The Mindful Way Through Depression
by Mark Williams

Read: Dec 30-5, 2022
Genre: Non-Fiction

For the past few years I have been working on my fitness - trying to be a little more than a weekend warrior. With this I have entered a few big events like Coast to Coast, and this has required quite a lot of training! I have found that as I train (and work) throughout the year I get really big fluctuations in my motivation and state of mind. While I think that this is natural, it is not uncommon for me to find myself unable to train for weeks at a time. I don’t think that this is clinical depression but it’s something along those lines, so here I am learning about one way to assist myself.

The first part of this book teaches about depression in general - the emotions, behaviours and physical feelings associated with it. It also teaches about the automatic intepretation of events in life and how our frame of mind can cause us to enter the Funnel of Exhaustion.

It also discusses the ABC model of emotions/resilience, which was all baked into the self-talk and whether you enter the Funnel of Exhaustion or not.

From there, the book leads into instruction of a series of mindfulness exercises and examples of people who the exercises helped. These exercises are all relatively simple but have the overall goal of altering your self-talk (B), with the aim of changing our response to events which may (or may not) trigger the funnel. It gives an 8-week course of mindfulness activities which you can follow - I haven’t done that yet but I think I will give it a go after I complete Coast to Coast in early February.

Overally, an interesting and easy read. The actual meat of the book is not very much - there is lots of talk and examples which are of mixed use.

Futher Reading: A book on stoicism!