That's not quite how it works. Sometimes rational people get depressed and they can tell that their thinking is distorted and un-distorting it doesn't make them feel better. They just feel bad. Meanwhile, some depressed people contribute to their depression through cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing that PECOS-9 pointed out, and CBT can help (though not necessarily cure) that subset of people.
But for many of the rest of us, being depressed is simply being realistic.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can't completely fix a problem, then once you've done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn't feel bad anymore.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can't completely fix a problem, then once you've done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn't feel bad anymore.
This is true, but not always helpful. People aren't necessarily at liberty to decide whether to feel bad or not.
Pain is extremely valuable as a motivator to address problems with our bodies, but when we're unable to address those problems, we can't simply decide to stop feeling pain, no matter how unhelpful the pain might be.
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more". This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.