How to recover from depression, part 1
I’m going to post a series of articles on how to recover from depression.
[Disclaimer: I’m not a professional of the field. I do not claim that the advice I write will be helpful for all people. I am writing based on my own deep experience battling with depression and my own recovery. I advise anyone struggling with severe depression to seek treatment from professionals.]
Lets dive right into it.
Set goals.
Always, always, set goals. What goals? Any goals. Are all goals equal? No. Not all goals are equal, but the most important thing is that you have goals and that you keep having them.
You’re returning home from work feeling down as usual. Your home is a messy catastrophe, you haven’t paid any of your bills and you have three messages waiting to be answered. You want to ignore all that, like you did yesterday and the day before, and watch Netflix until you can’t fight sleep any longer and go to sleep.
Sound familiar? Because doing all that will probably seem like way too much, you may be tempted to not even try to do a little. But it is essential — if you want to, some day, crawl out of the pit of depression — to have goals. You should pick at least one thing from your to-do list and do it immediately.
“Alright so if I do it — what do I benefit?” you ask, “I don’t care if my home is messy. I have bigger problems.”
I’m here to tell you, that’s your depression talking. Your depression is, in a sense, fighting for its own survival. It’s convincing you to do all the things that will keep you at it’s mercy. Don’t listen to it and just do one thing that you can do for yourself, such as answering that one message or filling that washing machine. Trust the process. You’ll get out.
