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Halfway through J.K. Rowling’s latest book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), Harry and his two friends are on the run. They’re trying to find the evil lord’s “Horcruxes,” which are objects containing part of his soul. They need to destroy them. They’ve found one but haven’t figured out how to destroy it. They don’t know where to look for the others. They’re having a hard time.

Then Harry’s best friend (Ron) gets mad and leaves them. This is a setback. And what does a setback do? It makes you feel demoralized. And when you feel demoralized, your mind starts making mistakes, and those mistakes make you even more demoralized. Here’s a passage from the book that perfectly illustrates it. This is what Harry is thinking:

He could not hide it from himself: Ron had been right. Dumbledore had left him with virtually nothing. They had discovered one Horcrux, but they had no means of destroying it: The others were as unattainable as they had ever been. Hopelessness threatened to engulf him. He was staggered now to think of his own presumption in accepting his friends’ offers to accompany him on this meandering, pointless journey. He knew nothing, he had no ideas, and he was constantly, painfully on the alert for any indication that Hermione too was about to tell him that she had had enough, that she was leaving.

In his depression, Harry exaggerates: He had no ideas, he knew nothing. This wasn’t true. But can you see how feeling demoralized makes those kinds of thoughts easier to think? And how thinking those thoughts would make him feel even more discouraged?

Hopelessness “threatened to engulf him,” but this was false hopelessness. There was still plenty he could do. Thinking of his situation as hopeless took the fight out of him, as it would for anyone. He desperately needed to use the antivirus for the mind and straighten out his thinking.

Okay, let’s look at one more thought-mistake Harry is making and then we’ll leave the poor kid alone. He calls their mission a “meandering, pointless journey.” This is the mistake of harmful judging. In fact, their journey is vitally important and he is the only one who has a chance of succeeding with it. Yes, he may fail. But if he succeeds, he may save thousands of lives, maybe millions. But harmful judging doesn’t help. It only makes him feel demoralized and unmotivated.

His depression also influences his perception, as it does for you and me. He begins to feel hypersensitive about how Hermione feels, maybe misinterpreting some of the expressions on her face and things she says. And you know what that’s like, don’t you? Everyone has done it. Misinterpretations can easily make negative predictions come true. Harry might accuse Hermione of thinking something she’s not really thinking, making her mad. And now she is thinking that.

The point of all this is to let you see it from the outside. I thought J.K. Rowling did a great job of conveying the feeling of demoralization and the kind of thought-mistakes that accompany and intensify that feeling.

And my other purpose is for you to realize you should waste no time when you feel disheartened. Don’t let yourself spin down into a dive. Run — don’t walk — to the nearest paper and pen and start using the antivirus for your mind. Undemoralize yourself as soon as possible. You don’t want any of those thought-mistakes to solidify into beliefs — the kind of beliefs that would hold you back from goals you want to reach.

Clean out your mind and your motivation will return. The antivirus for your mind works like magic to get you back on your feet, striving toward your goal with determination and vigor.

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
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When you feel discouraged, you know what to do: The antivirus for your mind. When you’re looking for why you think your setback has happened, you’ll look for mistakes in your explanations. So far so good.

Sometimes the explanation you came up with will be true, but the implication is false (or at least could be better). This falls under the category of false implication (one of the 22 virus definitions). False implication is a thought-mistake.

For example, a woman was depressed because she’d lost her job two years ago, and hadn’t gotten another job since. She felt like a failure because she was still jobless after all this time.

Her explanation of her failure was: She didn’t do well in job interviews.

Her therapist wanted to test this, so he did a mock interview with her, and the therapist agreed — she was terrible at being interviewed.

However, her conclusion was that because she interviewed so badly, she would never get a job. The therapist, on the other hand, concluded that since they now knew exactly what the problem was, getting a job has become possible. All she had to do was learn to interview well.

So they practiced and the therapist coached her to improve the way she presented herself and she got better. They rehearsed, did mockups, recorded the practice sessions and really worked on it.

At her very next interview, she was offered the job. That was ten years ago. She has been continually employed since then in a very competitive field.

Now look at what happened. Her explanation for her failure was correct. She made no thought-mistakes there. She thought she was a lousy interview, and she was. But she made a mistake in the implication she drew from that. She thought the fact that she wasn’t good at interviewing implied she couldn’t get hired. This implication is wrong, or at least you could draw a more productive implication from the same fact.

So when you’re going through the process, writing down your demoralizing thoughts and checking them for thought-mistakes, go one step further. If you find a demoralizing thought and you know it’s true, explore further. What demoralizing implications have you concluded about it? Are they necessarily true? Don’t be so sure. If a thought is pessimistic, it is suspect. Any negative thought you have is automatically suspect. Really look at it because the consequences are significant.

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
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