I’m meant to be writing about the mind and depression but I must say this. The way to overcome fear and
timidity is to control the mind. It is very important to set positive thought patterns for you to succeed at
anything. Once you believe in the God in you (not yourself directly) and take courage and adequate prep-
aration – you can scale any heights.
Now to depression and the mind. I have come to see that every bout of depression has its genesis in the
mind. Depression is seldom a one-day event – it’s a gradual evolution and distortion that arises from sev-
eral connected or unconnected events that we experience. I’d give a case scenario:
John wakes up by 7:40 and he has a class by 8. John rush prepares and begins to fly to school. On the way
to school, he runs into hold up so he is delayed by 20 minutes. He gets to class and the lecturer asks him
to leave the class. About 1 hour into the class the lecturer allows him in. After class, John goes to check his
previous semester’s performance and sees the results on the board. He has a D in a course. While John is
mulling over this loss, his sister calls and reminds him of something he was supposed to help her do. Then
his mother calls and shouts at him for forgetting to do something for her… Then the next day, John and
his girlfriend get into a fight over something insignificant and on his way home, his car breaks down… The
next day John is taking a picture and his phone falls leaving his screen cracked…
Little things will keep adding to the list and give John some time, he will get depressed. From our perspec-
tive nothing here really warrants depression – I mean we all oversleep alarms, right? But from a simple
alarm to several unconnected events – John will gradually sink into the well of sadness till he eventually
reaches a depth where he can barely see the light above. I find a well as the aptest description of depres-
sion because not only are wells dark from inside but they also drown life. The worst scenario for John is If
he has been recently depressed and hasn’t fully healed from it.
A very common bible verse says “Don’t Give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life” (Ephesians 4:27). I
like to say it like this. “If you give the devil a foothold – he will take a kilometre”. The second you let the
devil get in your head, that’s the beginning of the end. He will continue to distort and reshape everything
till he gradually leads you to depths of depression.
My advice is simple – kill the thought as it appears. I usually tell myself not to let anything get to me. I
make a deliberate effort to treat everything as a singular and exclusive event. This helps to avoid con-
necting events unnecessarily.
But sadly, sometimes this ‘firewalling’ won’t work and the thoughts will take root and begin to grow and
gradually depress you. It’s still not too late at this stage. This is where you take full-scale military action
against the thoughts.
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