How To Fight Depression
Recovery from depression rarely happens fast. Treatments exist in plenty, but their benefits can stay hidden for weeks. Antidepressants in particular often need three weeks or more before your mood shifts at all, and the dose or the specific drug may get adjusted, swapped, or combined with something else before anything clicks. People respond differently to these medications, so the first one you try, or the first mix, might do nothing for you. When that happens, you go back and begin again. There are also ways to pull yourself up that skip medication entirely.
Depression pushes you toward pulling back when activity is exactly what tends to help. Taking some action against the way you feel carries a certain power to it. Working on your symptoms, even modestly, can keep positive feelings going instead of letting them fade. Dan Bilsker, PhD, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, told WebMD that people who are depressed very commonly reach for goals that are far too ambitious right out of the gate. Bilsker helped write a self-care guide for depression, available for free through the university's Mental Health Evaluation and Community Consultation Unit. Don't expect to vault out of depression and remake your life overnight. His advice: begin with goals that are small, specific, and spelled out in detail. Chop larger tasks into pieces. Every step you complete, however minor, registers as a small success and chips away at the low mood.
Withdrawal is part of the pattern. People with depression often drift away from friends, family, social plans, and sometimes from spiritual or religious activity too. If you've drifted, ease back in by degrees. The first few times will probably feel awkward. Keep those early social contacts small and quiet rather than loud and crowded. Coffee with one friend sits much easier than a party of forty. Nobody expects you to walk into a room and own it, so skip that and just get out the door. Meet someone for a short coffee, or swing by a friend's place to return something you borrowed. Reconnecting gives you a sense of support, cuts down the isolation, and talking through what's bothering you with someone close can ease the symptoms.
Lea Ann Browning of the National Mental Health Association put it plainly: the ordinary things we all know matter for taking care of ourselves matter even more once depression enters the picture. Exercise has a long track record here. Studies going back decades keep finding that aerobic exercise lifts mood in people who are depressed. The amount that supports general health lines up with roughly 30 minutes of moderate activity on at least five days a week, and that same dose can produce real improvement in depression. A study in the January 2005 American Journal of Preventive Medicine followed people with mild-to-moderate depression through 12 weeks of varying exercise amounts. Everyone improved somewhat, including the control group that only stretched, but the people who hit the CDC-recommended level did best. Among them, 46% cut their symptoms in half on a depression severity scale, and 42% no longer counted as depressed by the study's close.
Watch how you think. Depression tends to pour fuel on negative thought, including thoughts of suicide, helplessness, and the same bleak ideas circling over and over. When one of those thoughts grabs hold, question it. How could I actually test whether this is true? What piece of the picture am I leaving out? Those questions interrupt the spiral.
The weight of it can get heavy enough that people start drinking or using drugs, or lean on them more than before. Steer clear of that. And hold off on any big life decisions while you're in the thick of depression.
Source: Kim B. Downs, M. (n.d.). Help Yourself out of Depression. Retrieved January 25, 2015, from WebMD.