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Prepared response to depression
7 years ago
I'm sorry you're depressed. Depression is like a great lake of mud in a storm where life should be firm underfoot and pleasantly sunny. Everyone has negative thoughts now and again, but when they're derailing life, they're a problem.
I found these things helpful, so I put them here:
. Sleep properly. Put yourself to bed early enough to have your 7-8 hours each night, and don't over-sleep. A regular routine helps create a useful habit: subdued lighting, a warm milky drink, a bath or shower, light jazz, whatever.
. If you suffer from insomnia when you're in bed, try to avoid fretting about it - instead keep a notepad by your bed to write down the thoughts and ideas that're troubling you so you can pick them up tomorrow (tomorrow, you can decide to ignore them). If you're still having trouble, try moving to a different room with gentle lighting and read a book (not on a phone) for half an hour before trying to go back to sleep.
. You can also use the notebook as a casual journal, making notes about how each day went - that can help show you recurrent thoughts that lead into unhelpful spirals.
. Eat properly - brightly coloured vegetables, oily fish, big-shape pasta, spices. A good varied diet. Occasional cakes. Vitamin pills are better than nothing, but vegetables are absorbed more easily and are more interesting on the tongue.
. Take breaks and focus on small achievable goals with little rewards. If your inner chimpanzee is bored, you need to engage it.
. Exercise - even a five minute walk in the outside before bed can help clear some of the cobwebs; more is better, but start small and reward yourself after each walk. If there's a cafe nearby, walk there for a (decaff!) coffee - sharing small-talk with someone about the weather can help lift your mood.
. Visit friends or clubs to talk with real-life people - again, getting out of the house - if you have friends locally, visit them. If there's a singing group or art club or whatever that piques your interest, visit it.
. Monitor and review your use of social media: if you feel worse or unfulfilled after reading some particular feed or other, it may be best to unsubscribe from that channel (or even the whole service). You don't owe people watch-loyalty at the expense of your mental health, nor do you have to read everything posted!
. Watch out for absolute language: use of 'everything', 'nothing', 'always', and 'never' should almost always be qualified with exceptions, so think of some or (if it's appropriate and likely to be helpful) think of ways to make some, ideally with other people.
. Like any major medical condition, depression can become the main/only thing someone talks and thinks about. It's worth asking whether friends are comfortable taking about it further than just saying it's not lifted yet: most friends can support you best by keeping you in touch with things - a few will be able to engage directly (and may well not be your current best friends)!
. If you can work out some particular cause for it, and it's something you can change, that will help: it can arise from unresolved conflict: living up to someone else's standards, or trying to stick with a plan you no longer believe in. Just recently I was trying to complete a project without realising i didn't have a clear route or goal defined so it never felt like I was making progress.
. Here's a weird one: cold showers. My wife found some Scandinavian bloke who's obsessed with cold water therapy, and building up from a short burst at (I think) the start, I now shower cold year round and... Well, it might be helping? It's certainly bracing and makes me feel like I've achieved something at the start of each day! I find it hard to shower warm now!
Something I found unexpectedly helpful was headspace.com - the starter course is free. It's a strictly secular mindfulness meditation, based on counting your breaths from one to ten repeatedly as a means of learning to distance yourself from the troublesome thoughts that you don't really want around anyway - for the next five minutes, giving yourself a little holiday from them, casually ignoring them, letting them drift away, bringing your attention gently and unjudgementally back to the counting each time it wanders off (as it does for everyone) and starting from one if you lose track of where you were or find yourself above 10 (because the counting is merely a thing to give your mind a holiday - it's not important in itself). My wife finds the counting intrusive, so she uses 'Daily Calm' instead, and usually falls asleep to the basket ball man.
The brain is just another organ, but when it goes wrong, we can find it hard to disconnect our sense of self from what it's doing, and feel weird about taking drugs in case they change who we are (they don't). It's a shame we don't call depression 'brain diabetes' to emphasise that when we feed our mind incessant negative experiences, don't let it get enough sleep, and don't exercise it, it falls ill and takes us with it.
So medication can definitely help. Depression is at least in part a mental habit, like the gulleys animals make when they follow the same paths over and over again. The drugs can help flood the area to make new thought-habits easier to form, ready for you to follow when you gradually come off the drugs.
These articles may also be helpful: https://badootech.badoo.com/burnt-o.....t-3a4146332770 http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9219704
All the best. Feel free to contact me if you want to.
I found these things helpful, so I put them here:
. Sleep properly. Put yourself to bed early enough to have your 7-8 hours each night, and don't over-sleep. A regular routine helps create a useful habit: subdued lighting, a warm milky drink, a bath or shower, light jazz, whatever.
. If you suffer from insomnia when you're in bed, try to avoid fretting about it - instead keep a notepad by your bed to write down the thoughts and ideas that're troubling you so you can pick them up tomorrow (tomorrow, you can decide to ignore them). If you're still having trouble, try moving to a different room with gentle lighting and read a book (not on a phone) for half an hour before trying to go back to sleep.
. You can also use the notebook as a casual journal, making notes about how each day went - that can help show you recurrent thoughts that lead into unhelpful spirals.
. Eat properly - brightly coloured vegetables, oily fish, big-shape pasta, spices. A good varied diet. Occasional cakes. Vitamin pills are better than nothing, but vegetables are absorbed more easily and are more interesting on the tongue.
. Take breaks and focus on small achievable goals with little rewards. If your inner chimpanzee is bored, you need to engage it.
. Exercise - even a five minute walk in the outside before bed can help clear some of the cobwebs; more is better, but start small and reward yourself after each walk. If there's a cafe nearby, walk there for a (decaff!) coffee - sharing small-talk with someone about the weather can help lift your mood.
. Visit friends or clubs to talk with real-life people - again, getting out of the house - if you have friends locally, visit them. If there's a singing group or art club or whatever that piques your interest, visit it.
. Monitor and review your use of social media: if you feel worse or unfulfilled after reading some particular feed or other, it may be best to unsubscribe from that channel (or even the whole service). You don't owe people watch-loyalty at the expense of your mental health, nor do you have to read everything posted!
. Watch out for absolute language: use of 'everything', 'nothing', 'always', and 'never' should almost always be qualified with exceptions, so think of some or (if it's appropriate and likely to be helpful) think of ways to make some, ideally with other people.
. Like any major medical condition, depression can become the main/only thing someone talks and thinks about. It's worth asking whether friends are comfortable taking about it further than just saying it's not lifted yet: most friends can support you best by keeping you in touch with things - a few will be able to engage directly (and may well not be your current best friends)!
. If you can work out some particular cause for it, and it's something you can change, that will help: it can arise from unresolved conflict: living up to someone else's standards, or trying to stick with a plan you no longer believe in. Just recently I was trying to complete a project without realising i didn't have a clear route or goal defined so it never felt like I was making progress.
. Here's a weird one: cold showers. My wife found some Scandinavian bloke who's obsessed with cold water therapy, and building up from a short burst at (I think) the start, I now shower cold year round and... Well, it might be helping? It's certainly bracing and makes me feel like I've achieved something at the start of each day! I find it hard to shower warm now!
Something I found unexpectedly helpful was headspace.com - the starter course is free. It's a strictly secular mindfulness meditation, based on counting your breaths from one to ten repeatedly as a means of learning to distance yourself from the troublesome thoughts that you don't really want around anyway - for the next five minutes, giving yourself a little holiday from them, casually ignoring them, letting them drift away, bringing your attention gently and unjudgementally back to the counting each time it wanders off (as it does for everyone) and starting from one if you lose track of where you were or find yourself above 10 (because the counting is merely a thing to give your mind a holiday - it's not important in itself). My wife finds the counting intrusive, so she uses 'Daily Calm' instead, and usually falls asleep to the basket ball man.
The brain is just another organ, but when it goes wrong, we can find it hard to disconnect our sense of self from what it's doing, and feel weird about taking drugs in case they change who we are (they don't). It's a shame we don't call depression 'brain diabetes' to emphasise that when we feed our mind incessant negative experiences, don't let it get enough sleep, and don't exercise it, it falls ill and takes us with it.
So medication can definitely help. Depression is at least in part a mental habit, like the gulleys animals make when they follow the same paths over and over again. The drugs can help flood the area to make new thought-habits easier to form, ready for you to follow when you gradually come off the drugs.
These articles may also be helpful: https://badootech.badoo.com/burnt-o.....t-3a4146332770 http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9219704
All the best. Feel free to contact me if you want to.
i eased mine by getting the mentality that the world dont matter when iam trying to sleep since it can matter when i wakeup again with the energy to deal with it
much easier to sleep when not worried about everything in the world
hope that will help someone
One thing I haven't yet mentioned above is how it can arise from inner conflict.
I hope some of the ideas up there help.
They all contribute: there's rarely one single thing.
Sometimes, when I'm really tired of the daily grind or a project at work is just going on and on. Usually that's also when I haven't been giving myself enough sleep - staying up late trying to fix things and waking up early for whatever reasons.
I also sometimes wish I had superpowers or a winning lottery ticket to fix things, or that whatever's getting me down were complete, which are more pleasant to indulge, but still I worry about the performance review at the end of the year, so even those still need keeping an eye out for.
For any of that, I take a deep breath, a mental step back, and remember that I've been through depression, and reflect on what's bringing those thoughts on this time, try to write the reasons on paper and try to look for what's objective and what's just colour, discuss them with someone if writing then down doesn't help by itself. Sometimes listing the good things and people I'd impact helps. Sometimes trying to help other people helps.