What you can do to help yourself through depression and how to fight depression via self help is an important topic. Depression can be debilitating and pervasive. What can you do to help yourself through depression? What’s involved with learning how to fight depression by helping yourself?
There are actually quite a lot of things you can do about depression that doesn’t involve medication. In fact, even with medication, you must change some things or when the medication is finished the depression will return because the behaviors haven’t changed.
Learning how to fight depression by helping yourself starts with developing a healthy balanced diet. Believe it or not, we are what we eat. Our bodies, including our brains, are fed by the food we put in our mouths. If we eat garbage we can only expect our bodies to produce garbage.
When we are under stress, and feeling depressed, we often lose sleep and forgo any exercise program we may have been using. Don’t! Exercise is important for the release of endorphins, which work in our brain chemistry to help elevate our mood. It doesn’t have to be an Olympic effort, just 30 – 40 minutes a day of work that elevates our heart rate will do the trick. Sleep, at least 6-8 hours per night, is just as important to recharge our brains. The trick is to get those hours between 10 pm and 2 am. If you have to work late, go to bed early and get up at 5 am. Your brain will be more productive and you’ll accomplish more.
Learning how to fight depression by helping yourself includes cutting down on the rehashing you do each day about your emotional problems. It is important to know what they are but it is just as important to concentrate on the solution to the problems and not the issues themselves. How to fight depression: When you find yourself doing all or nothing thinking, stop! When you don’t have an activity to do pick up a good book that is exciting, not a romance or self-help book.
Develop a support system with friends, family and support groups who can help you to stay active and involved in activities. The more active you are the less you time you have to worry about your problems and your emotional situation.
When you are developing a plan around what you can do to help yourself through depression remember that depression isn’t an all-or-nothing situation. Try keeping a diary or log of how you feel each day. You’ll start to notice that there are shades of gray to your feelings and your emotions. Depression is a continuum; some days are better than others. Celebrate the good days and learn what triggered them so you can repeat.
Continue to do what you know you enjoy. You may not feel like doing it, but do it anyway. You’ll find satisfaction in accomplishing the most mundane tasks. Even going out and meeting friends, though it may be difficult, will improve your mood and help you to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Triggers for depression can be found in environmental, interpersonal or physical/medical causes. Try sitting down and honestly evaluating what you feel and how you feel. Use a list to categorize the symptoms that make you believe you are depressed. For instance, you may be feeling fatigue constantly, or emotionally drained, or realize that your parent’s expectations are burdening you.
Next, take one step to evaluate those issues as you continue your plan for how to fight depression. If you are constantly fatigued you may want to get a physical exam to rule out a physical or medical problem. Or if your emotional fatigue is around a difficult relationship you may want to investigate some assertiveness training. A long, honest talk with your parents could clear up your perception of their expectations.
What you can do to help yourself through depression involves learning how to fight depression using several steps and you definitely have more than one option. Keep an open mind about what may or may not help and move forward. Remember that depression results in stagnation and loss of movement. Constructive movement, of any kind, is movement toward resolution and happiness.
