Around a week ago, I dug myself into an emotional trough. I am writing this blog because similar times have occurred before, and I wanted to finally reflect on it all.

The hard times started when I started consuming a lot of horror movie recaps.

I did this because my mind is often drawn to emotionally heavy triggers, leading to accelerated consumption.
Doing this unknowingly flooded my mind with negative thoughts/emotions inherent to those movies.
Subsequently, my viewpoint on everything in life started plummeting, as I took to a pessimistic outlook on the world.

By the time I have written this, many of these negative memories have already washed out of my mind. But here are some feelings I experienced:

A heavy depressive and supressive field on my heart.
Extreme inflow of fear/stress from empathizing with my parents on some family issues.
Doubts about my own character/vices.

How did I climb out of this hole I dug myself into?

Firstly, I put into concrete words, that what was depicted in those movies are not reality.
Secondly, I remembered my positive outlook on the world, which is something I forgot due to emotional overload.

Perceiving the world in a positive outlook.

Most of the time something bad happens in my life, I have always tried to adopt an positive outlook.

Some examples include:

When considering an out of distribution/flawed behavior in myself, eg various bodily desires, I would normalize them, leading to my subconscious making natural corrections, and leading to less occurances of this behavior. This is in contrast to if I repeatedly thought about such flaws, which may reinforce those negative impulses further.
When considering doubts about someone I care about, I would ground myself by thinking of all their positive attributes; how much smarter they are than me, all their positive traits, and how I wouldn't ever doubt that they will become a great person in the future.

By forgetting this positive outlook, my mindset shifted back into a pessimistic one, leading to overempathizing past that of reality, emotional overload, and collapse.

Before this event, I had developed prior, optimistic outlooks on various subjects in my life, based on deep introspection.
Flooding my emotions unknowingly displaced some of these priors.

The takeaway of this post, is to remove oneself from negative influences as much as possible, and to ground one's outlook of the world positively when faced with such negative influences.

Many previous depressive episodes I have faced have stemmed from myself digging deeper and deeper holes for myself as I spiraled downward in pessimism.
I don't look down on any of these experiences because they have contributed to a deeper understanding of myself.
These experiences may have bore worse on me in the past, due to a lack of reality-grounded perceptions that were only built through age. This may also be why horror movies affected me so much at younger ages, because I was unable to ground myself back in reality.
Overall, adopting a positive outlook on the world, surrounding myself with positive people, and consuming positive content has allowed me to maintain a happier life.

On Positivity