CBT for Depression Treatment Series Week 7

Hey there everybody, and welcome back to the Week by Week guide to depression treatment. This is part seven and I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Again, and I've mentioned this in all the other videos. I'll mention it again in depth. Videos on each of the topics that we discuss can be found@docsnipes.com YouTube so so if I start talking about something like mindfulness or cognitive distortions and you don't understand what I'm talking about, you can find more information about those things on the YouTube channel. Like the other weeks, we start out this week with a review of the morning and evening mindfulness logs for themes related to your physical health and well being, your emotional or affective health and well being, your cognitions, you know, how you're thinking. If you tend to be more thoughtful, if you're able to concentrate better, if you're more optimistic, themes related to your environment and your relationships. How is what you're doing impacting your life right now? Is it helping or you know, sometimes when you're Especially when you start processing traumatic stuff in your autobiography, you can have some minor setbacks because you're expending a whole lot of energy processing things and you're remembering traumatic events or experiences and that can prompt feelings of melancholy. It can be exhausting. So you may not have as much time to spend with your friends or energy to deal with their stuff. So we do want to pay attention to that and notice these things and make sure that therapy or working through these things is part of the solution and doesn't become another problem in and of itself. We'll review meditation and distress tolerance skills that are working for you to help you get into your wise mind. We'll review your progress and trends in the baseline data for your top three three symptoms, for example, your energy, your ability to sleep and your mood. And remember, just like I just said, because we have now moved into the part where you're processing stuff, where you're going through losses and processing trauma and those sorts of things. Yes, you're processing them and when you finish processing them, you are hopefully going to feel safer, more empowered and more connected and grounded within yourself. But during this process, it can be stressful and exhausting. So it's not uncommon to see energy levels, for example, drop during these next few weeks while you're really going through that intense stuff. We'll review the cognitive distortions worksheets that you completed and identify themes and discuss the loss that you began processing this past week. Remember, you're supposed to process at least one loss each week. So we're going to start reviewing those questions that we talked about last week. You know, what's the loss, how's it impacting you, what are your feelings about the loss, etc. We're going to talk about those in session to make sure that you've, you know, really thoroughly delved into that and worked through the loss as much as you can at this point. Asking yourself those questions that you were given last week and going through them once is not necessarily going to completely help you move to acceptance, but it's going to help you see where you need to go. It's going to help you start moving in that direction. In week seven, we're going to continue processing grief using your week six questions. That's going to be the primary focus of the of the session. You're also going to learn about the impact of poor liver and kidney functioning on mood, energy, and cognition in between sessions by watching kidney disease and mental health. You'll learn about the reciprocal impact of hormone imbalances and moods by watching the video, the effect of hormone imbalances on energy, sleep, depression and anxiety. And you'll learn about systematic desensitization by watching the video Systematic desensitization. So these are all things that can be important. And you may say, well, I don't have kidney disease. Well, great, that's awesome. However, it's important to recognize that if you get even viral hepatitis, Hepatitis A for example, or if you're drinking a lot, it can impact your liver and kidney functioning and that can impact your mental health. So that's just another one of those tidbits we throw in there or I throw in there so you can recognize and continue to recognize the impact of your physical health, your emotional well being and your energy. You're also going to start talking about how to develop a desensitization plan to help you mitigate your reactions to distress triggers. There are things that may contribute to you feeling more hopeless and helpless and depressed. So we're going to talk about those. We're going to talk about things that trigger your anger or your anxiety because those are your fight or flight emotions which cause you to surge to expend a whole bunch of energy. And when you expend a whole bunch of energy, that is going to leave you feeling fatigued when you're done. So we're going to start identifying some of those things. So as you learn about systematic desensitization, you can start thinking about strategies that might be helpful to reduce the impact reduce the effect of some of the triggers that you encounter on a regular basis. So this week, you know, you're really not using or learning a lot more new, new skills. You're continuing to practice mindfulness in the morning and the evening. Go completing those worksheets. You're continuing with your baseline data collection. And like I said, and, and I know I've said it multiple times in this video, but it's important to really drive home the awareness that when you start processing that stuff that you have that you've had, you know, stored away for so long, it's going to be exhausting. Just like when you do spring cleaning, you know, you start cleaning out those closets and stuff, and it's like, wow, it's exhausting, partly because there's just a lot of stuff there, but partly because it starts triggering other memories that you hadn't even thought about. So think about the next few weeks sort of as spring cleaning for your mind, if you will. You want to continue taking your happiness breaks at lunch, even though you're working through stressful stuff or traumatic stuff, grief. It's important to also force your brain, so to speak, to have to see a rainbow, to have a little snippet or a little infusion, if you will, of happy chemicals. So taking your happiness breaks is important. And because you're feeling, or maybe feeling grief or more tired, you may not feel as happy doing these same things, but it is going to give your brain a break. It is going to be a time where you're able to sort of check out from the distress and focus on something that potentially could make you feel at least a little bit more content. You're going to continue monitoring your thoughts for cognitive distortions and completing the worksheet. I know it's a lot, but it's important not to slack on noticing your cognitive distortions because as you become tired, you know, if you start to become tired with processing this stuff and it's exhausting, you can easily slip into a place where you start becoming more pessimistic. So it's important to be aware of those things so you don't slip. Slip into a pessimistic, hopeless, helpless pit, if you will. You're also going to continue processing at least one loss or group of losses this week. And the goal is not for you to do this all on your own. Remember, the goal is for you to go through the questions that you got in week six, to answer them, to think about them and process them as much as possible. And then in session. We'll go through them together and we'll start connecting the dots regarding how these losses that you experienced back then may be contributing to your sense of hopelessness and helplessness and depression in the present. And then what can you do to improve the next moment? What can you do so the past does not continue to drag you down in the future?