Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Together with medication, the exercises in Mind Over Mood helped me recover from severe depression. They teach you to recognise unhelpful thoughts you have about yourself or others and challenge them, which has a big impact on mood. There are also chapters on making action plans, dealing with guilt and shame, monitoring your progress, and tackling deep-seated beliefs. I began using this book in a therapy group, so it's hard to say how helpful it would be used purely as a self-help book, but the exercises are fairly simple and they do make a big difference. A "must buy" for anyone suffering from depression, anxiety disorders or perfectionism.

While I found this book helpful in understanding more about depression and anxiety, the "self-analysis" techniques it recommends are much too complicated. It attempts to classify and quantify intangibles such as moods and feelings to an impossible degree. For example, it divides moods into 25+ categories such as mad, happy, cheerful, angry, disgusted, panicky, etc. The problem here is defining the exact nature of a mood. Does "mad" or "disgusted" mean the same thing to everyone? Where does "mad" end and "angry" start? Can we really place a mood into a specific "box" that has precisely defined boundaries? Next, it attempts to rate the degree of each of these moods into a numerical scale ranging from 0 to 100. In other words, how much is "mad" is in our "mad" box"? While this approach to the problem may give it the appearance of "science", it is more akin to becoming excruciatingly exact about gross approximations.
The next question is whether the person afflicted with either depression or anxiety can actually view his/her situation impartially from the outside looking in? Highly doubtful! Most likely, the sufferer is "standing too close to the trees to see the forest". Finally, the sheer volume of record keeping suggested by the author is overwhelming. This may work for some, but in my case it simply aggravates my frustration which in turn elevates my anxiety level.
While some of these techniques may prove helpful to professionals and possibly to certain individual cases, they have not been helpful to me. Sorry, but the best I can do is give it the benefit of the doubt with a mid-range rating.

Hey guys,

I've NEVER EVER written a review in my life for a book or anything before. I wasn't about to start but after seeing that 1 star from that "Helen" fellow; I had to jump in. It's people like that who expect a magic pill type "Silver Bullet" INSTANT CURE that give everyone else false hopes.

Therapy is hard. Your negative and distorted thoughts cause your suffering. To be "CURED" you have to learn to talk back to your negative thoughts. Talking back to your negative thoughts is hard and painful at times.

At some point, you are going to have to make peace with all the anger, hostility, anxiety, resentment, worthlessness, guilt, shame, hopelessness by bringing those POWERFUL emotions into your conscious awareness. If it was easy, everyone would be able to do it on their own and Therapists would be out of work.

Here's what's worked for me. I used this "WORK"book in conjunction with the the following
1. 10 days to self-esteem by David Burns
2. The feeling good handbook by David Burns

Using those 3 books for about 4 months on my own I would say, I saw about a 40% imporvement. When I got all I could out of these books on my own, I sought the help of a competent therapist.

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If you live far away, you may have to travel a little bit. I live about 2 hours from philly and so I have to put aside 5 to 6 hours every week. 5 hours travel time and 1 hour for the therapy session. Your situation may be better/worse than mine but if I can do it, so can you. YOU HAVE OPTIONS !!!

BUT, EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE. If you do the exercies, you will see results. I GUARANTEE YOU. Get this book first and do the exercies. Then get the other two books that I mentioned above. After you get everything out of them that you can, move on to the next level. One of the biggest things that therapists struggle with is patients with conflicting drives. On one level, they want to change but on another level they don't.

If you do the exercises in these books, and if you still need additional help/coaching; when you do go to see a therapist, you will progress at a ridiculous speed (6 months max) simply because you'll already understand the basics and that extra nudge from a caring and competent professional will put you over the top. There won't be anything slowing you down.

Hope this helps and above all, KEEP YOUR EXPECTATIONS REALISTIC.

I was very disappointed with the content and layout of this book. The amount of wasted pages for 'workspace' is excessive, but considering the lack of true content, I assume they needed to fill pages with something.

Our spouses group purchased this item to donate it to a Psycology Clinic at our local hospital. The clinic was very excited to receive it since they specifically requested this book.