Happy Monday and welcome to your mental health mini this.
Week is. A solo and we are talking all
things. Depression.
I wanted to share a couple of things about depression, and
these are kind of like insights that I now have that I didn't
have when I was struggling. But if you're struggling, if you
relate to this, I think they'll be really helpful to hear.
So the first thing is that depression, a lot of the time,
when we look at it from a psychology perspective, when we
look at the research, when we look at how people talk about
their experiences, at least part of the time it's about a wrongly
pessimistic outlook. That was true for me.
I believed that I would be forever depressed for the rest
of my life. I was constantly looking for
circumstantial evidence that I wasn't good enough, that I was
unlovable, that my life sucked. And I found that because that
was all I was looking for, that pessimistic outlook added to my
mood. And so in general, when we can
get out of that pessimistic outlook, that's not necessarily
accurate. Things usually are or will be
better than they seem right now in this moment.
So if you're struggling, if you're at that extreme low, if
you're unconsciously looking for all of that circumstantial
evidence that supports what you're feeling, I promise you
that things are better or they will be better than they seem
right now in this current moment.
The next thing is that when we look at emotions across your
lifespan, when we look at the research that's been done there,
how people rate their joy, their feelings of like living their
life worth living, people are happier across time just in
general, their happiness tends to trend upward over time.
So if you're at your extreme low right now, if you're like,
things cannot get worse. I hate my life in general.
The trend is that that will change, things will get better.
They have to. And one mantra that I really
love is that life is impermanent and that impermanence will be on
your side. So even though you might be at
an extreme emotional low right now, you might be suffering.
No emotion, nothing in life is constant.
That extreme feeling of suffering cannot persist
forever. It has to shift, it has to
change. Something has to give.
And that will be on your side. The pain, the suffering, it'll
lift, it will change, it will evolve, and it can't stay as
constant and as overwhelming as it is right now.
And the future is really difficult to predict, obviously,
but from like a personal perspective, when we look at the
research on how people forecast their lives, life, and how
things will look like five years from now, people really
overestimate the impact of what's happening now on their
future happiness. We think that everything that's
going on right now in the current moment, whether it's a
test, a relationship and argument, is drastically going
to impact our happiness in our lives five years from now.
Where is five years from now? If you're like, what happened
about that test that you took freshman year of high school,
you'd be like, what? It's not even relevant remotely
to my life. And so it's important to
remember that we're really bad at predicting how much things
will impact our lives and our well beings, especially in the
future. So if you're feeling really
overwhelmed, if you're feeling like you're you're just at rock
bottom and things suck and they will suck forever, we're not
good at predicting that future. And that really is in your
favor. So I wanted to really quickly
dive into a couple of habits that were game changers in my
mental health journey that you can implement.
So the first thing is sleep. Sleep is my number one mental
health tip. Sleep has a huge impact on our
mood, on our emotional vulnerability.
If you are not getting enough sleep or you're not getting good
enough sleep, your emotions will suffer.
So investing in your sleep, making sure that you're getting
enough no matter where you're at in your mental health journey
will at least somewhat improve your baseline of functioning
relationships. When I was struggling, all I was
doing was trying to feel loved, connected, supported and
validated. So having relationships in your
life that allow you to feel that way is a game changing for your
mental health. Having a passion project and
something that brings you joy that you can invest in, that's
motivating to you is huge. And that today for me is like
the podcast, it's school. It's all of these different
things that I love doing and they have a huge positive impact
on my mental health. Another thing is accumulating
positives. There's this amazing DBT scale
where you plan moments of joy throughout your day so that when
you have those low moments in mood, you can't get into that
headspace of like, everything sucks.
The world is terrible because you've accumulated all these
different moments of joy. So your baseline is increased.
And that's something that I implement on a daily, weekly,
monthly basis. And something that is so easy to
do is to back, OK, I'm going to drink my favorite cup of coffee
tomorrow and I'm going to sit and enjoy it.
Or I'm going to watch my favorite TV show tomorrow night
and it's going to be great. Or I'm going to go have coffee
with a friend and I know that I'll have have a great time.
Like plan those moments, build your life worth living for
yourself. And that's something that is
easy to do It's fun. The last two things I'm going to
say 1 is just giving myself grace.
We all have tough moments. We all have bed days.
Our mental health is constantly changing and fluctuating and we
can't always be perfect or on an upward trend.
And so I give myself a lot of understanding and compassion
when I'm struggling or when things don't go my way or when
it feels like I don't understand what's going on.
And that's something that I wish I had done when I was really
struggling, Giving myself grace and being like, you know what,
you're struggling a lot right now.
Everything is going on in a really crazy, huge, big way.
And so it's OK to feel overwhelmed and it's OK to not
know how to proceed and things will change.
So really self compassion, giving yourself understanding
and I just want to end this by reminding you that you're not
alone. Someone in the world has been
where you are and will no one 100% get what your mind is going
through right now. People can relate, they can
understand, they can resonate, and they can support you.
Ask for help, get the support and resources that you are so
deserving of and cultivate that self compassion to want to get
better because you are deserving of a life worth living.
That's just a fact. If you enjoyed this week's
mental health mini, you can listen to the.
Full episode It is episode 80 with yours truly.
A link to the full episode is in the show notes.
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podcast thanks for. Listening.