When I was writing yesterday’s post I chuckled to myself at the fact that there are times I truly enjoy be down or depressed. I’m grumpy and annoyed at everything and yet this is the attitude I choose to have. If something starts to cheer me up I get more annoyed at it. Now we all have emotional cycles of ups and downs, but what is it that makes me feel that I’d enjoy be down more than up?

Thankfully these times are rare but when I was growing up, they were much more common. It really kicked in around adolescence, which I’m sure means initially it was biological. The armchair psychologist in me says that during that time I had some self-esteem issues, quite a few actually, and liking to be depressed was one method I chose to deal with it. After all, if you are already down, another failure really has less impact. Also it could attract attention, which I wanted anyway, so it worked on multiple levels.

None of this is healthy, of course, nor does it endear you to the people around you. It wasn’t until well after college that I started to conquer this behavior and these feelings. My self-worth started to improve so the need to stay down started to disappear. Also I was gaining competence in the things I wanted to do so the fear of failure subsided as well.

Still, there are times when I’m a little down and when I start to get over it, my first impulse is to quash that feeling. Almost as if my subconscious does not want me to feel better. I have to actually identify this fact and then take steps to stop it from happening. I find it strangely silly that at least at some level I don’t want to be happy. Talk about being out of balance.

I’ve tied this to my previous self-esteem issues and I think that is a lot of it, but the other part ties into stretching your comfort zone. Have you ever met someone who never seemed happy? No matter what was going on they always had a dark side to it, like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh? Obviously, they are not people you want to spend too much time around, but why are they like that? Have they been down for so long that anything else feels uncomfortable for them? If so, each day that passes makes pulling away from that behavior that much more difficult. It takes serious effort to change your behavior, but once you do you will often look back at where you were and wonder how you let yourself get into such a situation.

So the next time you are down, look at yourself and see if you are there because you secretly want to. If so, it is time to be a “person of action” and make a positive change in your life. One little step at a time.