Depression Tactics

My mother kindly sent me the following as a clipping with this year's Christmas card, after we discussed the article on the phone:

But early in her new book, Julie Fast comes clean: she's sometimes so paralysed by depression, she can barely leave her bed. Her book is called Get It Done When You're Depressed, but since I've never experienced the debilitating extremes she describes, I can't say whether it's useful if you're suffering from depression. What's striking is how useful it is even if you aren't.

Fast's starting assumption is that, like her, her readers are depressed and aren't about to stop being so any time soon - but that, in the meantime, there are a few things they'd like to be getting on with. She thus largely sidesteps the perfectionism implicit in much pop psychology: boundless joy and unlimited achievement are off the table at the start, so the familiar destructive cycle of self-improvement (resolve to become amazing, fail, feel worse, resolve to try harder, fail worse) is less of an issue. Fast offers ways to work around and alongside depression, rather than attacking it directly. Handily, her strategies also work if the mental obstacle you need to work around isn't depression, but an even more commonplace barrier to action: not really feeling like it.

"Don't wait until you want to do something," Fast writes, in possibly the single most useful productivity tip ever (it's a close cousin of "motivation follows action", mentioned here previously.)

(It's worth reading the whole piece, and I'm going to add the book to my Amazon wishlist, if any kind soul wants to buy it for me - hint, hint!)

I'm going to add one other idea/concept that I've been using more and more to help me cope and function: put simply, it is "reward yourself for the little things".

In my experience at least, being depressed leads to situations where I feel like I am failing at things that "normal" people take for granted: when I don't manage to do things that I would find easy when I'm on an upswing in my depression, or that other people seem to find easy as a natural part of life, it reinforces the sensation of being a failure, of being "too ill", of being "unable to get along". In the clipping mentioned above, Julie Fast is quoted as writing, "Many people equate depression with the inability to work. In reality, the problem is often the inability to feel like working."

Fast's answer is, "Don't wait for motivation, just get on with it". My answer to avoid falling into the trap is to change one's conditions for "success".

Depression is an illness, and a debilitating one at that. We just don't expect a guy with a broken leg to be able to get around the house as easily as someone who isn't in a plaster cast.

So, I record even the normal things as successes. At the end of the day, I count up all the little things and for each one give myself a little pat on the back to say "well done!" Even something as simple as having a bath gets a "yay for a shiny new me!" Getting up the energy to go to the shops is a struggle some days - so every time I do the shopping (especially if I get all the things I want and don't overspend on other items - but even if those conditions aren't true) it's counted as a success (in my mind, I go with the old hunter-gatherer thing, and frame the return home from the shops as the mighty hunter dragging an animal carcass back to the cave to be eaten - but that's just because I'm into fantasy fiction and stuff, and a bit weird like that). Writing a post on this blog is an achievement. Talking to friends or family on the phone is an achievement. Getting dinner for myself, having a good night's sleep, all the things that are required for just holding steady, are achievements.

Even with things that don't get done, I reward myself the same way. I no longer look at a half-tidied room as "Bugger, I didn't get the job done!" but instead as, "Hey, I only have half the job to do tomorrow!"

And the result is that these little mental rewards add up over time. I've found that it means that I get more of the little things done, because motivation has followed the reward of the achievements. And that means one or two bigger things can get done, things that instead of just holding steady, actually represent progress. It isn't a cure, and it isn't "overcoming" depression. It's working around it, through it, not treating it as a single block but as something fluid that can flow around you. The other positive consequence is that by not punishing yourself for NOT getting things done, you can conserve your energy for when you can get them done. As my mother explained when dealing with stress-induced problems, sometimes you just have to put up your hands and say, "nope, can't handle that, won't try", and write it off.

I imagine this is probably similar to NLP or CBT (that's "cognitive behavioural therapy", not "cock and ball torture", btw!) in concept, all I know is that it's how I developed it, and it works for me.