To help you pull yourself out of the depression trap, there are three things to do: your behavior, your thinking, and your support system. Depression will also continue to subtly weaken you as you work to improve your mood, so you need to be constantly vigilant. When you plan to try something to help yourself, depression will put obstacles in the way of your transformation, stuffing your mind with all kinds of pessimistic thoughts: “It’s futile to try”; “Nothing will come of it”; “My emotions are so bad that I’m not even interested in trying”. These types of thoughts prevent you from using your own power to change yourself.
The best way to help yourself out of depression is to focus on the small shifts that will lead you in the right direction. Instead of keeping your eyes on the distant horizon, look at the next bend in the road beneath you. The goal is to let go of your baggage and feel better than you do now, but don’t think you can make a complete turnaround all at once. If you can focus on making a few small shifts, the rest will come naturally. So start with one strategy at a time, and after a period of time (e.g., after a week), add another strategy and gradually develop it into a set of methods that works for you.
Working with behavior
Depression makes people sleepy and drains their energy; it is as powerful as influenza and can make people lazy and sluggish. It is this laziness and sluggishness that prevents healing from taking place. Therefore, the first step to help you get out of the mire of discouragement and laziness is to re-engage in your daily activities.
(i) Schedule something simple for yourself
Schedule simple things for yourself that have been interrupted by depression. Maybe these things are too simple when you are in a normal mood, but don’t mind, such as writing a letter, making a phone call, going to the store, ironing, picking up the kids from school, or meeting with colleagues, and so on. The fact that you don’t want to do these things means that they are not easy for you at the moment, which is the same reason why a person with a cold finds it difficult to do something that is otherwise very simple. Be generous with yourself, be realistic, and know that you are in a state of depression, which is not the same as usual.
Those who don’t feel too badly depressed will adopt the following attitude that actually well not be of much use: “Pull yourself together, stop moaning and keep doing it!” While this attitude has some value, it is fundamentally wrong. Because forcing yourself to do what you dread or feel bored with will only deepen your depression. It is wrong to think that this is something that is easy to do and that failure to do it is due to your weak will. The most effective attitude is to admit that you are suffering from depression, just as you admit that you are suffering from a bad cold, and then find a way to get yourself to do a little more of something. While there are things you enjoy doing when you are in a normal mood, you may not enjoy doing them now.
For example, you had enjoyed meeting friends at lunch, but now due to depression, you may discontinue this activity, you will feel that this activity is not interesting, you do not want your friends to see you in a bad mood, you will feel that you are not a valuable person, but a burden to others. Despite this, you should still do this thing, because it is your first step to depression.
Once you rededicate yourself to the activity you have given up, the grip of depression on you will weaken. Of course this is a gradual process, and depressed moods cannot dissipate overnight.
(ii) Activity journal
When you are feeling depressed, it is particularly useful to keep a journal. Writing down your daily activities can help you understand how your time is being spent each day, and a journal can help you in many ways to offset the laziness and energy drain that comes with depression. It was invented by Dr. Alan Baker in the 1970s. Dr. Baker invented a method in the 1970s that has been used successfully by thousands of patients. The Activity Diary Method has four main steps.
Step-1: Go through the diary to understand how you spend your time. Divide the diary into columns by hour (counting only waking hours) and fill in everything you do on time for several days in a row. This is a way to counteract the lazy effect of depression, because in a depressed state, you will look back on the day’s activities and feel like you’ve accomplished nothing and spent it in vain.
Step-2: Activity evaluation. Evaluate your daily activities in terms of “victory” and “joy”. At the end of each day, review the day’s activities and pay attention to the following two aspects: First, pick out the things that you find particularly difficult, such as getting up in the morning and getting ready for work. If you found it difficult, but you did it anyway, even if you got to work a little later than usual, you must give yourself a little praise and a “win” score, using a scale of 0 to 10 to represent the degree to which you overcame the difficulty. The evaluation here is measured by the degree of difficulty you feel when you are depressed now, not when you are in a normal mood. For particularly difficult things you can rate 8 to 10, for normal difficulties you can rate 4 to 7, and anything that is a little difficult must be rated, even if it is only 1 to 3.
Any normal activity becomes quite difficult when you feel depressed. It’s not your fault, it’s the result of depression. After you have done this, go back to your diary and pick out the things that you enjoy or get pleasure from and rate them on a scale of 0 to 10 as “pleasure”. You should rate even the smallest of pleasures. For example, you might write P=4 next to the activity of watching an engaging TV show, or P=6 next to the activity of “escaping from the house to soak in the tub.” From the perspective of a depressed person, it is easy to overlook the less obvious pleasures. So don’t push for an accurate evaluation of “victory” or “joy”, just give it a score that’s roughly the same.
Step-3: Troubleshooting. Figure out how to increase the number of “wins” and “joys” in daily activities. What is difficult and what is enjoyable is personal to you.
Step-4: Plan of action. Make a plan for future activities based on the activity diary. Now that you have seen your reality and are no longer confused by the strange thoughts that come with depression, you should use this reality to guide your future activities.
Here are five suggestions for your action plan.
1, arrange more activities that can make you enjoyable, from meeting a friend for a trip to taking a relaxing bath. People who suffer from depression tend to think that they are not entitled to fun, or even feel guilty about having fun, especially when they find that they are not able to complete their daily tasks as usual. You should use your journal to help yourself break out of the prison of guilt.
2. Schedule activities that will refresh you, such as walking to the store, mowing the lawn or taking the dog out for a walk, etc. The tiredness that comes with depression can make you feel less and less active, so throwing yourself into the activities of daily life can revive your spirits. Physical activity also has this effect.
3, seek activities that you find more attractive. Being attracted to a certain activity can help you get out of a depressed mood. Even if at the beginning this relief is only temporary, it is worth a try and worth relying on. If you are having trouble concentrating and reading and focusing, browse a magazine or watch a video.
4. Look at your diary and check how your time is wasting away. Some people get lost in depression and their activities become increasingly unplanned. If this is the case for you, creating a daily schedule for yourself will help you. There are also some people who are depressed because their lives are too stagnant, too dead and depressed, so a little change in the schedule will be beneficial to them, even if at the beginning they do not adapt to it does not matter.
5, consider the balance of responsibility and joy in your daily activities. If you are living a puritanical life with only responsibility and no joy, happy mood will certainly leave you, the effect is counterproductive. Because depression can interfere with your ability to perform tasks, while a happy mood can help you do things more smoothly.
Work on thinking
Zhang San is a 20-year-old college student. Like many college students, she has a few classes where she does a little better than other students on assignments. She came to the psychological clinic due to depression. She has had several episodes of low mood in the past two years, and lately this low mood has been lasting longer and deeper, and when she is depressed, she always talks about the reasons. For example, she will say that she did not do her homework well and cite a low score on one of her assignments as evidence. Even when she was in a bad mood on holiday, she would say it was because she had asked a friend to dinner and then to a movie, but the friend came late, the meal didn’t happen, and the movie was extremely boring. The reasons she cites do exist in themselves, but they are carefully chosen by her.
In fact she also did some of her homework well, and she recently made a new friend and had a nice hiking trip. Zhang San’s story demonstrates something you may have noticed in yourself long ago, and also found time and again in your research work, namely, that depression can affect your memories and thus perpetuate depressed moods. When we feel depressed, we always like to remember the bad things that happened to us, and this memory will aggravate our depression.
Not only will the memories be affected, but our judgment will also be infected by our emotions. We overly condemn ourselves for what we have done wrong. One female patient felt like a bad person because she forgot to give her son a week’s allowance one time. These psychological phenomena lead to the creation of the cognitive model of depression, which was developed by Alan? Baker proposed in 1985, the theory that there is a very close relationship between feeling and thinking, when we are depressed, our thinking and memories are always in a bad direction, resulting in, a more gloomy mood. After the thoughts become bad, the mood follows, thus entering a downward spiral of increasing depression. From the cognitive model a special type of psychotherapy has developed called cognitive therapy.
The basic point of this theory is to help patients recognize and examine their already-dimensional ways to avoid negative depressive tendencies and to reverse the downward spiral by shifting the already-dimensional negative patterns. As thinking shifts to the positive, emotions begin to rise, resulting in more positive thinking and feeling until the downward spiral is transformed into an upward spiral. One of the most valuable aspects of cognitive therapy is that you can learn how to self-regulate. Whether you are climbing out of a depression tunnel, trying to overcome anxiety, or dealing with a confusing emotion, cognitive therapy can help you achieve a good state of mind. It can provide you with some of the most useful tips to help you develop and maintain a good mindset.
Use your support system
George Brown and Tyrrell Harris have conducted fruitful research on the causes of depression in women. They surveyed nearly 1,000 women, looking closely at their moods and some of the factors that might influence them. One of their main findings was that a loved one who can be relied on completely is one of the most effective safeguards against depression. This basic conclusion holds true for men as well.
If you have someone to whom you can confide your inner feelings, you should not shy away from letting him know how you are feeling. There are many reasons that make it difficult for you to tell others about their depressed mood, such as, feel embarrassed or worried about bothering others; feel guilty, as if depression is your fault or a sign of weakness; there is a widespread view in society that talking about yourself, especially about your mood is a taboo, and so on.
However, as the adage goes, “A friend in need is a true friend.” If you are suffering from depression, you are in distress. A friend can help you overcome depression in many ways. First, getting support is the biggest help. You know you have someone who understands how you feel and cares for you. Talking to a friend also gives you a chance to think about why you’re depressed and what’s going on in your life that’s making you depressed. Friends can help you find ways to deal with these problems and can offer different advice on how to deal with them and how to deal with yourself. Friends can also encourage you to put into practice the strategic actions you have chosen.