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What are some anxiety and/or depression hacks?

Anxiety and depression epidemics are treated with medical baggage in the Western society.

Depression, unless rooted in physical malfunction, is often the residual effect of anxiety gone untreated or mistreated for a prolonged time.

Let's talk about how to treat anxiety. Once you do, your source of depression should get cut off and it should slowly vanish.

Like with most "mind-body disorders", Western medicine fails to address anxiety and depression from all angles because psychiatry was born at a time when Medicine was "serious science" while psychology was "arts". Therefore, to gain legitimacy, treatment of psychological disorders had to be exclusively accompanied by medical (chemical) experimentation.

Medicine expects all human body conditions to be chemically caused. This is a fallacy.

The burdened history of psychology often shapes a doctor's education in viewing chemicals as the cause of anxiety and depression as opposed to its effect. To borrow an analogy from computing, is the CPU hot because of bad hardwiring or because of software? Western medicine for too long has dismissed the role of the software running in the brain.

Therefore, when you go to a doctor, you end up being prescribed medication for anxiety and depression. Only for some conditions this makes sense. For many conditions, this is simply misdiagnosis and mistreatment. Medicine frequently jumps to treating the effects of anxiety and depression, not its causes.

Alternatives that work

Anxiety is a mind condition most frequently (with some brain-atrophy exceptions) caused by cognitive disorders. Simply stated, during your life time, through observation of certain events, you come to take certain "rules" for granted through thinking and belief. They become the software of your brain, running in the background.

These rules might be observations such as "I'm never good at attracting a partner" or "I'm always last at my workplace / school", or "I never get a break". Your brain will then take these cognitive observations and use them to chemically optimize your body's processes to live up to the observed challenge. For example, when you're thinking "I'm always last", your brain kicks your heart into gear, which will make you sweat, because you brain wants you to run and be first -- even though in reality, it's not a physical match but a proverbial match in which you're last. Or when you say "I never get a break", your body tenses up and you become angry, because your brain is gearing you up to finish your job faster to catch a break, even though you meant "I never catch a break in life".

By silently verbalizing falsehoods, you turn them into automated background software to run in your mind forever; until the day of the conflict in this theatrical play (depression) when you need to wake up to automatic thinking, and challenge your assumptions.

Note that there are other alternatives, but in the rest of this writing we'll focus on this single powerful alternative.

Cognitive distortion,
or your mind's software glitch

The subtlety of cognitive disorders (of which anxiety is one) is that we end up not realizing the transition of these one-time personal or social observations into automatic subconscious thoughts. In other words, your brain is usually so smart that it can automate things for you without your awareness.

For example, when you discover how to stabilize yourself on a bike, you're not thinking in logic; you're delegating decisions to the motor cortex of your brain, which acts on thousands of sensory input signals. The brain does the same kind of subconscious learning for repeated observations: it starts saying the sentences in the back of your mind, without you having to use your mouth! It's critical for you to realize this: you're actually saying things to yourself in the back of your mind, without so much as a peep. "I doubt if that's really true?!" you think to yourself. See, you just proved the point.

Cognitive restructuring,
or fixing software bugs for the brain

The key hack to completely reversing anxiety is to train yourself to stop the moment you're having anxious feelings and realize this: You're not having anxious feelings. You're having anxious thoughts. The distinction is night and day: feelings are treated by chemicals, vitamins and hugs. Thoughts are treated by thinking correctly.

Here's the kicker: The subconscious part of your brain, which is responsible for automating your thoughts and forming your personality, has evolved a long time ago. So long ago in fact, that it's childish in its level of intelligence. You let it hear from you "Gosh, why can't I catch a break in life" and its childish response is to think "Oh! Master is tired. Master needs a break ... let me turn on ALL the machines under my control to get everything done as quickly as possible so master and I can catch a break together." BOOM - your heart is suddenly in high gear, your muscles are tense or otherwise fatigued, you're hyper-ventilating, you're having a panic-attack and eventually if this pattern repeats itself frequently enough, you're giving up on life completely and going into depression. Why? Because the subconscious brain has the IQ of a moron, and you're feeding the moron confusing information. This confusing information enters your subconscious mind and gets mis-interpreted. This mis-interpretation is called Cognitive Distortion.

And to reverse it, you must restructure the way you talk to yourself.

Treat yourself using key hacks

First, unless you have faulty hardware in your body (check with your family doctor), accept that anxiety is most often not caused by feelings or chemicals.You're causing it, through your automated thoughts.

Stop for a second and think very clearly (this takes a tremendous amount of practice and you really need pen and paper for it to work) what was the thought you just had? For example, did you just think "I'll never get this business off the ground"? Did you think "I'll always be miserable at this job"? Write it down.

Now, check it against the following checklist, and see if it matches any of the following patterns:

1. All or Nothing Thinking: Do you frequently catch yourself using sentences that start with "always", "every", and "never"? Language is a powerful medium. People understand what you mean when you say "I'll always be miserable". It's an understandable exaggeration. But your subconscious doesn't understand it. It lacks the processing power of your conscious mind. It interprets such False Dilemma messages as True Dilemmas, which then kicks in all the wrong sub-systems in your body. 
   
   The key hack here is to recognize that if there are shades of gray in between, you should train yourself to speak verbally with those shades of gray included so that your subconscious childish mind hears the right messages. When you catch yourself thinking (i.e. saying in the back of your mind) "I'm always miserable at work", you should respond to that thought with "That's not factually true. I have had many days that have been quite good. Some days have been really hard, but I also have good days." Instead of "I'm always miserable at work", you should train yourself to think in terms that are instead factually true: "a few days per month I've had difficulty dealing with the workload". To you this might not sound very different, but to your subconscious mind, it's the difference between an emergency and an inconvenience. Your subconscious is dealing with these two messages like so: "always miserable? alert! alert! initiate melt-down so that we can remove ourselves from this situation" vs. "some days it's tough? okay, has today been tough yet? no? okay I don't have to do anything, carry on!"
2. Overgeneralization: Do you find yourself jumping to "observations" without sufficient evidence, solely based on a few past experiences? For example, do you generally avoid social situations because of a few past awkward experiences? Do you subconsciously tell yourself "This is just going to be one more of those awkward situations / bad days / etc" ? 
   
   The key hack if you do this often is to confront yourself, using pen and paper, and write down a response to the automatic thought: "You don't know anything about what's going to happen. Past experiences don't define future experiences. There's simply not enough evidence. I must go out and gather more experiences before generalizing". If your conscious mind doesn't act like a true scientist, your subconscious mind is happy to operate on false information. Act like a true scientist and don't jump to conclusions right before an experience.
3. Mental Filter: Are you the type of person who hears a bunch of encouragement and some criticism, and you completely tune out during the first part and only focus on the second part? This is called a mental filter. And it becomes automated. So later when you're thinking about that same feedback while sitting alone in a room, all you remember is the criticism. Then your subconscious braces for defensive maneuvering, i.e. let's not spend any energy on anything because heck, we need it to fix this project. And boom, you're sitting on the couch, fatigued from lack of energy, and sobbing because life sucks and the day is passing by. Why? Because you've allowed yourself the narcissistic life perspective of just looking for flaws so that you can maximize your time for improving them. The trouble is that those encouraging messages you dropped on the floor are necessary for your subconscious mind to reward your body for having gotten you closer to your goal. 
   
   The key hack is to realize it's not up to you to decide what part of the feedback is important. You should relay it fully to your subconscious. And you do that by focusing on BOTH the encouragement and the criticism, and mentioning both when recollecting the memory, not just one and not the other.
4. Disqualifying the Positive: Sometimes you don't have the mental filter and let yourself hear the encouragement. But have you noticed how sometimes you say to yourself or others "ah, that was nothing" or "yeah I achieved X and Y, but that doesn't really matter, there are so many smarter people / so much more to do"? Guess what. It matters. By internally and externally disqualifying your achievements or the fortunes that you've had, you're feeding your subconscious false information that the intuitive strategies it automated for you to get to that point were useless. So you end up not converting those strategies into internal learning and confidence. As a result, in the competitive landscape of today's world, you're constantly keeping your body in high-gear for performing at its peak. You don't let your subconscious regulate your body by relaying the positive feedback that really conveys "okay calm down, we achieved something, you don't have to run at 100 MPH anymore." 
   
   The key hack is to make a list of positive achievements or fortunes you've had in all the areas that you're anxious about.
5. Jumping to conclusions - Mind reading: Ever catch yourself or loved ones assuming the worst about what somebody else is thinking about you or what you did? You might catch yourself thinking "I published this article but readers are going to think it sucks" or "I worked my butt off but my manager won't think it's promotion worthy" or (usually to a spouse) "you think I don't do jack around the house!" -- Those are mind-reading. They're all based on a linguistic shortcut for "There's a chance that you might think". But we don't say that. We say "You think" or "They will think" to ourselves. The trouble with that is the subconscious mind confuses that with a fact. And so it responds with all the right defenses: gearing up for fight-or-flight (i.e. sweating, anger, tension, chronic pain with no specific location in the body, shortness of breath, and all the indignant confusion in the world). Why would you let this happen? 
   
   The key hack is simply to either vocalize things as "They might think", or better, ask people calmly what they think!
6. Jumping to conclusions - Fortune Telling: Similar to mind-reading, but related to reading the mind of life itself. Yes, it's that absurd: You tell yourself "I'm going to fail this test", or "I'm going to embarrass myself while speaking publicly" or "This year is going to be painful". You have no idea! The future hasn't come, but your body will start paying the liability for your negative prediction of the future NOW, if you don't change your internal dialog and automatic thoughts. 
   
   The key hack here is to write down the automatic fortune-telling thought, then confront it using a pen and observable facts.
7. Magnification or Minimization - Also known as "catastrophization"; you might recognize yourself in this. It's when you take a possible outcome, no matter what its probability (suppose you're not fortune telling and actually considering all probabilities) but then attributing an unreasonable impact cost to that possibility. As an example, you're frustrated with your boss who is just micro-managing and abusing you. You come home, you don't eat, you sometimes sigh before going to sleep, you have trouble waking up and you go to work to face all of it over again. Sometimes you have trouble getting out of bed for work. This is anxiety bordering depression. But why? If you ask yourself enough "why"s, you will realize your underlying fear is that possible though low-probability situation in which after you give your boss feedback, he or she might fire you instead of listening. The issue may not be how realistic you are about the probability, but rather about the impact. What's the worst that can happen in the unlikely scenario that you get fired? -- Is your life over? Will you default on the house? Or will you simply dip into savings for a month or two until you find your next job, perhaps a dream job? Not exploring each probable branch to really realistically evaluate its potential impact and instead assuming catastrophe in place of discomfort is an example of "magnification" mental distortion. 
   
   The key hack is to continue asking yourself "why" when you're feeling like crap, and once you discover the possibility that you're worried about, asking yourself "what's the worst that can happen?" -- Minimization on the other hand essentially refers to underestimating the impact that the boss's behavior is having on your daily life and psyche. A healthy person would strike the correct balance between bending over backwards for the boss vs. thinking of the prospect of being fired as catastrophic when it's only a discomfort and improbable at that.
8. Emotional Reasoning - Ever catch yourself giving up on something or someone, because it feels hopeless? Ever give up on yourself socially because you feel you're boring to others? Feelings are not facts. But sometimes in the absence of a measurement scale, we choose feelings to measure things. "I feel like I'm not valued at work, so I should work harder", or "I feel like something bad is going to happen today, so I should stay home", or "I feel over-weight today, my health is probably deteriorating and people think I look fat". Feelings are not facts. 
   
   The key hack here is to first realize that if you verbalize feelings as facts, your subconscious mind will certainly perceive them as facts. Then it kicks in all these body sub-systems to cope with that "fact" and soon enough, you've started a self-fulfilling prophecy because now because you're anxious and not going anywhere, you are starting to get chubbier and forgotten by friends. The false facts turn into true facts. When you can measure something like your weight, always choose the measurement over the feeling. When it's something that's not measurable, like feeling like you're boring, ask! "Do you think I'm boring?" "Uhhh, not at all?!", ... "Oh!".
9. Should Statements - Do you catch yourself starting a lot of sentences with "should"? "I should have performed better", or "Everyone should be on time", or "You shouldn't talk to me that way". Should statements are cognitive distortions because while in your conscious mind you're interpreting them as "it would be nice for everyone involved if X", your subconscious mind interprets them as "X will happen. If X doesn't happen, my survival is threatened and the person who caused X not to happen is morally responsible. For my survival, this responsible person must change their behavior." Just observe how wide that gap is! On the one hand, an inconvenience, on the other, subconsciously, you've kicked in your body in self-preservation survival gear. Is your face red? Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you realize you're doing this to yourself? 
   
   The key hack here is every time you start a morally authoritative sentence with "Y should do X", you should write it down. Then give it a few seconds, catch your breath, and write down another sentence in front of it that reasons "Y is not morally obligated or responsible to do anything. It would be nice if Y did X, but I can't revolve my entire day around that. I should anticipate that Y might not do X, and have a plan for if that happens.
10. Labeling - Ever reduce yourself or someone else to their actions? Anything from "My boss is an a$$hole" to "I'm such a klutz" to "you're such a bad child" to "this president is a Socialist / Warmonger / <insert your label>". It doesn't matter what the label is: Labels are cognitive distortions, disabling your subconscious mind to see the full reality about the labelled person including yourself. Your conscious mind may be able to deal with this linguistic subtlety, but your subconscious mind that controls your body turns labeling into an apocalyptic overgeneralization that threatens your very survival. 
    
    The key hack is whenever you catch yourself saying "Y is such an X", you should immediately correct yourself vocally (so that your subconscious mind can hear it) and say "actually Y is not an X, but Y does a lot of X things. It discomforts me a little, but it's not the end of the world. I'm still able to be happy."
11. Personalization - Ever hear the boss say "not everyone here is a top performer" and later think to yourself "I'm one of the under-performers"? That's personalization. The boss might not even have meant that as a criticism but rather, just the law of averages: not everyone can be above average. But you not only turned it into a negative thing, but also you made it about yourself. While our narcissistic conscious is always trying to make things about us, our self-preserving subconscious wants to reassure our survival. And as soon as it receives the cognitive distortion that something bad and personal was said about you, anxiety kicks in. 
    
    The key hack is to write down what started the train of thoughts, then trace it back to whether it's exactly what was said or whether you personalized something. If it was personalized, write an answer to yourself like "don't be a fool, that wasn't about me" so that your subconscious can hear it. If it was actually about you (very unlikely, and more-over, unlikely to cause anxiety), seek direct feedback. Direct criticism tends to induce anger rather than anxiety. It's usually the untrue cognitive distortions that cause the torment.
12. Blaming - This is the opposite of personalization. It could even be called externalization. Do you blame someone else for problems when you're also part of the problem? By doing so, you're actually not putting much pressure directly on your subconscious. The issue is that the thing for which you're blaming others is not going away. Therefore, you're keeping the door open for a lot of emotional distress that you perceive as coming from others, while they're actually (at least partly) caused by yourself. 
    
    The key hack here is to write down the criticism of you for which you're blaming others. Then see if you could possibly be involved in causing it. A spousal conflict is an example. The easiest thing to do is to tear pieces apart for which you can accept responsibility and blame. Ironically, acceptance of blame makes us feel better, not worse. It's simply the child-minded subconscious that's trying to protect us from accepting the blame, because we automatically are thinking "if I accept the blame, I have a flaw, and I cannot live with a flaw". Yes you can. Everyone is flawed. Just trying saying out-loud: "I want to say something: I realize I'm to blame for X, Y and Z. I don't know how to fix it, but I want to at least confront facts." The subtle thing about accepting blame is that you no longer have to subconsciously maintain shields (or high blood pressure for that matter). Confess that you were a lousy friend or parent. Tell coworkers that you don't think you've done your part in solving team problems and ask for ways of improving things together. Just ... drop the shield. It's doing more to your body than you realize.
13. Perfectionism and Fallacy of Self-Worth - I kept the best for last. Workaholics recognize this in themselves. When you have automatic thoughts such as "This result is not perfect. My whole career and reputation is pinned on this thing", you're actually kicking your entire body through cognitive distortion into full gear for survival mode. Your childish subconscious doesn't realize "your whole life" doesn't literally rely on this. It hears something as a child hears it: "If this project doesn't go well, I will be abandoned, starve and die very soon." It doesn't matter how much you think you have a grasp on your internal linguistics: that's what your body is defending. High achievers die of auto-immune physical disorders or experience chronic back pain and musculoskeletal or blood and heart problems more than most segments of the society. The physical conditions are tightly coupled with mind-body processes that are caused by cognitive distortions -- more simply put, you could avoid early death if you could change your internal automatic dialog! 
    
    The key hack is to write down your thoughts about your work at high times of stress, then write rebuttals that clarify how they're tied to perfectionism and your struggle for self-worth. And tell this to yourself loud and clear: There is no self-worth. Everyone is worth exactly equal and exactly ZERO. I'm worth nothing. My friends, parents, society, famous people, everyone is worth equal to each other and exactly nothing. I do what I do because I enjoy it, not because my worth depends on it. We will all die someday. Those who chase worth all their life will not find it, will die sooner, and will have wasted a whole human life chasing other people's opinion of themselves rather than their own passions and free will. Remember this: you're worth nothing. So am I. We're ALL worth ZERO. Do what you do because you love it. Five decades from now nobody cares. Exactly nobody. All that will remain is humanity, and perhaps you've done enough good to be reincarnated into a better version of it. What doesn't remain is you as you are now, and any association of your achievements with it. You -- will be gone. So do what you love today -- because this whole life thing might just be a big experiment to see which one of us is willing to imprison ourselves behind a desk for a lifelong achievement of "nothing". I'm not trying to be absurd though: You need to say all this out loud for the subconscious to lay off your body's chemistry. Repeat after me: "I am and I will always be worth zero. Exactly equal to everyone else."

Why aren't more people doing this

I took the long way for figuring out these hacks. During my college years I was baffled at my inability to deal with anxiety. I even nearly completed a second major in Psychology just to figure out myself, because good old doctors certainly seemed clueless.

Moral hazard is the extra risk someone is willing to take because they won't suffer the consequences personally. As much as you can trust your doctor, never delegate 100% of your care to another human-being. They may mean the best for you, but if the doctor's prescription is just slightly wrong, they won't suffer the consequences. You do. So make sure you recognize yourself as the owner of the business of treating yourself. The doctor is there to provide a service. You must do your full due diligence for all possible alternatives.

This hazard is further perpetuated by the pharmaceutical industry's influence on the field of medicine. If we spent 10% of what we spend on drugs on programs that raise self-awareness, not only we'd be a healthier society, but our recovered productivity would move a needle as massive as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Anxiety is an epidemic in the Western world, quite possibly because of over-reliance on specialization. If your computer keeps saving your Word documents with bad formatting, would you take it to Geek Squad to inspect and treat the power supply? (I've seen it done.)

Sources and more reading

I came across the work of Professor Aaron T. Beck, an American Psychiatrist and the "Father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy". Based on his work, I started reading such books as "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David D. Burns (MD):

http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Go...

A book on the relationship between your mind, internal dialogs and the chronic back-pain / RSI / carpal tunnel syndrome epidemic is "The Mind-body Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain" by Dr. John E. Sarno, which I discovered through California's KQED radio:

http://www.amazon.com/Mindbody-P...

Much of the ideas I've referenced here come from the books above and the Wikipedia article below which helped me remember:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog...

Conclusion and final thoughts

Remember, curing side-effects is not curing the root cause. Cough-medicine doesn't cure the common cold, it just eases it. But our society dishes out Prozac and Paxil as if they're the cure-all. (all this is barring serious brain disorders, i.e. true hardware problems, which are outside the scope of this thread). We should still take cough medicine. But it doesn't suffice.

Consider the possibility that your anxiety or depression may be due to "software" problems in the mind. "Hardware" is not the only possible cause. And take ownership. It's not our fault that we end up in ditches. But while we ask for a hand to get us out, we must also put our effort in. And if that rope over there could be useful, why not give it a shot?

Forgive the author for any over-simplifications and presumptions.

I hope these writings prompt you to consider more than one alternative.