Coping with Depression

I took my first significant long-lasting downturn when I was 14 or 15 and didn't come back up, just about at all, for several months. Eventually I was diagnosed with Major Depression, got into therapy, started on medication, and sort of stabilized. But since then, depression has been a recurring theme in my life. Like waves on a beach or like the tides rolling in. It comes back to me, and I'm just kind of in it and drowning again.

One of the unfortunate parts of my flavour of depression is that it seems to have locked itself firmly into my natural response to stress. The more stressed out I get, the more likely it is that I'm going to take a nosedive into the dark again.

But because of this, I've put in a lot of time and work into finding coping strategies and developing healthier habits to pull the brakes on my depression train and help start turning it around.

Some of my main coping strategies:

• Recognizing as early on as possible when things start to take a negative turn, reflecting on the cause, and taking action to intervene.

  • When those moments happen, I question them; question myself. Assess and reassess. Why am I feeling this way? What triggered this and what is the deeper root that is being affected like an exposed nerve? What can I do differently? Can I look at things in a different way? Is there a perspective that I am missing because my field of vision is narrowed by the blinders of depression?

• Being compassionate with myself. I deserve it just as much as the people I care about.

• Giving it time and not making any big decisions when in the thick of it. Always allowing time for things to ease off.

• Using whatever strategy that works. Playing whatever mind games are needed so long as they are helpful.

• Reaching out for help before reaching the end of my rope. Finding people I trust and talking about my downturns with them when they happen. People will be there for you if you let them.

• Using all available coping strategies. Sometimes the first one that's used won't work this go around. Keep trying everything until something sticks.

• Sometimes it helps to think that the pain is more than just an empty pit of despair.

  • In times when I experience a great deal of emotional pain and discomfort, I tell myself that it is a growing pain. Like the pains of youth - when a young person's body sprouts and changes so rapidly that it causes physical pain - but this is emotional growth.

With sustained effort, I have gotten myself to a place where I haven't had a major prolonged downturn for about three years. Now when I take a downturn, I still fall down and crash pretty hard, but I've gotten a lot better at picking myself up more quickly. It typically takes less than a week for me to get back to a place of stability.

My last really bad downturn was probably from some point in 2018 until late '21. It wasn't sustained for the entire ~3 years, but I frequently found myself in a hole, struggling to get out – some days with so little energy that I could barely get out of bed. At one point it got bad enough that I took a week off work as sick time / unplanned vacation. It was very much situational - rooted in a couple back-to-back toxic relationships. After I moved out in early '21 and was in a healthier place, I started to improve slowly. But it wasn't until I got a promotion at work that I fully started to turn around.

My previous position was a constant mental battle of Perfectionism versus "Necessary & Sufficient". I couldn't switch it off. No matter how hard I tried to ignore what was wrong or stop myself from fixing things, I struggled just about every day to keep my cool. It got to the point that my stress was boiling over into anger at one of my housemates.

Eventually I sat him down and told him that he needed to respect my workspace as if it was a proper work environment. I told him that work was particularly stressful and that when he walked into the room, it made me irrationally angry. I had realized that I was having trouble focusing, and that he was breaking my concentration. Even if he was trying to be helpful by stepping in to clean the litter box, it would just piss me off. I explained what I needed. And he respected my boundaries (for the most part) after that.

The promotion was into a new position that makes much better use of my skillset, and I got away from the things in my previous role that felt like a constant battle. It wasn't necessarily a reduction of stress; it was a different kind of stress. But it significantly improved my quality of life. I've been relatively stable since then, but recognize that I am still susceptible to situational downturns.