Name: Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
Rating: 4.2 (939 reviews)
Author: Julie Smith

What’s in it for me? A therapist’s toolkit for life’s most trying challenges.

Nobody’s happy all the time. Fluctuating moods are a universal part of the human experience.

But sometimes, when a low mood is lasting or recurs very often, we tend to think it’s because of hardwiring in our brains, and that we don’t have any influence over our painful emotions.

Dr. Julie Smith, clinical psychologist and social media star, is here to show us that we do have influence over our emotions. Her book Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? details strategies for managing our mental health in our daily lives. She shows us that we have more control over our mental health than most of us are taught to believe.

In this Blink, we’ll outline some of the most important and accessible strategies you can implement today that will help you build resilience and grow better at managing your moods over time. As you discover that your mental well-being is more within reach than it can seem, you just may find yourself asking, Why has nobody told me this before?

In this Blink, you’ll learn

how to keep anxiety from turning into panic;
the key to building confidence; and
why you should never feel like a burden when you’re down.

Lay the groundwork for robust mental well-being by becoming aware of how your feelings are generated.

When Dr. Julie worked with patients caught in an ongoing low mood, she noticed some common thought patterns. To her patients, it often felt like their low moods came out of nowhere, or that their brains were simply faulty. It seemed like other people were born with the ability to be happy, but for them, it was out of reach. These beliefs prevented them from taking their mental health into their own hands. But let’s take a closer look at how a bad mood might arise.

Say you’ve been working late, worried about a fast-approaching deadline. You finally make it to bed, but you’re too tired to remember your usual glass of water before sleep. You spend the night tossing and turning, worried about your deadline. You drift into a light, restless sleep – only to be jolted awake by your horribly loud alarm.

You wake up irritated, exhausted, and with stress hormones shooting through your body. In short, you’re in a bad mood.

It’s easy to see why, isn’t it? Your bad mood didn’t come out of nowhere – you’re stressed, sleep-deprived, and dehydrated!

Of course, not all low moods arise due to a night of dehydrated tossing and turning. But what’s important to understand about emotions is that they’re constructed by a variety of factors, many of which we can influence. If you’re in a bad mood, it’s actually more likely that you’re experiencing an unmet need and not a malfunction in your brain!

So the first step to relieving an ongoing low mood is to reflect upon what those unmet needs might be. Dr. Julie helps her patients build this awareness over time by asking questions that help uncover what’s going on in their bodies and in their minds. Once she and her patient have started to break down the thoughts, behaviors, and environmental stressors that contribute to a low mood, the patient can start to address those unmet needs.

Some of these questions are: What exactly are you thinking when your low mood surfaces? When do these thoughts start to surface? What other physical sensations did you experience? What did you do in the week leading up to the low mood?

These are questions that you can ask yourself, too! Emotional hindsight is a skill that can be built outside of the therapy context. Dr. Julie recommends keeping a journal that focuses on both positive and negative experiences, and detailing the thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and circumstances leading up to those experiences. Gradually, this will help you notice patterns over time and the concrete factors that contributed to a certain mood.

Let’s say this practice of turning a bit more awareness onto your feelings helps you recognize an easily fixable source of low mood. You might notice that you regularly think, “I’m such a loser!” right after scrolling through social media. This recognition gives you an actionable clue of how to get away from that feeling, simply by deleting certain apps or unfollowing people who generate bad feelings of comparison.

Now, building this awareness of how feelings are generated won’t bring clarity or solutions to all painful emotions. Some problems are more complex and may require professional help, and that’s OK. But if that’s the case, increased awareness of your feelings and their origins will still help you and your therapist in the joint work of improving your low mood.

Remember that feelings aren’t just in your head; they’re in your body, your living conditions, your past and your present, and the influences you surround yourself with. The more practiced you are at breaking down the factors interacting to create your emotions, the more easily you can see the changes that are within your power to make.

Turn bad moods into better moods by focusing on “good enough” decisions.

One reason we can get stuck in an ongoing low mood is that painful moods can keep us from making good decisions. We’re feeling down, so we crave instant relief – which leads us to decisions that aren’t always helpful in the long run. It’s the urge to choose junk food over a more nourishing meal or to call in sick because you’re stressed, only to push the workload onto your future self. If we heed that urge to take the easier decision, we then often berate ourselves for making the wrong choice. That keeps us stuck in a cycle of low mood.

Why do we do this, when in most cases we know what the right decision is? Well, part of the reason is that the right decisions are oftentimes easier said than done. It’s simply harder to get up and go to work than it is to hide under the covers, especially when we’re in a low mood.

Learning how to manage anxiety will open up your life.

Choosing healthy behavior step by step is also the most effective way to deal with anxiety. If you struggle with anxiety, you know it’s no fun – at best, it’s uncomfortable, and at worst, it can completely take over your life. Because anxiety is something we all experience, it’s no surprise that one of Dr. Julie’s most commonly asked questions is how to make it go away.

Managing anxiety is about facing fears. The most tempting way to deal with fear is to run away from it by avoiding the situations that make it flare up. But here’s the thing about fear: The more we avoid it, the more we feed it in the long run. And what’s worse is that if we let fear dictate our choices, our lives become smaller and smaller.

Ask for help when you need it, and learn to give it in return.

It can be hard to ask for help. Cultural taboos, expensive therapists, and a lack of availability are all barriers to seeking professional mental help services. But it can sometimes be especially hard to ask for help from the people that we know.

That’s because, sadly, depression often makes us push people away when we need them most. It’s very common to believe that showing people around you that you’re struggling is burdensome. You then withdraw from people, believing that your depressed self will only bring other people down.

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