Thanks for your replies everyone. Like I wrote earlier I reread Steve's article
Overcoming Depression and am trying out that advice. It's what I did today and it was successful so far. I DO have an almost constant barrage of negative thoughts these days, it was nice to catch them when they cropped up and give myself a mental vacation! Here are some quotes from the article (is it okay to quote from articles here?):
Quote:
Your circumstances are NOT the true source of your depression. The true source of your depression is your attention… specifically your habit of putting your attention on what you don’t want.
...The solution is to withdraw your attention from what depresses you and place it on what makes you feel really, really good. If you’re chronically depressed, however, it’s possible that virtually nothing in your life makes you feel good. Your whole situation may be unpleasant from top to bottom. So in that case you need to withdraw your attention from your external environment and plug into your imagination. Within your mind’s eye, you must construct completely imaginary circumstances that make you feel good when you think about them. Then spend more of your time focusing your attention on your imaginary creations and less of your time observing external reality...
...Obviously you’ll still need to attend to your basic needs and deal with certain external problems as best you can, but only devote the bare minimum attention to them. Give your problems no more attention than is absolutely necessary to keep your head above water. Then spend the rest of your time withdrawing into your imagination.
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The tough part WILL be when I'm sitting down to work out my plans in more detail, but at least when I'm not sitting down and doing that I can take a break from all the heaviness/depression I feel. So far, so good.