Tips To Help You Break Free From Depression
Tips To Help You Break Free From Depression
Whether you have a formal depression diagnosis or not, living with low mood is hard going. And the worst part is, symptoms of low mood are self-maintaining. Low mood drains you of energy and motivation, and feeling down makes everything feel hard, even activities you’d usually enjoy.
It makes sense then that when you’re down, the thing you want to do most is nothing. But as understandable as that is, doing nothing cuts you off from activities that positively impact mood, which is why going along with the feeling of wanting to do less isn’t helpful and actually often ends up making things worse.
The key to beating depression is being active even when you don’t feel like it. Any kind of activity helps, but there are four categories of activities in particular that we know help to positively impact mood.
Pleasant Activities
Meaning activities you’d usually enjoy if you weren’t feeling down. The kind of things you’d usually look forward to or that used to bring you joy before you started feeling so crappy.
Mastery Activities
Activities you don’t necessarily enjoy, but that give you a sense of mastery or achievement when they’re done. Think things like cleaning/organisation tasks, life admin tasks, tasks forever on your to-do list.
Social Activities
Any activity that helps you feel connected to others. Spending time with friends or family face to face, but also calls, messages, or social media interactions.
Regular Exercise
Physical activity of any type and any intensity - walking, running, yoga, pilates, team sports. To benefit your mood, you just need to move your body regularly.
Think of activities for each category, then aim to do 1-2 mood activities each day, aiming for a mix of activities across categories, and remembering that the days you most feel like not being active, are the days it’s most important to act despite that feeling, and be active anyway. It’s OK to take your mood into account and modify where you need to, but try to be active even when you don’t feel like it - it’s what will help start to get your mood back on track.
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