Okay, depression really fucking sucks.
Depression sucks. It’s like doing everything you can, day in and day out, just to have the chance to take a positive step in the right direction.
Every day is an accumulation of all the shitty days that came before, piled onto your back like 49 contestants from the Biggest Loser, waiting for you to take them to the finish line.
The finish line, of course, is your bed. Because you can’t wait to get away from everything and everyone and just do nothing.
The last 5 months I’ve been in and out of depression.
There are weeks I go without answering the phone or returning text messages from my family. I spend entire weekends on the couch. I even started watching Kourtney and Kim Take Miami—to make myself feel better… about feeling bad.
Kinda like eating a cheeseburger when you already feel like shit.
(Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about…)
I’m all for positive thinking and reinforcement, but let’s face it… sometimes that shit doesn’t cut it. Positive thoughts alone won’t lift you up out of the crappy situation you find yourself in every day.
I wish it did. But it doesn’t.
I tried maintaining a daily workout regimen, meditating, reading, hanging out with friends, Skyping family, waking up earlier, getting more sleep, taking vitamin D pills, eating bananas, making long-term plans, developing a routine, writing down my goals, talking to my cat… you name it!
None of it worked for me.
So here I am. Still depressed on a cold, rainy day in Detroit, Michigan with nothing but gray clouds outside while my cat Celestine sits on my feet.
Did I mention I lost power in my condo? Yea, that shit just happened. Because that’s what happens when everything sucks: it just gets suckier.
Here’s what the sky looks like outside…
This is my first time being depressed for this long a time. So I’m no expert on it. But I can say with confidence that the thing that sucks about depression is that you know something is wrong with you, but you’re not sure how to fix it.
My Guide to Lifting Yourself up
So here’s a guide to lifting yourself out of depression when you’ve tried workouts, vitamin D, meditation, (insert failed remedy here) and none of it has worked.
This worked for me and hopefully it may help you…
1. CELEBRATE THE SMALL WINS
This, I think more than anything, will help you to deal with your depression.
There are so many days where you try to lift yourself out of your funk, only to find that 20 minutes later—whether you went to the gym to jump on that treadmill or not—you still feel like shit. It’s okay!! It’s okay to feel this way because it’s not you! But remember to celebrate the fact that you even went to the gym!
Let me give you an example…
Before this 5 month spurt, I woke up every morning at 5:30am. I jumped out of bed, drank a glass of water, and headed to the gym to start my workout by 6am. After my workout, I came home and showered by 7:15am so that I could begin meditating by 7:30am. After 30 minutes of meditation, I would take a quick nap, get ready for work, and be out of the house by 8:45am.
It may sound rigid, but it was a GREAT routine! One that made me very happy to start the day off right by completing the most important tasks of my day early!
Well throughout this depression, I’ve wanted to return to that routine. But I’ve failed and failed and failed again. Some successes thrown in there, where for a few days (5 days tops!) I woke up at 5:30am. But the successful days were sporadic and the failures FAR outnumbered the successes.
Each morning that I came even close to waking up that early, I would just turn off the alarm and go back to sleep because I wouldn’t want to get out of the bed.
And at night, I’d know that I should turn off the tv so that I could go to sleep and wake up early, but I’d punish myself for not feeling right and keep the tv on anyway (because that makes sense…). Then I’d feel like crap the next day for not waking up early like I intended. This cycle repeated itself day after day… after day.
This self-sabotaging behavior, or psychic masochism, is more common in people suffering from depression.
Finally, I realized I wasn’t going to win this battle. At least not in the way I was attacking it: as an all or nothing proposition. Instead, I would attack my morning problem in small bites.
Each morning I would try to wake up 5-15 minutes earlier the day before. But here’s the catch: I wouldn’t actually wake up… I would just celebrate the fact that I COULD’VE woken up “if I wanted to”!
Sounds crazy, right?! But it worked!
Each morning I set the alarm on my phone for 5-15 minutes earlier than I did the day before. And the next morning when it was time to wake up, I would just turn it off and decide whether or not I’d actually want to get out of bed.
99.997% of the time I’d decide to stay in bed. But I still felt good about it because I knew I could’ve woke up at that time had I wanted to!
The next day would roll around and I’d do the same. “15 minutes earlier” I’d think to myself. And I’d turn over and go back to sleep.
It’s funny, but although I didn’t actually reach my goal of waking up early like I wanted to, I felt better about coming closer to achieving my goal. Any goal!
I started applying this to other things I was having trouble with.
I would start work for projects at night that I know I needed to finish soon. Even if I spent only 15 minutes on it before I went back to doing something worthless, I’d feel like I spent 15 minutes more than I would’ve if I had otherwise gone straight to watching Kourtney argue with Scott about getting drunk and punching his fist into a mirror the night before. (This is kind of embarrassing that I know this…)
Even with typing this post, I had to decide whether to sit on my couch and… well, do nothing. Or hop on my laptop for a few minutes and bang something out.
Already I feel better!
Celebrating the small wins is the best trick I know for making yourself feel better in any situation.
Allow yourself to fret over not knocking out the big projects or to-do’s another time! For now, we’re just working on doing something.
I promise, it helps!
2. CULTIVATE POSITIVE SELF-TALK
(YEAH, THE STUFF I SAID WON’T GET YOU OUT OF THIS… “ALONE”, I SAID!)
It’s unrealistic to think we can be completely free of depression, but we can learn to understand it enough to not give it total control over our lives.
Despite the fact that positive self-talk alone won’t get you out of your funk, it does help.
Remembering that your depression is a temporary state of mind and reclaiming hope that it will be alright in the end is a helpful reminder that things will get better. Depression will not suck forever.
Also, reminding yourself that you have so many experiences and events to look forward to in your life (traveling around the country, your wedding, spanking your children) does help to put things into perspective, although it may not totally alter how you currently feel.
Positive self-talk is a very practical method to break patterns of negative thought.
If you’re looking for a resource to guide you, check out What to Say When You Talk To Yourself by Shad Helmstetter.
3. SPEAK WITH FRIENDS, FAMILY, AND THOSE THAT LOVE YOU ABOUT HOW YOU’RE FEELING. They understand Depression Sucks!
This is a difficult one. It’s something that I struggle with. But I find that when I turn to the people I trust most not to judge me, they show sincere interest in what’s going on with me and want to help. Even though they may not be able to, just having them listen makes me feel better.
Love is a powerful force. And knowing that those who love you truly care about the direction of your life can reinstate hope and a drive to get better.
Also, I noticed that those whose calls I didn’t want to return because I felt like I owed them something or because didn’t want to have to explain myself, they cared too.
In fact, I haven’t come across one person who I have shared what I’m going through with who doesn’t care.
People genuinely care about your situation and want you to do better.
Remember this when you’re down because it’s so easy of us to think the opposite when things are going wrong.
4. WRITE
Taking inventory of your life by writing down exactly what you’re thinking and feeling in that moment is one of the best tools I know for uncovering some really interesting things about yourself.
The insights you learn from your own writing can be invaluable in helping you to understand your state of mind and how you may overcome it. Understanding depression sucks and why it continues nonetheless can all be revealed through writing.
The best part is that you don’t need to have a mission for your writing. No structure. No theme. No intended outcome or length. Just write.
Sometimes all it takes is a couple of words with a pen and paper (or laptop) and the rest of the words write themselves.
Write whatever messed up shit that comes up and filters from your mind to the paper. I’ve written some pretty messed up stuff. But each time I write, I learn a little more about myself.
The action of writing down everything that is trapped inside of you is a freeing event. It’s like taking a bottle of your emotions and unscrewing the top to let them out. Even when what you write is really messed up, somehow it feels better to let it out onto paper.
At times what you see on the page is flat out ugly. Other times, you may find bits of compassion, gratitude, and hope in there.
Here’s a suggestion: make writing down whatever is on your mind the last thing that you do before you go to sleep at night. Do it in a journal or moleskin notebook, so that you have all your writing in the same record book.
You don’t have to examine it. You don’t even have to read it. Just let it out and hit the lights.
You’ll feel a little better.
5. ACCEPT THE FACT THAT YOU’RE DEPRESSED. AND TRY NOT TO MINIMIZE IT. DEPRESSION SUCKS. OWN IT.
This took me a while…
For weeks and weeks I would try to pull myself out of it by trying to push through the blockade of not wanting to workout or whatever.
I kept telling myself “I’ll be fine” and trying to pull myself together—like I’d done with everything else in my life to this point—using positive self-talk and continuing to do anything that should make me feel better.
It’d move me in the right direction for a few days or even a week. Then all of the sudden, I’d be right back where I started.
Low to the ground.
I tried reaching out to a friend from middle school who posted something to Facebook about how depressed she was and how she wished things would be better. I sent her a message saying that I was going through something similar, though on a much smaller scale, and that maybe we should chat to see if we can help one another out.
She said something I’ve heard medical professionals and people who’ve experienced depression say before: “No depression is better than another. They all affect people differently, and they all suck.”
She’s right.
What she was saying to me is that what I’m going through sucks just as bad as what she is going through. There’s no ‘Scale of Shittiness’ that I can compare my pain to hers.
Not only would that be pointless, but it’d probably suck just as bad for the winner as it does the loser (“Oh, I’m not as screwed up mentally as you are, yet I still feel like crap and am complaining about it”.)
Being able to accept the fact that you’re depressed is a huge step.
It helps to eliminate that feeling of blame for not doing things which you feel like you should or for feeling the way you feel—because it’s not totally in your control.
Once you’re able to accept the fact that you’re feeling depressed (which is to say, after you’ve identified that depression is in fact what you’re experiencing), you’re able to take the necessary actions to remedy it. Whether that’s vitamin D pills, sun lamps, medication, or counseling, it should be prescribed to you by a medical professional.
This is what helped me to work my way through depression. I’m not a medical professional, but I hope that what I’ve used to get through my experience with severe depression is helpful to you too.
Depression sucks. And it’s not something you should feel like you have to deal with by yourself.
PS: I WROTE THIS A YEAR AGO WHEN I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF A DEPRESSION WHICH BEGAN IN THE WINTER AND LASTED ROUGHLY 5 MONTHS. THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO HELPED ME WHEN I WAS LOW TO THE GROUND…
Robert James Collier writes at practicalidealist.net, where he shares practical ideas to achieve worthy goals.
