Overcoming depression and anxiety

The last 90 days has been the worst 90-day period of my last 5 years. I’ve hit a new rock bottom filled with illness, grief, hurt, shame, thwarted plans, overwhelm, stress, anger, avoidance, escapism, mild depression and anxiety, dread, disconnection, confusion, loss of control, overeating, shattered dreams and identity, freefall in the abyss of self-sabotage, and unfamiliar territory.

If I had to explain why this Christmas has been so terrible, the major factors are:

• The holiday period is always terrible because I’m always reminded of how my family never celebrated Christmas so it has always represented a time for everyone else to be happy, just not me.
• Several years ago on Christmas Day, my mom nearly died. And even though by sheer miracle or luck she escaped certain death, years later I still haven’t fully processed what happened.
• After more than a year, I’m finally getting on the property ladder, but the timing has been terrible and I’m locked into tens of thousands of dollars of negative cashflow for the next few years.
• Due to the above, my dream of traveling to Europe in late 2023 as a digital nomad is probably infeasible.
• Many plans and intentions have been ruined for me in 2022, compared to the 3 years previous where I have been highly successful and only faced one major ruined plan per year. Although I’m simply learning the common wisdom that not everything goes according to plan, this is the first time I’ve experienced it on such a scale, that I’m finding it hard to process and to resist forming negative interpretations about myself, despite the fact that I still achieved many significant things in 2022.
• I got into a bad relationship and got dumped at the worst time, and even though I mostly recovered from that, being friends with my ex and continuing to hang out with her friend group has been seriously bad for my social life, not because of my ex, but because I’ve finally realized how they are the wrong people for me. This feels unusually devastating because I invested in this group the most (though frankly I didn’t invest much in friend-making overall in 2022), and it gives me flashbacks to the last time I tried really hard to be accepted into a group and had zero progress to show after a year.

My body recognizes the current state I’m in. At my worst, I’ve been:

• Binging games, food, Netflix, PMO, alcohol
• Ruining my sleep schedule
• So incredibly uncomfortable facing the real world that I spend hours immersed in puzzle games instead (shoutout to this addictive puzzle game site though and my current favorite, Tents, which is kind of like an actually solvable version of minesweeper)
• Extremely distractible, and about a third as productive as normal at work
• Doing nothing but hiding from the world during the holidays, also crying and feeling sorry for myself

It hasn’t been all bad though. Despite my dire state, I’ve:

• Made multiple new friends and connections
• Had more meaningful conversions than during the rest of the year added together
• Come to terms with big temporarily-saddening decisions that will ultimately be good for me
• Learned a tremendous amount about myself, both concrete knowledge and directions that need further exploration
• Gained important clarity and insight on how I should aim to orient myself for a happier 2023.

So how do I overcome my depression and anxiety?

I’ve been in this state twice before, and that gives me confidence that I will overcome this again. Previously I was at luxury to take unlimited holidays (because I wasn’t working or independent), this time I will be working while recovering. I’m far from an expert, but a few insights come to mind.

1. Let go of guilt and regret.

If you feel bad about how you’ve wasted the last several days/months/years not living to your potential, let go if it. Watch Overcoming Regrets of Wasted Time. Long story short, your “wasted time” wasn’t wasted, you learned what it feels like to be unhealthy and for things to not be right, and how much it sucks. This is useful experience and it also makes you relatable to other people with similar struggles in the way that not everyone can be.

2. Your mental health is the last thing that will return to normal

You’re probably feeling down due to three reasons: the external circumstances, which led you to feel sad and hopeless, which lead you to spiral into a depressed state with imbalances in your brain. Even if your external circumstances became ideal, you’d still feel down because you’re not over your feelings. And even if you did therapy exercises to process your feelings, you’d still feel down the next day due to the non-ideal condition of your brain and body.

How terrible you feel is not a fair reflection of how life is actually going for you, and it isn’t helpful to spend too much energy on trying to improve how you feel now. In order to return to normal, you have to do the things that improve your wellbeing eventually instead.

3. Basics: exercise, eating, and rest

The basic 3 things that are sensible to prioritize during your “everything feels terrible” recovery phase are exercise, eating, and rest. The minimum for exercise should be walking for 20 minutes a day. A solid amount would doing a gym session every other day. Either end of these will both eventually make you feel better, but also probably make you feel less worse shortly after doing them. Eating doesn’t need to be super healthy, but it does need to be not eating to punish yourself, and to avoid foods that are known to irritate you or interrupt your sleep patterns (e.g., avoid careless alcohol or caffeine consumption). Then for sleep, the goal is just to reduce self-sabotage such as revenge sleep procrastination. Why? Falling into an unhealthy sleep pattern will undo the benefits of and disrupt healthy eating and exercise.

4. Reducing escapism

You’re probably indulging in all manner of escapism habits, due to feeling irritable, anxious, impulsive, restless, uncomfortable, and so on. It may not be possible to stop your escapism habits altogether, but the goal is just to become more aware of when you’re doing it, identify the most problematic type of activity for it, and try to gradually wean yourself off it. If you’ve been doing escapism 16 hours a day, then doing it 14 hours today while fitting in proper exercise and one healthy meal is an improvement. If you did 8 hours of escapism yesterday, then convincing yourself to do no more than that while also achieving a very important 10 minute task is an improvement.

Don’t shame or judge yourself. Your mind isn’t playing by the normal rules, so it’s fine if you look for easy wins. The more you resist an addiction, the more it can grip you. So instead, it could be more productive to gamify things or coerce yourself by saying “ok, I’m still going to do this useless thing because it’s too darn addictive, but at least for every hour I’m going to do one useful ten minute task in between.” And you’ll still have set an important precedence, that you are capable of doing at least a small amount of important tasks, and that you can be better than you were yesterday.

5. Identify and use a technique for breaking your escapism

When you know you’re procrastinating or escaping, you also know that you have the option to stop doing that. The way to do this is to choose an “activation trigger,” for lack of a better term. It’s hard to explain, so here are some examples of ones you can choose:

• Breathing exercise. 10 slow breaths.
• IAAA from the book Running On Empty, or basically name at least three emotions you’re currently feeling, accept them and explain why you might be feeling that way.
• The five second rule. Basically count to 5 and just start doing the task you wish you could be doing.

I personally use IAAA but I keep naming emotions until I can’t think of anymore. When I’m desperately avoiding my problems, the first step is to stop thinking and doing. This is where I tell myself, if I want to break out of this, I need to do stop doing that puzzle that I’m using as distraction by doing IAAA. Just pause, take a deep breath and accept that I’m going to examine my emotions. Since I’ve used IAAA many times, I know and trust that it will make things better, even if it doesn’t magically solve problems. It gives me clarity and calms my emotional panic, allowing me at least enough head space to decide on what easy wins I have available to tackle. Even if I still feel relatively jittery, and that may be inevitable given the present level of anxiety, I’m still able to redirect that energy towards facing reality. Also, I might get distracted multiple times when initiating my chosen task, and end up back at the puzzle game instinctively, but it becomes 10x easier to stop that again without needing to do IAAA.

6. Doing important things

What are these important things I’m referring to, besides the basic 3? They could be life responsibilities or obligations, but at a fundamental level, they are simply things that either:

• Take your life forwards a little bit. Examples: planning your schedule/routines/goals, reading non-fiction, learning, practicing a skill.
• Heal you or take you closer to a healthier state of living. E.g., tidying the house, distancing yourself from bad influences such as unhealthy food or friends who aren’t good for you, getting emotional support from family/friends, doing your laundry, getting your seasonal hay fever meds.
• Make you feel better, either eventually or in the short term. E.g., getting a massage, booking yourself in for therapy, expressing yourself, achieving something meaningful to you.

It’s worth noting that simply surviving to fight another day is an accomplishment in itself. Even if all you did was the basic 3 plus enough chores to maintain basic hygiene, while still doing a ton of escapism, the fact that you’re not doing worse than yesterday despite still feeling terrible is a success. In fact, doing the above for long enough even though you don’t feel you’ve actually taken any forwards steps in your life might still be enough for your body and brain to start resetting, for escapism to start to lose its grip on you, and for being functional to get easier and easier until you find yourself taking steps forward again.

Closing words of advice

The above isn’t easy. It requires trust and action in spite of your feelings making you constantly want to escape from the world instead. The truth is, you probably won’t improve everyday, and that’s perfectly normal and fine. What’s important is the struggle. If nothing else, try to fight the grip of escapism every day and struggle. Maybe you struggle today and you “lose”, but it’s not for nothing. Fighting for your livelihood is never for nothing. Your scattered attempts to struggle eventually add up over time so long as you don’t give up.