How To Overcome Depression

When we talk about depression it is important to define what exactly depression is. Depresson is described as “a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person’s thoughts, behavior, feelings and physical well-being.” Wikpedia. This state of low mood can, however be caused by a number of different reasons. It can be as a result of life events (temporary stress) or it can be caused by certain illnesses or major psychological problems.

It is important to draw a distinction between these two causes. This website will advise you on how to overcome depression when life events are temporarily causing you to become depressed. However, If you believe that you are suffering from some form of illness or a deeper psychological problem, you should seek medical help. If you are unsure, try out the tips on this site for a couple of weeks and see what difference they make to your mood – you may well find that they are enough to make you feel much better.

Overcome depression

Ways to overcome depression tend to fall into two categories:

1. Changes to your outer lifestyle.
2. Changes to the way you think about life (your ‘inner lifestyle’).

It is important when dealing with your depression to pay attention to both of these factors, everything that you do to tackle your depression will make a difference.

Change your outer lifestyle to overcome depression

• Eat well – Research shows that ensuring that we eat well can be effective in overcoming depression. Taking vitamins such as Solgar 1 a day multivitamins can help to make you feel better and can help in the battle with depression. Another great tip is to be aware of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – this disorder can affect people in countries with low light during the winter months, is a direct cause of depression and is caused by vitamin D deficiency. Latest studies show that this is far more widespread than we first thought, if you live in a country that suffers from low light, be sure to try a vitamin D supplement. A word to the wise when it comes to vitamin supplements, you really do get what you pay for. If you are going to try them out, go for the top of the range vitamins, the absorption rate of cheap ones from the supermarket is so small that you might as well not bother.
• Get exercise – Like eating well, this is just basic body maintenance. Your body is really designed to be used daily and requires a certain amount of physical activity to keep it at its optimum. The balance between body and mind is complex and not fully understood but research overwhelmingly shows that exercise is one of the most beneficial things that we can do to tackle depression. When your body feels bad it gives birth to negative thoughts and vice versa, this is something that can be dealt with easily.

Changing our thoughts to overcome depression

Depression is ultimately all in the head. It is caused by the way we think about things, generally by beliefs that we hold deep down but don’t realise that we hold. Often people suffering from depression will believe that they are somehow different from others, that there is something wrong with them (there’s something wrong with EVERYONE – No-one’s perfect). These unreal and unrealistic beliefs generate unhelpful thoughts which then loop over and over again in the mind. Dealing with depression by changing our thoughts generally consists of either covering over the unhelpful thoughts, or rooting out the wrong beliefs in order to cut it off at the source. Below are some of the main ways to deal with depression by changing your thoughts along with my opinion of how useful these techniques are. These are just MY OPINIONS – I strongly urge you to try all of these out for yourself, different things work for different people and I promise that you will find at least one technique that helps you to beat depression.

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is the treatment of choice for many therapists and has been proven to have a very high success rate in dealing with depression. CBT works by investigating the underlying beliefs which cause the depression. By changing these beliefs, then you change the way you feel about them. If you would like a taster of what CBT is about, Dr Michael R. Edelstein has written an award winning book on the subject which he has released on the internet for free. It is an accessible and practical book that I have used to great success in my own life, check it out here. Once you are sure that CBT is for you, then it is recommended to seek a practitioner.

• Positive thinking. This includes affirmations, gratitude journals (ie – writing down 10 things that you are grateful for every day) and reframing of negative situations. Positive thinking is a slightly lazier way of trying to alter the way that you think about things than CBT. While CBT tries to get to the root of the problem and is based on ultimately asking the rational question ‘Are things really that bad?’ (they almost are never as bad as you think they are), positive thinking is more about saying ‘If I tell myself things are good for long enough I will start to believe it.’ Whilst this is true to some extent, if you have deep rooted beliefs that are causing your depression then this papering over of the cracks is likely to give you a temporary mood boost. It is good to practice positive thinking wherever you are and can be used to pick you up when you are down but if your depression is being caused by underlying beliefs then they must really be tackled first.

• Get busy doing something meaningful. Dr Viktor Frankl was a Jew living in NAZI Germany. When he was sent to a concentration camp he observed that of all the Jews who died during his years of captivity, whether they lived or died seem not to be so much linked to their physical health, as one might think, but more about their attitude. A doctor of psychology, Dr Frankl occupied himself by studying this strange phenomenon. In the end he observed that those who survived were ones who felt that they were doing something meaningful with their lives. That what they were doing was helping the other Jews or that they had some mission to fulfil in the world when they got out. By doing a job that is meaningful and will make a difference – even if it is only helping out an elderly neighbour or a loved one in need of some help, it will create a focus for you on doing something that is useful and positive. This means that you are so busy concentrating on the job that you are doing that you simply don’t have enough time to ruminate on dark thoughts. This phenomenon is often seen in people who lose their job and, denied the opportunity to carry out meaningful work, start to lose their self-confidence.

• Meditate. Whilst positive thinking and CBT are about combatting the dark thoughts of depression, getting busy and meditating are about avoiding them completely. The forerunner to modern psychologists were ancient spiritual practitioners. They identified that the source of pain and evil was our thoughts (God condemned Adam after he ate of the fruit of knowledge). Meditation was identified as a way to control those thoughts. By sitting to meditate, one practices slowing down the constant stream of thoughts running through the mind and instead starting to feel the world around us. Meditation can be a scary process, when we stop the noise and confusion of our minds there is nothing left except what we really feel. When you have spent most of your life trying to cover this up and being ashamed of it, meditation can become extremely uncomfortable for many people. However working through these uncomfortable feelings can really help to put us in touch with the thoughts and events that cause us to have problems in life.

There are many tools out there to help you overcome depression, the ones above are only a few, it is important to know that you are not powerless and that there are lots of things that you can do to help yourself. Please take a look at some of our other articles and check out some of the resources in our links to find out more.