Hi James,

I had to respond because I have gone through similar things myself. Here’s my two cents based on my own journey:

The first big realisation was for me to understand that how I thought and feel was different to the average person. The way I’ve come to understand it is each thought you have comes with an emotional charge good or bad (happy, sad, angry etc.) and this emotional charge can be weak or strong (on a scale from 1 to 10).

So lets say you have a thought like why do I refuse to let people help me? This comes with a feeling of guilt. For an average person this feeling of guilt might be at a level of 2 or 3 and they will quickly reframe the thought into something positive and happily go on with there day.

For myself however, the feeling would be at a level 8 or 9 and it will be heavy and suffocate and sit with me all day. It will then also trigger other negative thoughts like why do I always feel this way? Cue more guilt at high levels and an overall negative spiral of emotion that covers everything in my life. (This is actually what I think depression is.)

Now my reaction for years was to try and figure out why I FELT this way by THINKING it through. This never worked because until you turn down the negativity nothing you think will FEEL positive or right and you get trapped not doing anything – analysis paralysis

So finally I realised I couldn’t THINK my way to a new way of feeling, but I could LIVE my way to a new way of feeling.

What I mean by this is I researched all the things that support a positive emotional state and made them a part of my daily life and just focused on them until they became a habit. I know that doing them each day is non-negotiable.

• Supplement with Saint John’s Wort (please research this before taking)
• Meditate
• Journal
• Keep a clean diet
• Exercise
• Get enough sleep

This is a journey. I have had many times where some trigger caused a huge emotional storm and I stopped doing them and was back to square one with negativity. The most important thing however is to never give-up. I thought of it as practice, like a kid tying there shoe-lace, and that each time I was getting at living this way. NEVER GIVE UP!

So after practicing these things day after day after day, slowly the volume of my negative thoughts was turned down and room was made for new and inspiring ones (that spark you speak of) and the things I wanted to do became easier because when I thought about them I was no longer suffocated by ANXIETY and could actually take action etc.

So to summarise my advice:

1. Recognise that the ‘weight’ of your negative thoughts is heavier than for other people
2. These thoughts will feed off each other creating an overall feeling of depression which then makes it much harder to do anything positive (because you will feel negative about it)
3. You can’t think yourself better, but you can LIVE your way better
4. Forget about the new job, board game, game design and concentrate on doing the key things each day that support a positive emotional state for a while and know by doing this all other things in your life will naturally fall into place
5. Realise that from this foundation how you think and feel about everything else will change and from there life becomes a joy, a festival of lights
6. Know that following this path is hard and you will fall over many times. See this as an education and never give up.

Hopefully that all makes sense?