intention

"Do or do not. There is no try."  This suddenly makes sense, removing success or failure from the equation.  When doing is a matter of intention, and not the external objective it's supposed to accomplish.  You either intend something, or you don't.

Who to believe.. Yoda or Lao Tze?

Wondering what I'd posted about cognitive behavioral therapy exactly, I did a blogger search for 'cognitive.' A number of passing references, and one post on it specifically.  It made me realize just how much differently I'm thinking about it, and how there are a few different ways of interpreting what sort of behavioral changes we're talking about.  I've read about it some, but not at enough depth to get into specifics.

In one old post, I was thinking of it from the perspective of overcoming depression.  The idea being that doing happier things would lead to feeling happier.  Or the old familiar premise that if I'd just get up and get moving, I'd feel better.  This is a bit simplistic, but can be true, unless there's a physiological problem preventing it from being true.  All my references to physiology did remind me that I used to feel a lot worse all the time.

Understanding how neurophysiology is altered by behavior has a lot to do with my recent change of direction, though.  Understanding that these changes are very gradual.  It's not the impact of behavior in any immediate sense.  Doing things as part of an every day routine pushes our neurophysiology to adapt and get better at it.  This is what I've meant by viewing everything as practice.

I've also thought about behavioral therapy more from the perspective of anxiety.  If you expose yourself to anxiety provoking situations, you'll get used to it, you'll get over it.  This can be more universally true than the first approach, but it can be quite difficult and painful.  I'm not sure it's always the right solution.  I've realized that I don't like the emphasis on getting used to it, as I don't believe that will necessarily happen.  It might, but I can't count on it.  I need to be able to tell myself that this is all worth doing regardless.

Now, I'm thinking of it in terms of behavior, not to counteract negatives (anxiety, depression) but to build up positives.  That is, to do things so that I'll get better at doing things.  That may or may not involve any reduction in anxiety or depression, but I know that I really need to get better at this whole life thing.  I need to get better at navigating society, one way or another.  Of course that should in turn help with mental health, but that itself isn't the point.  Fixating on my problems like that would be kind of depressing, right?

In any case, doing so much nothing has made me terrible at doing things, and changing direction has been like trying to steer the Titanic, but I'm getting there.  In trying to read up on CBT though, I still don't know which of these angles, if any, it's supposed to involve.