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Burns's "Feeling Good" book led me to a breakthrough in my mood management. Now I keep a copy of the Feeling Good Handbook for quick reference beside my desk at all times.

I spent two years with a fantastic psych in the bay who studied under Burns. She used a combination of 50% ACT, 50% Burns CBT and it was very impactful. Workbooks for homework were The Happiness Trap and the Feeling Good Handbook.

Fundamentally changed my life for the better.

Sorry you’re in pain. Your mileage may vary, and I’m not a doctor and all that, but one thing that has worked wonders in my own life is cognitive behavioral therapy.

You can get the gist of it in this chapter from “The Feeling Good Handbook”, which was written by one of the pioneers in the field:

http://faculty.fortlewis.edu/burke_b/personality/readings/Bu...

That, and getting plenty of sleep.

Seconded--actually I highly recommend The Feeling Good Handbook by the same author (David Burns). I've found it very helpful for dealing with procrastination as well.

Someone here recommended David Burns' "The Feeling Good Handbook" and it was a very, very good read. I'm not going to say it turned my life around, but it taught me how to spot and disarm all kinds of cognitive distortions, defeat laziness, better align my expectations of others, assess my self worth positively...

It's also well written, fast paced, and sometimes even funny. It includes lots of exercises that are practical and easy to do.

It's a book, not a website, but I highly recommend "The Feeling Good Handbook." http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452281326

It's also been shown in experiments to be beneficial: see e.g.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/63/4/644/
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/ccp/65/2/324/

I know there's also another study that compared it to a placebo book instead of just a waiting list control group, and it was better than the placebo book too.

There's two really good approaches to this issue that I've learned. The one in the article is cognitive behavioral therapy (also, dialectical behavioral therapy, depending on the type of ruminations). Another approach that has been gaining more traction lately is mindfulness, which is basically using meditation to clear the mind of ruminating thoughts.

I've read bits of Feeling Good Handbook, which is an often recommended book for CBT, but I really felt like I connected more with the mindfulness approach. Mindfulness seems to work faster for me since I can use meditation to quickly clear out negative thoughts rather than trying to reason about them over time as with CBT. For mindfulness, I'd highly recommend Hardwiring Happiness, which goes into depth about using neuroplasticity (the ability to rewire the brain) to pave more positive neural paths using mindfulness techniques.

I'm sure both CBT and mindfulness are good approaches and can be used in conjunction, and there's likely other good alternatives to these as well. Ultimately the goal is to balance our evolved negativity bias with more positive thinking.

I found David Burns' 'The Feeling Good Handbook' an invaluable resource while coping with depression and probably the factor that helped the most. Others probably were removing stress (changed from a job which was just not working for me), getting longer sleep hours, regular exercise, getting more sunlight, 5-10 minutes meditation and reading books encouraging a positive outlook and gratitude such as 'Search Inside Yourself'.

Along the same lines, mental health professionals usually draw a hard line between thoughts & feelings. Specifically, thought X cause feeling Y. Part of solving feeling Y is to correct thought X (which could be a "twisted thought" [1], I've been guilty of all of them), and it's amazing how you can change your feeling if you change your thought. I've been a solo entrepreneur and it's been very difficult to handle my own emotions, and these are hacks I've found to work.

I would also highly recommend seeing a counselor/therapist (there are sliding-scale prices), they are of tremendous value, but if you're broke like I am, I highly recommend The Feeling Good Handbook by David D. Burns [2]. I can't say enough good things about it; it has helped me tremendously when I've felt stuck and helpless.

If you're very hard on yourself, very goal-oriented and driven, and you're beating yourself up - well, I'm like that too and I've learned from reading that book that it is a vicious cycle that you need to break. There's a whole chapter to procrastination (I know you didn't say procrastination), but it applies to the general feeling of being "stuck" and therefore being really stuck, and it talks about the root causes that you can change. When I read the book, it was a dead on diagnosis for me and I thought the author wrote the book for me!

I sincerely wish you all the best.

[1] http://www.ptsd.org.uk/twisted_thinking.htm

[2] http://t.co/2FvSKFr

What makes you believe that it's not possible to recover from burnout in a few days? I'm reading "The Feeling Good Handbook" (David D. Burns) and p173 talks about a man who suffered from a serious depression that had threatened to ruin his business for quite some time and was steadily getting worse. Apparently he recovered from his depression within a week after after his session.

Obviously I'm not claiming this happens with all patients (it's taken me 4.5 months to move from "severe depression" on the BDC to "normal but unhappy"), but I don't understand why you're so convinced the poster wasn't suffering from a real and debilitating condition that - from his description of it - significantly decreased the quality of his life.

I'd also like to suggest the possibility that the OP may not have recovered at all, but have simply found some temporary respite. I see this from time to time on Facebook with people I know who are suffering from depression but who haven't received (or worked on) proper treatment - they'll post non-stop about how great everything is, how awesome the world is... and then they'll crash. They haven't addressed the underlying causes of their depression, they've simply found a temporary distraction from it.

While I agree that being skeptical about self-help books is a good thing, I think you made a big mistake in your specific example. I have not looked at "The Feeling Good Handbook" that you linked to, but I am quite familiar its predecessor (by the same author), "Feeling Good", which is excellent. It has helped a couple of my friends, and at least one other HN reader.[1] Further, its efficacy is supported by at least one clinical study.[2]

You're right about the image, but the book is worthwhile.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509281

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2738212 (The book is not cited in the abstract, unfortunately, but I believe this is the correct study.)

I struggled with a something very similar (complete inability to work, not knowing what makes me happy), a few things I learned seem relevant:
1) Don't assume what other people are thinking or feeling (about anything, but in this case, many other people do go through similar things)
2) Happiness and fulfillment has a lot to do with expectations (intrinsic as well as external). Understand what those are and where they come from.
3) Talk to people, read, and if that's not enough, get help (seems like you're doing that). You'll probably learn something about yourself.

I can recommend "The Feeling Good Handbook" by David Burns (Stanford), which is about cognitive therapy [also described in other places]. It may not be exactly accurate for your situation, and those types of books may sound silly (I thought so before reading it), but I've found some of the techniques useful.

I just wanted to reply to give another endorsement to David Burns' Feeling Good (http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/03808...) - I personally use the Feeling Good Handbook (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452281326) which is the exact same thing but a little condensed. It's a big book which can be hard to tackle with depression.

Guys, if you're suffering from depression or anxiety, this is the be all and end all of lasting treatments that works. I actually Ctrl-F'ed for it when I opened this thread.