Living with depression, part 1 of 2
Aug. 4th, 2009 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceriI've been having bits and pieces of this conversation with several people lately, and decided to draw together what I've found helpful into one place.
What this isn't: This isn't medical or other professional advice, or a replacement for any of that.
What this is: My experience, what I've seen of others' experience, reflections on that.
What it won't do: Give you your pre-depression life back. At least it hasn't done that for me. This is what I've learned so far about getting into a new life that feels worth living, but it's not the same as what came before, and I wouldn't know what to suggest might do that. It's about working within what you're stuck with.
The starting point: You're depressed. You lack energy. You lack motivation. You lack the ability to get pleasure from most things in life that should be pleasurable. You're probably tired, and may be sleeping a lot or a little but not getting good rest from it. You're getting into a lot of arguments online and/or off, and it's one of the few things that leaves you feeling actually alive for a little while. You hate where you are, but anything that might lead you out of it to something better seems impossible and in any event any real change seems like it would just mean the annihilation of your self in favor of some blank generic entity that isn't you at all. And the only way out of any of this seems down into worse.
The biggest source of trouble: Depression messes with our self-appraisal. You can look at someone else who's depressed and recognize that, yes, even though they feel particularly clear-headed and insightful, they're actually stuck in small, endless, unproductive ruts. And we still turn to our own heads and feel particularly clear-headed and insightful. I don't know what cures that, if anything does; what I'm focused on here is how to work past and around it.
What doesn't help: Pep talks. Advice like "So don't get into fights" and "Why not read something nice?" Anything that smacks of "You could cheer up if you tried." I'm going to assume that you did try, a lot, just like I did, and that your failures at it are part of why you're so down on yourself right now. Furthermore, resolving to do differently doesn't help. If willpower could make you well, it would have by now.
Things that may or may not apply: You're stuck in extremes. You may well be way overweight, or way under. You're probably sleeping too much, but you could be not sleeping enough. You're probably surrounded by messes you can't seem to get under control, but you may have produced a too-sterile ultra-ordered environment, at least in some of where you live. On and on like that—what both poles share in all these is that they're not comfortable or desirable, they're just what you're stuck with, and it's possible that you oscillate any time you try to get to the healthy norm.
What you need: Demonstrable victories.
What you need to get demonstrable victories: Several things. First of all, you need information. You should keep a record of your waking and sleeping times, and also of what you eat when. Don't start off using this to force yourself into a routine. Just get the information. If you're inclined to make graphs, do that. Keep the information in a notebook, on your computer, whatever feels comfortable to you.
This will be an ongoing part of your life. But it's important to know, and to tell yourself, up front that it doesn't have to be perfect. You will sometimes forget to log things, and some days you just won't feel up to it. That's okay. For this purpose, partial information is in fact better than none. Record what you can and don't fret a lot about the rest. With practice you'll get more. Completeness and perfect precision are absolutely not necessary. The point of this is to get your self-appraisal resting on things besides what's in your head at the moment, at things you recorded in the past and are now what they are, no matter what memory and mood are serving up to you.
I am sometimes inclined to doubt my own written record, because my mind is so very sure it's got the whole truth. I'm guessing you'll have the same. I don't know what to do about it, either, except to put on a mental brake and allow for the possibility that we're wrong no matter how certain it seems otherwise.
If you're prone to sometimes tearing up or deleting stuff that offends you and enrages you, it'll be a good idea to back up this data somehow. Maybe make photocopies and store them someplace you don't usually go, or set up a spare GMail account and forward them there, or whatever works for you. You know your situation that way better than me. I don't think we can stop these bouts of self-destructive behavior from coming, but we can prepare for them. And if you do lose some? Eh. Start again. These things happen.
Defining things: Here I draw on the Getting Things Done approach to dealing with work load and clutter. You can hunt up GTD websites and books on your own and see if they offer any value to you. If they don't, that's fine. This point stands on its own.
By now you've had experience trying to meet straightforward goals and failing miserably. You take something like "clean my home" or "clean the kitchen" or "sort all the laundry" or whatever, get a bit done, bog down, much remains undone, and you feel worse than when you started, and it's one more failure to accuse yourself over. It stinks, more than I know how to say, and it stinks in ways that non-depressed people are really unlikely to understand. So you need to stop doing that, and look at the problem a different way.
In GTD terms, a task is something you can do in a single bout of 15 minutes' effort or less. If it takes more than that, or multiple sessions, what you have isn't a task, but a set of tasks you need to break down further, and keep breaking down until you're at those individual units. For me, for instance, "clean my home" is composed of "clean each room", and "clean the bedroom" keeps decomposing down to "fold and sort everything in the top drawer" and "fold and sort everything in the second drawer" and so on, while "clean the living room" includes "dust the first bookcase", "dust the second bookcase", "make sure all trash and recycling in the living room are in the right bins in the kitchen", and so on. Some things will be faster for you than for me, and some slower, and that's fine. This is to work for you, so you need to poke around some and find what it is you can do in a single session of 15 minutes or less.
Doing tasks: So now you have a sense of what constitute "tasks" for you. Time to set some priorities. If you're severely depressed, doing one (1) task in a day may be a real accomplishment. Pick one and set it as a goal. Do it. Write down that you did it. Do another tomorrow, and another the day after that. At the end of a week, you'll have seven tasks done, which may well be an improvement over where you are now. If you can add a second task, do. Try some more. But if you find yourself getting exhausted, or flustered, or angry, or sad, or anything else, from trying more than you can do, back up and cut down.
Be sure to record what you've tried and what you've done, and compare it to your sleep and food logs. Do you have a good time? I discovered that I do my best housework late at night and early in the morning: in the three hours from 11 pm to 2 am, I can often get 4-5 domestic tasks done, and sometimes even more. When I started ,that was the time of day (or night) I could get any tasks at all done, and that was good too, because I went from a daily average of 0 to 1-2. And some is better than none. There are no complete solutions to any of this; incremental progress is what we get.
You will notice that there are things you'd like to do, some of them important, that you are not getting done. But that was true before you tried any of this. Taking one step up out of the crypt is better than still being splayed on the cold stone floor at the very bottom. You didn't get this badly off overnight, and you won't recover overnight. Train yourself to take heed of what you have done and give yourself full credit for having done it.
Removing irritations: When you can't feel much of life's routine pleasures, feeling pain, rage, and sorrow become substitutes, because they beat feeling nothing. I'm not going to say anything like "knock that off". But as with doing tasks, this is something you can shift a bit at a time. If you are depressed and reading this online, you likely have recurring feud spots, blogs, forums, communities where you routinely read things that rouse negative emotions in you and inspire hostile responses. Cut just one of them out of your routine.
Your computer has some version or equivalent of the UNIX world's /etc/hosts file, which lets your computer point itself back at itself when you try going to a specified site. (It does other things as well; I'm just concerned here with the setting up of a match between the name of a site where you have trouble and the address 127.0.0.1.)
Pick just one, and put it in there. See if you can keep it there for 24 hours. Use the time you spent on that site to do one single task. Then take it out. How did you feel when you couldn't go there? How did it change what you did elsewhere? Experiment, and think it over. Try it with some other sites, and take a week or two to get a feel for what the absence of a particular star in your constellation of aggravation does.
Once you've done that, then cut yourself off from one for a full week. Do a task each day in the time you're not spending there. Repeat the reflection, and try it with others. This could take a month or two, as you work through your top sources of aggravation. Then commit yourself to cutting out one on a lasting basis. You'll know what it is you should let go of. Do it.
Stick with it for a month, and see how it feels without that. Then, next month, try it with another. Cut three to five of your major sources of aggravation out, over the course of a season.
It's good to fill up that time with something you do like, but it's hard, at least for me. If you happen to have a long-neglected interest for which there's an active blogging community, that's great. If not, you may need to try something else. Read for pleasure in a subject you don't know much about, maybe, or get a cookbook of very simple recipes and try some out, if you feel like you can. Or use the time for more rest and a little bit of calisthenics and isometric stretching.
I have some more to write, but this is enough for a first post on the subject. If you can manage this much, you'll have given yourself some real improvements, even though the underlying problem is still there as strongly as ever. This about living in spite of that, not about wishing it away.
What this isn't: This isn't medical or other professional advice, or a replacement for any of that.
What this is: My experience, what I've seen of others' experience, reflections on that.
What it won't do: Give you your pre-depression life back. At least it hasn't done that for me. This is what I've learned so far about getting into a new life that feels worth living, but it's not the same as what came before, and I wouldn't know what to suggest might do that. It's about working within what you're stuck with.
The starting point: You're depressed. You lack energy. You lack motivation. You lack the ability to get pleasure from most things in life that should be pleasurable. You're probably tired, and may be sleeping a lot or a little but not getting good rest from it. You're getting into a lot of arguments online and/or off, and it's one of the few things that leaves you feeling actually alive for a little while. You hate where you are, but anything that might lead you out of it to something better seems impossible and in any event any real change seems like it would just mean the annihilation of your self in favor of some blank generic entity that isn't you at all. And the only way out of any of this seems down into worse.
The biggest source of trouble: Depression messes with our self-appraisal. You can look at someone else who's depressed and recognize that, yes, even though they feel particularly clear-headed and insightful, they're actually stuck in small, endless, unproductive ruts. And we still turn to our own heads and feel particularly clear-headed and insightful. I don't know what cures that, if anything does; what I'm focused on here is how to work past and around it.
What doesn't help: Pep talks. Advice like "So don't get into fights" and "Why not read something nice?" Anything that smacks of "You could cheer up if you tried." I'm going to assume that you did try, a lot, just like I did, and that your failures at it are part of why you're so down on yourself right now. Furthermore, resolving to do differently doesn't help. If willpower could make you well, it would have by now.
Things that may or may not apply: You're stuck in extremes. You may well be way overweight, or way under. You're probably sleeping too much, but you could be not sleeping enough. You're probably surrounded by messes you can't seem to get under control, but you may have produced a too-sterile ultra-ordered environment, at least in some of where you live. On and on like that—what both poles share in all these is that they're not comfortable or desirable, they're just what you're stuck with, and it's possible that you oscillate any time you try to get to the healthy norm.
What you need: Demonstrable victories.
What you need to get demonstrable victories: Several things. First of all, you need information. You should keep a record of your waking and sleeping times, and also of what you eat when. Don't start off using this to force yourself into a routine. Just get the information. If you're inclined to make graphs, do that. Keep the information in a notebook, on your computer, whatever feels comfortable to you.
This will be an ongoing part of your life. But it's important to know, and to tell yourself, up front that it doesn't have to be perfect. You will sometimes forget to log things, and some days you just won't feel up to it. That's okay. For this purpose, partial information is in fact better than none. Record what you can and don't fret a lot about the rest. With practice you'll get more. Completeness and perfect precision are absolutely not necessary. The point of this is to get your self-appraisal resting on things besides what's in your head at the moment, at things you recorded in the past and are now what they are, no matter what memory and mood are serving up to you.
I am sometimes inclined to doubt my own written record, because my mind is so very sure it's got the whole truth. I'm guessing you'll have the same. I don't know what to do about it, either, except to put on a mental brake and allow for the possibility that we're wrong no matter how certain it seems otherwise.
If you're prone to sometimes tearing up or deleting stuff that offends you and enrages you, it'll be a good idea to back up this data somehow. Maybe make photocopies and store them someplace you don't usually go, or set up a spare GMail account and forward them there, or whatever works for you. You know your situation that way better than me. I don't think we can stop these bouts of self-destructive behavior from coming, but we can prepare for them. And if you do lose some? Eh. Start again. These things happen.
Defining things: Here I draw on the Getting Things Done approach to dealing with work load and clutter. You can hunt up GTD websites and books on your own and see if they offer any value to you. If they don't, that's fine. This point stands on its own.
By now you've had experience trying to meet straightforward goals and failing miserably. You take something like "clean my home" or "clean the kitchen" or "sort all the laundry" or whatever, get a bit done, bog down, much remains undone, and you feel worse than when you started, and it's one more failure to accuse yourself over. It stinks, more than I know how to say, and it stinks in ways that non-depressed people are really unlikely to understand. So you need to stop doing that, and look at the problem a different way.
In GTD terms, a task is something you can do in a single bout of 15 minutes' effort or less. If it takes more than that, or multiple sessions, what you have isn't a task, but a set of tasks you need to break down further, and keep breaking down until you're at those individual units. For me, for instance, "clean my home" is composed of "clean each room", and "clean the bedroom" keeps decomposing down to "fold and sort everything in the top drawer" and "fold and sort everything in the second drawer" and so on, while "clean the living room" includes "dust the first bookcase", "dust the second bookcase", "make sure all trash and recycling in the living room are in the right bins in the kitchen", and so on. Some things will be faster for you than for me, and some slower, and that's fine. This is to work for you, so you need to poke around some and find what it is you can do in a single session of 15 minutes or less.
Doing tasks: So now you have a sense of what constitute "tasks" for you. Time to set some priorities. If you're severely depressed, doing one (1) task in a day may be a real accomplishment. Pick one and set it as a goal. Do it. Write down that you did it. Do another tomorrow, and another the day after that. At the end of a week, you'll have seven tasks done, which may well be an improvement over where you are now. If you can add a second task, do. Try some more. But if you find yourself getting exhausted, or flustered, or angry, or sad, or anything else, from trying more than you can do, back up and cut down.
Be sure to record what you've tried and what you've done, and compare it to your sleep and food logs. Do you have a good time? I discovered that I do my best housework late at night and early in the morning: in the three hours from 11 pm to 2 am, I can often get 4-5 domestic tasks done, and sometimes even more. When I started ,that was the time of day (or night) I could get any tasks at all done, and that was good too, because I went from a daily average of 0 to 1-2. And some is better than none. There are no complete solutions to any of this; incremental progress is what we get.
You will notice that there are things you'd like to do, some of them important, that you are not getting done. But that was true before you tried any of this. Taking one step up out of the crypt is better than still being splayed on the cold stone floor at the very bottom. You didn't get this badly off overnight, and you won't recover overnight. Train yourself to take heed of what you have done and give yourself full credit for having done it.
Removing irritations: When you can't feel much of life's routine pleasures, feeling pain, rage, and sorrow become substitutes, because they beat feeling nothing. I'm not going to say anything like "knock that off". But as with doing tasks, this is something you can shift a bit at a time. If you are depressed and reading this online, you likely have recurring feud spots, blogs, forums, communities where you routinely read things that rouse negative emotions in you and inspire hostile responses. Cut just one of them out of your routine.
Your computer has some version or equivalent of the UNIX world's /etc/hosts file, which lets your computer point itself back at itself when you try going to a specified site. (It does other things as well; I'm just concerned here with the setting up of a match between the name of a site where you have trouble and the address 127.0.0.1.)
Pick just one, and put it in there. See if you can keep it there for 24 hours. Use the time you spent on that site to do one single task. Then take it out. How did you feel when you couldn't go there? How did it change what you did elsewhere? Experiment, and think it over. Try it with some other sites, and take a week or two to get a feel for what the absence of a particular star in your constellation of aggravation does.
Once you've done that, then cut yourself off from one for a full week. Do a task each day in the time you're not spending there. Repeat the reflection, and try it with others. This could take a month or two, as you work through your top sources of aggravation. Then commit yourself to cutting out one on a lasting basis. You'll know what it is you should let go of. Do it.
Stick with it for a month, and see how it feels without that. Then, next month, try it with another. Cut three to five of your major sources of aggravation out, over the course of a season.
It's good to fill up that time with something you do like, but it's hard, at least for me. If you happen to have a long-neglected interest for which there's an active blogging community, that's great. If not, you may need to try something else. Read for pleasure in a subject you don't know much about, maybe, or get a cookbook of very simple recipes and try some out, if you feel like you can. Or use the time for more rest and a little bit of calisthenics and isometric stretching.
I have some more to write, but this is enough for a first post on the subject. If you can manage this much, you'll have given yourself some real improvements, even though the underlying problem is still there as strongly as ever. This about living in spite of that, not about wishing it away.