Does thinking about the end of the year and the upcoming New Year get you down?
Do any of these depressing conversations sound like the ones you have with yourself sometime between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, year after year?
“I just couldn’t lose those last 10 pounds!”
“I didn’t start that new career that I promised myself I would”
“I didn’t go back to school that I told myself I would”
“Why do I keep making these new year’s resolutions that I can’t keep?”…
Yes, there are a great number of people that look forward to New Year’s parties and resolutions, but there are just as many others that dread this traditional time of the year to look back and take stock of their past years’accomplishments, or even the lack of, and this may make us feel down and out.
You are not alone in trying to understand the urges you may have to become blue and place self-blame, during this time of year. If you are already depressed, taking stock of yourself and accomplishments at the end of the year can make things worse.How do you overcome these feelings of self-doubt?Well Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, professor of psychology at Yale University has researched depression and the habit of rumination (going over and over your problems and feelings without taking any action to overcome or solve them) and has two suggestions for overcoming them:
- Recognize when to stop ruminating.
- Don’t focus on the worst aspect of a problem, and feed the depression.
Now is the time to stop going over and over your problems and feelings of self-doubt as you near the end of the year and to start to focus on all of the positives that you can bring to your life in 2015!
Lets’s do this together, step by step!
