248. why “look on the bright side” doesn’t work (do THIS instead!)

Feb 3

listen to this episode:

if you struggle with depression, you might be facing a brain bias that’s stopping you from healing. this solo episode explains how your brain is holding you back and why daily diaries can move your mental health forward.

by the end of this episode, you’ll know the three easy aspects of your mental health you can keep track of to change your life!

i talk about:

why i started tracking my mental health when i was depressed
how mental health tracking can lower your shame
the power of tracking your most positive moments
a psychology study that changed how i viewed my mental health
what’s stopping your therapy from translating your into life
the three things you should be tracking every day

SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC

About She Persisted

She Persisted is THE Gen Z mental health podcast. In each episode, Sadie brings you authentic, accessible, relatable conversations about every aspect of mental wellness. Expect evidence-based, Gen Z-approved resources, coping skills (lots of DBT), insights, and education in each piece of content you consume. She Persisted offers you a safe space to feel validated and understood in your struggle while encouraging you to take ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

Sadie: [00:00:00] when you're feeling depressed, it's really easy for your brain to bring up all those other times you felt depressed this is why advice like "look on the bright side" doesn't work

I want you to remember that this isn't a motivation problem, it's a memory problem,

Tracking your mental health becomes so helpful in helping us overcome this brain bias that is working against us.

This is the key to breaking that cycle.

Welcome to She Persisted, the Gen Z Mental Health Podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton. Let's get into it.

Hello, Hello, and welcome back to She Persisted Today we are talking about one of the most important parts of my mental health recovery in my year and a half intensive treatment which was dialectical behavioral therapy diary cards.

I have probably filled out hundreds of diary cards, and before I was in DBT I was an extremely diligent bullet journaler.

I would track my anxiety, I would track my panic attacks, I would make these really pretty aesthetic charts of how depressed I was that day, or how I felt mental health wise. And while part of that was a [00:01:00] creative outlet and an incredibly kind of silly way to look at my mental health, it had some really important and crucial benefits when it came to the day-to-day work of improving my mental health, using the coping skills I was learning and building my life worth living.

So one of my biggest takeaways from over a decade of therapy and that year and a half of intensive treatment is that you can't change what you don't notice. There's something in your life that you don't like that's uncomfortable that. Isn't the way you want it to be. That thing can't change, it can't improve.

It can't go away without first that observation. And there might be areas of your life that are really ineffective and really dysfunctional, and you're not aware of them, which means they probably won't ever change. So if there is one thing that has to happen before we can change for the better, it's awareness and understanding what patterns are at play, what behaviors are occurring, and how we're feeling about them.

And there have been so many times when I've been in therapy or outside of therapy and, consistent patterns when it comes to my mental health [00:02:00] felt so incredibly random until they were written down. Whether it was things related to my sleep routine or. How I approached conversations until I actually saw in front of me this thing is happening over and over again and I keep doing the same exact thing without change.

And if you've ever heard the quote, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, this is the key to breaking that cycle.

And the other piece here that's really important.

Is that when we approach this just from collecting data, understanding what's happening, writing down objectively what's going on, it takes a lot of the shame away. We're not evaluating the situation, we're not rating our response. We're just writing down what's happening. And in doing that, we can look at it objectively without shaming and blaming ourselves.

And I've talked about this before, but I find that when I don't objectively look at all the information that's happening and try and understand what patterns are going on and why and how I'm responding to the behaviors that keep popping up, I tend to shame myself into being like, [00:03:00] why can't I just do this?

Why can't I just get the outcome that I want to? Why is it so hard for me to just do the thing or respond better or not be upset by this? But when I take the time to objectively catalog all the information of

like, here's what's happening. Here's the vulnerability factors, here's the response that I'm having. I can come at the situation from a problem solving lens, apply more validation, rather than just shaming myself for not getting it right the first time.

So I want you to understand that tracking these things doesn't immediately fix anything. It just stops the guesswork. And the confusion.

So if you're listening to this and you're like, that sounds great. I'm so glad that worked for you, but I feel like I'm pretty good at remembering what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong, and I don't think I need to track every aspect of how I'm feeling. Totally get it, and I'm gonna make the case for you of why it's important to not only track the negative parts of your mental health, but the positive.

One of the biggest challenges that I had to overcome when I was severely suicidally depressed at 13, 14 years [00:04:00] old is that I kept falling into this mental trap of, I don't remember what it felt like to not be depressed. I found myself in a position where I had been depressed for months and years on end.

And what I found so frustrating and so challenging and so discouraging is that I could not remember what better felt like It truly felt like I had never experienced any emotion, other than depression and despair and hopelessness. Now, objectively, I knew this wasn't the case. I was like, I have gone through over a decade of life and yeah, I'm sure I had all these happy memories and all these things that I enjoyed, but it was really, really challenging for me to not only recall those,

but identify with those experiences in any way. They felt so far away. They felt so unreachable and absolutely unattainable when it came to building a life worth living. I came to the conclusion that this was just how my brain worked. Like it wasn't capable of feeling happiness or [00:05:00] hopefulness or excitement for the future.

thought that my brain was deficient. Malfunctioning And the only state that it was capable of experiencing was depression

this is one of the reasons why I think struggling with mental health as a young adult is so incredibly challenging

because it's so easy to fall into that trap of, I've never felt anything but this. You don't have as much life experience to call on. You can't lean on that belief of I've navigated challenges before and I will continue to do so again, it is really easy to slip into that trap of, this is all I've ever experienced, so this is all I ever will experience, even if that's not the case.

So after years of psychology classes, a decade in therapy and working full-time in depression research, I now understand what I was experiencing and what you've probably experienced as well. And this is a psychology concept called emotion dependent encoding

The idea here is really simple. When we're feeling a certain way, it's a lot easier to remember. Other times we [00:06:00] felt that way, and conversely, it's harder to remember times when we felt different emotions.

So when you're feeling depressed, it's really easy for your brain to bring up all those other times you felt depressed and hopeless and overwhelmed. It's a similar experience. It's really easy for it to connect the dots and say, Hey, this was similar. This happened before. This is what's top of mind.

And conversely, it's really incredibly challenging to remember the times that you felt hopeful or inspired or connected, or really happy when you're overwhelmed with feelings of depression.

So your brain recalls what matches your emotional state. It doesn't remember evenly, it doesn't play fair. It remembers based on how you're currently feeling

there's something really cool about this as well. They've done research that shows that after you recover from severe depression, you can't fully remember and describe and depict how deeply painful it was. So I can talk to you now and be like, yeah, high school was really hard and I did a year and a half of intensive treatment, and here are the [00:07:00] things that I remember being painful and distressing and overwhelming.

but my memories of that and how I explain it to you. Is a bit of like rose colored glasses. And this is the brain and the body trying to protect this. It does this in a lot of different ways, in a lot of different domains. If you've ever heard that moms who give birth can't remember how painful and distressing and overwhelming childbirth was because of the hormones that are released after childbirth, your brain literally has you forget the experience so that you'll do it again in the future.

It's the evolutionary response to keep us. Reproducing to keep having kids, to keep our species alive because if we really remembered how painful and overwhelming and intensely horrible childbirth was, we probably wouldn't sign up to do that again. And the same thing is true for mental health.

After people recover from extreme depression, they underreport, how painful and distressing and overwhelming that experience was

But the opposite is true too. When you are deeply depressed and [00:08:00] struggling, you can't remember what it felt like to feel happy and hopeful and connected and excited for the future and this is why advice like look on the bright side or look for the good or just keep going, doesn't work when you're depressed because you can't look on the bright side.

Your brain can really only access memories of times you felt similarly. Which means you feel less hopeful that things will change in the future And less optimistic about your chances of recovery.

However, this isn't just a fun psychology fact that I like to read about in my free time. This actually creates a really big problem in therapy.

Because if you're having a good day, you come to therapy and are like, I don't know what to talk about. I know this week maybe wasn't great, but I don't really remember what it was that was challenging about it.

And the opposite is also true when you're in therapy in a low spot. When your therapist asks you about things that have been going well recently, or things to look forward to, It's really, really hard to do that.

And this is why treatment and recovery [00:09:00] and therapy can really feel like an uphill battle because therapy happens in one state and life happens in another.

So we talked about the bad part of this, which is that when you're depressed or anxious or overwhelmed or stressed or burnt out, you unfortunately get like. All consumed by memories of feeling similarly. It can be really hard to motivate yourself and remind yourself that you felt differently in the past and you'll likely overcome this.

But there's another problem here that comes from the way that we encode our memories and. How dependent that is on our mental health and emotional state, which is that we learn our coping skills when we're feeling better. If you chose to click on this podcast episode, you're probably in a bit better of a headspace or a bit more motivated than you would be.

If you are in absolute crisis mode, you're feeling optimistic, you're hoping to try something new, to see if things will change. You're willing to hear a different perspective when you're deeply depressed or. In a panic attack or so burnt out that you can't continue to take a step forward.

I can [00:10:00] promise you that you're not gonna remember what I'm saying about emotion dependent memory and coding and why the way you're thinking isn't totally rational. this is really a problem because you know the skills. You know what would help. You've learned them, you've practiced them, but you can't access them, It becomes exponentially harder to do what you know you should do to make things better.

So if you are struggling to do what you quote unquote should, when you are struggling with your mental health, I want you to remember that this isn't a motivation problem, it's a memory problem, and this is where tracking your mental health becomes so helpful in helping us overcome this brain bias that is working against us.

So with this added information that you're receiving in a more positive and motivated context dependent state, I want you to think about tracking your mental health and your habits and your behaviors as memory scaffolding. If you're doing yourself a favor, you're externalizing your awareness and you're creating a bridge between the calm you that's listening to this [00:11:00] podcast episode when you're feeling motivated and the overwhelmed you, that is going to have a hard time implementing this when you're in crisis.

And tracking will keep these options visible when your brain narrows into just the experience that you're currently navigating.

So having this habit and routine of tracking not only the quote unquote bad aspects of your mental health, like how depressed you're feeling, how anxious you're feeling, how many panic attacks you're having, how many times you engaged in that problem behavior, but also the positive. How many times did you ask for help?

What coping skills did you use today? How many hours of sleep did you get?

How many times did you reframe that negative thought? That tracking is how you cue your brain when it can't cue itself.

And so what I want you to do without overwhelming yourself, do not Google A DBT diary card. It might send you into a spiral because it has approximately 65 bajillion things that you're tracking on a daily basis. I want you to simply focus on one coping skill that you're trying to use on a daily basis.

One emotion [00:12:00] that's especially salient. Maybe it's shame, maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's burnout, maybe it's sadness

and one foundational behavior that has a positive impact on your mental health.

And the goal here of starting small with tracking your mental health is to A, create the habit and routine that no matter what is going on, no matter what I'm navigating, I'm creating this external awareness of what's happening with my mental health. That allows you to accurately reflect on how the week has gone, how the month has gone, how the year has gone without relying on our varied, accurate context dependent memory, and B, start to look for those patterns so that we can have the awareness that is required for us to change things for the better.

And while we're creating that habit and routine of tracking how we're doing on a daily basis. We're also queuing our brain regularly to use and reinforce and remember the coping skills that help us when we're struggling.

I feel pretty confident that if you're struggling with your mental health right now, [00:13:00] you are not looking at a list of the coping skills that you know on a daily basis and thinking about if you're using them or not. I think we underestimate how beneficial it can be to look at the skills in our toolbox that we have and remind ourselves that we can and should use them.

you've used them in the past, and you can continue to use them. And so creating this daily routine and ritual about not only gathering information so we can accurately understand and problem solve when it comes to our mental health, but also having a really powerful reminder of, these are the ways I know how to overcome these challenges and here's when I'm using them and how I'm using them.

Is really effective when it comes to increasing your usage of those tools.

So I really hope this was helpful. Tracking for objective information that wasn't so heavily influenced by how I was currently feeling, was a game changer when it came to my mental health journey. And it's a reminder I still give myself when I'm feeling lower because I immediately go back into that loop of I feel like I felt this way yesterday or last week, and wow, I'm feeling this way a lot.

When [00:14:00] did I not feel this way? And similarly, when I'm feeling better, I try and remind myself to sit with that Give myself that internal reminder of, wow, I feel happy and hopeful and excited and I'm capable of feeling this way and I'm gonna feel it again

Also the habit and routine and ritual of reminding myself of what coping skills I had access to, documenting when I was using them, and seeing that progress as I continued to improve my mental health and see the steps that I was taking to do so and getting the results that I wanted to.

So I want you to save this episode. I want you to text it to a friend. I want you to take a screenshot of it, whatever works best for you,

So I want you to do that now when you're in a good head space, when you're motivated, when you're feeling optimistic about your ability to change, and I want you to come back to this when you're struggling, when you feel like there's not been a time when you felt differently, when you feel like all that's in your future is distress and despair and overwhelm and crisis, I want you to remind yourself of the psychology that's happening here and why your brain is lying to and might be inaccurate.

And then I want us to use this to our benefit

[00:15:00] my other challenge for you is to leave a comment on Spotify or YouTube, giving some advice to someone who's currently struggling with this, who feels like they don't remember a ton, they felt differently. who feels really overwhelmed by all these disconnected pieces of their mental health? What helped you in that spot?

What reminder do you want to give them?

what helped you in your experience? So with that, I'll see you guys in the next episode.

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