“Human beings are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today.” Andrew Weil, M.D.
After a long winter and dreadful May of rain and cold temperatures, beautiful June is finally here. The sunlight is filtering through the green tree leaves and warm air blowing across my hair.
Summer’s a great time to start investing in your health again after winter’s hibernation. People are out walking or working in their gardens. This whole time of year screams “move!” I have added weight training as part of my moving routine. Maybe you can, too.
I am 57 years old. I am a lawyer. And I struggle with depression.
I was diagnosed when I turned forty. I didn’t know what was happening to me. But I knew something was wrong. I was crying quite a bit. My sleep became disrupted. It became difficult to concentrate. I felt no joy in my life.
Ultimately, my family doctor diagnosed me with major depression and provided me with the help I needed. I started going to therapy and was put on anti-depressants. This saved my life.
Since being diagnosed all those years ago, I have learned to live with depression as have many of the 20 million people who are living with this illness right now in this country.
Although my mood seems to be better with more sun, I understand why a substantial number of folks get more depressed in the summer. Extreme heat is hard to tolerate. In fact, in a study published in Science in 2013, researchers reported that as temperatures rose, the frequency of interpersonal violence increased by 4 percent, and intergroup conflicts by 14 percent.
There are four distinct types of people when it comes to weather and mood, according to a study published in Emotion in 2011.
Summer Lovers (better mood with warmer and sunnier weather)
Unaffected (weak associations between weather and mood)
Summer Haters (worse mood with warmer and sunnier weather)
Rain Haters (particularly bad mood on rainy days)
Ten percent of those diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder suffer symptoms at the brightest time of the year. The summer’s brutal heat, bright light, and long days can affect a person’s circadian rhythm and contribute to depression for the opposite reasons that winter conditions do.
If you’re a Summer Hater, or just notice that your mood is affected negatively by the heat, here are some summer depression busters that may help you better tolerate these months — maybe even enjoy them.
Article serves as a friendly reminder, supported by the latest research, of how essential physical exercise can be for your mental well being. Read more here.
Clinical studies show that regular aerobic exercise is effective as antidepressants in reducing mild to moderate depression. In fact, exercise causes the same structural changes to the brain as antidepressants do and is a treatment option that is not recommended enough and is underutilized in the United States. Read more here.
Sometimes the ache is dull, other times sharp. It can last a few hours, days, or weeks.
This is ground zero for depression sufferers. What can I do to feel better?
The answer is often elusive. Many don’t know where to get help, let alone walk the path of healing. Recovery starts and sputters for others: they feel better on a med, then it stops working. Or, they start a bold new exercise regimen, only to see it fizzle.
What to do?
There is no one-size-fits-all cure for depression. That what makes it so exasperating. It isn’t like having a bad cold where Nyquil will do the trick for most. Rather, depression is an illness of the body, mind, and soul that doesn’t lend itself to simple fixes. Because we’re all humans with bodies and brains, some things will generally work for everyone; exercise comes to mind. But because we’re also unique, we need a tailored recovery plan to get and stay better.
Burnout often results from extended periods enduring the emotional stress precipitated by unaccomplished expectations or failure to fulfill unreasonable demands. The symptoms can include intensified emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, lowered self-worth, changes in eating and exercising habits, social withdrawal, sleep disorders, anxiety, and depression.
There are specific and reproducible patterns of changing neural activity and brain connectivity associated with the stress buildup that leads to burnout. In the high-stress state subjects’ neuroimaging scans reveal less activity in the higher, reflective brain (Prefrontal cortex/PFC) and more activity in the lower, reactive brain that controls involuntary behaviors and emotional responses.
Prolonged stress correlates with structural increases in the density and speed of the neuron-to-neuron connections in the emotion-driven reactive networks of the lower brain and corresponding decreases connections in prefrontal cortex conscious and reflective control centers.
The explanation of these changes is attributed to the brain’s neuroplasticity defined by the phrase: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” The brain literally rewires to be more efficient in conducting information through the circuits that are most frequently activated.
When stress is frequent, the more frequent activation of the neural pathways to the lower, stress-reactive brain results in their strengthening from enhanced wiring (dendrites, synapses, myelinated axons). These pathways can become so strong that they become your brain’s fast route to its lower, reactive control centers. The stressful, burned out state when the lower, reactive brain is in charge overcomes the calm, reflective, and productive higher neural processing in the (PFC) – the preferred brain locale for control of behavior and emotional self-management.
As your efforts to achieve unreasonable goals are thwarted or increasing demands recur, and the lower brain dominates more frequently, you lose touch with your reflective brain. With less management coming from your reflective PFC, it becomes harder and harder to logically see these challenges in realistic perspective or to solve problems creatively.
Disappointments take on more emotional power and without your higher brain’s perspective, they are interpreted as personal failures. Your self-doubt and stress further activate and strengthen your brain’s involuntary, reactive neural networks. The spiral down to burnout accelerates as these circuits become the automatic go-to networks. Your brain achieves less success in problem-solving and emotional control and ultimately reacts by withholding efforts to escape the burnout state.
Reset Your Brain’s Default Neural Network from Retreat to IGNITE!
The good news is you can apply what we’ve learned from neuroscience about your brain’s survival mode to take actions to retrieve voluntary control of your choices and emotional wellbeing.
You can activate the same neuroplasticity, that gave dominance to the lower brain networks in the burnout state, to construct a new, stronger positive default response. With increasing successful experiences in achieving goals, you can reset the circuits to redirect your brain to access its highest cognitive resources. You can build up newly improved circuitry switching your responses from retreat to IGNITE for mindful awareness and creative problem-solving!
Since an effort-failure pattern sets up the brain’s survival response to withhold effort, you’ll need to strengthen your brain’s recognition that effort toward your goals can result in success. Your weapon of mass reconstruction can come from your brain’s very powerful drive for its own intrinsic neurochemical reward— dopamineand the deeply satisfying and motivating pleasure it brings. When the brain releases dopamine in rewarding bursts, you experience a deep intrinsic satisfaction along with increased motivation, curiosity, perseverance, and memory. Dopamine is particularly released when your brain recognizes that you’ve achieved a challenge (from the “I get it” of figuring out a joke to the satisfaction of completing a marathon).
To get the dopamine-pleasure response from challenges achieved, you’ll need to plan for your brain to experience frequent recognition (feedback awareness) of incremental progress. The choices of what you set as a goal should be guided by their desirability and the goal’s suitability to be broken down into clear segments. You want to set goals, the progress of which, you can chart or easily recognize with each stepwise challenge and success. The pleasure burst of dopamine’s intrinsic motivation accompanying your brain’s recognition of each progressive increment achieved in the goal pathway will keep you motivated to persevere.
Goal Buy-In for Your Brain’s Neural REWIRING
Buy-in and relevance are important in choosing your rewiring goal. Since your goal is to rewire your brain’s expectations that your goal efforts do yield progress, despite increasing challenge, you need to really want the goal. This is not the time to challenge yourself with something you feel you should do, but won’t really look forward to, such as dieting, climbing stadium stairs, or flossing after every meal.
The idea of planning and achieving goals as a burnout intervention is probably not new to you. These are likely to be activities you’ve considered but didn’t do for the obvious reason. They take time. when it comes to adding another activity to your schedule, past experiences have left you with the expectation that there is not enough time.
These first goals that can provide ongoing awareness of your progress are often tangible (visible, such as planting a garden or making pottery on a wheel, or auditory such as playing an instrument, or physical such as learning tai chi), but your goal can also be spending more time on something you already do, but want to do more frequently or successfully, such as journaling, practicing yoga, or sketching.
You’ll Find Your Own Goal for Buy-In, but Here are Some Examples of Planning
Physical goals: Notice I didn’t say exercise. That’s not as motivating as “training” for a physical goal you want to achieve, even though they often overlap. If you want to run a 10K, and you enjoy running, the goal for an achievable challenge could first be building up to the distance starting with your baseline distance you comfortably run now. Then, plot out the increments that you’ll consider progressive successes, such as adding 100M each day or a week (with increments based on what you consider both challenging and achievable). Once you reach 10K goal, speed can become the next goal again plotted out in segments of incremental progress before you start.
Hobbies: From woodworking to shooting wooden arrows, hobbies really are opportunities for brain rewiring. Again, plan your stepwise achievable challenge increments. If you select darts, start with a home dartboard—low initial investment and throw from a close, but challenging distance at first. As you get better in accuracy move back further. Record your results with the notations of the distance of each improvement you set as an achievable challenge. If you get so good that you are no longer challenged by the dartboard, try that archery!
Mindfulness and meditation are certainly positive interventions for burnout and will be topics of a subsequent blog.
Your Rewired Brain’s Default Changes from Defeat to Ignite
With your understanding of what happened in your brain to create the hopeless frustration of burnout, you’ll hopefully have more positive expectations to help you put in the effort to try (or retry) suggested interventions. Your own natural dopamine-reward system will then be at work deconstructing the resistance network built by your burnout as you reset your circuits of motivation.
The repeated experiences of dopamine-reward you’ll experience as you monitor your goal progress will literally change your brain’s circuitry. Repeated effort-reward experiences promote the neuroplasticity creating neural networks that expect positive outcomes in your new default network. This is because your brain will build stronger connections into the memory pattern. The expectation in achieving this challenge will bring pleasure. As with other less used networks, the previous lower brain stress-activated go-to response network you developed in burn-out, that caused you to react negatively to stressors, will be pruned away from disuse.
You’ll be rewired with optimism and renew positive expectations about your self-efficacy. With your higher, reflective brain back in control, as you access your perseverance, innovation, and creative problem-solving when you need them.
Just be sure to take the time to break down big challenges into opportunities to recognize incremental progress as you achieve each small step en route to your goals. With that positive recharge, your well-deserved dopamine reward will sustain your brain’s motivated perseverance on to the next step of the path to your goals.
By Judy Willis, M.D., M.E
Dr. Willis is a board-certified neurologist and middle school teacher, specializing in brain research regarding learning and the brain. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa as the first woman graduate from Williams College, Willis attended UCLA School of Medicine where she was awarded her medical degree. She remained at UCLA and completed a medical residency and neurology residency, including chief residency. She practiced neurology for 15 years before returning to university to obtain her teaching credential and master’s of education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She then taught in elementary and middle school for 10 years and currently is on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara.
This article first appeared in Psychology Today magazine
Small doses of exercise, if performed consistently, can be effective tools for combatting depression. A new study from Australia finds that even as little as one hour of exercise a week can elevate one’s mood, regardless of age or gender. Read the article here.
Reversing the downward spiral of depression takes less energy than you think.
Depression and loss of energy — it is the beginning of a waiting game that does not end well.
Sometimes depression is born from loss of achievement, loss of goals, and loss of positive feelings about oneself. When low energy plays a role, a person who is not blessed with high drive and physical energy can see a spiral into depression start quickly. But even people with more energy lose it while bearing the weight of the losses. And, without a lot of energy, people begin to wait for things to get better around them rather than take action to make a change.
The Downward Spiral
Spiraling — the word makes it seem like a gentle way to go down, but when it comes to depression, going down is hard to stop, and once at the bottom, reversing the spiral takes intention and support. I hear about this often from my younger depressed clients — those adults who started out of high school or college ready to be successful but who found the world did not fulfill the vision they had.
Jeremy (not his real name) was one such young man. He never had to work too hard to get a passable grade point and was popular enough to have a solid romantic relationship. He was ready happy with his life. But, as commonly happens, the college romance did not last, which made him feel down in the dumps. Then the company he worked for, facing hard times, cut his hours. He now did not earn enough to live on but he expected the company, not himself, to change and he took no action. He waited for work to increase his hours, but in the meantime, he felt like a failure, and the waiting sapped him. His self-esteem, already suffering from being single again, took another hit as he saw his money dwindle to nothing. He started to isolate himself from friends without funds for fun and without a date to go along. Waiting was his enemy. Without meaningful activity beyond limited work hours, that isolation increased his depressed mood.
Waiting also intensified the mental and physical fatigue, so he slept later in the morning since he did not have to get to work early. He began to think he had a lot of time every day to work on his situation, so he did not start on possible job hunting and, as the day melted away, it was too easy to let himself decide that tomorrow was a good day to start fresh. But that waiting also increased his fear that nothing could change and his mood became very depressed. That depression and his situation robbed him of the very things he needed to reverse the spiral: meaningful work (purpose, as well as money), positive interactions with others, pride in his achievements, sense of competency, and a feeling of being loved.
This spiral is one I have seen repeatedly in young adults who have not met with easy success out of high school or college. They often did not have to work at jobs during those years to obtain phones or cars or clothes or do costly activities, such as attend concerts or sporting events. One young man I worked with as he finished high school, Casen (again, a pseudonym), felt literally terrified of applying for a part time job so that he could begin developing job skills and a resume and have some spare cash. Without classroom demands, he moved into waiting mode: waiting to apply to community college, waiting for a job that might fall into his lap. (The job that a friend would provide not that Casen would go search for since the friend said he could get his boss to hire Casen). Waiting did not bring him the job or the college acceptance letter, and he felt even more scared and more depressed. And he judged himself rather mercilessly: believing he would never succeed. That negative mindset robbed him of even more energy, and the more time he spent watching shows on his laptop, the less energy he had to reverse the downward spiral to depression.
What can be done about this? It is typical that an outside force will help. If you are reading this you might be saying to yourself phrases like, “Yeah — the outside force of getting evicted or starving! That would work!” If so, you would be correctly identifying motivators! At times, though, a person in a downward spiral ends up living with family or friends who are being helpful to them in averting disaster, but the pattern of waiting on something outside themselves does not change until motivation can pick up.
Reversing the Downward Spiral
How is it possible to reverse the spiral? Raising energy is a primary initial goal — with or without motivation. To start the spiral on an upward trend, simply:
Stop telling yourself negative things: you only reinforce the belief they are true. Interfere with negativity, saying, “Stop! I choose to believe I will solve this!”
Stop isolating. Get in contact with people, any interaction with others will help you also get outside of your own negative thoughts or mood.
Stop talking about your own life for a short while. When you only ruminate on your troubles, they seem larger. Ask someone else about his or her life. Hearing about another’s life, you can look at your reactions. I love the saying that troubles shared are cut in half and joys shared are doubled.
Then start the upward spiral with attention to developing a sense of purpose. Don’t assume this is a deep spiritual quest. In fact, it can be initially as simple as scheduling your day and meeting some regular commitments. An important brain change toward a less depressed mood occurs results from intentional activity. You get a blip of glutamate, an activating neurochemical, and one of dopamine, the feel-good neurochemical, and the combination is energizing. The bigger the step you take, the more you get. And any action will supply enough energy to do a little more.
My Tips
If you are underemployed — set a daily schedule that begins with a reasonable wake-up time.
Have a pattern to the day what news show you listen to or watch when you have your coffee when you feed a pet or meet a friend for tea.
Leave the house — you might have to start with leaving your room and interacting with others in your home- but forcing yourself toward less isolation is important.
At work, be sure to talk to your colleagues and ask them how they are; It improves the chance of a positive social exchange that can increase your self-esteem a bit and moves the spiral upward a fraction.
Set small goals — like walking the dog an extra 5 minutes — and notice you achieved them. There’s a bit more glutamate and dopamine!
Do something physical. When you move your depressed body you gain energy rather than lose it, so even a few minutes of tidying up can raise enough energy to do a bit more.
The above ideas tend to work best when you are working with another person who supports you, such as a therapist, a 12-Step sponsor, or a good friend who knows your goals and will help you keep track of them.
As you stop the waiting game — that passive waiting for life to change without you doing something to change it — the spiral reverses. You will be surprised that you will slowly feel your energy rise so you will be more able to take the next steps toward success.
By Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D.
This article first appeared in Psychology Today website.
I’ve struggled to write this blog, just like I’ve struggled to do most things for what amounts to a very long time now-so long that it feels like a lifetime and what came before only fragments of a not well remembered dream. In actual temporal time, it’s only a few years of melancholy and moderately severe major depression. But in the life of the mind, there is an unbridgeable chasm between the person I am now, who I once was, and who I want to become. I am so lost in my isolation that my only refuge is in turning inward; a strategy which offers no solace at all-only shame and regret.
I feel so isolated. I suppose that is one of the hallmarks of mental illness – detachment – that it seems impossible to relate to anyone. Furthermore, I’m not an attorney, just someone who has lived the hells and wonderful peaks of manic depression. My exposure to the law is through my father, my uncles, my cousins, and Dan Lukasik. I hope to go to law school one day, but I need to retake the LSAT first. So why write a blog? What good could it possibly do? Hopefully, some of the sentiments I describe will resonate with you. But hope is fickle; a thinly stitched veneer stretched tautly over an ever-widening mire of unfulfilled promise. When I look back at what I hoped for, most of it has faded into the mists of time with barely even the trace of memory or, worse yet, has been completely buried beneath the scars of regret.
In the face of my futility, my stupidity, my selfishness, my demons, hope that I can one day return the love and support that has been given me has allowed me to trudge on, kept me from giving up. Even if it flies in the face of all rational thinking, experience, and who you believe you are the sole advice I would deign to give is to no never give up hope that you can bring yourself to a better place and can make yourself into the person you wish to become. Though there be no reason to believe, allow belief to inspire you all the same.
“I can only stand apart and sympathize/ For we are always what our situations hand us/ It’s either sadness or euphoria.”
The above is a stanza from Billy Joel’s song “Summer, Highland Falls” that has always resonated with me. The song itself captures the sense of helplessness, at times even ironic apathy, I have felt towards a disease (or mental illness or whatever I should call it) that has allowed me to leap through the heights of “euphoria”, and to spiral down into the depths of suicidal depression, seemingly completely independent of any of the external aspects of my life.
I once told a friend that in the past three months I had had at least 45 “perfect days” (i.e., days that I could not imagine being any happier in), but that 45 was a conservative estimate and it was probably more. I’ve also spent weeks on end consumed by vivid images of ways in which I could gruesomely kill myself. And both of these emotions, which at the time feel so pervasive and all encompassing, occurred while living on the same college campus and surrounded by many of the same people. So it’s hard not to “stand apart and sympathize” with the fact that regardless of daily accomplishments or minor setbacks, or even in the face of significant change, it doesn’t matter what you do. That because of who you are, in a very intimate and fundamental sense, you are going to experience “either sadness or euphoria,” and you have little say in how intensely you are going to experience that emotion, or for how long (so let’s hope its euphoria, and it lasts forever).
This complete lack of control has always weighed on me as a moral failure because I’ve recognized what I consider the best version of myself-productive, engaged, intelligent, charming and yet, due to an inherent weakness, have been unable to maintain that persona consistently.
Instead I, and I would like to emphasize the contradiction and confusion surrounding a feeling at once of helplessness and simultaneously of complete responsibility for being who I am, have eventually always succumbed to periodic bouts of anxiety, negativity, and self-doubt. These periods have always been characterized by an intense sense of isolation in which almost palpable barriers are restricting me from coming into touch with the people and events surrounding me while at the same time engaging/suppressing the most endearing aspects of who I would hope to be as a person.
There are two types of sadness which result from this frustration and alienation.
Painful Sadness
There is a horrible, painful sadness. For me, this type of sadness is expressed through intense suicidal ideation-constant mental images meant to shock the senses into an acknowledgment of how base you are. Brutal beatings, stabbings, gouging’s, hangings. It consumes you until the idea is all there is and it takes every ounce of energy you have to beat it back. And it breaks your heart to see someone you love not to be able to say that this is how you feel, and it’s not their fault, but you are worlds away and mired in a sadness/loathing that is impossible to understand for those who have not yet experienced it. And they love you, so they are trying to understand, but, how could they? And this breaks your heart even more.
Cleansing Sadness
And there is also a beautiful, cleansing sadness. For me, this beautiful sadness feels more real than anything in the world. When I have been at the height of mania-during the happiest times of my life, I have still felt intimately in tune with songs that deal with regret-juxtaposing the inadequacy of the self with the intrinsic sublimity of some other-which you have failed.
There is a powerlessness to this beautiful sadness, an inevitability. It is real because it exists at the core of our most vulnerable selves, and therefore its expression comes out at a time when we are “most alive” and most in tune with our emotional intuition-when we are most ready to admit to and grasp on to that which we truly hope for and believe in. This sadness is not manifested in horrifying suicidal ideations but rather in the awe-inspiring idea that we are not worthy of the wonderful phenomena we call life. That we are ashamed of our ugliness amidst so much beauty and yet, in spite of our baseness, we have the opportunity to exist within as well as work towards some greater good.
Mania
In many senses, for me, the mania of bipolar has been synonymous with stripping away the debilitating fear and anxiety which were so constricting for so long, and a constant struggle has been not to glorify it. My Mom is taking a wonderful self-help course entitled “Fearless Living” and those two words, again from my experience, imbibe what it means to be manic or hypo manic; imbued with amazing amounts of self-confidence and gratitude, it’s unbelievably easy to live a carefree, upbeat, happy-go-lucky lifestyle, all the while being extraordinarily productive. Thus thinking in the binary can be dangerous-there is a natural tendency to see every aspect of the mania as better than every aspect of the depression.
However, beyond the fact that I have never been able to sustain mania, there is also a depth of feeling engendered by the sincere melancholy of depression that I have never encountered in the euphoric whirlwinds of mania. And I think the small silver lining to what is a dark cloud is the depth of meaning such great sorrow can expose you to-in a way an almost redemptive suffering. At the very least, though depression has taught me to hate myself many times over, it has also taught me to love life. The sad beauty of such a self-effacing distinction, to hate your being while loving your existence, is something to be thankful for and, hopefully in time, something to build off of for the future.
I would like to close this blog with what have for me been some solid building blocks for sheltering myself from, coping with, and eventually recovering from depression.
Exercise
When there seems to be nowhere to turn and the prospect of getting through the day seems unbearable, working out and (especially) yoga exercises are blocks of time where you don’t have to interact with other people, can be totally in your head, and when you’re done you feel a little better physically, even if not mentally. Really any small thing that you can do consistently and through which you can mark progress-I’m getting stronger, better endurance, or greater flexibility-is a wonderful way to establish extrinsic markers of success-I’m better at this than I was a few weeks ago, which, in turn, can catalyze good feelings about yourself as a person.
Think of something you’ve always wanted to do or be good at, and then identify manageable steps that you can take on a consistent basis that gradually takes you towards your goal. Don’t say I need to be as good as someone else or make an arbitrary benchmark-rather say I want to get in better shape relative to how I am right now, so I’m going to run or go to yoga more often. Or I’ve always wanted to know how to tie my flies, shuffle a deck of cards, play an instrument, or speak a foreign language, so I’m going to work on this task a few minutes each day as opposed to watching TV or surfing the web.
Taking little steps like these that are working towards longer goals, even if you are not aware of any specific professional or extrinsic benefits to achieving those goals, can be inherently rewarding in and of themselves. If you’re better at an activity, any activity, then you were a few weeks ago, that can be one small thing that you feel good about, even as the rest of your world remains shrouded in darkness. It can help motivate you to get through the day, can serve as a spring towards other “productive” behavior, and eventually be something you can hang your hat on. However, it’s important not to beat yourself up after a day in which you failed to take your positive “step”-rather have a little self compassion and say tomorrow is a new day, and it’s not the end of the world, indeed its completely ok, that I wasn’t able to do anything “productive” today.
Finally, reading and writing can be extremely cathartic. Reading great literature can give you an emotional connection to characters, ideas, and feelings during a time when you felt completely isolated and estranged from the outside world. Fiction and non-fiction distract you from the constant stream of negative and self-critical thinking that can paralyze you. And, in a way similar to the steps discussed above, finishing a book you’ve always wanted to read or one on a subject that you’ve wanted to know more about, can generate a (no matter how small) sense of accomplishment that, no matter how insidiously it attempts to, the depression cannot take away.
On the other hand, for me, writing is more of a risk. I can be very critical of myself as a writer-a case in point is this blog which has been taxing at times-and sometimes end up feeling worse after sitting down to write. At other times, writing has been akin to therapy in that it has helped me to sincerely articulate-in the best way I know how the complex matrix of emotions enmeshed within me. Even if journaling or poetry don’t make sense to a single other person, the fact that they make sense to you can temporarily relieve part of the burden imposed by self-guilt and personal shame. It can be an outlet for your anguish, space where you can be authentically yourself. Sometimes, you can be so overwhelmed by your depressive thinking that you need some way to release that thinking-writing can be an effective way to do this.
In any case, don’t immediately sit down and assume that because of your depth of feeling you’re going to write the next great American novel. Rather start with a paragraph or a poem. It might end up being useless junk that you never look at again, and that’s ok, because part of what depression is, is a needless anguish and self-doubt that is inhibiting you in your quest to live a full life and should be discarded as soon as possible. But amidst the uselessness you may stumble upon small snippets of truth-a rhyming couplet here, a few sentences there-that satisfactorily express for you one of the tragic and meaningful aspects of your condition (or symbolically the human condition more generally). These small snippets are worth holding onto as they reflect the deeper truths embedded within a malaise that so often brings us to our knees and which, on sublimely rare occasions, reveals insights that one (I believe) can only obtain through suffering.
“Human beings are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today.” Andrew Weil, M.D.
Think of something you’ve always wanted to do or be good at, and then identify manageable steps that you can take on a consistent basis that gradually takes you towards your goal. Don’t say I need to be as good as someone else or make an arbitrary benchmark-rather say I want to get in better shape relative to how I am right now, so I’m going to run or go to yoga more often. Or I’ve always wanted to know how to tie my flies, shuffle a deck of cards, play an instrument, or speak a foreign language, so I’m going to work on this task a few minutes each day as opposed to watching TV or surfing the web.
