I’ve been working my way back out of a long depression too, and it still feels strange a lot of the time to me too. I’ve found so much of the material on this website to be very, very helpful, for moving away from depressive thinking, but I never really found very much anywhere when I tried searching for reassurance that being undepressed might feel downright weird.

This is just a bit of odd thinking that has helped me – maybe it will give someone else a bit of encouragement too.

Elsewhere, I’d come across the idea of ‘10,000 hours to mastery’, which is usually mentioned in the context of learning a musical instrument or language, or similar skill (and has been misrepresented anyway – article here explains it and how the phrase got taken up and reinterpreted – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26384712 ). Anyway, it occurred to me that skills are thinking patterns, so maybe a similar timescale could also apply to developing mastery of a more positive outlook, after so many years of the opposite.

If I think of all the hours I’ve spent mastering digging those negativity channels so deeply in my brain, it’s hardly surprising that changing them doesn’t happen instantaneously, or that it would feel ‘wrong’ to think differently.

I idly worked out how long 10,000 hours is. At 8 hours a day (8 hours positive thinking a day? hmm), that’s 2,920 hours in a year. So over 3 years to reach ‘mastery’. For all that the 10,000 hours figure is plucked out of the air, it did really help to think in terms of needing to practise a new skill for a good long while before it became automatic and comfortable.

It encouraged me to keep battling on, hoping that non-depression would start to feel more normal, and it helped me to remember to ‘let go’ when it felt strange, rather than focusing on the strangeness.

It’s about six months since I made myself a little reminder: “10,000 hours – 8 hrs/day = 3.5 yrs. Patience.” I can see a lot of progress since then – a distinctly increasing proportion of days where I can honestly say that I feel ‘normal’ again. I do still fall back to feeling really bleak again sometimes, and that is a shock every time (it feels almost as if the ‘better’ bits hadn’t happened), but I’ve got much more skilled at seeing it as old habits trying to reassert themselves, and then being able to dig myself out again.

Tips and encouragement from other tinybuddha people like Julianne are invaluable. Knowing that others have been along this road before is really helpful. Thank you. One day at a time and SMILE. 🙂