Hardcore Self Help: F**k Depression

by Robert Duff

The last flavor of depression is the physically wrecked version. This is the type where you seem to internalize all of your depression. You know Kirby? The pink marshmallow videogame character? Imagine him sucking up a bomb and swallowing it. That bomb is your depression. Sometimes, it can feel like all your sadness expresses itself through your physical body. Common complaints are constantly feeling weak, sick, and tired. Exhaustion probably plays a big role in your life. You might turn down many opportunities that could be helpful simply because the mere thought of doing anything makes every muscle in your body cry. Perhaps you are legitimately sick more often than other people, but it’s more than that. Things just seem to hit you harder than they should. This type is really hard. Maybe you have even gone to doctors and specialists to try to figure out what’s wrong and no matter what tests they give, they can’t find anything in particular that should be making you feel this way. (Now, I should clarify that this sort of depression is not the same thing as having a chronic fatigue disorder or autoimmune problems. Those can cause a lot of strange and confusing physical issues. The defining factor that would help you know that this is depression would be that it ebbs and flows depending on your emotional state. If you were feeling great physically when you were happy and things seemed pretty good in your life and once things took a turn, your body started breaking down, you ...

One of the superpowers that this evil villain named depression has is the ability to drain you of your energy and motivation. To make you feel hopeless and stuck. Often you are left trying to internally search for this feeling of motivation that you remember having at some point in your life, but that has not been present for quite some time. That is a trap. If you wait to feel motivated before you move forward with the things that you want or need to do, you will never do them.

Behavioral Activation acknowledges that when you are depressed, you fall into a negative behavioral pattern where you not only lose motivation to do the important stuff that you need to take care of, but you also stop doing the things that bring you happiness and pleasure.

You need to push yourself to do things anyway even though you don't want to. Especially because you don't want to.

Essentially, you have learned to stop feeling pleasure, and you need to re-train your brain to recognize and benefit from the things that should be having a positive impact on you. How? You guessed it - Just Do It.

I want you to get out a piece of paper and write down 10-15 things that you used to provide you happiness, pleasure, motivation, laughter, or any other positive experience.

If some emotion comes up for you while you are writing it, that is totally okay. It can be hard to recognize how many things have fallen by the wayside during the battle with depression.

You have probably seen the cartoons where someone has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, right? Well, depression is that devil that sits on your shoulder and whispers in your ear to tell you this exercise is useless. It will tell you that you don’t deserve to do fun, pleasurable things for yourself. Especially when there are more important things that you are neglecting. If depression is going to be that devil, let me be the angel on the other shoulder telling that devil guy to shut the fuck up. Being stuck in the weeds does not mean that you don’t deserve to take time to re-engage with these activities.

That whole saying of “fake it ‘til you make it” actually has a lot of validity. Your jerk of a brain is so used to not having motivation and so used to not deriving pleasure from fun activities that you need to beat it back into shape. You don’t have to be motivated to do things that normally take motivation. You just need to act as if you were motivated.

Having no motivation and no energy is a symptom of depression, and taking no action is also something that makes you feel more depressed.

If you find that no matter how hard you try, you just cannot get the ball rolling, even on these easy wins, and you have already tried the strategies that I have outlined here, it may be useful to consider medication. I talk more about this in a later chapter, but the purpose of medication for depression is basically to give you a little boost in your neurotransmitters to ease your lethargy and low motivation a bit, so you have more emotional energy available and can put in the work re-training your brain like we talked about above.

Having depression is like viewing the world through shit-colored glasses.

Even if something is logically outside your sphere of influence, you assume that somehow you have to be responsible for any mishap. In turn, you feel the need to apologize and beat yourself up emotionally.

Hopelessness is a symptom of depression. That is a really important thing to remember. That is why you feel like you are never going to overcome your depression. That’s what the depression devil is whispering in your ear all the time.

However, if you are experiencing depression, it is almost guaranteed that you are distorting the way in which you interpret the world to match gross feelings in your heart.

If you have people in your life that you can talk to, tell them a bit about what you are struggling with internally. Help them understand your thought process and then invite their feedback about whether it makes sense. You should tell them that you aren’t just looking to be told that everything will be okay, but rather that you want to know how they would think about this situation if it were happening to them.

Filtering: We pretty much covered this one at the beginning of the chapter. This is where you wear those shit-colored glasses and selectively filter out most of the positive aspects about any given situation.

Overgeneralization: This is one of the more sneaky cognitive distortions, because it does come from a place of logic and reason. However, it takes the lessons that your big human brain has learned from trial and error and overextends them. Our brains are amazing, but they are also kinda lazy. They like to make shortcuts and it is way easier to apply a single rule to everything instead of taking the energy to determine whether a rule applies to each particular circumstance.

Personalization: This is a tricky one that often leads to those nasty feelings of guilt. Basically you hold yourself personally accountable for things that you may not have even played a part in. You have gotten so used to things being your fault, it’s almost like your default mode now.

Fallacy of Control: The fallacy of control takes both external and internal forms. For external, you feel that there are many things that are outside of your control that affect your life and emotional state. Things keep happening to you and it’s so annoying that you can’t do anything about it! The fallacy of internal control is very much like the personalization that we talked about above. You assume that you somehow have control over the way other people act or feel.

Emotional Reasoning: In this one, things get a little twisted. It’s probably one of the most common distortions of thinking that happens with or without depression. Instead of having a situation lead to you feeling a certain way, the emotion comes first and colors your perception of what is going on. Basically you assume that since you feel a certain way, it must be true, regardless of what the objective evidence says.

Labeling: You apply a global label to things instead of thinking about them on a case by case basis. Instead of saying that you fucked up a particular situation this one time, you label yourself as a fuck up and take on the emotional hit to the groin that comes along with that label.

I don’t want you to think magical pixie dust thoughts and hope that you can do whatever you want without consequence just because you think positively. You still need to handle your stuff. However, you can be more realistic and try to work toward having emotional reactions that are appropriate to the situation instead of using that deadly combination of emotional reasoning and all-or-nothing thinking to drive you straight into Depressionville every time you might the slightest mistake.

Whether it be a nagging self-doubt, a sense of guilt about something, lingering anger about some injustice, or an obsessive worry about something that hasn’t even happened yet, sometimes these thoughts seem to exhaust all of your mental horsepower.

I think that you 100% need to fight back against the depressive mindset, but you also need to get better at sitting with the thoughts and feelings that you do have and recognize that they are not always so threatening.

So clouds, right? They are awesome. You can lay on your back and look up at them and see all kinds of things. Some of them are big and fluffy, like they would make an awesome bed to go take a nap on. Some of them are kinda gross and unhealthy looking. Maybe some of them remind of you different animals (I always seem to see dragons). Obviously, each of these different interpretations (comfy bed, gross darkness, awesome dragon) brings about different feelings as they pass into your awareness. Here’s the thing, though. They are all made of the same stuff. They are just water vapor up in the air. That’s it. And if we keep lying there and looking up, we can notice that the clouds will drift into our awareness, and if we allow ourselves to not fixate on them, they gently float past as well. I think of our thoughts as being just like these clouds. Some of them are happy thoughts, some of them are worrisome, perhaps some are even a bit scary. They are just thoughts though. We may have our own different interpretations of them and we like to apply labels like “good” and “bad” to them, but in the end they are just thoughts.

It’s about allowing your thoughts, emotions, and other private internal experiences to exist and not necessarily dictate all of the actions that you take.

Speaking of moving forward in your quest… you deserve it. You deserve to move onward and upward. Another stumbling block that has been expressed to me by many people is the feeling that moving on or letting go would somehow be wrong, because it would imply that you are pretending like all the shit that happened in the past didn’t actually happen.

You don’t have to find a way to mentally reconcile every single action or inaction. I know you try. As if there were some way to think about it long enough to figure out a way to feel less shitty about it. OR you might be the type to just replay scenarios in your head over and over, as a sort of self-flagellation, because, in your mind, you deserve exactly what has happened. I call bullshit.

You owe it to yourself to move forward. Imagine the advice that you might give to a friend in a similar situation. I’m sure that you would be WAY more gracious with them. You would tell them that it sucks that things have gotten all fucked up AND you know they can get through it if they leave the past in the past. Extend that same grace to yourself. You deserve it just as much as anyone else.

Don’t imagine that you one day found all of the motivation in the world to complete every single project you had previously abandoned. Instead, imagine yourself struggling. That’s right. Imagine that you had to put up the fight of your life against this crap, but you did it. You got through it one way or another. Visualize yourself putting in the work and learning all of the lessons that come along with enrolling in the School of Hardknocks.

Dear ___________, You are getting this letter because you are an important person in my life, and I want you to understand more about what I’m going through. I know that I can be difficult and I’m sorry for that. I know that I probably don’t need to be sorry, but I am. In fact, I feel guilty for feeling sorry in the first place. Ridiculous, I know. That’s how my brain works because I have depression… and yes, my mind is an exhausting place. I want to give you this letter to help you understand a little more about what I am going through, ask for some grace as I work this crap out, and to suggest a few ways that you can best support me if you are willing. The first thing I want you to know is that I am trying. Or, rather … I am trying to try. You see, 1 and 1 don’t always add up to 2 with depression. There are legitimate biological differences between me and someone who doesn’t live with depression, which makes this a really difficult uphill battle. I am literally fighting against my biology which tries to tell me that none of this is worth it and that I shouldn’t even try. When people say things like, “Just think positively,” or “It’s all in your head,” it does not help at all. I know it’s in my head, but unfortunately it is not as easy as flipping a switch and suddenly feeling better. I know that probably have 1000 reasons to be happy, and sometimes I feel like the worst person ever for being so down all the time despite them. Fighting off depression is not a simple...

PS: Please feel free to ask questions. I’m sure this is a lot to take in. It’s not the easiest thing to explain. I may not always have the answers for you, but you are welcome to ask.