I've noticed a pattern I go through now that I'm depressed. The strangest thing is that there will be those days when I feel great, but being in the state I am in, somehow the very next day I'll go back to feeling horrible about myself. That's my pattern. I'm happy, then I'm sad. The problem with what I was doing though, was focusing more energy on the fact that I was sad than focusing on the fact that I was happy. When we're sad we wallow in the sad. "Poor me, poor me, I hate myself." But when we're happy we somewhat doubt it and we dont' live in those moments as much. We dont' exclaim "I'm happy, I'm happy, I love life!".

I think a good tip for everyone would be to wallow in our happiness more. When we're happy we should be conscience of what is actually making us happy, and keep doing those things. I started getting better when I started meditating and exercising ways to lessen my anxiety. You see, I believe a large part of my depression came from my anxiety. I've always had it but when life became a little bit harder for me the anxiety became an enemy. I realize that my life isn't any worse from anyone's else but my anxiety causes a whole lot more stress than necessary. Back when I was a child I had no responsibilities and so my anxiety was never a problem; it just made me hyper.

So now that I exercise natural ways to relieve that anxiety it helps a whole lot, but I'm still caught in my pattern. I do the things that make me happy but then when I am happy I stop doing those things that made me happy, so I become depressed again. I need to learn to make doing those things that make me happy a daily routine.

I'm not depressed right now. I feel great, but I've been practicing my daily energy booster every day, and I take note at the end of the day of all the good things that happened that day, and I'm much happier.

I think another problem is, as well as remembering the things that make you  happy, people don't remember the things that don't make them happy. If there's something you do that makes you feel okay at first, but later, you regret it, or feel bad for doing it, then it'd probably be best for you to stop doing it. The fact of the matter is sometimes people forget who they are on the inside.

Right now, I'm speaking more so of abusing drugs and alcohol, but it may also apply in other situations. I'm a firm believer in the spiritual and I believe every has a spirit. I believe when we are depressed it is because there's some part of our soul that doesn't like who we've become or a decision we've made. I think everyone knows the feeling you get when you cry so hard that your chest tightens and you feel like there's something deep down inside you that hurts beyond comparison. You're in no physical pain but you're hurting. This can happen from anything from regret about somethign you did, or when someone just hurts you bad. I've been mastered by regret, and this happened to me because I ran away from home and left my little brothers and started doing drugs. After a while I became depressed, being away from them, which made my drug abusing days even worse, but every time after getting high or drunk I would cry my heart out because I regretted it so much so I would slip even further into depression. But one day I realized that the drugs and alcohol weren't helping me…

I decided I deserved to be happy, and I threw drugs and alcohol to the curb, and guess what? it helped. I still have a long way to go to fixing all the bad I've done, but now at least I have the energy to get out of bed every day… well, most days.

We, as humans, have a need to do. When we lose our initiative to grow, physically, mentally and spiritually, we lose ourselves.