Depression: The Starting Point

The most serious mental health issue faced by today’s society is depression. The more developed a country is, the more serious its mental health issues are; in the case of the United States, approximately 18.8 million American adults, or about 9.5 percent of the population age 18 and older in a given year have a depressive disorder.

Many theories explain this epidemic of depression ranging from societal systems to chemical reactions to the polluted environment. Rather than using our energy to place blame, we must accept our starting point and find an honest, workable solution. To find the answer we must look inside of the brain. Neuroscientific research has shown that human happiness depends on the hormones in the brain. If you have suffered from depression, how you utilize your brain is important in generating the levels of happiness that will improve the experience of your life. The responsibility to improve the quality of your life and cure depression does not lie with the medical associations, the government, or the school systems—at this point, it is up to you. It is up to you to take back your brain!

In the 21st century, the brain is no longer under the exclusive domain of neuroscientists or medical professionals. Brain utilization has to become common sense that anyone with a brain needs to know. Anyone with a brain is capable of creating health, happiness, and peace on their own. There must come an era in which enlightenment becomes the norm and conscience becomes common sense.

Become a Brain-gineer
In order to restore mental health, you must utilize your brain with the skill of an engineer. If you become overwhelmed easily and tend to react negatively to the situations in your daily life, you must examine your brain and figure out how it works. You don’t need any special equipment to monitor your brain’s activity; all you have to do is pay attention to the thoughts and emotions that your brain produces. Like a computer, your brain has an operating system. I call this the BOS (Brain Operating System). You can think of your brain as the hardware, and your thoughts, beliefs, and preconceptions as the software running the experience of your daily life.

There are three principles of the BOS that will help you get started with effective brain management:

1. Wake up and get it together.
What do I mean by waking up? Pay attention to how you move through the situations in your life. Discover what makes you unique and use those talents to improve your environment, wherever that may be. We are all different, and there is no right answer. You have something unique to offer the world. Find it and share it generously, leaving every situation a little better than you found it.

2. If you choose it, it will come true.
If you choose something that inspires you and put your efforts toward it, you will rediscover your strength, diligence, and creativity by working toward that purpose. It can be anything: a good cause, a grand dream, a vision that you have had for your life but haven’t worked toward achieving yet. Choose it, work toward it, learn from all of the ups and downs, and enjoy building your dream brick by brick. Don’t expect someone else to create your dream for you. It is up to you to make each brick, with love, and lay each brick intentionally. Before you know it, you will have created something tangible in the world that you can be proud of!

3. Generate good information to make a good brain.
When you produce good information, positive information, you become a good person with a good brain. People will like to be around you, but more importantly, you will like to be around yourself!

You must choose to let go of the negative information inside of your brain. What’s especially important is to release disparaging information about yourself. When you release the negative information from your brain, your brain is recalibrated to its zero point and your perception is not skewed in any particular direction.

When your brain is in a state of zero, in which it has recovered its balance, the fresh positive information that you choose can be integrated into your brain through a new dream and vision. After you reinforce that positive information with hard work and just a little progress you will have the confidence to start living as the true master of your brain, and the owner of your life. You can recover mental health through using your brain to enhance your personal life, but it’s also important to use your expertise to establish systems and effort at societal and governmental levels to sustain and promote mental health for everyone.

Just as it’s natural for a person to have self-respect, it is also healthy for the citizens of a nation to take an interest in its collective health. A person’s identity comes from their sense of humanity, but it also comes from their identification with their family, community, and country. For the people of this nation to recover their spirit, for the people of this nation to take back their brain, they need to recover a sense of community within their country. If each person resolves to take care of themselves as well as those around them—if everyone recovers that sense of conscience, you can imagine how quickly the state of our world will change.