How Self-Discipline Can Help Heal Depression
Of all the things to have by your side in life and to continually hone your proficiency in, consistency is one of the best. This isn’t a new idea by any means. Most of us are so used to it we barely register this statement as anything more than a trite mantra of the 21st century. And yet, as valuable as consistency is the everyday human, it is doubly important to the depressed individual.
Consistency and depression — simplistically speaking, a dichotomy of positive and negative — share some striking parallels. By any technical measure, depression itself is habitual and consistent. It gruelingly persists with unrelenting regularity. It is usually categorized by sameness, flatness. Consequently, an interesting strategy, indeed, is to fight the very nature of depression with something that bears the same underlying pattern.
Depression drags down and is predictable. Consistency (that is, of predetermined good habits) lifts up and is, by definition, predictable.
The difference between the two, of course, is that depression feels natural and consistency feels artificial. Depressed people commonly lament a lack of naturally-occurring motivation and feel helpless in escaping their predicament because they are too focused on trying to produce this naturally-occurring motivation (which reveals itself to be maddeningly…
