Christine Padesky's Mind Over Mood and Depression (N3)

Mind Over Mood, by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky, is the best-selling cognitive behavioral therapy workbook in the world, the one clinicians hand patients to learn the skills that lift depression and calm anxiety on their own. Its premise is that mood can move, that the thoughts feeding a low stretch can be caught and tested. Padesky frames the whole enterprise as teaching. In an interview with the Milton H. Erickson Foundation she says, "Therapy is a learning process. I think of myself as an educator when I'm doing therapy and I want to help people learn in the best ways possible." The low, heavy mood the book most aims to lift is, in the Big Five, one facet.

The heavy mood it lifts is the Depression facet

That facet is Depression (N3), under Neuroticism, your standing tendency toward sadness and the sense that effort is pointless. A high scorer sinks more easily and stays down longer; a low scorer rebounds and holds a steadier baseline. Greenberger and Padesky write for the high end, and their bet is that the mood is reachable through the thoughts that maintain it, which a person can learn to examine on paper. It matters to say that a high N3 is a trait vulnerability, a dial you were partly born on that life loads further, and the workbook teaches skills, it does not replace treatment.

Depression travels close to Anxiety (N1), and the book treats both, though the two feel different from the inside. Anxiety leans forward into a threatening future; depression sits heavy in a present drained of point and pleasure. What Mind Over Mood rebuilds, one thought record at a time, is a quiet sense of self-efficacy (C1), the belief that your actions still matter, which low mood is so good at erasing. The skill is noticing the automatic verdict that nothing will help and checking it against the evidence.

For a reader placing themselves, your N3 is a fair read on how easily you sink and how long the heaviness tends to stay. High on it and Mind Over Mood is a proven, self-paced way to work with the thoughts that keep the mood low. Low on it and the book explains the loved one whose sadness will not simply lift on cheerful advice. Where you sit on Depression tells you how steady your emotional floor is, and we take the facet apart in Depression (N3).

Read the book: Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think by Christine Padesky.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

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