How I Beat Depression

There are many reasons for the perpetual tiredness, one major factor is this people who suffer depression usually have an overactive mind in an underactive body. There was never one thing that made be better, not one factor which caused the silver lining to appear and expand. However there was an attitude shift which emphasised the cultivation of what I consider the most important of ‘feelings’: hope. Depression is quite rightly described as a deadly cocktail of hopelessness and helplessness.

What I learnt thought my own reading and my own therapy is that I wasn’t as helpless as I thought and with appropriate guidance the ability to frequently renew my will to change, I could arrest my inertia and paralysis. This was hard. One of the main reasons it is so hard, in my opinion, is that depression makes you tired – incredibly tired, mental and physical fatigue converge and make you feel absolutely paralysed and unable to perform basic routine functions that daily life require. It’s an enhanced tiredness which never seems to go away, even short naps or marathon sleeping session seem to have no affect, you never feel properly rested and refreshed. Little bouts of activity seem to knock you back for a long time which makes you question whether to do them again or not.  Getting up in the morning, which admittedly is hard for most people, is downright impossible sometimes. The foul and bleak mood which hold you captive and in which you wade through every day without fail makes it hard to relate to others without getting tense or without feeling you are ‘acting’ if you come across as pleasant or nice. Everything is a struggle and it’s exacerbated by the fact these tasks which seem impossible look very ordinary and basic

Action and consequence become very hard to gauge when I was depressed. The relationship between action and consequence got derailed and there was great uncertainty whether certain activities or actions would have any positive benefit. My mind was always guessing and second guessing about the course of action I was considering, it never shut up. When this deliberation occurred I normally erred on the side of caution, however the opposite of an error is usually the opposite error.

When really depressed I remember short conversations with people making me tired for the rest of the day. So I would often try and avoid conversations. The problem wasn’t in the conversation or in any of the activities. It actually was about how I expressed my tiredness. I realised always complained about being tired, by doing this I was fuelling the furnace of lethargy, reinforcing all my beliefs on a daily basis, keeping me stuck. There is a great nugget of wisdom in the grow program: ‘tiredness is only tiredness’. And wow, how those four simple words digested, remembered, absorbed and practised on a daily basis has changed my life and my energy levels for the better.