5 tips for living, from one depressive to another
What follows are 5 depressive-tested-and-depressive-approved tips for making things a little bit brighter when you’re feeling blue.*
1. Wash Your Face.
First things first, you’ve got to cover the basics. When I’m feeling down the first things to go are basic self-care items like showering, blowing your hair dry, washing your face…they just seem like they require so much effort. In fact, it is usually not until I notice that I haven’t been washing my face or doing my hair that I realize that I’m going through a little bout of depression. I’m not totally sure why this works other than to say that for me sometimes I have to pretend like I’m not depressed in order to actually start not feeling depressed and that means putting the pieces of your daily routine back together as though you actually gave a crap. So, when I can’t imagine doing anything to take care of myself, I force myself to at least wash my face twice a day. Bare bones. If I can do that, I start to actually feel like I person that cares about themselves, that takes care of themselves and then frequently other little things start to follow. And that is the beginning of the light.
2. Eat Something Warm Once a Day
So we’re working our way up from the bare bones basics. Once you’re washing your face every day, get in the habit of eating at least one warm meal everyday. Warm meals are nourishing for your body and your soul. You need this. Cold meals may make you feel sort of full but I wouldn’t call them comforting or nourishing necessarily. You don’t need to eat another bowl of cereal for dinner or cold leftovers or pint of ice cream. You can still eat those things if you want, but you need to arrange to eat at least one warm meal every day. Your depressive instincts are pulling you down into a spiral of detachment from yourself and your body and warm food helps kill them.
3. Get Your Nails Done.
It’s not super expensive and it adds a tiny bit of color and glamor to your hands, which you see all day long. Plus, it’s good to have someone tend to you and take care of you, even if it is just cutting and filing your nails adding some lotion and then painting them a pretty color.
4. Wear Leopard Print
Because it’s a little bit ostentatious, because it’s a little bit ridiculous, because it’s a little bit like this.
5. Talk to someone with your voice everyday.
Remove yourself from your computer, your television, your texting, and actually talk to a friend or family member in person or on the phone. Hear your own voice responding to someone else’s voice. Verbalize things that have just been swirling around in your head all day long. Hear some encouraging words, or funny ones, or even just familiar ones. When you talk to someone you have to listen to what they say and then respond and that means you have to be in the present moment rather than inside your head. At least one time a day you need to pull yourself out of your head and into reality/
So I know this may seem like a lot of things to do when you don’t feel like doing anything, but trust me, even though the drama of being bummed-out feels comforting in a self-destructive way, feeling like you can thrive in your own life is much better. You may need to take some time to wallow in the ‘grey’ at first but when you’re ready to head towards the daylight, these are a few simple ways to get started.
*Depression is a difficult thing to write about because the severity of it ranges so much from one person to another, from one year to another. In writing this post I do not aim to make light of depression or being depressed, I just mean to share the tips for living that I’ve learned over 10 years or so of being a ‘depressive.’
