Ways to Overcome Depression
Take a long, hard, honest look at yourself for personal problems, paying particular attention to repeating problems in your life. Do you need more interests and activities to avoid boredom and keep your mind off negative thoughts? If you avoid confrontations and bury your anger at mistreatment from others until you explode, work on assertiveness and expressing your anger in constructive ways. Are some people inconsiderate, unkind, overly critical, or overly hostile toward you? If certain people in your life contribute to your depression by the things they do, you may need to become more assertive with these people, to reduce your contact with them, or even to eliminate them from your life. Do you abuse alcohol or other drugs?
Tackle Your Bad Habits
Change bad habits that keep you depressed.
Work on replacing negative thoughts with positive thought alternatives every day. If you tend to blame circumstances or other people for your depression, combat these thoughts of helplessness by reading or by repeating, "I made myself depressed over that. I didn't have to respond that way." Use assertiveness skills, good problem-solving skills, or more positive thinking the next time a similar situation arises. If you often assume other people think badly of you, read or repeat "I can't read other people's minds." Humor also helps a great deal in facing life's problems without drowning in negativity.
If you find it difficult to motivate yourself, stop prejudging and avoiding activities because you believe you wouldn't enjoy them or wouldn't be good at them. If you force yourself to start, you will often find that you do get some pleasure from and gain some skill in the activity after all. Don't let negative thoughts about many activities block your improvement and interfere with your happiness. You probably have negative thoughts about lacking energy, not being in the mood, hating exercise, etc. Replace these each time they occur with more positive, helpful thoughts such as: "I'll feel more like it once I start," "Let's just give it a try. Who knows, maybe I'll really like it," or "Why sit here and feel bored? I'll try …"
Depressed people tend to overlook and discount feelings of pleasure and accomplishment, both in trying new activities and in many other areas of life. Learn to recognize these feelings. Develop these slight feelings and take pride in your activities. Counter negative reactions with positive alternatives such as: "Hey, that wasn't bad. I enjoyed it some. Maybe if I try it a few more times, I'll really like it," and "Not bad on my first try, but I'll get better with practice. That was kind of fun." Repeat those activities that give you slight feelings of accomplishment or pleasure. You can develop them into very rewarding activities.
Develop Friendships and Relationships
Good social skills and a good network of friendships
ranging from casual to intimate ones help prevent depression after life stresses and speeds recovery from depression. Happy people generally have several very close friends and a number of other friends, some closer than others, with whom they can share different activities and parts of themselves. Do you need to reach out and make more friends?
Marital relationships are often important in depression. An appreciative, complimentary, supportive marital relationship can protect you from depression despite challenging life stresses, and as noted previously, marital problems often lead to depression. Work on increasing the positive behaviors in your marriage. Perhaps your marriage lacks a confiding relationship of sharing feelings and receiving acceptance, understanding, and emotional support from each other? Sharing feelings is much more important than simply sharing facts with your spouse. Ask your spouse to compliment you more and to say many of the things normally taken for granted, to show appreciation for the routine things you do every day. Learn about good marital skills and put them to use in your life.
Research shows depressed people are more likely than other people to interact with their spouses and children in hostile or angry ways. Do you yell, sulk, bring up old resentments from the past, nag, insult or use negative labels, make demands or ultimatums, or criticize with overgeneralizations? Do you alienate other people with communication problems such as avoiding important issues, blaming, or assuming you know what another person thinks? Another communication problem is bringing up too many problem issues without focusing on solutions, one at a time. Of course, everyone does these things at times, but bad habits in these areas increase stress and can destroy intimacy with your loved ones. Learn about and practice good communications skills.
Some depressed people long for friendship and love but alienate other people with negativity or with clinging neediness because of lack of enough socializing or interests and activities. Many depressed people make the mistake of hunting for romance to satisfy their unhappiness, poor self-esteem, or other problems. A preoccupation with finding romance is generally frustrating and disappointing. Yearning for a romance to make you happy is looking in the wrong place for happiness. Although finding a mate can help make you happy, your best chance of finding a mate depends on developing a different set of priorities.
Looking for a romance to save you from your loneliness and unhappiness is a rather desperate, needy search that alienates other people. Your personality cannot sparkle with this kind of focus in your life. Instead, focus on enjoying the single life, meeting people, and making friends. Accept you may be single for a long time and get on with your life. You need a wide variety of interests and activities, and you need to enjoy and value your friendships. Having these priorities will make you more pleasant, give you practice in socializing, and increase your chances of finding romance. With interests and activities and a good network of friends and acquaintances, your painful longing will cease.
A common, very painful mistake in dating is to become completely engrossed in a person who shows little true concern for your needs and feelings. Perhaps your partner only wants to see you occasionally or when other relationships end. Perhaps your partner is selfish and repeatedly inconsiderate of your feelings or needs. Staying in any unfulfilling relationship ties up much of your time and deepest emotions. The danger in staying in an unfulfilling relationship is you become accustomed to unhappy situations, making you an easy target for people who will use you. Unfortunately, plenty of people will use you if you let them. Your time and emotional energy are better spent developing interests, activities, ways of meeting people, and a more suitable love relationship. Never settle for less in a relationship-hold out for what you really want.
If, despite an unfulfilling relationship, you sometimes resort to sexual activity to relieve negative emotions such as loneliness, boredom, depression, or anxiety, plan more constructive ways of dealing with these emotions. Keep busy, avoid the problem person, make new friends, find better ways to have fun and to relax, and practice rejecting the person's advances in behavioral roleplays. If lowered inhibitions due to drinking alcohol or using other drugs play a role in your continuing an unfulfilling relationship, plan ways to avoid this problem or work on your addiction.
Figure Out Why You're Depressed
If you don't know why you feel depressed, look for clues by comparing and contrasting your life now with a happier time in your life.
The best way to understand your depression is to study it carefully. Use the scale of zero to 100 to rate your depression many times throughout the day, and observe and record all the thoughts, circumstances, and events associated with it. Ideally, you should make your observations and rate your depression hourly. If you think over your day and rate your depression at the end of it, you will tend to rate your moods more negatively because of your negative thought habits. Even if you feel you know your stresses and problems, you can learn from studying your depression in these ways. By frequently rating depression, people generally discover their moods are not always low. Depressed people usually feel better when they keep busy (at work, cooking, visiting, etc.) and worse when idle (weekends, evenings, etc.).
The fastest way to change an emotion is often simply to act the way you want to feel. Act happy, smile regularly, act friendly toward other people, and participate in plenty of interests and activities, including fun things such as dancing. Don't wait to be in the mood to do these things-you may never feel like it. Depressed people who keep practicing these behaviors find themselves feeling more cheerful. With practice, these behaviors gradually become more comfortable and natural. Other people generally respond in positive ways to these changes, so you receive more pleasure and satisfaction in your life from them. Work on improving nonverbal behaviors that convey depression. Don't use a slow, quiet, bored, monotonous tone of voice. Show some pitch variation and enthusiasm in it. Use erect posture rather than drooping posture with downcast head and eyes. Use good rates of eye contact with other people and don't frown.
Balance in Your Life
People need a healthy balance between pleasure and work.
A few depressed and overwhelmed people need to quit pushing themselves so hard, relax more, and eliminate some work activities, but most depressed people need more interests and activities. Idle time often leads to negative thinking and depression. Choose more interests and activities, including those you once enjoyed and could resume, and ask yourself which ones you might do if you didn't feel depressed. As you develop interests, share them with other people.
Many doctors and psychologists recommend regular exercise for depression and note it improves the mood. Exercise invigorates you, giving you more energy. Deep relaxation also helps combat depression and especially helps anxious depressed people. Relaxation helps people find peace within themselves. Learn about different kinds of relaxation techniques and meditation and put them to use in your life.
Journaling Can Be Helpful
Certain kinds of
written records help combat depression. Compile a journal or list of joyous experiences you remember. Describe your most special moments, including beautiful nature scenes, especially close moments with loved ones, fun times, a series of events that you particularly enjoyed, or spiritual experiences. Make another list of your positive attributes. Include your talents, qualities, virtues, accomplishments, etc. (Anyone who wants to help a depressed person can make such a list and give it to the person. Sometimes doing this for a depressed friend can make a huge difference.) Make a list of blessings you can be thankful for, too. Compile a collection of inspiring thoughts, quotes, poems, prayers, or affirmations. Affirmations are inspiring statements you write and then repeat throughout the day for self-improvement or emotional well-being. For example: "I will strive to be an example of peace and love for my fellow human beings," or "Let calmness and serenity fill my heart." Keep adding new items to these journals or lists as you think of them, rereading them regularly to help keep your mind focused on good, rather than negative, things. Quit Rewarding Passive or Dependent Behaviors
When you complain, cry, talk of sad feelings, or discuss problems, your friends and loved ones probably respond with sympathy and tender loving care. Unfortunately, these loving responses reward and help maintain the depressive behaviors. Some friends or family even take over chores for a depressed person who stays in bed or asks for help. Again, this rewards the passive or dependent behavior. Perhaps you reward yourself when you drown in negative thoughts or self-pity. Many depressed people eat, spend money excessively, abuse addictive substances, or have sex without love to feel better. Eliminate these and any other subtle rewards for depressive behavior.
Stop seeking consolation with complaints, sighs, sad looks, and crying.
Don't worry about whether you are happy. Develop interests, activities, and friendships, be kind, help other people, strive to be virtuous, accept emotional pain, work on conquering your personal problems, and improve your thinking habits. These things will lead to happiness. Conquering your depression may take months or years, depending on its severity, how long you have had negative thinking habits, your personal problems, and how much effort you put into it.
Work to make your social interactions more positive by showing warmth toward other people, taking an interest in them, developing and sharing interests and activities, etc. Ask your friends and loved ones to ignore your depressed behaviors and to cut telephone calls and visits short when you dwell on complaints or drown in self-pity, spending more time with you and showing more warmth and interest when you act in more normal ways. Asking them to do this is very important because close friends and loved ones generally take appropriate behaviors for granted and try to cheer you up with extra warmth and attention when you feel depressed. Tell them to avoid taking pity on you and feeling guilty for not catering to your depression, and ask them not to take over chores and duties you can do for yourself.
