An Alternative Approach to Healing Horrible Depression

When battling clinical depression several years ago, I hoped that medications would have resolved the problem. However they didn’t. And the more they didn’t work, the more the doctors added. With each new prescription, my mental health seemed to get worse with a new onslaught of bizarre side effects.

One day I put my foot down and refused to take one single pill more. Those supporting me in my struggle got terrified that things only make things worse. Luckily my therapist also had a vast knowledge of more unconventional methods for treatment. And most intriguing of all, she suggested the use of subliminal messaging programs by a company called Brain Sync.

For those who aren’t familiar with subliminal messaging, it is a form of delivering information to the unconscious mind without the person knowing it. In other words, hidden messages that we don’t realize are there and still somehow influence our train of thought.

As I had learned in therapy, thoughts and feelings are not the same thing. But they affect each other. What we think leads to feelings and feelings influences the things we think. Therefore excessive negative thinking can create quite the vicious cycle of emotions. Perhaps my depression had resulted from a lifetime of being a miserable pessimist.

This is one of the main reasons that many therapists recommend daily affirmations. Yet these optimistic reminders don’t work so great for everyone. We can easily refute the positive message the moment it comes out of our mouth.

“The world is in perfect balance,” one affirmation said as I read it aloud.

“No it’s not. The world is a fucking mess,” I immediately responded.

Subliminal messaging uses affirmations a little differently. They are hidden amongst some soothing music just below a person’s conscious hearing level (according to the Brain Sync website). Apparently the unconscious mind still hears it and the brain receives the message. And since the conscious mind doesn’t hear it, the listener is unable to counteract the positive message.

Brain Sync offered an array of mental health programs such as eliminating stress and relieving anxiety. Since they listed off all of the affirmations being played, I was able to make an easy decision on what my brain needed most. I opted for the program on positive thinking. For thirty minutes a day, the user is supposed to sit down with some headphones and listen in a distraction free environment (no multitasking allowed).

At first I found this difficult. To try and sit without being utterly entertained made my brain go race with busy thoughts. I would instantly get fidgety. Besides, finding thirty minutes to just sit proved quite problematic for me.

“Isn’t that interesting?” My therapist said after I complained about this. “You can’t even find thirty minutes a day to do something nice for yourself?”

She made a good point. Perhaps this kind of thing was another reason I suffered from depression. So I became determined to not only make time for myself, but also focus on letting my mind quiet down. I would come home from work and sit in the hammock while staring up into the trees. The music often caused me to drift off. But the website mentioned that this kind of thing was fine.

Within two weeks, I already started feeling like life wasn’t so atrociously miserable anymore. Within four weeks, my negative thinking started to subside and I was becoming more grateful for my life again. By the recommended six week period, I felt like my old self again. My mood swings were gone and my random bouts of crying stopped. And dare I even say it, I had actually become an optimist. Even during some tough transitions in the workplace, I remained hopeful. My co-workers called me the most positive of anyone.

Not long after, my therapist saw that my need for help had been resolved. In our last session, she recommended that I continue to use the Brain Sync program. Funny enough, I had already planned on it. I had spent so many years thinking that prescriptions were the ultimate answer. After working with subliminal messaging, my mind is open to all sorts of other ways to heal. While I am not anti-medication, I no longer feel the need to reach for a bottle of Xanax in times of stress. Instead I just plug in some headphones. This method may not work for everyone. But for me, it saved my life.