Once you have, I want to tell you that if you suffer from depression and still want to try to live a full life, there are several steps I would urge you to take.
Step 1: Find Hope
In my previous post I stated that, "you want to believe there is hope for things to be different when you so often feel like there isn't any." When you suffer from depression, especially deep depression, hope is what you need to hold on to. You need a reason to hope. You need a reason to keep going even when you don't feel like it. Even when everything seems impossible, everything feels like blah blank boring empty nothingness, you think you can't possibly go another day the way you are...ness. You need to find something, or several somethings that give you a reason to get up day after day, to resist giving into the blahness, to continue to form and maintain relationships even if you keep thinking there isn't any point. You need a reason.
Allie's reason was kind of nebulous- she was able to laugh hysterically at something small (a piece of corn sitting all alone under the fridge), so maybe everything isn't hopeless. However, when everything seems hopeless, when you have no reason to keep going... A reason, however nebulous, is enough for a while.
After a long while I realized I had three reasons to hope, and things I hold onto to maintain hope: My God, my husband, and my child (now children). The more reasons you have, the more motivation you have for making yourself do things that seem impossible when you are lying in bed thinking everything seems too difficult.
I can't tell you how many days I woke up lying in bed thinking, "Why am I awake? Why should I even get out of bed? Why should I even care about getting up?" Once my first son was born, the answer always became, "Because Reilly needs me. I love him. I'm his mom and I need to take care of him because there isn't anyone else to do it when Steve is at work." Reilly gave me reasons to get out of bed, and often I got smiles which made a little pocket of happy in my day filled with zombie like foggy thinking.
Steve gave me reasons to care about other aspects of life and drew me more into being around other people, whether I wanted to or not. I wanted to because I wanted to see people, and to be and feel normal. However, it often seemed like a lot of effort and energy expended so I wasn't always sure I wanted to. Afterwards, I was always glad I did. Classic introversion made a lot worse with depression!
Steve, himself, is an amazing man, loves me unconditionally, and has often made me laugh or smile when I wasn't expecting it. At some point there will be a post all devoted to him as there are so many ways a spouse can help or hurt someone going through a chronic condition.
[Steve, Reilly, and I taken a few years ago by our friend
Sarah at Sarah Zimmerman Photography]
My God is the underlying foundation beneath everything. I seriously think He's the reason I'm still able to show love when my emotions feel so much like nothing. He's the reason I push myself to care about and for Reilly and Steve, now Connor, and my other relationships when I could so easily just not care and let myself be isolated. He's the reason I even want to have hope, because life without God so easily seems hopeless. Holding onto my faith hasn't been easy, as I'll share in a later post, but it has been completely worth it.
If you don't believe in God, I would ask you to consider the reasons that keep you from it. I wouldn't be surprised if it had little to do with God and everything to do with people that gave you a reason to resist believing in Him. However, whether you believe in God or not, I urge you to find some reason, any reason, to have hope and hold onto it day after day.
As you go through each day find little reasons, little signs, that there is a reason for hope. It can be as little as a flower or sunset, and as big as someone showing you love in some way. Each person will have different things that give them hope throughout their day. I will tell you, though, that this can be difficult as it's easy to just ignore everything that could be a sign of hope as you continue in your depression. Still, please try. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
Step 2- Find Ways to Ease Your Symptoms
Whether it's medication, supplements, exercise, relationships, dietary adjustments, or some form of meditation/spirituality, it is really important to find ways that help ease your symptoms. I won't list all the possible things of each you can do in this post as you can easily do a Google search and come up with a ton of information- although I may go into some of them in more detail later. I can tell you that the more you can do, the more it will help.
However, what works for some doesn't always work for others. Also, because there is a ton of information available, it can also be overwhelming to figure out where to start. Where I would start is with something that seems manageable that could help a lot- like taking a daily vitamin if you currently don't do that. A vitamin is such a little thing but I always feel better when I've taken them and always feel worse if I've skipped a few days. I don't always recognize it in the moment, but after I've started feeling bad I look back and realize I forgot to take them.
Another manageable thing is to just sit outside in the sun for 15-20 minutes every day with no sunscreen. Unless you have extremely sensitive skin you shouldn't burn during that amount of time. The reason you want to skip the sunscreen is that while sunscreen blocks UV rays, it also blocks the rays that carry vitamin D. Vitamin D can help your body feel better in general and most people are deficient. So, if you want to gain Vitamin D skip the sunscreen just for a little while.
A seminar I listened to said you can get all the Vitamin D you need for a day by being naked in the sun just for 5 minutes with no sunscreen. Now, I don't recommend that- don't want to scandalize the neighbors or cause issues with little kids running around (though if you have privacy areas, what you do in your home is your business)! However, with summer approaching, unless you are so deep into depression you can't get out of bed (in that case perhaps open the window and shades for a while?), it shouldn't be too difficult to sit in the sun with shorts and a t-shirt for even 10 minutes while you read or play games on your phone. Well, at least that's probably what I'd be doing (being honest)!
Step 3- Avoid Pity Parties
When you are in deep depression, and especially in that spiral of depression, it is soooo easy to throw yourself pity parties. Then, when you do get together with people you tend to invite them to your pity parties too. I could tell you some stories but they would just depress you. Just suffice it to say, Yeah... so easy!
Unfortunately, when your depression has a piece of it based on mood, internal and external factors, this just feeds your depression and makes it worse. It can sometimes feel like it's helping. After all, misery loves company! But, that's the thing... company in misery just makes more misery. It doesn't really help at all.
What helps with this is to replace pity parties with thinking something positive, even if it's little. When you realize you are in that place where you are entertaining your pity party, find one of your hopes and just embrace it. Immerse yourself in it, marinate in it, (insert favorite action verb that basically means to surround yourself with it here). Spend time/talk with that person, do that thing, look at that piece of beauty. Whatever your hope may be, just start feeling, thinking, and doing everything about that hope that you can so it blocks the feelings, thoughts, and actions of your pity party. This can take a while to get to where it's an auto shift in thinking, but you can do it.
Every time you shift your pity party to your hope it helps that much more. Any change takes a while to become automatic. First, it's completely hindsight- so it could be days in your pity party before you remember, and that's ok. The more you do it the better and sooner it will get. Then it becomes the same day, then hours, and minutes, until finally it's a pity party mode first with a quick shift to hope in almost the same instant. But, all this is a process. So, it will take a while. Give yourself grace in the meantime and don't give up on it.
[If you are a Doctor Who fan (because who wouldn't want to be!?!), you will immediately recognize
David Tennant who plays the Tenth Doctor on the show. David Tennant did an excellent job at portraying
the dichotomy of a deeply depressed individual who still managed to often find happy things in life
and reasons to maintain hope, sometimes after indulging in a pity party. He's a favorite
Doctor and actor for that alone.]
Step 4- Adjust Your Coping Mechanisms
A coping mechanism is anything you do to adjust to the effects of stress in the hopes of reducing the impact stress has on you. Coping mechanisms are most basically broken down into fight (e.g. learn more, attack the problem, seek help, blame others) and flight (e.g. avoidance, denial, distancing, humor).
Some of these are positive, and some not so positive. Learning more, attacking the problem, and seeking help are all positive coping mechanisms. Blaming others, denial, and avoidance (anything you use to keep from dealing with stress, such as substances, affairs, or overindulging in hobbies) are negative ones. You will notice I didn't mention humor as a positive thing even though you would think it was? I also didn't mention distancing in the two categories. Well, with these two it's not so cut and dried (ever wonder how we got sayings like that one?!?).
Sometimes distancing can help because it gives you space to look at stressors and the situation more objectively so you can handle it. However, you don't want to stay with that distance maintained. That is when it becomes a negative, and more like avoidance. At some point you will need to deal with the stress rather than keep it at arm's length. Humor is a form of distancing. It can be a stress reliever, but if you use it too often it can become annoying, unhelpful, and more stressful.
My go to coping mechanism is avoidance, and most often is with books. I tend to read a lot. No, I really mean a lot. Seriously, a LOT. If I had a physical book for each book I've read, including the multiple times I've read them, I think my entire house would be lined with books.
If you are a book lover of any kind this could seem like a dream come true! The only problem with my coping mechanism of reading is that I often read fiction... and when I read I tend to completely immerse myself in the story... so much that if it's a good book I can view what's happening in my head like a movie or as if I'm there. Book lovers won't see a whole lot of problem with this (I can totally hear you saying, "Of course not! Why is this a problem!?!").
Well, here's the problem... when I'm living immersed in the world of the current book I'm reading, I'm missing what is happening out here in the real world ("Well, yeah, that's half the point of reading!"). And, if I'm missing what is happening out here in the real world, while I am missing [read: avoiding] the stress, I'm also missing all the good stuff and memories that are happening with the people I love ("........*blink*.......But.....*blink*......").
Yeah, not a lot I can say back at that one...
Now, I'm not saying I don't read anymore. Far from it! I still have stress and have a hard time coping with stress sometimes. However, I try to limit it when I can. If that doesn't work during a high stress period, after a time I will have a book fast in which I don't read many books at all (I'm in one now and decided to start a blog- funny what can happen!). Sometimes this comes naturally after I've read all my favorite books again, and everything that I can find at the library, and am in a waiting spell for more books by my favorite authors to be published (sometimes with internal pouting... and lots of sighs...). However, usually I get to some sort of saturation point when I have gotten to a place where I've avoided for as long as I can mentally, emotionally, and physically take and just have to deal with the parts of life I've been avoiding.
So, how do you adjust your coping mechanisms? First, recognize the coping mechanisms you have in the list I mentioned above. If you are having trouble with figuring out your coping mechanisms, you are welcome to let me know and I will help you with this! Second, identify one or two coping mechanisms that you think would be good to do instead. Or, to do what I've mentioned, which is do what you can to keep it from taking over your life. With some things this will work. In other instances (substance abuse being a big one), you may need to abstain entirely and find another way to cope.
After these two things, you adjust similarly to the process I mentioned in the pity party section. It will take time, but you can adjust, you can do it, and it can become normal to have a positive coping mechanism that still lets you experience life in the midst of depression and stress.
Hold onto Hope, even (especially!) when all you can feel right now is nothing. Feelings aren't facts and don't get to dictate your life. You can do it. Find your somethings to have hope and just hold on.
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