconscious behavior! Yet, everyone around can see it, except her.

Because, in those first years, she was programmed by her Mother – it couldn’t be any other way, it was only the conscious part of Sarah that couldn’t see it.

My partner, at the funeral of her Mother (who she loved but drove her mad) delivered a beautiful and very funny eulogy recounting her Mother’s life and her hilarious and calamity ridden interactions with life. After a few minutes the person sitting next to me leant over and whispered – “This is absolutely hysterical, she is describing herself and isn’t even aware of it!”

So many of our behaviours, values, responses and beliefs are not even ours, they are just the programming put into us.

The part of you that we might label “me” conscious thinking me, is in fact, at most only 10% of your brain – yet you are spending 90% of your time there – and even then, that part of you is not paying attention to what is happening in that exact moment….

Consciously, we are either running “What if..” stories about the future – or “If only..” stories about the past – and the 90% of your brain (which is unconscious) thinks these stories are true and tries to give you the appropriate feeling that will keep you safe.

But safe based on how it was programmed by your parents, home, school, culture etc. in the first years of you life.

This can be exhausting! It flattens your battery, so you don’t feel good – and anxiety steps in to keep you at home – you know the story!

Over time, the result of all this thinking and reacting – is that you end up with a chemical soup full of stress chemicals, a suppressed immune system and cells with a biased (or impaired) arrangement of receptors.

So your conscious mind is saying “stay calm” yet your unconscious just reacts with anger, anxiety or some conditioned response from your early years.

To make it worse, you may then, consciously beat your self up, by being disappointed with how your programmed unconscious responded – “I’m such an idiot, why can’t I stay calm…?” which your unconscious mind thinks is true and the cycles goes on and on….

So, I want to teach you ways to change your internal chemical soup, your conditioned responses and the way you consciously talk to yourself – this is what this course is all about – but remember, we are still in the learning phase right now.

So, if you want to change your emotions, I think the question becomes “How can I use the 10%, which is my conscious mind to reprogram the 90% of me that firstly, is unconscious and secondly is deeply programmed from childhood?

Well, it turns out that once your unconscious is programmed, it doesn’t check to see if that program is true or not – or even helpful, it just sees a trigger and fires off.

an automatic response. Someone criticises you and “bang” you just get upset or anxious.

Turns out too, that how the unconscious got programmed in the years between 0 – 7 was by watching, listening and repetition. We watched our parents, we copied their reactions, we wired our brain – We watched our parents, we copied their reactions, we wired our brain…

We got told off, we wired our brain, we got rewarded we wired our brain.

Now, I am going to show you how to rewire your unconscious mind – but remember, knowing something consciously does not update your unconscious brain, repetition does, new stories do, tricking yourself does, talking softly, challenging beliefs, seeing yourself differently.

These are the processes you need to consciously do, to rewire and update your unconscious to stay calm and stop dumping stress chemicals into your blood stream.

One of the best ways to rewire your unconscious mind is done by listening to recordings whilst in a relaxed state – which is what hypnosis, meditation, mindfulness and self-awareness are all about.

And as we proceed through the course I will be producing many relaxing and educational recordings that you can listen to as you unwind or go to sleep, so we can reprogram your unconscious mind with new calmer responses.

A new habit comes first from learning, and then from repetition – if I read a good book, I read it over and over again until it sinks in, I never read it once and assume that because I consciously understood it my unconscious behavior would change.

I think this is why so many people read self-help books, which they consciously understand, but, still they keep doing the same old unconscious programmed habits.

This is why I love audiobooks – I can get myself relaxed, into theta brain waves (where my unconscious can learn) then I repeatedly listen to them, there are at least 4 audio books I have listened to over 20 times and some learning audio recordings I have listed to 30 or 40 times – so it gets past the conscious and into the unconscious – where, over time, it becomes a new behavior.

You will experience this yourself as you repeatedly watch these videos – suddenly you’ll say, “I didn’t see that before” or “argh! I now see what he means.”

This is why mindfulness is so important – we stay in the now, what is happening now? How would I like to respond in this now?

If you can be present and watch your old unconscious thoughts arise then you can consciously interrupt them and repeatedly retrain it with new more appropriate thoughts – even if they are placebo stories or little fibs that calm you down like “Its ok, we can let that go” etc.

A quick word too, about our immune system, every time we accidentally flood ourselves with stress hormones – blood is sent out to our arms and legs ready for the fight or flight response, this turns off the bodies natural regeneration processes (the rest and digest response) – or we could say – suppresses our immune system.

When this happens repeatedly – the body is not repairing itself each day, it is just oscillating between bouts of anxiety and stress, the body gets inflamed, tired, exhausted, the battery gets run flat, our chemistry becomes overloaded, the receptors on our cells become imbalanced – and our little 8 year old steps in to try and make us retreat from life (you know the story) – and for some types of people – one aspect of this absolute exhaustion is, perhaps, what we might call depression?

Of course, this is over and above any natural disposition you may have for what the medical world would call depression.

And to make the whole thing worse… When the fight or flight process kicks off, and your immune system is turned off and your blood moves to your arms and legs – the blood capillaries in your prefrontal cortex (which is your logical thinking conscious mind) become restricted and the blood moves to your mid and hind brain, so you act from conditioned responses or instinct – rather than logic and reason, which is why we often “lose the plot” and get angry or do silly things when we get overwhelmed.

Finally, almost every study ever done on depression points out that friendships, laughter, community, family, creativity, movement and your life having some purpose or meaning – are by far the greatest indicators of happiness – and depression abates as these conditions increase in your life.

So, a summary:

It doesn’t matter why you have depression – the main two questions to consider are:

What parts of my life do I need to change or learn to accept differently – work, relationships, health, exercise, passion, desire, your home?

And, “To what degree can I trick my own internal chemistry and change my unconscious conditioned responses to life?”

Then, by staying calm we avoid turning off our immune system, so our body comes back on-line – we keep our logical mind in operation to make good decisions and keep our chemical soup in a positively charged state – so our cells get conditioned to have more receptors for happy chemicals rather than stress chemicals.

In addition, we must re-evaluate our victim stories – depression may run in families, but it’s not necessarily genetic – it’s behavioural, so how can we change our thoughts and behaviours?

And this is where we are going – “how can I retrain my cells, by conditioning them to have more receptors for “feel good” hormones and less for “stress hormones?”

And your homework:

You may need to watch this video a few times as I am introducing many new concepts which may take a while to sink in.

In the notes below this video are some links to audiobooks about these topics that I would really encourage you to listen to.

Of course, If you have depression, are you going to feel like wanting to do this homework? Probably not, but I don’t think that is not a good enough reason to not do it.

If you say I don’t have enough time to do this, then you will need to stop doing other things – so you can start doing this, prioritise your emotional health, not your distraction from feeling bad by watching television.

If you think, well there’s no point because I am stuck with depression anyway – then you’re just plain wrong – stop behaving like a victim and do everything you can to reprogram your mind and your cells.

If you say, well I can’t pay attention because my mind is all foggy, listen to the books in 15 minute segments and take notes. All progress is progress, no matter how small the increments are.

Find new ways to do things that will help you grow and dwell less on excuses to not do them – and you will slowly see that people without depression or anxiety think in far more positive ways, than perhaps, you do.

In the next video, I will be starting to show you how to interrupt anxiety and calm yourself down – as we proceed into the part of the course that gets more hands on with what you need to do – to find more calmness, quieten your mind and adjust your chemistry.