When you feel bad, you will have the tendency to come up with a theory as to why you feel the way you do. Without knowing the actual cause, it makes sense to create a reason. As long as you can create reasons for your depression – your marital status, your job, your children, your genes, your financial situation, your future, and so forth – you can maintain the false hope that things will get better when…But you can probably see that, in actuality, this is not true. The mindset that says ‘Life will be better when…’ will create further conditions that must be met as soon as the initial conditions are satisfied. You need only to look at the countless times in your life that you received what you wanted – and happiness still eluded you – to realize that changing your circumstances isn’t the answer to your problems. If it were, you’d already be happy! You wanted to graduate, you graduated. You wanted a mate, you got one. You wanted a pet, you got one. You wanted a pay-check, you got one. And so on. Tens of thousands of times in your life you got exactly what you wanted and yet you’re still unhappy!

The solution is to have the humility to admit that all along you have been creating your own pain through your own thinking. Don’t worry; almost everyone else is doing the same thing. The good news is that as soon as you see that this is true, you’ll be on your way to a far better life. No matter how depressed you have been, or how long you have been depressed, the moment you can see that it’s only your thinking that is holding your depression in place, you’re on your way to freedom. - Richard Carlson