I have written a great deal about the factors to take into account when evaluating yourself for a stress-related injury like depression here, specifically in the context of anxiety disorder.

Depression is a different but fundamentally related condition.

It is fundamentally related in the sense that both clinical depression and anxiety disorder have as their root cause extreme and often chronic stress.

As a result of this relationship, many of the same principles I applied to a test for anxiety disorder also apply to a test for depression.

In particular, the most important test for depression is the one that you give yourself.

What this really means is that, as for any illness of any kind, you typically diagnose yourself and then go to a doctor or other medical professional to have that diagnosis validated and a course of treatment prescribed.

Depression is no different.

You start your test for depression with an idea, a preconception, a mental construct of what it means to be “depressed”.

In the process you compare yourself to that personal, individual mental construct of what it means to be "depressed", and determine on your own whether or not you meet the requirements.

Often this comparison is influenced by the people around you. Maybe you factor in comments by friends or relatives like:

“Hey, you seem kind of depressed lately. Is everything alright?”

Or conversely, “Wow, you’ve been through a lot lately. How do you stay so chipper and upbeat?”

But regardless of the amount of external input you receive in regards to your test for depression, it all boils down to what you decide.

I’ll now and go a step farther and tell you that there is a secret to understanding the way that you make these kinds of internal self-diagonoses.

The secret to determining whether you will decide that you are depressed or not, the key factor in the analysis, is how much your symptoms inconvenience your day-to-day life.

Think about it – how many times have you heard of people neglecting their dental hygiene, not going to the dentist for cleanings for years, even decades?

Their teeth are rotting in their head, indeed, you may even be able to see it, but they still find a way not to do anything about it.

Then all of a sudden they wake up one day with an awful toothache. Within the hour they’ve likely called the dentist and set up an appointment.

An appointment that will likely involve expensive and intensive dental work.

Up until they felt that pain, their life had not been sufficiently inconvenienced for them to make the decision, in their own mind, that they had a genuine problem and needed to go see a doctor.

A legitimate problem had probably been therefor years, and could likely have been averted by the regular practice of simple dental hygiene. But instead they waited and neglected the issue until it couldn’t be ignored any longer.

Stress-related injuries function in practically the exact same way.

The regular practice of stress-related injury prevention as outlined in my book THE STRESS VACCINE™ and my HARDCORE STRESS MANAGEMENT™ MASTERCOURSE helps to ensure that serious stress-related symptoms like anxiety and depression never surface.

Ever heard the expression, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"?

Sage advice!

But people have a habit of waiting until things get so bad that they become overwhelmed.

Then they call in a professional, who rightly agrees that the patient fails the test for depression or whatever other problem they have. And that professional suggests a method of treatment for the symptoms – often involving anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs.

How much better would it be to treat the root cause, to neutralize the stress, before anxiety, panic attacks and depression ever become an issue?

This is the essence of the HARDCORE STRESS MANAGEMENT™ philosophy.

The real issue is that it is human nature to focus on symptoms, instead of causes.

We focus on the anxiety or the depression, because it is the symptoms that are inconveniencing our lives, and we ignore the root cause: the stress.

Modern medicine is equally focused on treating the symptoms, the anxiety and the depression, with its psychotropic drugs.

That is why the methods I teach are so radically different. It is all about treating and managing the cause, the stress, at it's root in the body.

These techniques are so effective at helping wean people off prescription medication because as the root cause is managed, the symptoms begin to disappear …

... if those are the kind of results you are looking for, you want to pick up your copy of THE STRESS VACCINE™ today!

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