Cultivating Hope in the Face of Depression

Depression can leave you feeling hopeless and powerless. In this interview, author Ben Courson shares insights from his new book on the topic.

Source: Ben Courson, used with permission

Ben Courson is an international speaker, bestselling author, TV and radio personality, and the senior pastor of Applegate Christian Fellowship. He has been featured on Fox, Hallmark Channel, TBN, and other mainstream media outlets. His TV show, Hope Generation with Ben Courson, is broadcast in 180 countries, and his radio show airs on more than 400 stations nationally.

His latest book, Flirting With Darkness, is now available. Learn more about Ben Courson at bencourson.com and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Jamie Aten: What is the primary takeaway you hope readers will learn from reading your book?

Ben Courson: My hope is that readers learn that we can be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Through neuroplasticity, we can rewire the pathways in our brains, transmogrify our cranial package, and drive our thoughts toward the light. We are not stuck with our psychological equipment. We can take our thoughts captive and gain greater control of our minds.

Researchers have found that the brain can change. Through repetition, we can drive our thoughts out of unhealthy grooves by deliberate practice, by repeatedly choosing to think about hope. You may not feel like the most hopeful person, but our brains’ grooves are changed by habitual and recursive thinking.

One of the ways to help drive our thoughts in the right direction is meditation or prayer. In reading Mike McHargue’s Finding God in the Waves, I learned that CAT scans have shown that when we meditate on or pray to a god we perceive to be a loving god, we develop richer and thicker grey matter in the prefrontal cortex (the place in the brain responsible for creative thinking), the anterior cingulate cortex shows more blood flow (where empathy and compassion are located) and there is less activity in the amygdala (the place in the brain where fear and anger are found).

JA: How does your multidisciplinary approach integrate psychological research and best practice?

BC: Holistic cures and pharmaceutical medicine are not antithetical to one another. They’re symbiotic! Amalgamating them can help us employ and deploy an integrated approach wherein we are using all the resources available to us to aid us in our fight against depression. Sometimes we may need SSRIs to help serotonin travel successfully from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic neuron. Other times what we need is a good jog (research shows that a 40-minute jog has the same impact on our brain as an antidepressant). Why limit ourselves to half the resources available to us, when we have so many tools at our disposal?

JA: What are some lessons from your book that can help people live more resiliently?

BC: Through exercise, we release endorphins that activate opioid receptors in our brain that are akin to the drug morphine and are natural painkillers. By pushing our bodies to the limit, we can clear out the mental cobwebs from our brains.

Through prayer, we can fire up the frontal lobe of the brain into its highest intellectual capacity.

Through friends, we discover that what we truly want is not to disappear, but to be found.

Throughout history, we can find that the taboo on depression is misplaced, as we are in the company of giants. Here are some cases in point:

• Calvin Coolidge fell into a deep depression after the death of his son, and he led the nation into the roaring twenties!
• Buzz Aldrin walked in space for five hours and 37 minutes and was the second man on the moon, but he also endured significant mental illness.
• Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis, and Janet Jackson all struggled with depression.
• Winston Churchill even nicknamed his depression/bipolar predispositions as a “black dog” that would follow him around.
• Tolstoy battled depression when writing Anna Karenina, one of the masterpieces of Russian literature.
• President Lincoln once walked in the woods with a shotgun, tempted to kill himself.

The point is, people with great creative fire often are burned by it. There’s no shame in depression!

JA: What are some insights from your book that help readers support a friend or loved one?

Source: Ben Courson, used with permission

BC: Readers learn what suicidal depression is like for the one who experiences it, so they can form a greater empathic bond. Emotions of hurt and feelings of self-rejection are registered in the brain as physical pain. Everyone has felt physical suffering, and through that neurological lens, we can better understand emotional suffering. Not only will readers learn to remove the social stigma from depression, but they can learn to help a friend who’s struggling with depression. We can help by:

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1. Listening. Be swift to listen and slow to speak. Hear their story. Let them find a cathartic and therapeutic outlet in your presence to pour out their heart so the negativity isn’t bottled up inside them. Emotions denied breathing room impact emotional, physical, and intellectual performance. Allow your depressed loved one to breathe free in your presence.
2. Turn your scars into stars. Your wounds are your greatest wisdom. Share with them your own deep hurts, so the relatability factor plays strong in the conversation.
3. Assure them they are not weak. Encourage them that many of the greats dealt with depression, too. They’re not alone; they are in good company. Struggling with depression is not a weakness, it’s a challenge that some of the world’s most influential members have faced.
4. Help them take control of their life. Rather than hoping for happiness in their circumstances, encourage them to look for meaning. Rather than waiting for change to happen, encourage them to throw themself into a grand purpose via honing their craft, following their dreams, making art and strategic decisions, and doing something significant in their corner of the world. This logotherapy, searching for meaning rather than happiness, often empowers people to start clawing their way out of the pit.
5. Encourage them to own their oddness. At the turn of the 20th century, Alfred Adler did a study wherein he found that 70 percent of the art students he studied had optical anomalies, and some of the greatest composers like Mozart and Beethoven had ear degeneration. Adler found that this occasioned the need to cultivate compensatory ability, wherein the artist has to pour more focus into the area of their weakness than most people, thereby turning it into a strength. Adler believed that negative circumstances and even birth defects often prove to be a springboard for success (Batterson, Mark (2016) In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, New York, NY: Multnomah). Encourage your loved one that their weakness might just be their strength, and their oddity is their commodity.
6. Don’t leave them to suffer alone. Check up on them regularly. Help surround them with friends that galvanize them into higher plains of hope. Edison, Firestone, and Ford all had summer homes next to each other in Florida. Dreamers flock together. We become like the people with whom we spend time. Sometimes by surrounding ourselves with hopeful people, we in turn flourish.