Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (17 page)

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One: the unblocker challenge

This series of ten challenges is designed to change your ways.
If you are in despair, clearly
your ways need to change.
How do you spend your days at the moment? Chances are your days are currently spending
you
. Let’s try an experiment. Below is a week time grid. Fill it in as honestly as you can. There are 168 hours in your week. Distinguish between paid work (£WORK) and unpaid work (NON£WORK), as, for example, working in a charity shop or doing your accounts or writing up projects to try to generate income. ‘TICKOVER’ means general maintenance, e.g. grooming the home, the garden or yourself, shopping, ironing, etc.

MY CURRENT WEEK

When you have filled your grid, sit back and look at it. Is that how you want to spend the rest of your days? This is not a dress rehearsal. This is your life. That clock applies to you. It is telling your time. On our Restart courses, many of the candidates found they spent an inordinate amount of hours in bed. Their ‘sleeping sickness’ was both a symptom and a cause of their malaise. I would recommend a loud alarm clock – and a pin within easy reach next to it in case they still couldn’t rouse themselves. A lot of candidates found they were filling the ‘OTHER’ column with hours spent playing computer games or watching television and DVDs. Nothing wrong with leisure activities; something wrong with disappearing into screens and monitors for most of the week. So what I would ask you to do now is to fill in another identical grid, but this time re-allocating your hours
the way you would like them to be
. See what happens when you do this.

When you have had the chance to consider the difference, ask yourself –
Why am I wasting so much of my time right now?
As the Ancient Romans said,
time flies
. Once it is gone you never, ever, get it back. And if your response to that is, ‘I really don’t care, as there’s nothing I want to do any more,’ then the following challenge is designed especially for you.

A SENSE OF WONDER

What can give you back your sense of wonder? A child has only to look out of the window to see something magical, but we lose the gift as we get older and our vision is dulled by life’s troubles. The magic is still really there, but how do we retrieve it? William Wordsworth said in his famous poem ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison house begin to close

Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy …

So in this first challenge we are going to try to recapture your childhood sense of ‘seeing things anew’. You will also be taking one small step towards helping yourself. But
before
you attempt to take any action, we are going to ‘warm you up’ with some improvisation. The reason is simple: if you just went ahead and tried the small assignment in the usual way, your mind would probably be cluttered with past failures, doubts about self-confidence and queries about the meaning of
the task (or the meaning of life). Trust me: you either wouldn’t do it or you wouldn’t do it with any enjoyment or panache. Thinking on your feet, though, ‘frees the soul’. It allows adults to recapture the imaginative thinking of childhood. There is magic in improvisation exercises, and they transformed my often
very
depressed and demoralised trainees, no matter what wicked witch had allegedly stolen their sparkle.

WHY DO PEOPLE JUST SIT THERE?

When people get into this habit of just sitting there, it’s not through a lack of intelligence. It’s not because they are not thinking. Often they are thinking
too much.
Do you know the story of the Imprisoned Butterfly? When he was a little caterpillar he had to forage. He didn’t think about it. He just went out and climbed on stuff and ate stuff. Then the time came to pupate, and because he suddenly had time to think about what he was doing, and what it meant to have wings, and what it might be like to crash into a wall – he got stuck.

Right – now try this.

Written exercise

We’ve all got things that we think we can’t do. Write down at least one thing (or possibly two or three things) you can’t do that you think you ought to be able to do. Take five minutes of your precious life to write them down. Don’t show them to anybody.

We will come back to them later as they are important. But right now, look at that list. You can do those. What’s stopping you? Nothing. Make every excuse, blame other people, blame circumstances, blame it on money. It’s not those things. What’s stopping you? One word –
you
. It’s you! You have a brain. Your brain is just as big and data-rich and impressive as anybody else’s, as anybody’s that you admire, as anybody’s who has changed the world. You can, you really can. It’s not just words. It’s not just ‘positive thinking’. You
can
. All you have to do is
Stop stopping you.
‘But
HOW?
How can I stop stopping me?’ you say. ‘I get so depressed!’

I’ve been down there at the bottom of the well, just like you. That’s why I want you to succeed and I am determined that you will. In this book I offer you the benefit of 25 years’ research on the works and wonders of the human brain. In fact I’m not talking to
you
at all – I’m talking to your brain! I want it to get a wake-up call. I will do whatever it takes to turn it back on again and jump you out of the deadness, so you can ‘behold the light and whence it flows’ as you used to do.

IMPROVISATION

I am going to give you some improvisation exercises. When you see what they are, I don’t want you to start second-guessing and putting up cynical barriers. ‘I’m not really going to try. I’m not engaging in the exercises. I’m going to do them in a halfhearted way, as if they’re beneath my dignity, or as if I can’t be bothered. That way I won’t make a fool of myself.’ This would ensure one thing – the experiment won’t work. Let’s overcome the deadness. Improvisation is designed to get behind the facade we regularly show the world.

Some of the exercises come from an inspirational theatre director called Keith Johnstone. Years ago I used to interview famous actors, and one or two of them mentioned this marvellous book they had read called
Impro
.
¹
It is chock full of wonders. For a start Johnstone claims that education has meant the elimination of fantasy, because kids are corrected for coming out with ‘the wrong thing’. He also suggests that what we call ‘self-expression’ is really a misconception. The Inuit believes a piece of bone contains one figure only, and that by selflessly carving away a sculptor can find it.

Johnstone says that uncreative people are ashamed of the ‘madness’ of creators. We are taught that the first thing that comes to mind is ‘psychotic, obscene, unoriginal or inappropriate’. He explains: ‘We suppress our spontaneous impulses, we censor our imaginations, we learn to present ourselves as ordinary – and we destroy our talent – then no one will laugh at us.’ When actors came to him for training, a lot of them were just showing off. Most were wooden. Despite long efforts in rehearsals and practice and talking and pep-talking to get the wooden
ones to act, they still couldn’t do it. They were stiff and scared as they ‘tried’ to be natural. So to allow his actors to escape their prisons of self-consciousness, Johnstone collected ‘impro’ exercises. They helped his actors. They helped my unemployed trainees. I think they will help you.

RULES FOR IMPROVISING

The more obvious you are, the more natural you will appear. If you try to think up ‘original’ things, you will seem mediocre. Be obvious. Accept the first word that comes into your head. What your imagination comes up with is not your fault. It may come from afar! The following exercise is one that you can try out on a friend, just to demonstrate how the thing works.

GUESSING A STORY – Exercise with a friend

A invents a story by letting B ‘guess’ what it’s about.

A – You don’t have to know a story. Just tell B this is a story about … (any subject that springs to mind). B must then guess the story by asking you questions. You answer ‘no’ if their question ends with a vowel, ‘yes’ if it ends in a consonant and ‘maybe’ if it ends in a ‘y’. If they start getting discouraged answer with more ‘yesses’. The results may amaze you …

All impro work is based on making connections – fast and without thinking. Since Donald Hebb came up with the idea in 1945 scientists have known that the brain works by
making connections across its synapses
. This is what it likes to do. And this is really what ‘creativity’ is all about. Try these:

CONNECTIONS – Exercise 1

Ask somebody to call out three different objects. Your task is very quickly and without thinking to combine them, out loud, in a story. Don’t try to be ‘funny’ or ‘original’. Just let your imagination have its say.

CONNECTIONS – Exercise 2

If you are stuck in traffic, look at the car registration plate in front. Make up a story or a piece of nonsense loosely based on the letters and numbers.
NI80 EHE
might give you ‘
N
orman had
18 O
perations.
E
nemas
H
ad
E
ncouraged them’. Or you could use postcodes, e.g.
C28 1UF
might come out as ‘
C
yril’s lucky number was
28
, but
1
day it
U
ndid his
F
ortunes’.

CONNECTIONS – Exercise 3

Take a newspaper and without thinking or planning, make dots on three words randomly chosen in the printed text. Connect them up in a storyline. Cheating or picking out ‘matching’ words will defeat the object.

Now try these improvisation exercises to ‘warm you up’ for self-help action.

DRAWING WITH BOTH HANDS – Improvisation exercise 1

Take a piece of paper and two pens (felt tips are good). Now without thinking or trying to be ‘artistic’, draw a house or a face. Don’t switch your gaze from one hand to the other: it’s better if you stare somewhere in between. It’s an odd sensation but see what you get.

PERIPHERAL VISION – Improvisation exercise 2

Notice something in the corner of your vision. Don’t look at it: just be aware of it. Keep it in mind for a few moments without being tempted to look.

Now look at it. What do you notice? It appears sharper.

WRONG NAMES – Improvisation exercise 3

Go round the room and shout out the wrong name for everything your eyes light on. Now stop and look at your shoes. Do they look different? How?