When you are struggling with problems like anxiety, depression, relationship conflict, or stress in some area of your life, it is easy to conclude that the one thing all these problems have in common is you.

In her book, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, Kristin Neff says that self-compassion “entails three core components.

Depression is not sitting alone in a dark room feeling hopeless and sad. People who struggle with depression go to work, watch movies or plays, and interact with people in their lives. The struggle with depression means you may do a lot of these activities without a sense of joy or meaning. As you live on autopilot mode, you may get through the day, but it feels like you are just going through the motions.

When people who don’t know me very well find out I am a therapist, often they will ask, “What, exactly, do you do?” Of course, they have their own images of what I do: give advice, help people get in touch with their feelings. Many people describe therapy as analyzing your thoughts and feelings.

The verb “to thank” comes from a root word that means “to think or feel.” The Etymology Online website points out that “thank” is related to “thought” the way “song” is to “sing.” So the word for “memory” comes to mean “good memory.” The word for “thought” becomes “good thought.”

In their book, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Move Through Depression and Create a Life Worth Living, Kirk D. Strosahl and Patricia J. Robinson describe these two parts of our thinking as the reactive mind and the wise mind. Most likely, the reactive mind is the way of thinking that you are most familiar with. The reactive mind helps to make sense of the world around you.

It is easy for people who suffer from depression to get caught up in thoughts and feelings that allow the depression to become entrenched. It can reach a place where these depressive thoughts and feelings become a lens through which you look at and interpret the world. The depression shapes and forms how you see yourself and how you see others; it begins to give direction to the actions and choices you make.

One of the signs of depression is the tendency of your mind to produce negative thoughts about yourself and your life. Your mind is always generating thoughts. It is always looking at qualities and characteristics about who you are and how you are in life and judging if you have been right or wrong, good or bad. With depression, it seems like the only evaluations and judgments that get through are the negative ones.

When you are depressed, it is easy for your mind to produce automatic negative thoughts. It is like your mind gets stuck in a rut, and most of the thoughts that come to you are negative self-evaluations and self-judgments. It is like the depression places a filter on your mind, and the only thoughts that get through are negative ones.

It is easy to get caught up in a mindset that sees the world as a hard place. This is especially true if you struggle with depression. It is common for people with depression to ruminate over all that is going wrong with their lives. This mindset leads you to have negative perceptions about yourself, your relationships, and the world around you.