Meditation Techniques for Depression

The WikiHow piece "How to Lift Depression with Meditation" walks through general meditation practice along with several specific forms of it. What follows draws on that material and lays out instructions plain enough that a beginner can sit down and start using the techniques the same day.

Timing matters when depression is part of the picture. Mood tends to swing over the course of a day, and trying to meditate during a deep low can backfire, particularly for someone who has never meditated before. If hopelessness ever gets bad enough that normal functioning slips away, that is not the moment to attempt it. Better to wait until your mood has lifted enough that you can go about ordinary activities, because that is when the mind and body respond best.

Pick a quiet spot. Calm and focus are hard to reach with distractions pulling at you, so the setting should be free of them. For anyone who finds total silence uncomfortable, soft instrumental music works well in the background, and it doubles as a way to mask household noise if a genuinely silent room is out of reach.

Comfort comes next. A chair, a cushion, a mat, even a bath can serve, whatever lets you relax, and loose comfortable clothing helps. When depression travels alongside an anxiety disorder, sitting still may feel impossible. In that case, light movement such as a walk is a fair substitute, provided the activity actually settles you rather than winding you up.

Breathe slowly. Use the diaphragm to draw more oxygen deep into the lungs, and let the pace drop. Slower breathing loosens the muscles across the shoulders, neck, and chest.

Close your eyes. Shutting out visual input makes the peaceful state easier to reach and frees attention to turn inward and outward at once: thinking, breathing, smelling, hearing. With the eyes closed, the focus settles on the brain itself.

Give it real time. Rushing defeats the purpose. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is the suggested amount.

From there, the techniques branch out. Concentrative meditation asks you to fix attention on one thing: a sound, a piece of music, an image. It is a common starting point for people new to the practice.

Guided imagery builds a soothing scene in the mind. A lake, a mountain, waves rolling in, a forest. The method the author describes is to start with the immediate surroundings and then fill in the far distance. In a forest, for instance, begin with the trees close by; once that is clear, "look" off toward mountains or a small stream in the distance. Then widen it past sight into the other senses. Hear the wind moving through the branches, or a brook running somewhere far off. Smell nearby flowers. Feel cool grass underfoot.

Mantra meditation runs on quiet repetition of a calming word, phrase, or sound, "om" being the familiar example. A short prayer or a sacred word works for anyone who is religious.

Then there is the meditative walk, which the guidelines admit is a bit unconventional. It suits people carrying both depression and chronic anxiety or nervousness. Walk somewhere quiet and let go of any destination. Put attention only on the movement of legs, feet, arms, and breath. You can fold in a mantra, repeating a calming word with each step, or simply take in the smells, sights, and sounds around you without stopping to analyze any of them.

Mindfulness meditation has research behind it for easing symptoms of depression and anxiety alike. Start with the breath, the easiest thing to hold attention on. From there, move awareness through the body, beginning at the feet and working up, checking each part for pain or tension. Wherever you find tightness, relax those muscles before moving on. The harder step, especially with depression, is acknowledging emotions without judging them. Admit that you feel depressed. Skip the questions about why or whether the feeling is justified. Name the emotion, accept it, let it go. For many patients that is both the most difficult part and the most useful.

A fair amount of ongoing research is looking at whether meditation can stand in for medication or work alongside it to relieve depression and anxiety symptoms. As the number of people reporting those symptoms climbs, interest in alternative approaches to managing them keeps growing in the field. Meditation costs nothing, is available almost anywhere, and lowers stress. (Kim Nygaard)

One reader, Bergen, added his own experience. He has leaned on various meditation techniques through different stretches of his life to deal with depression, stress, and anxiety, and is confident nearly every one of them has helped him, while cautioning that the same may not hold for anyone else. Finding which methods actually worked, and which worked best, took him years. His advice is to experiment and sort that out for yourself.

Sometimes, he wrote, the best quiet time is nothing more than sitting at his desk in a comfortable leather chair with the office door shut and the do-not-disturb sign up on both the door and the phone. Reflection comes faster in that stillness even with the noise of the day only a few feet away. When he was younger, racing up his career and refusing to admit stress or depression even existed, he loved taking his dog out for the last walk of the night. He lived far enough from the city's light pollution to see the stars and take in the creation and its Creator. The quiet gave him peace and a sense of security, and talking to his Creator there never left him embarrassed or self-conscious. In the listening, he felt loved.