Depression is a serious illness that I’ve lived with most of my life. I am not alone. Here are some statistics on depression for the U.S.
• Percent of adults aged 18 and over with regular feelings of depression: 4.7%
• Percent of physician office visits with depression indicated on the medical record: 9.3%
• Percent of emergency department visits with depression indicated on the medical record: 11.2%
• Number of suicide deaths: 47,511
• Suicide deaths per 100,000 population: 14.5
source
Depression can be caused by emotional trauma, physical trauma, or be passed down from one generation to the next.
This is not medical advice. But after almost forty years of dealing with depression, I believe there’s only one real solution, and that’s action. Stagnation leads to depression. Action frees you from it. The scary thing about depression is it becomes a feedback loop. The depression discourages action, which leads to stagnation, which increases the depression.
This is the downward spiral.
Why is action so hard for depressed people?
Depression zaps your energy and makes the smallest things seem overwhelming. If not dealt with, it turns into nihilism which can lead to self-harm or harming others.
What do you do then?
I just told you to act, but you have this giant problem standing in your way, and you’re stuck. I’ve identified two things that will get you unstuck.
Create a routine
Now that you’re willing to act, use action to build supportive routines.
The internet is in love with motivation, but routine is better. Motivation is fleeting because it is associated with how you feel.
I feel motivated…let’s work!
I don’t feel motivated…I quit!
Motivation is little more than a roller coaster ride where the lows outnumber the highs. If everyone was motivated it wouldn’t be a billion-dollar industry. Look at the market data for motivational speaking. After reading this you might consider a career change.
industrydata
Routine is boring, but it works. The person who succeeds in life is the one who can do the same thing repeatedly. They know what needs to be done and they do it. They don’t need external sources of motivation, like drugs, friends, good feelings, or for the internet to tell them it’s cool.
The big lie depressed people buy into is that the feeling must come before the action. The truth is, the action CREATES the feeling. This is the key to getting on an upward spiral.
When you don’t feel like getting out of bed, get out of bed. Once you get out, the problem of motivation becomes irrelevant.
When you don’t want to exercise, exercise. Endorphins are the body’s happiness juice, and they kick in AFTER you begin moving, not before.
But depressed people wait to be motivated. Trust me, the feeling rarely comes first. Routines trump motivation because they are based on habits. Habits are the brains subroutines. Habits eliminate the decision-making process, and the less decisions the better. Every decision in life has infinite possibilities and depressed people are easily overwhelmed.
Begin with a morning routine.The morning sets the precedence for the rest of the day. If your morning goes well, chances are the rest of the day will. If it doesn’t, well, at least you had a nice morning.
Your morning routine is the perfect arena to start forming habits. Here are things you can do in the morning:
Things you should stop doing.
Remember this, the goal is not to be perfect, but to build habits. There is a snowball effect to habit building. Repeated small actions become habits, and those small actions grow into bigger actions.
When I was in junior high school, I could barely do a push up. So, one morning I woke up and just started doing pushups. I started with one push up every morning. It quickly became a habit and I no longer need “motivation”. The one pushup became two, then three, then ten, then twenty and so forth.
Waking up early is where depressed people should start. Everything else is irrelevant if you’re not awake. Once you get waking up early down, build other habits on top of that.
Here's a simple habit prescription for it.
Set your alarm clock for five in the morning, not a minute sooner or later. Champs wake up at four, but don’t feel the pressure to do that right now. Five is early enough. Place your alarm clock far enough away where you must get up to turn it off. When it goes off, just turn off the alarm and leave your bedroom, and that’s it. Put on clothes if you have to.
What you do after you wake up doesn’t matter at this point. Just don't go back to bed. Your only goal is to get up. After twenty-one days you will wake up early for the rest of your life. Think of this as the snow flake that grows into an avalanche.
