 I often wonder how I went from someone who was so anxious and depressed and I was even suicidal. I was like this for so long and I wonder how am I someone now who loves life and wakes up every day excited and happy to be here. I look at it and I'm like is there something I did? Is there some kind of formula that I found that I can maybe relay to everybody out there to potentially help them? The answers that I've been looking for might be found in the new book called Lost Connections by an author by the name of Yohan Hari and in this video I invite you to join me as I try to find out if there's a secret formula for overcoming depression. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focused on the solution and I just finished the book Lost Connections by Yohan Hari and in this book he talks about the sources of depression as well as solutions. So I wanted to do something kind of interesting with this video and use myself as a test subject for an experiment and put his solutions to the test. Part of Yohan's story is that he was on antidepressant medications for about 13 years and he found that they never really solved the problem. He would start taking them, he'd be depressed again, he'd go back to the doctor, they would up his dosage and he would be depressed again and then they would up his dosage again and this is a story that is far too familiar for a lot of us who have taken antidepressant medications. So what's going on? So in his book he challenges this story that we've been told about depression. This story that if you have depression then there is something chemically wrong with your brain. Here's a medication, this will fix it. It'll take those low serotonin levels, it'll raise it back up and you will be fixed but like I mentioned a lot of us have a much different experience with that so he spent all this time gathering as much data as possible and put them all into this book to see if he could find the real sources that led to some real solutions. So Yohan believes that there are nine primary sources of depression alright and in this video I'm going to be breaking down those nine sources of depression. I'm going to share a little bit of my experience as well as what they are, see how they relate to me then I'm going to talk about his solutions and see if maybe this helps come up with that formula that I've been wondering about to see if there is actually something out there that can help people like all of you live much better lives overcoming your depression. My hope, my hope by doing this experiment is that Yohan Hari is right about the real ways and solutions to overcoming depression so make sure that you share this video because even if you're not somebody who struggles with depression share this video with somebody because that might be able to help them out. Alright so let's get this thing started. So first like I said we're going to go through the nine different disconnections as Yohan Hari calls it we're going to talk about those and what I want you to do as you watch this video I want you to ask yourself questions as we go through these different disconnections ask yourself these questions do you feel or have you felt disconnected from these different things alright let's get started. Disconnection number one lack of meaningful work so the biggest study on work was done by Gallup and according to their studies 13 percent of people love their work 63 percent of people sleep work and what they mean by sleep work is pretty much you just show up to work to collect your paycheck then 24 percent of people hate their job. I did a video on this recently that you'll find linked above in the info card but when you figure that 80 percent of people don't have meaningful work and it's where we spend most of our adult life this is a huge factor for becoming depressed. So for me personally my first real job was in the car dealership industry and it was one of the most stressful depressing jobs that I had basically it was my job to be the guy who you yell at when your car breaks down and you got to bring it into the dealership alright so spending my days getting yelled at by customers but also my paycheck was 100% based on commission so it was extremely depressing and extremely anxiety-ridden okay and if I'm being honest this is actually when my alcoholism started to progress every night I was going home trying to get blackout drunk so I can leave work behind and then it progressed to a point where I started taking shots of booze before going into work because I knew how bad my day was going to suck so yes I was in a job for a very long time that was fueling my depression because I didn't feel like I had meaningful work and it was also making me extremely anxious disconnection number six disconnection from other people when you feel alone it makes you feel both depressed and anxious we often forget that based on our evolution we're tribal people we've survived by being here for each other and helping each other for hundreds of thousands of years now in the age of internet connection we're more disconnected than ever before I want you to ask yourself a few simple questions so I can try to prove my point to you do you feel uncomfortable if a stranger sparks up a conversation with you do you find it uncomfortable to start a conversation with a stranger now even strangers aside how many close friends would you say that you have why is it that when humanity has risen to the top of the food chain over the course of 200 000 years by sticking together that we feel so uncomfortable just simply talking to other people on this planet now growing up as a child of an alcoholic mother one of the symptoms of children of alcoholic or addict parents is is this feeling of disconnection to other people throughout my childhood I felt like nobody understood what I was going through and I often wondered why can't I be like them why can't my family be like them and I always just felt uncomfortable in my own skin so as I got older this really progressed even worse so even in high school even though I was a triathlete playing multiple sports I had a ton of friends I had girlfriends in high school all these things I always felt like I was not part of normal society and for some of us this is even our family some of us feel like that black sheep like we don't even belong in our own family disconnection number three disconnection from meaningful values we live in a world where we're constantly being told that we're not good enough and the only way to feel good enough is by having things did you know that the average person experiences about 5000 advertisements per day this comes in the form of tv commercials radio commercials brand logos that you're seeing on clothes as well as different stores that you pass by every single day in this book yohan makes a very good point in the chapter he says that literally the worst advertisement in the world would be to tell you that you're perfect just the way that you are and you're loved by everyone who matters like think about it if commercials told you this would you ever buy anything of course not so our value system has been screwed up because we're constantly being told that we're not good enough and we need things to make us good enough the problem with believing that things are going to make us happy is that we're never going to be happy because we're constantly moving the goal line there's always going to be a better job there's always going to be more money there's always going to be a nicer car a bigger house a better girl to date or guy today you know what I mean all these things that we're trying to chase after they're constantly moving not only that but this constantly makes us even more depressed because we're constantly basing our insides the way that we feel based on what other people have that's one of the reasons why social media can be so depressing that we're constantly looking at what other people have and what we don't and I can definitely relate to this one because this is how most of my life was I always thought if I could just make a little bit more money I'll be happy if I could just date that girl I could be more happy if I could just buy these things I could be happy but I eventually got to that point and I was making a lot more money than I ever thought I would make but I was actually more depressed than I had ever been because I was completely disconnected from my values disconnection number four disconnection from childhood trauma this seems like a no-brainer but it's one of the biggest factor when it comes to depression as I just mentioned having a traumatic childhood myself I felt disconnected from other people in the last video that I did it was found that some 55 percent of people in an obesity study were victims of sexual abuse and even more people in that study were victims of other forms of childhood trauma research has shown us time and time again that various forms of the most common mental illnesses are purely based or largely based on the way that we were raised or what we experience as a child and yes we're talking about things like depression anxiety PTSD and even ADHD there's been some recent studies that show children that spend more times with their parents are less likely to develop symptoms of ADHD we need to start realizing that as a society mistreated children turn into mentally unhealthy adults disconnection number five disconnection from status and respect we live in a world of social hierarchies and numerous studies have been done that show we're the most anxious and depressed when our status is low or is threatened we feel low because we're told that the most important people in this world are rich and celebrities so much so that we currently have a reality tv star as our president of the united states and we get our political advice from celebrities studies have shown that in countries like norway where the status gap is much smaller people are less anxious and depressed countries like the united states with much larger gaps we have more people struggling with anxiety and depression we're far more depressed and anxious when we fear our status is threatened so if you're like me i've constantly worked at jobs where there wasn't much job security if you meet certain numbers or goals you're fine but if you don't your head might be on the chopping block so this means when you combine this with disconnection number one lack of meaningful work this means that 87 percent of us are either depressed or anxious because of a job that we don't even like 87 percent of people are depressed or anxious due to low status or a lack of respect at a job that doesn't even give them meaning in life i can personally really relate to this all right when i had about a year and a half sober the closest i've ever come to relapse was after i got fired from a job that i hated like let that sink in for a minute right like i talk to clients all the time like the depression that hits them from jobs that they lose that they never even liked from in the first place like it's such a sick and twisted combination disconnection number six disconnection from the natural world as humans we're extremely egotistical beings so much so that we forget the simple fact that we're animals the more disconnected we are from nature the more entitled selfish and self-centered we become depression feeds off of us being stuck in our heads and believing that we're the most important things in the universe we're costly thinking about our wants our needs and our desires as a woman named isabel in the book explains it's hard to think you're the most important thing on earth when you hear the roar of a lion and realize that you're just lunch this this book is not recommending that you move out to the africans of vanna and live with like wild animals but the point they're trying to make is we're extremely disconnected from nature and part of our depression is forgetting how not only are we a very small part of everything in the universe but we're also connected to everything else on our planet as well as the universe aside from that countless studies have shown that people more connected with nature are happier and less anxious this is why it really bumps me out and when i'm in mental health support groups on facebook and i see people post this meme it really shows you how the pharmaceutical companies have us exactly where they want us the more that we're thinking that natural remedies cannot help our depression or anxiety the more money that they get to make like think about that for a second all right all right i know i know this sounds like some crazy kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory but make sure that you're subscribed to my channel because i will do a much more deeper dive into the pharmaceutical industry as well as antidepressant medications okay i promise i'm not crazy i guess that's exactly what a crazy person would say though right anyways subscribe stay tuned disconnection number seven disconnection from a hopeful or secure future when we're depressed it's hard for us to imagine any type of future under than what we're currently experiencing one of the most common symptoms of depression is a feeling of hopelessness there was an interesting study done at a psychiatric psychiatric ward for teens they had two groups of teens one of the groups of teens were there for anorexia to the point where they'd have to be in a psych hospital and the other group of teens were there for severe depression or suicide attempts they each read a christmas carol as well as another book that teaches powerful life lessons to the main character and teens who were there for anorexia were easily able to explain how the main character might change and have a different future based on the lessons that they learned when the teens who were there for severe depression and suicide attempts were asked the same questions about how the main character might grow and change in the future they couldn't answer this question they were even a little bit puzzled by what the question even meant and yes this was one of the disconnections that i had when i was at the lowest point in my depression and i was extremely suicidal i had no possible vision of the future nothing looked different everything looked the same and that's what gets us into that hopeless state disconnection eight and nine the real role of genes and brain changes throughout the book yohan harry pointed out studies that the story we're told about low serotonin levels being the source of depression isn't entirely true as i mentioned before this isn't just some crazy theory i will make another more dedicated video on this okay i promise you in one of the previous videos i did i talked about these studies that were done where it talked about how only 37 percent of depression is based on your genetics okay most of it is dependent upon our environment situations that we get in trauma and all those things so of the vast majority of people experiencing depression it is not the genetic component see one of the reasons why this is so dangerous this is dangerous thinking to think that we just have a broken brain is that it puts us in a situation where we think i'm chemically imbalanced things can never get better i'm always gonna be like this but there have been so many studies in neuroscience on something called neuroplasticity i will link to another video i did called the science of hopelessness but science has discovered that our brains are constantly changing from the day that we're born until the day that we die so no matter what's happening in your life right now no matter what's going on with your mental illness science has proven that it can change all right enough about the problem let's get into the solution because that's how we do here at the rewired soul so now i'm gonna take a look at yohan harry's solutions and see if this is some type of formula that maybe i can relate to and this might be something that can help all of you out there or someone that you know all right so let's get started there are seven reconnections so let's break them down one by one we'll take a look at them and i'll share a little bit of my experience and see if these are reconnections that i've made that might be the answer to why my life is so much better and i have far more good days than bad days and i am no longer severely depressed so reconnection number one is to other people so i personally started reconnected to other people for me personally it was through 12 step programs but for all of you out there if you are not a drug addict or not an alcoholic if you're somebody who just experiences depression or you've been through trauma like the point is reconnecting with other people what happened to me was i started to attend these 12 step groups and i started to realize like i'm not alone i'm not alone in this struggle there are other people out there who understand what i'm going through but the beautiful part of what i experienced was is that we're all there to pick each other up uh one of my favorite sayings is thank goodness we don't all have a bad day on the same day so through different types of community groups that you can get in with like you start seeing that you are not alone it will it will begin to reconnect you with other people number two social prescribing so in the book lost connections there was an interesting method in england that was introduced to people who were depressed they were put into groups and they had to go around to various parks or they were assigned a park and their job was to clean up the park plant flowers and get it all nice and beautiful for the neighborhood and through this experience what they found was not only did they start connecting with each other so that also solved the disconnection from other people issue but they also found that they were now having meaningful work and they saw that they were actually doing more to contribute to the society they constantly had people from the neighborhood coming by and thanking them or bringing them food and everything looked amazing so part of social prescribing is basically working with a group towards a common goal of making this world a little bit better of a place and yeah i can definitely relate to that today i am surrounded by people and i choose to be surrounded by people who all have the same goal of making this world a better place from everyone from my mom my mom is not only is she in recovery from addiction she works at a drug and alcohol treatment center she goes in every day helping people overcome symptoms of mental illness as well as their addictions to drugs or alcohol then i have amazing people in my life like my beautiful girlfriend and my son who get involved with everything that i'm doing to help promote better mental health and increase awareness and stop the stigma and then my best friend brosney she is one of the kindest people that i know and she is constantly trying to make this world a better place which is also constantly influencing me to try to make this world a better place so the social aspect of what i'm doing today is much different than what it used to be reconnection number three meaningful work of the 13 percent of people who love their job 63 people who sleep work and 24 percent of people who hate their job i can definitely say that i fall into the 13 percent man working with my clients who are struggling with various forms of mental illness as well as trying to overcome a drug and alcohol addiction like i love my work i love my work like man i almost hate talking about it because it feels like i'm like gloating about it but no like i want to let you know that it is possible to find a job where you find meaning in your work i wake up every day excited to go in and see how i can help people today and maybe just maybe making a small impact in their lives like if we're being completely honest here i love my work so much that even though i work five days a week and i'm on call throughout the weekend i then come home and make this youtube channel so i can keep trying to help people in more ways you see what i'm saying i love what i do so let's work on making that 13 percent a much larger percentage it is possible reconnection number four meaningful values i would say that this is probably the number one thing that has helped me overcome my depression and it it's so hard to explain it to people like when i explain it to people they look at me like i'm crazy and for me like through through my experience it it just really shows me how really disconnected people actually are from their values like i no longer judge myself from what i have or don't have i'm not going around in social media basing my happiness on whether i have more stuff than the next guy or a bigger house than that guy or a nicer job or anything like that like i used to think that i would only truly be happy until i got a nice big house and i eventually got to that point and now if i'm being completely honest with you like i pretty much live in the hood and i am happier than i've ever been like one of the best things is i'm no longer just this mindless consumer who is costly running towards the next shiny piece of electronics or the new clothes or the new car or anything like that and like it's hard to explain but it's this truly liberating feeling but i still like stuff of course i like stuff i'm a video game nerd i love playing video games i love seeing all the new comic book movies with my son i love like building legos with my kid these are all great joys but because my values have changed i can honestly say without reserve that if i were to lose these things if i were to lose that stuff it would not fuel my depression because what truly makes me happy now is the value system that i have i found that in this day and age with all of the advertisements and everything constantly being shoved down our throat it's very hard for us to separate our wants from our needs but good news is i plan on making a video about that very soon and with this exercise that i teach my clients it'll really help you get back reconnected with your values number five sympathetic joy and overcoming the addiction to the self for a lack of better words we have become haters we get upset over other people's success how crazy is that what are the points that they make in this book is that we walk around acting like happiness is some sort of scarce resource something in our brain tells us that if other people have too much happiness somehow it's going to take away from our happiness like i want you to sit back and think about that for a second that is a crazy way to think but it's something that so many of us naturally do like i'm definitely guilty of it me this guy right here i used to be the biggest hater and it was throughout my life throughout the time i grew up like me growing up with a single dad not having that much money and all my friends have these nice big houses and all these other things like i would get mad that people actually have a mom and a dad who are still married i got mad when my friends got more presents than i did i got mad about these things and it progressed into my life like when my friends were getting married and getting better jobs and making more money i was so upset like i was mad at them i was like i deserve that i deserve these things right like it's crazy and it's really no way to live if we're being honest it's exhausting so what they're talking about was sympathetic joy this is actually another word for a mindfulness meditation called loving kindness and i will do some videos on it if you check out my video about self-compassion that is a form of loving kindness meditation but because of this book i will be doing a video about the loving kindness meditation that they talk about in this book that relates more to sympathetic joy like now as a result of being more connected with others not only do i feel another person's pain when they're in pain when they're sad or when they're down and i go and i reach out and try to help them but i also feel joy when other people have good things happen to them when i see my friends get promotions or raises now or they get married or they get a brand new car or they succeed i'm like heck yeah like anybody who knows me well like the most excited you will see me is when i see people in my life succeeding like i will be your biggest cheerleader i swear to you because your happiness equals my happiness you see what i'm saying you might not see what i'm saying but if you follow these guidelines you'll get there i promise but the other part of this is the addiction to the self and this is something that i've had to work on for a long time and it's really about breaking down the ego breaking down my selfishness and self-centeredness these are things that are kind of our default but we can naturally work our way to quit being so selfish and self-centered this is one of the reasons i make my youtube channel like like i just mentioned happiness isn't the scarce resource it is something that is available to all of you and everybody you know so who am i to sit back and hold on to all the things that have helped me and not want to share them with you i want everybody to experience what i've been able to experience number six acknowledging and overcoming childhood trauma so for me personally i was able to do this through my 12 step groups there are steps that are specific to this i was able to go through the things i endured as a child um but for all of you who are not addicts or alcoholics or not in 12 step groups there are other ways to do this um some of you might find it through church some of you might find it through other forms of support groups some of you might find it through therapy again if you're interested in checking out online therapy i'll have a ton of resources down below by the way but these are things that i was able to process and work through and let go of like one of the most beneficial things was being able to forgive my mom for being an alcoholic like she's 12 years sober now i don't know if i mentioned that but even for the first like five six years of her sobriety no wait let's run that back even for the first eight or nine years of her sobriety i had a lot of resentments towards her through this therapeutic process that i went through i was able to let go and forgive her which was really letting myself off the hook too because the other most beneficial thing is i was able to look back and say you know i was a child this wasn't my fault and for a lot of us who experience childhood trauma we carry around this shame or guilt like we could have done something differently to change this situation but imagine telling a kid that imagine you seeing a kid being emotionally or physically or sexually abused and you walking up to that child and telling them that they're in control of this situation it'd be crazy so part of this therapeutic process is letting ourselves off the hook and realizing that we didn't have control over the things that happened to us when we when we were children the only thing that we do have control over is the work that we do now in this new chapter of our life number seven restoring the future this is probably most the most difficult one and what yohan explains in this book it was fantastic but i don't think he had as much optimism as i do and i'll explain that in just a second so in the book he discusses a social economic experiment that was done in canada in the 1970s that greatly helped reduce depression and anxiety i won't dive too much into the details now but i will do a later video on it the problem with this idea of how to restore the future is that it's purely based on many factors that are completely outside of our control it's about the government spending money on mental health which a lot of us know isn't gonna happen anytime soon so when i share my story when i share my story of recovery with clients or other people anybody who wants to listen to it i share about how i got sober on my 27th birthday and i was furious i was furious with my mom that she gave me this ultimatum to get clean or i'd be on the streets of las vegas okay like the reason i share that with people is because i want people to know that even if you don't want help or even if you feel hopeless and there's no way that this is gonna get better i want to be an example that i felt that way over five and a half years ago and now i live an amazing life so i share that because i want people to remain hopeful because i'm living proof and the reason i found this the reason this this switch flipped was because i met a ton of men and women who were as low as i was at some point in their life they were hopeless they were down they were defeated they were depressed they were suicidal there were all these things but then they ended up living these amazing lives this was some hope that i could believe in i realized i'm like man if that person could do it then so can i and once i had that kind of hope in mind i knew i knew that i could attain it too and here i am i have so that's why i i somewhat disagree with that point that we need some kind of huge outside force to restore the future we need to start latching on the people who have been through some stuff and now they're living amazing lives okay because it really puts things into perspective we often think oh well you know that's okay for you but not for me but when we start reconnecting with other people and seeing what they've been through and the work that they did to get through it we start to actually believe that we could do it ourselves i often tell people that the only reason the only reason i'm alive today is because of one word one simple word and that's hope okay like hope is such a big deal for me i literally titled it the name of my first book like it is the only reason that i'm here today is because i found hope that the future could be better looking at yoan's nine causes of depression and the seven different ways to reconnect i think this experiment was a success i can honestly look at everything he listed and it really shows why my life is better today all of the things that i was able to be reconnected the moral of this story is that we can we can overcome depression and it's not completely dependent on antidepressant medications now because i didn't put this disclaimer somewhere else in here i don't want to make anybody think that i'm against antidepressants the studies show that antidepressants do work but they work very very minimally so what we have to do as people is start doing the work to reconnect in all these different ways so what we've discovered is overcoming depression takes work a community of people as well as a willingness to change but the good news is that it is possible and i am proof of that as well as so many others so again i've also provided a bunch of resources down below from the link to yoan harry's new book lost connections there's some online therapy there's some other information down there so make sure that you check out the description down below so i highly recommend that you go out there and check out this book or at least share this video share this video with somebody that you know and let's start seeing if we can start working together and restoring some of these lost connections okay and i want to end this video with one of my favorite quotes from the buddha himself which i butcher all the time and can never seem to find it on the internet but here's the quote that i wanted to share with you don't take my word for it go out there and try it for yourself if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and if you're new here i'm making a ton of videos to help you as well as everybody else out with their mental health make sure you click the little round subscribe button over there there are some thumbnails that you can click her top on check out some other videos on this channel again please share this video with people that you know so they have hope restored that they too can overcome depression thanks for watching i'll see you next time