This is How I Got Over My Depression

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that there are a myriad of causes for mental health issues; some of which are, of course, beyond human control.

But if — like me — you are one of the people whose depression could be attributed to modern living, then this might just be the article for you. Here are some of the things I’ve learned on my way to feeling better:

1. Sometimes it helps to think about *why* you feel depressed

My doctor told me not to try and rationalise the way I was feeling, and for the first year or so I listened. But sometimes we feel the way we do for a genuine reason, and it was only after a year of therapy and introspection that I realised…

Depression and anxiety happened when I kept doing things that I knew to be morally wrong.

It doesn’t mean I am (or was) a bad person. Sometimes it would involve allowing someone else’s immoral behaviour to go unchallenged — for instance, at work, where employers constantly make unreasonable demands.

2. Be mindful of how you adapt to survive

Whenever I tried to make myself accept things that I knew weren’t right — being mistreated by others, doing harmful things, being reckless — and I kept doing it, I inadvertently added a new rule to the reality filter that is my brain: bad things happen even when they shouldn’t. And this feeling descended, like a darkness, surrounding me. I became enveloped in my own subconscious pain, which I see now as being caused by knowing that the moral balance of my life was out of sync.

I know this because of how I used my therapy. I wasn’t as interested in a diagnosis or ‘being treated’ as I was in learning how my therapists were treating me. Forget the years of training, what were they doing in the room to help me? Surely, I should be able to practise self-awareness to the degree that I could be my own therapist?

It sounded straight-forward enough to me, although you might think I was deluded. It took a year of antidepressants capping my emotional peaks, and speaking for hours about some of the most random details of my life with a number of different counsellors before I noticed the forms of conversation and thought that accelerated my progression towards a happier, lighter self.

I realised over time that as I spoke, it was often intended for me to eventually notice some of the patterns that emerged in the stories that I shared, and learn how these patterns impacted my experience. Once I started consciously tapping into those unhealthy patterns and making necessary adjustments, I began to feel better. And now, no more meds for me!

3. Don’t wait for therapy to provide the answers — learn your patterns

Here’s the thing — your therapist likely won’t want to equip you with the tools that would make it pointless for you to come back; they get paid per hour, not per cure. That is the only reason I could think of to explain why my therapists didn’t point out any of my patterns, despite how glaringly obvious they were in retrospect. You might argue that there are no shortcuts in therapy, and I might agree. But they would let me speak and would examine situations with me — but never offer much in the way of a conclusion. In many ways, having to clock my own patterns mirrored the fact that I was the only one who could really do anything about them.

These patterns included allowing my worth to be determined by how other people choose to respond to me; not having enough empathy at times, or sometimes too much of the wrong kind of empathy; not communicating my feelings clearly — the list goes on. But to save time, I will just tell you that pretty much the entire list was to do with how I connect with myself as well as how I connect with others. And every single item had a moral grounding.

4. Be selfish in the right way

A lot of people will say that you have to look after yourself first, and this is very true, but it isn’t in the way that you might think. It doesn’t mean putting yourself first always — it just means making sure that you aren’t pouring from an empty cup. It doesn’t mean keep the cup for yourself and hoard all the water, and this is where I think a lot of people go wrong. Hell, it’s definitely where I’ve gone wrong a few times. Turning inwards only worsens the imbalance that is likely the root cause of your pain, since as social creatures humans crave positive and healthy connections with the world around us. It’s why, for instance, service to others is an important part of addiction recovery.

Some of the ways in which I connected with the world were unbalanced; I was either feeding too much energy into the wrong places, or I was sucking up other people’s. And this led to disheartenment, and wanting to turn away from everyone. To protect my energy. To stay still, and be safe.

5. Some of the voices are worth listening to

‘Your mind is your own worst enemy,’ I’ve been told more than once. But is it always? Isn’t it possible that sometimes negative thoughts genuinely occur because of what’s happening around you? Because that’s what I think depression is — confirmation that you are literally not in a good place. And if you allow things to stay the same, without radical attempts to affect positive change in your life, it only gets worse.

So when my body said ‘stop,’ I stopped. It was horrible. I felt suicidal more than once, and spent way longer than I would like to admit feeling like I never wanted to leave my bed again. I hardly did anything at first, but when I started to pay attention to the things that did motivate me to get out of bed on those rare occasions — the things that were truly essential to me — everything changed.

6. Seek out what makes you happy

Guess what? For me, it wasn’t money. Don’t get me wrong — I am not wealthy. In fact, right now I have probably about £25 in my account. I quit my job in the height of my depression, and after the learning journey I have been on since, I realised that I need to make my contribution to the world on my terms, so that I could be sure my conscience can’t be arrested by the demands of my working life. This is part of why I am unemployable and also why I am currently broke. But I am happier than I have been my entire adult life, even while I pump all of my money into my writing and the online education platform I’m developing.

You may prefer the sounds of your tears to echo around the halls of your dream mansion, but I would prefer my laughter to bounce off the wall five feet from me in my studio flat.

Admittedly, staying true to my morals does make everything a little harder, but overall, I’m happier when I know I’m impacting the world around me in a more positive way —not working for huge corporations, recycling, supporting local businesses, engaging with the community, doing more to benefit others, visiting my mother from time to time, etc…

7. Stress isn’t always a bad thing

One of the things that held me back from my recovery for a while was the idea that any negative emotion was a product of my depression, and so worth avoiding. But this can lead to the trap of self-invalidation, believing that you are wrong to feel what you feel, which is extremely harmful.

Nowadays, I’m stressed a lot, I worry for the future and I sometimes feel a little sad about sad things. But I recognise that I’m no longer always stressed. I feel stressed when I worry about the hopes and dreams for the future that I now have once again, which is entirely different.

It used to be that I would feel bad about something and put myself down for ruining my day. When I felt good about something I would put myself down as punishment for my previous negativity, and so the cycle continued.

Now that I accept and appreciate my negative emotions as natural and okay, I am able to enjoy more of the positivity that life has to offer. I find myself smiling on a daily basis, moved by the smallest and most random things that I never would have noticed before. You might say, the cycle has reversed.

8. Remember the things you have learned along the way

Nowadays I get anxious or feel a little low, I remind myself that it’s probably because something isn’t quite right and needs to be looked at. I know how to differentiate between the anxiety caused by an incidental occurrence or the kind of long, dragging anxiety caused by an unhealthy pattern operating in the background. And I’ve learned to accept what I can’t change and how to identify the good that balances it out. I’ve learned that refusing to pay attention — when deep down, I know something is wrong and I should be doing something differently— inspires a kind of self-loathing that makes it harder and harder to feel good overall. This is what led to other destructive behaviours, that more deeply entrenched me in the fog.

Takeaways

The recurring theme throughout my learning journey here, has been the need for the right kind of self-love. It’s much easier said than done, but the first step is patience — understanding that you won’t always get it right, and that it’s a game of averages, not absolutes. Each day, I try to do at least one thing — even if it’s a tiny thing — that improves on the day before. Maybe that’s adding something back into my routine that previously fell by the wayside, such as flossing; maybe it’s simply making sure that I continue the improvement I made from the day before because that’s all I could handle at that particular moment. Or maybe it’s accepting that on this particular day, I need to allow myself to just sit down and not expect anything of myself because I don’t feel up to it and that’s okay. Change is not an event, but a process, and determination can nearly always lead to progress.

Now, here’s why you probably won’t listen.