Tips for living with depression and/or anxiety

gittetj:

This is really a personal list of various habits I have picked up over a lifetime of periodic depressions and general anxiety, but I thought I might as well share it. They help me, maybe they will help someone else too.

Note that these are things you can do to get through the day and keep from dragging yourself down, they aren’t a cure. Also note that everyone is different and what works for one person might be useless for another.

If you’re feeling so bad that you’re seriously contemplating self-harm or suicide, please don’t try to handle it on your own and ask for help.

Mental health

Seperate your mental illness from who you are as a person. Remind yourself of how you think and act when you aren’t ill and remember that it’s possible to return to that. Write it down if you have to, hang it on the wall if you have to. Treat your mental illness like the unwelcome intruder it is.

Counter your negative and intrusive thoughts. When you’re dealing with depression or anxiety your perception of yourself and your situation will be skewed and often unrealistic, but you have to be critical and fight back. Whenever thoughts of self-hatred and self-blame come up, take note of them and ask yourself if they’re really true. Your immediate answer might be yes, but ask again if you would think the same of another person in your situation. If the answer is still yes, think about what you can do to prove yourself wrong and work towards doing it. Keep your actions as evidence and counter intrusive thoughts with them in the future.

Never make your mental illness an excuse. If you give up on things because you’re depressed and it’s too difficult and you can’t help it, you’re setting yourself up for getting even more depressed. Sometimes you will act in unfortunate ways because you’re depressed, but that doesn’t mean you should accept it. Instead, take note of the ways your mental illness can make you act out and stop it or call yourself out on it when it happens. You can ask other people to call you out on it too, but in the end it isn’t their responsibility to fix your behaviour.
Anxiety shouldn’t be made an excuse either. You have to challenge the anxiety, not avoid everything that makes you uncomfortable. Avoidant behaviour can quickly turn into bad habits that make the anxiety even harder to deal with.

When you’re feeling particularly bad, get it out of your head and into reality. Talk to someone about it, talk to yourself about it, write it down, draw a picture of how you feel, just put it into tangible words or pictures one way or another. If you write or draw, look at it later when you’re feeling better and remember how you felt at the time. Hold on to the knowledge that it was only temporary.

Ask for help. Tell the people you trust how you feel and let them know what they can do to help you, as well as what they shouldn’t do, because often they genuinely won’t know. Maybe you just need someone to listen, maybe you need someone to cheer you up and go on as normal, maybe you need help with practical tasks.
If you think your workplace or school is accomodating when it comes to things like mental illness, it can be a good idea to tell your boss/colleagues/teachers/classmates that you’re having a hard time and let them know if there’s anything they can do. Everything is a little easier when you don’t have to pretend you’re fine all the time.

Allow yourself to give up sometimes. This might sound contradictory to other parts of this post, but if it’s killing you to go to work or school or go about your daily tasks, maybe you need a break from them. As a psychiatrist once said to me, if you feel so bad that you want to die, maybe you should focus on not wanting to die. Severe mental illness takes an enormous amount of energy to struggle through and you have to respect that.
If you’re not sure whether you should give yourself a break, try to look at your situation objectively as if you were another person. Would you recommend another person to go about their normal daily life feeling the way you do?

One thing you can not give up on though – No matter how bad you feel, make sure to get out of your home every day. I don’t care if it’s just to stand outside for 5 minutes, you still need to do it. If you have spent an hour trying to get yourself out the door crying and kicking and screaming multiple times you can be excused, but you need to try every day.

List 3-5 things that are important for you to get done every day or week. Depending on how poorly you are doing, this can be anything from putting on clothes to working on a project of yours. Only pick things that are a little challenging but that you are realistically able to do every day/week – the goal here is to succeed.
Congratulate yourself when you complete your goals and consider if you need to lower your expectations when you don’t, or if you just need to try again. This is a good way to figure out what you’re actually capable of so you can avoid putting yourself in a situation where you’ll constantly disappoint yourself.

Make sure you always have at least one thing to look forward to. It can be going to some event, hanging out with a friend, watching a new movie you’re excited about – it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small as long as you look forward to it. If there is nothing at all, do your best to make plans for something.

Every day before you go to sleep, think of some things you’re grateful for. It doesn’t have to be about you, maybe you’re just happy for something that happened to a friend or thought it was nice that the sun was shining today. It’s fine if you can only think of very small things, the goal is to end the day on a positive note.

Physical health

Basic stuff:

• Try to avoid sugar, it will make you tired and can worsen depression.

• Especially relevant in the winter, make sure that you are awake while it’s light outside and go out during the daylight hours if possible.

• Go outside every day and walk or run or ride a bike, it’s good for clearing your head and calming yourself down.

Anxiety and panic attacks:

• If you’re having a panic attack or feeling very anxious, try to lie down on the floor. Seriously, it’s very grounding.
• Remind yourself that panic attacks aren’t dangerous. They are an extremely horrible experience, but they can’t actually hurt you and will usually last half an hour at most. You need to develop a bit of a nonchalant attitude to them so you don’t end up fueling your anxiety because you’re now also afraid you’ll have panic attacks.
• If you’re feeling very anxious, take a nap. If you’re lucky it’ll restart your brain and you’ll feel better when you wake up.

Medication:

I will not say a lot about medication here, but if you are struggling to keep up your daily life and have felt miserable all or most of the time for two months or more, it might be a good idea to talk to a doctor about getting some antidepressant- or anti-anxiety medicine.
Be critical about it if you start medical treatment – different medicines work for different people and you might experience side effects. If you feel that the side effects have a real negative impact on you, that is not acceptable and you should talk to your doctor about trying out different kinds of drugs until you find something that works well for you. You might not be lucky on the first try.

Sleep:

If you can’t sleep because you can’t stop worrying/thinking about things, teach yourself to meditate to clear your mind. Two simple techniques I use sometimes:

1. Close your eyes and imagine a river or road, it can be one you know from the real world or one that you make up. Imagine that you’re floating or walking along the river/road and describe to yourself what you see along the way. It works best if it’s always the same place so it comes to feel familiar and calming.
2. Lie down and close your eyes, then go through every part of your body, focusing on each one and letting go of any tension along the way. Start with your toes and work your way up to the top of your head.

If you’re feeling anxious and jittery, meditation can be a very unpleasant experience. If you can’t sleep it’s probably better to get up and distract yourself with something until you calm down.

Sometimes deliberate sleep deprivation can be very effective in kick-starting your brain out of bad depression. Get up when you usually would, skip a night’s sleep, go to bed when you usually would the next day, then sleep until you wake naturally. Don’t give up halfway through so you end up going to bed at a weird hour.
For me, lighter but consistent sleep deprevation helps and I keep myself from sleeping more than 5-6 hours. If you are very tired and can’t stay awake it’s better to sleep some more sometime during the day than to sleep for many hours in one go.

Disclaimer: Depression doesn’t make lack of sleep healthier for you than anyone else, so use this in moderation. Also, in case of anxiety this might make matters worse.