An Idea To Help With Depression

This is just something that I have worked with that may help some people who suffer from depression.

It’s an idea that focuses on solutions and the way forward, and avoids trying to analyse the causes or underlying causes of your depression. Often trying to identify the root causes does not help. Sometimes the causes can never be identified. Sometimes there is no use in identifying the causes. Sometimes it’s better to look forward and work on solutions instead.

It works in a few steps:

Step 1: You take a look at your self and think about how you feel. You think about how you feel right now at this moment in time. And, you compare to how you feel now at this moment in time with other times where you have felt worse, and when you have felt better. You then rate how you feel now on a scale of 1–10. 1 for the worst possible and 10 for the best possible. Be realistic and set your score.

Step 2: Write down or run through why you are the score you set. Why not lower, why not higher. A few minutes for this is fine. Why am I a three? Briefly what makes me feel 3/10 at this moment in time.

Step 3: The key to this idea for helping depression is that it’s all about tiny steps. Whatever your score or rating is, you just say to yourself; To be one rating higher tomorrow what would I be doing tomorrow? So in my example, to be a 4/10 instead of a 3/10 what would I be actually doing?

Now the idea here is that it may well be very simple things. It may be that you think that if you go for a walk, spend some time speaking to someone, tidy up your flat or house, go for a run, create some art, to get up and go out by 8am….maybe the jump to 4 from 3 is too much, so then ask yourself what would you be doing to be a 3.5 out of 10 tomorrow.

Step 4: You do what you said you would do. Maybe you do two or three things. But it’s all ok if there is just one thing and it’s ok if from the outside this one thing looks very small and in consequential.

Step 5: You repeat this process. You rate how you feel. And ask yourself what would you be doing differently to increase your rating by 1 or 0.5 or whatever increase you wish to see. You may not rate yourself every single day, maybe you use this process to rate your self once a week and set small actions and goals for the week ahead. The point is you set easily achievable actions that you commit to doing. Like I said, you may decide to wake and be up and out of the house by 9 am each day, or go for a walk every day, or read two pages of a novel each day, or meet a friend or member of your family…the point is, it can be whatever you want it to be. As this is all about doing things, more than thinking things through.

Finally, you may want to make a note of these things that you do in a notebook or something — if that helps.

If anyone has any other ideas or suggestions then please pitch in.