AKA please, don’t tell me “get professional help”. Poor people can’t afford it anyways.
Some of the things that helped me:
- Regularity. I also have ADHD so actually getting me to catalog daily/weekly things that I need to do was hard enough. But now that I have like 5 todo lists things are looking up.
- Cataloging things. I love photography and writing down interesting ideas. Someone looking through my photo collection might wonder why I take photos of random shit. Simple reason: Something managed to brighten my day and I just had to put it in on the record. I feel happier when I know that those moments won’t ever disappear if I can at all manage it. Similarly, if I have cool ideas that made me happy for some reason, I write them down.
- Crap social media is the worst. Be on the social media to fearlessly shout your cool ideas to the void if you have to. Don’t be there to passively and silently afraid to speak up and stick around with people you barely know and watch them slowly turn nazi yes-men. (Yes. It has happened. Before Elon bought Twitter. Can’t even imagine how shit things are nowdays over there.)
- LLMs make decent therapists. Try CharacterAI or even just assign a therapist persona to ChatGPT (makes it more accurate - e.g. “You are an experienced psychologist with experience in the following therapies…”). This is both solo and affordable.
- Look into books you can read about managing your mental health.
- There are loads of apps out there that can help you with your depression, e.g. supplement your flagging executive function, remind you to practice rejection of useless self-castigation, help you check in with how you’re feeling, etc.
- Go outside at least once a day.
- Exercise at least once a day for half an hour.
- Set small and manageable goals, and make sure you speak to yourself positively when you achieve the goal, no matter how small.
These are all admittedly easier said than done when you’re depressed, but they are better than nothing, especially if you weren’t doing anything in these areas earlier.
Read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. Helped me through a hard time in my life.
Thats a great question, I should know considering ive been depressed for years. I mostly focus on the near future so I can make it through the constant traumatic events in my life.
It’s very difficult, and in the end, it comes down to finding things that work for you, but in my experience, doing it “on my own” is virtually impossible. Humans need social interaction and often help, especially when battling with mental illness. That being said, there are some things that help most people.
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Exercise - you don’t need to run a marathon or lift free weights, but any kind of exercise, including walking, can have a big boost on mental health. If you can, working up a sweat can help release more endorphins (and also helps motivate me to take a shower when I’m struggling with hygiene).
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Sleep - prioritize getting good sleep. This has a huge effect on your mental health, and lack of sleep makes intrusive thoughts more difficult to ignore. If you suffer from suicidal ideation, this can be very beneficial. It can also help set up a routine for exercise, hygiene, etc. if you have more consistent bed and awake times.
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Eating healthy- this is hard, because often when depressed we go for unhealthy foods, which make us feel bad, so we eat more of them and it perpetuates the cycle. If you really struggle with this start by making small changes - find a fruit or vegetable you genuinely enjoy and start incorporating more into your diet. Learning some basic cooking skills can also make healthy eating more enjoyable.
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reduce drug and alcohol use (if any) - these can be excellent short term solutions, but will often make you feel worse in the long run
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find someone to talk to - online resources help, but there’s no substitute for genuine in person (or over the phone) interaction. This can be harder said than done if you’re older or in an area where it’s hard to meet people. Support groups are also excellent- there’s something very empowering about being surrounded by folks experiencing the same challenges you do every day.
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practice gratitude- take some time every day to thing of things you are genuinely thankful for. Supposedly, the brain can’t think or negative things while you are thinking of positive ones. Even if that’s not true, taking time to appreciate the good things in your life (even if it’s something small like your morning coffee) can help redirect your thought process.
Lastly, understand you can do all the “right” things to battle depression and still be depressed. No amount of exercise or vegetables will suddenly make you better - you will likely still have bad days. That’s why, for me, it’s important to have people I know I can call and talk to (my brother being a big one right now). We don’t even really talk, I just call him and cry talk for a bit and eventually it doesn’t hit so hard.
Give yourself some credit for all the bad days you’ve been through- if you weren’t strong, you wouldn’t have made it this far. Good luck! I’m rooting for you!
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Ultimately, you don’t battle it alone. You are here. You read this. This is you not being alone. And just like this little exchange, there are other possibilities out there. You just have to try and reach out. Even if it seems hopeless to you. I read a lot of useful stuff in here. Sometimes that alone helps. Sometimes the tiniest steps are valuable. Just keep on. We can overcome.
Running shirtless at -3 ℃
“On curing sadness with cold showers, excess with Cynicism, and madness with veganism. And if you can’t go vegan, eat the rich.” —https://arscyni.cc/file/cynic.htmlPersist.
Keep at it; try again tomorrow.
Depression will rob you of joy, erode your appetite for life, and leave you blaming yourself for any/everything.
In those circumstances where you cannot defeat it, you can still outlast it.
Do what you can for yourself. When you can do no more, do what you can for the person you will be later, and, when you can do no more: forgive yourself.
Depression is a parasite and it’s been eating your strength far longer than you realize.
It’s hard but doable.
There are couple of things that can synergize with each other, so you don’t need to do one thing perfectly, you can make some progress in one and move one to the next one.
step zero: (eat sleep exercise)
eating well will help you sleep and exercising sleeping will help you exercising and eating at regular interwals exercising will help you sleep and burning the food
step one: (become hobbist psychologist)
Read some books: “What happened to you by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey” - you can download ebooks from piracy sites
Youtube lectures: “heathy gamer gg” was particulary helpful for me but it has some (IMO) minor controversies and innacuracies. Still VERY helpful to get started.
Seek profesional doctors as the likes of Andrew Tate are also targeting depressed men (all people on the internet are men until proven otherwise)
step two: (emotional awerness)
Develop emotional inteligence. There are couple of techniques there that you will discover in step one That will help you train your inteligence.
Journaling, meditation, etc. are some of them
step three: (discover life and who you are)
this will come naturally after step two. You will need to seek new experiences.
step four: (build life worth living and build your purpose)
[I am at this stage so I can’t really help you much, but everything that I have learned is helping me immensely]
1- Exercise - I generally think that walking or running on trails in nature is one of those generally free beneficial thinks you can do for depression. Worse case scenario, you improve your fitness and feel better about the shape of your body.
2- Sleep - Yeah, this is a massive one, aim for at least 7-8 hrs. Regular exercise will help, but try to keep a relatively even sleep schedule (schedule yourself to be in bed without your phone by 10pm is a lazy but easy way to help).
3- Limit doomscrolling - Looking at the latest news about what craziness is happening in world probably isn’t that amazing to do that often, so limit it a bit.
4- Diet - I’m vegetarian, and when I started years ago I noticed it really seemed to make my bouts of depression easier to handle. That being said, at the very least make sure you aren’t eating too much junk food and try not to drink. If you aren’t getting enough of a particular nutrient, take a multivitamin (magnesium is a pretty common deficit for most, and can affect your sleep).
5- Meditation - The act of breathing can occasionally give a bit of a break from the spiral of depressed thoughts, so it’s no wonder that a lot of therapists tend to recommend it. Just start with 10 min a day and see if that helps any.
6 - Atmosphere - I know his can’t always be helped, but just adjusting your living environment can make a tremendous difference. Try taking a day or so just to thoroughly clean your room/apt/house. Personally, my advice is to clean like you are trying to truly help someone you love/respect so that at the end you feel like no stone was left unturned.
7- Music - Kinda try to find some music you like that is soothing and try to like, and limit depressive or harsh music. Sounds stupid, but it helps some.
8- Psychedelics - A bit controversial, but I personally use shrooms long term to handle depression. They honestly have been the best long term depression maintenance I’ve found for the price. But truthfully, most of what they do is give you a few hours to step out of your emotions, and force you to actually look at yourself. They are basically just making you acknowledge the above for the most part, and after a trip if you don’t make changes, they won’t really help that much. Pro tip, a notebook to capture your stream of thought can be very helpful for post trip integrations.
Shrooms are definitely dangerous, especially for people who are prone to schizophrenia I’ve read.
Personally, they made me realize my mind is capable of being content. No longer full blast, spinning plates all of the time.
That experience made me realise change is possible, and I got professional help a year later. Turns out I’ve been living in C-PTSD since I was 5.
I’d argue that shrooms themselves aren’t a huge deal, but pre-existing conditions for sure have accounted for (if you are schizophrenic or have bipolar disorder, please be careful/don’t take them), correct dosages for different strains should be taken, and you should do them in a safe environment. Shrooms themselves can’t directly kill you, unlike some stronger psychedelics (lsd, research chems, etc) which is why I generally recommend them (and not mushroom chocolate bars, which are usually research chems even if they say otherwise).
Either way, glad to hear that you seemed to get the benefit of change!
Excellent post.
On the topic of shrooms, the 50-100mg of Golden Teacher or Penis Envy have worked well for me. Every other day for 2 months. Then take a month off.
If you have the ability, OP, you could adopt a pet. It helped me a lot to have someone to keep me company and that I was responsible for.
You can’t just lay in bed hoping for tomorrow when you got a terrier yapping at you to get up and play with him.5-HTP serves me well. It’s got a similar serotonin impact without the tripiness of shrooms.
Glad it helps, I was kinda in the same situation as op as few years ago (depressed, broke, and living with my parents), although I was in the US. I don’t personally recommend having a pet when depressed, I’m thankful that my dog wasn’t cared for by just me at the time as I suspect that I wouldn’t have gone great. I personally try to fully trip every 4-6 weeks, but the more time passes the longer I find I don’t need to trip that frequently. I take a pretty high dose, have to schedule out a full day to get through it. I haven’t really tried much in the way of micro dosing, but I’ve heard that they work for a lot of people.
Mindfulness, if you can get your hands on it, read Why Buddhism is True.
Professional help can be cheap! You just might have to look little harder. For a while, I saw a psychologist who had a deal with a church where they subsidized most of his fee. So it was super cheap for me.
One of the most helpful things for me was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT. I used a workbook that helped me see how skewed and untrue some of my thinking was.
Finally, walking in nature or, even better, exercise! Find what works for you. I like jump rope. Good luck!
There’s literally nothing where I live. I’m not American, so many of your structures and help don’t apply to my world.
Walking outside is free! There are free support groups online. Those require time, but just 20 minutes can make a bigger difference.
The CBT workbook I used was maybe $20, I think. It’s worth the investment.
Finally, getting over depression is all about retraining how you think. It’s going to take time, practice, and effort. Depression wants to show you how you don’t have the resources to beat it. That’s not true. You can beat it, even if you don’t have the resources other people might.
Depression has forever changed me. It’s easy to think that it was for the worst, but I’m more empathetic to people than I was before. Something that helped me was realizing and believing that depression is temporary. You won’t always be like this, even though you might feel that way.
You can do this.
This might be a weird one, but it is helping me a lot.
My deepest spirals into depression and alcohol abuse happen in the evening and at night.
I switched to waking up early (5am), focused on experiencing and enjoying sunrise as a kind of meditation, then going about my day. I’m off to bed by 8pm.
There’s still days where I can’t catch sleep for hours, mind racing. But hours past 8pm is still only 2am.
I found that a five minute session on a Muse 2 device (essentially over the counter neurofeedback training via a small consumer headband) kills my insomnia for at least a week.
Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll look into that
I used Ai to vent my problems to, and binged research papers. Read up on cognitive behavior therapy and the mechanics of depression.
I also made some big life changes and cut WAY back on drinking, but it took months and years to ease into the changes. Im still having shit days often, but can actually troubleshoot my mood and see why I’m depressed.
Half if it is don’t dwell on the bad things and that is damn hard. You got to catch your brain thinking something like “im a fuck up”, or “I get no benefit from $hobby”. Once you catch it stop or distract the though, literally tell the thought to fuck off if that works for your head.
Once your ready start stacking little things like showing and walking a few laps around the house over time. Its sound like bs but it helps.
Don’t do it on your own, do it with other people.
I found that the more time I spent with other people, the less time I was spending beating myself up.
