Are intelligent people more prone to depression?

I think it’s true yes, and more prone to other mental illnesses too like anxiety, OCD, schizophrenia.

The human mind is hyper-malleable and the most intelligent mind, the most malleable of all. I often think of this issue as the difference between driving a Ferrari and a Mini. The Ferrari is more powerful, can go faster, but is also more dangerous, harder to handle, and perhaps is tuned so finely that it’s prone to break down :-)

With more power under the intelligent bonnet, it’s especially important that such people have the right nurture and the right tools to know how to run their powerful minds. Unfortunately this information is missing from our education and missing from our culture.

And so very sensitive and very intelligent people often suffer from their gift which is a crying shame.

So what to do? — it always boils down to that. A massive help is meditation, in fact I would say that if you’re having any trouble with thoughts at all, then meditation is a must. And I don’t mean play around with it, or dip your toe in the water, I say dive in, make it a top priority.

The benefits of meditation are incredible and are especially needed for sensitive and intelligent folks as I said. It’s about driving your own mental car, your Ferrari brain, learning to go left, right, brake, stop, go faster… being the boss.

Thinking has become over-dominant and so we lose our selves, in the process. We can easily trip up and make a self out of thinking, by identifying with thoughts and incorrectly calling them “me.” This can happen to such an extent then there is no true sense of self left at all, just a bunch of mislabeled thought habits and that spells hell and misery.

So meditation means you’re the boss again and also means a return to your true sense of self. That’s why it must be a priority. And there’s also the “sins of the father” that we have to undo, all the well-meaning advice we took on-board as children and never questioned that can cause so much pain down the line.

One wrong idea believed and invested in can cause a lifetime of misery.

So, meditation is number one and very very powerful. But everything affects everything else — that means that your whole lifestyle plays its part. Simply put, a happy mood = happy thoughts. So how to get a happy mood?

The six lifestyle elements in Happy Guide all tied together by the powerful way of good habit creation (which is the way you’re wired; for habits), are the causes of “happy mood.”

And what makes you happy, will also make you healthy and that means preventing all sorts of potential illnesses down the line which may have become reality if you’d not changed your ways.

Bottom line is that it all boils down to living right and thinking right; living the lifestyle that you’re tied to at the level of your genetics… a natural lifestyle.

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Michael Kinnaird is the author of Happy Guide, the result of a 20 year exploration into what works for health and happiness.

Read Chapter 1 “The Happiness Secret”
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