While you can't control your experiences, you can control your explanations. - Martin E P Seligman

The takeaway lesson from positive psychology is that positive mental health is not just the absence of mental illness.

Above all, during the interval, change from “ego orientation” to “task orientation.” Think: “I know this seems like a personal insult, but it is not. It is a challenge to be overcome that calls on skills I have.

Women are twice as likely to suffer depression as men are, because on the average they think about problems in ways that amplify depression. Men tend to act rather than reflect, but women tend to contemplate their depression, mulling it over and over, trying to analyze it and determine its source. Psychologists call this process of obsessive analysis rumination, a word whose first meaning is “chewing the cud.” Ruminant animals, such as cattle, sheep, and goats, chew a cud composed of regurgitated, partially digested food — not a very appealing image of what people who ruminate do with their thoughts, but an exceedingly apt one. Rumination combined with pessimistic explanatory style is the recipe for severe depression. This ends the bad news. The good news is that both pessimistic explanatory style and rumination can be changed, and changed permanently. Cognitive therapy can create optimistic explanatory style and curtail rumination. It prevents new depressions by teaching the skills needed to bounce back from defeat. You will see how it works on others, and then you will learn how to use its techniques on yourself.