Depression is commonly understood as a mood disorder– it affects how you feel. When you’re depressed, you may feel emotions like sadness, despair, hopelessness, excessive guilt, and so on. You might feel so buried under these emotions that it’s hard to notice anything else about your experience with depression. You might experience anhedonia, or the lack of ability to feel pleasure.
But we know from research that depression is also, in many ways, a thought disorder. It affects the way you think. This is partly why treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) are so effective – people with depression have thinking patterns that contribute to their depression. By addressing the thoughts, we can help improve our mood.
So if we know that depression affects the way we think, then wouldn’t it make sense that trying to change our thinking style (the how, not the what, of thinking) could help counteract the effects of depression?
That’s exactly where Prof. Moshe Bar’s focus was when he developed Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP), an adjunctive treatment method that’s been scientifically proven to significantly reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Today, we’ll discuss what to do when depression traps you in certain thinking styles, and how this innovative treatment method can change the way you think just by playing a game.
How does depression affect your thinking?
Depression makes you feel sad, but it affects more than just your mood. Depression affects your thoughts as well, which can get you caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of rigid thinking and worsening mood.
While researching the way depression affects cognitive abilities, Prof. Bar and his team discovered that depression affects your thinking style in 3 primary ways:
Depression leads to a thinking style that is:
Repetitive
Narrow
Slow
Repetitive thinking
First, people with depression have repetitive thoughts, often referred to as “rumination.” If you’re depressed, you probably think about the same things over and over again. For example, your thoughts could fixate on what you believe to be your flaws or mistakes. Your thoughts cycle, over and over again, on the same mistakes. You have a hard time thinking about anything else; the more you think about it, the worse you feel.
Narrow thinking
Next, depression causes a narrow thinking pattern. Taking the same example, you don't think past your mistakes. Even if there is plenty of evidence that you’re a good and successful person, you ignore that evidence. Your mind is not able to expand past the thought that you’re a bad person and a failure. It gets stuck in that narrow pattern of thinking.
Slow thinking
Lastly, people with depression tend to think more slowly than people without depression. Slowness is a known symptom of depression; if you’re depressed then you might move so slowly that people around you start to notice. This is called psychomotor retardation. But you might think more slowly too – it might take you longer to come up with new ideas or solutions to problems.
These effects on thinking are part of why depression is so hard to break out of. A non-depressed person’s mind thinks differently because -their mind has not developed these patterns of thought. They might think; “I feel a little down today, but life is like that sometimes. What could I do to help myself manage these feelings? Maybe I can go for a walk or call my friends?”
But depression doesn’t allow you to think in this way and make these connections. Instead, you might get stuck thinking: “I am a failure and nothing will help me. I just want to go to sleep. I feel so bad. I will always feel this way.”
That’s why treatment methods like CBT, even though they’re very powerful and effective, might be unattainable for people in the throes of depressed thinking patterns.
How FTP helps you change your thinking patterns and combat depression
Luckily, there is another way to undo the stuck thinking that comes with depression that’s easy to do even when depression is draining you of motivation – a method called facilitating thought progression, or FTP. FTP targets the style of thinking that drives these thoughts, and helps you shift away from the restrictive, repetitive, and slow patterns typical of depression.
Activities that engage the brain more dynamically are key to this approach. For example, to counteract the narrow and restricted thinking patterns of depression, you might train your brain to see the bigger picture by viewing a whole picture instead of just one detail. Or you might improve slow thinking patterns by practicing speed-reading.
By regularly engaging in these activities, you gradually reshape how your brain processes information – changing the way your thoughts progress – without needing to directly confront the negative content of your thoughts. This shift can spill over into other areas of your life and create a more expansive, flexible way of thinking that naturally counters depressive patterns.
In other words, you don’t need to target the exercise around specific depressed thoughts like, “I am a failure” or ‘Nothing will ever get better.” This is what CBT helps you to do – you identify the parts of your thoughts that are irrational and work toward changing them. This is an immensely powerful technique, but might feel out of your grasp if you’re in the throes of severe depression.
you don’t always need to challenge the content of your thoughts to see change. You just need to train your brain to think in a different way.
Play Your Way to Well with Mood Bloom ™
This is exactly what the mobile game Mood Bloom helps you to do. By playing simple, fun games, you target the patterns in your brain that contribute to depression. Mood Bloom integrates therapeutic games, like word association or speed-reading, which subtly rewire your thought patterns.
You might wonder: Can simply playing games actually help with depression? Clinical trials have found that playing Mood Bloom for 15 minutes a day for 8 weeks reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety significantly and is about as effective as many antidepressant medications.