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How to (Quickly) Turn Depression Into Motivation
- Written by NelsonQuest
- August 17, 2022
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I spent most of my teens and early 20’s feeling depressed, despite talking with friends and family, spending hours every day… mostly at night… scrolling through internet forums learning about how others cured their depression, and I even met with professionals.
And we’ll talk about how useless these things were shortly, because what I really want to focus on today is a different way to treat depression that you won’t read about in any book or hear about in other videos.
Once I FULLY understood it – it didn’t JUST cure my depression… it turned me into a GOD.
Ok it didn’t turn me into an ACTUAL God, but it made me GodLIKE – transforming me from an average mortal who never did any of the stuff they always promised themself they would do – into the exact opposite of that.
The massive business I’ve built, my investments, the salsa, boxing, smoking hot girl and of course my growing action figure collection –
All of it is because of the uncommon knowledge that I’m about to share with you. To understand, we’ll need to go on a journey of 4 steps, starting with:
Step 1: Hitting Rock Bottom
In 2011, I found what I thought was the girl of my dreams. A few months later she left me to get back together with a past boyfriend of hers who was smart, successful, spiritual, and philosophically inclined –
While I was just some loser whose entire existence revolved around New York sports teams and getting drunk on weekends.
So when she left me, I was POSITIVE that I would NEVER find a girl like her again, and for all of the depression I had experienced up until that point in my life, this was the worst.
At first I did everything we’re ‘supposed’ to do to get better, and when that didn’t work, I decided I would just ‘wait’ for the pain to end… and that’s when a miracle happened.
I was smoking a cigarette on the rooftop of the building where I lived, gazing woefully onto the New York City skyline as I had done every night for months, when suddenly a little after midnight on March 11, 2011, I officially hit the absolute lowest point of my life.
I know this because the very next moment was when everything changed.
In a fraccion of a second, less time than it takes to snap your finger, I awakened to the mind-blowing revelation that I didn’t HAVE to experience depression the way that society had taught me to experience it – but that I could instead use it as ENERGY.
In understanding this, I felt an unimaginable power enter my body. I flicked my cigarette away and started jumping as high as I could, tears streaming down my face.
Then I ran back to my apartment, and OBSESSIVELY began doing ALL of the things that I always knew I had ought to do but never was quite able to do – starting with – for the first time in my life – ordering a book.
From that day forward, I would start every morning with a few chapters and a cup of coffee, and from there it was game on.
I completely cut myself from friends and social media. No procrastination, no distractions – every second of every day spent working towards realizing my true potential.
In my career, I quickly went from earning very little for designing websites that took me MONTHS to complete – to earning thousands of dollars designing websites that now only took me days.
In my physical, I went from having never run more than a few blocks, to running, biking and swimming for hours every day – a year and 2 months later I would fly to South Africa to compete in my first ironman…
And you guys more or less know the rest…
Now here’s the thing – to fully understand what I’m trying to share in this video – we need to be able to look into the mirror and ACTUALLY be honest with ourselves – we probably are already at rock-bottom.
Incapable of doing the things we know we should be doing, which has caused us to fall far behind in life. We know we have to change, but we’re completely powerless to do so.
So why the hell are we spending so much time trying to improve something that’s already broken when COULD be doing the exact opposite?
FUCK self-improvement, self-DESTRUCTION is where it’s at. When we destroy what we presently believe ourselves to be, we FREE that thing that we might become.
This all starts by systematically destroying the fundamental truths that constitute present reality, which is a lot like a prison. This is a long process which I’ll talk about in other videos, but for now let’s start by talking about the ‘reality’ of depression.
Step 2: Understand How Society ‘Distorts’ Depression
We’re taught that depression is a long-term mental illness that requires treatment from a trained medical professional, who can decide whether or not we should be put on medication to help alleviate symptoms. Nothing inherently wrong with this.
When those around us see that we’re depressed, they encourage us to ‘take our mind off of things’ by hanging out with friends or doing something that we enjoy. They try to help us, because they care about us. Nothing inherently wrong with this either.
But here’s the thing, everything that society encourages us to do – Confide in others, Seek help, take medication, distract ourselves – these are all EXTERNAL remedies that do NOTHING to address the underlying root of depression which is of course an INTERNAL problem.
And we NEVER hear about internal solutions, because the primary goal of modern society is PROFIT, and there is absolutely NO profit to be made in our inside.
Imagine for just a second, how catastrophically the world economy would collapse if everyone first looked internally to solve their problems instead of looking to EXTERNAL things.
What does that tell us about the true nature of reality?
Get the Dark Mode guide
The Dark Mode Guide
is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.
This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.
Step 3: Understand The True Reality of Depression
The societal beliefs surrounding depression are so concrete that it’s considered taboo to even REMOTELY question them.
Why? Why can’t we have a rational conversation about whether depression is possibly a ‘choice’ without ravenous, mouth-foaming zealots shouting us down?
Depression itself is an ‘effect’ – and we know that every ‘effect’ has a cause, which in the case of depression is different for everyone.
Not being happy with who we are, or where we’re at in life, sexual frustration or the feeling that we’ll never find a good partner, a particularly difficult family or life situation or circumstance.
For most of us, Depression is the end result of feeling lots of these things for a sustained period of time, and what we ‘feel’ isn’t depression but rather ‘negative emotions’ – like sadness, loneliness, anger and fear, and this is precisely where the problem begins, because the idea of a ‘negative emotion’ is absurd…
a fundamental truth that we plainly accept as one of the pillars that form our reality which I implore you to destroy.
Because if we look closely, there is a place before positive and negative, where emotions exist simply as emotions.
And in this place, we can choose how to perceive them – and this is where the power that I’m describing begins.
Step 4: Decide How to React to ‘Negative’ Emotions
When something HAPPENS to us – Maybe we fail a difficult assignment, we get fired from a job, someone we like rejects us, or it’s saturday night and we’re all alone… again.
Society teaches us that it is NORMAL to react NEGATIVELY to these things… but does it really have to be that way?
If we really think about it, isn’t it even a bit silly to react that way, which only makes things worse, when we could instead be making things better?
Because if we look closely here as well, there’s a space between the things that happen to us and how we react to them.
When we feel powerless to fix our depression… It’s because we don’t see that this space exists.
And when we learn to observe this space, we can execute the following formula that I use to channel my depression into godlike power:
First, something happens to us which usually causes us to feel some sort of negative emotion.
Then, instead of reacting “negatively” as we always do – we should CHOOSE to use to use the emotion as the FUEL to drive the ACTIONS that will instead MOVE US towards the AMAZING thing that we know we can become if we simply do the things that we know we MUST do.
As soon as we begin to do this – in that same space where we are now choosing to react positively to negative emotions, we can now start to PERCEIVE negative emotions AS positive because of the POSITIVE effect they are creating.
This is the formula.
Now I can’t stress enough that for this to work, we HAVE to be willing to challenge the things we currently accept as truth, which is easy if we just observe how profoundly those truths are limiting us.
After that, all that’s left is to try it with the full-belief that it will work. And if you’re not convinced, what do you have to lose by at least giving this a try?
For me this is no longer a formula that I need to practice, it’s simply who I am. I still feel sadness, anger, frustration etcetera, but I rarely react negatively to them.
Instead I channel them into the fuel I use to give me a life that I previously thought was impossible.
If you feel like you got something from the article, please like and subscribe to the YT channel, and visit nelsonquest.com to download ‘Dark Mode’ for free – it will give you a framework that will make it much easier to channel negative emotions into power.
This is the path.
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