A Look at Depression

I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of depression. The thing that got me really started was an excellent post from the blog The Belle Jar dated April 8, 2013, titled “How to be Loved.” In this post she gives the best description of the internal workings of depression that I have ever seen. I highly recommend her blog. She has a lot of good things to say about a lot of topics that I care about, and she writes about them much better than I do.

The entirety of last week very hard for me to get through.  It was my first week back to work after having broken my arm. Between dealing with the pain, catching up at work, getting written up at work, and having a hearing with Minnesota Care, I just was not able to maintain very well. All my coping mechanisms went out the door. If it wasn’t for my sister, I don’t know what I would’ve done. I’ve taken a good hard look at what I need to do to improve how I work with in my depression. Here is what I’ve discovered so far.

I struggle constantly with the voice in my head telling me that I’m stupid, that I’m worthless, that I’m a waste of space, and that I’m not worth the effort. Usually this is the voice of either my dad or my ex-husband, both of whom were very abusive and really did say such things to me. Because this comes from people who were supposed to care about me, I take it personally and I believe it. After thinking about it for a while, I changed that voice. That voice is now Niedermeyer, the nasty frat boy bully from the movie "Animal House." It’s a caricature and somebody that I don’t need to take personally. So now, anytime I start hearing that horrible, mean, abusive voice telling me how horrible I am, I can either ignore it for being silly or I can tell it to fuck off. So far that seems to be working. I also created a nifty little picture of Niedermeyer yelling at Flounder with a “no" symbol on it, which I printed out and taped in places that I can see them easily, especially in places where I know my negative thinking gets triggered, such as my bathroom mirror and that my computer.

I need to replace all that negativity with positive things, so I also do affirmations. I have a wonderful little app on my iPod called Affirmation Works. When I’m awake and not using my iPod for something else this app displays affirmations. They change every 10 seconds. That way, whenever I look at my iPod there’s a positive thought sitting waiting for me to read it and absorb it. Affirmation Works!

I’ve also been working very hard at my WRAP. This is short for Wellness Recovery Action Plan, which is a system for looking at how to recover from various things by defining wellness and coming up with strategies for when things are not going very well. It’s a program worth looking into, not just for mental illness, but other issues of wellness requiring foresight and planning. Wellness Recovery Action Plan

Another thing I’ve been concentrating on again is DDP Yoga, not just for the workouts, which are fantastic, but for the whole mindset change that DDP talks about and help to work through. Seriously, this guy is an amazing motivation. I highly recommend checking out the whole system, and even if you’re not in the space right now you want to actually work out with DDP Yoga, at least look into his audio book “Own Your Life", and over at Team DDP Yoga look for his lecture “Living Life at 90%", which lately I have been listening to over and over again. Basically, he boils it down to 10% is what life throws at you, and 90% is how you react to it; he goes over what to do with that 90%. What can I say, I like his style. DDP Yoga    Team DDP Yoga

Affirmations of the moment: "You Can Do It!" . Think it in DDP's voice.  It's way cool that way.