So You’re New to Anxiety and Depression?
Welcome, let me show you around.
This pandemic is filled with ingredients of the mental illness cocktail. You start with a heavy pour of fear for the safety of your friends and family. Add in some social isolation. Throw in uncertainty of the future and fear for the pending economic collapse. Remove routine. Make exercise near impossible. Then add any of the following to taste: empathy fatigue, hyper vigilance, insomnia or hypersomnia (why not both?), frustration with your children, guilt over your frustration with your children. And there you have it — a recipe for depression.
I have been in a battle with depression (anxiety, PTSD, et al) for the past 15 years. I am a long time resident to the world of depression. I still haven’t found the key out of here, but I’ve learned enough that I can help you out here if you’re visiting for the first time.
Note 1: I have no medical credentials in the realm of therapy. I am merely repeating the advice that I’ve heard from professionals and adding in pieces from my own experiences.
Note 2: If you are really struggling right now, there are many resources out there for you — even in pandemic — that will be more effective than reading this post. I recommend using Psychology Today’s website to find a therapist who does telemedicine. If this is an emergency, you can also use the National Suicide Prevention Hotline (1–800–273–8255) or try a crisis text line.
Some Quick Tips to Navigate Your First Bout of Depression/Anxiety
1. This does not mean that you are weak.
Mental illness has a way of hijacking your brain and telling you that you are bad for feeling this way. It might tell you that a stronger person wouldn’t feel this way. This is not true.
Abraham Lincoln had severe depression and also freed slaves and won the Civil War. Robin Williams sadly lost his life to depression, but first he filled the world with joy. Brilliantly strong individuals have battled depression. We don’t know about all of them because mental illness is often kept private, but the world is full of strong individuals with depression. And for right now, you’re one of them.
Being compassionate towards yourself is a big step towards making these feelings go away. Counter your thoughts of inadequacy with thoughts of self compassion.
2. This isn’t going to last forever.
I have no idea how long this pandemic will be affecting our lives, and I can’t really say how long you’ll struggle through this either. But treatment resistant long term depression is quite rare. And as one of the lucky few who has it, I still have windows of remission.
This is the toughest landscape to navigate healthy mental behaviors in. Just because you are struggling now, does not mean that you will struggle after this lock down or even for the duration of it.
3. Break as many depressive habits as you can.
Preventing the spread of a pandemic requires you to behave eerily similar to a person in the throws of depression. Imagine going to a therapist’s office in 2019 and saying:
“I’ve only left my house four times in the past month. I try to stay at least 6 feet away from all people. I am aware of everything I touch. I have no separation between my work life and my home life. I’ve stopped exercising, eating healthy or sleeping my regular hours.”
The therapist would tell you that you are showing classic signs of anxiety and depression. A likely next step would be to encourage you to leave the house more, to create work boundaries, to exercise, to eat well and to keep a regular sleep schedule. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot you can do about your social isolation (except perhaps more Zoom calls?) or fear of touching surfaces, but you can do your best to tackle the rest of the depressive behaviors.
I recommend picking one or two behaviors you think you can get back on track easily (for example, setting work and non work hours/spaces; following some at home exercise videos on youtube). Much like confidence is something you’re told to “fake it ‘till you make it,” not being depressed is also something you can trick yourself into doing by acting not depressed.
4. Ways to slow or stop a panic attack.
Panic attacks are scary, especially the first few times you have them. Here are some things that help me when I’m starting to have or in the midst of having a panic attack:
- slow down your breathing and try to focus on each breath
- distract your mind from the panic by counting backwards from 100 by 7 (100, 93, 86…)
- observe and describe what is around you in a matter of fact way: small plant, brown table, flattened box. Try to do this with adjectives that have no positive or negative association (this is often referred to as non judgmental observations)
- adjust your posture. During a panic attack, your brain thinks it’s in danger, so your body often follows suit. You may find that your posture is tensing for a fight. Changing your posture to match the posture of a human in a safe space can help to bring your brain back there too. One technique called “Willing Hands” encourages you to relax your arms and hands and to turn your hands out to expose your wrists. This is a fairly vulnerable position and tells your brain, “I wouldn’t be standing like this if something was wrong.”
- just let it happen. As scary as a panic attack is, it really isn’t dangerous and it doesn’t last forever. Riding out a panic attack shows you that nothing bad happens even in a panic attack. For me personally, I sometimes feel relaxed for a short while afterwards. If you have this as well, this can be a great time to meditate and focus on maintaining that calm.
5. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have it the worst.
Another trick your brain is going to play on you is that it will point out how much worse your life could be right now. You’ll think about someone you know who has lost a loved one or is not making ends meet, and you’ll think you have no right to be feeling badly.
It may be true that others have it worse, but you are the one experiencing a shortage of serotonin and the symptoms that follow. Though it’s important to acknowledge that others are struggling more and to try and help if you can (helping others tends to give you an emotional boost too), what you are feeling is both real and reasonable.
I struggled to realize this regarding my own PTSD. I had never been to war or been kidnapped or experienced these hugely traumatic events I’d associated with PTSD, but I had faced trauma. More importantly, I had just about every symptom of PTSD. It took me years to get here, but eventually I concluded that some people can face the worst trauma and not have PTSD while others can face less severe events and have terrible PTSD.
Let me save you some time. No one does or doesn’t have the right to be depressed. It just happens to some people sometimes.
6. Depression and Anxiety are known as each other’s evil twins.
Many people with ongoing depression will struggle with anxiety too (and vice versa). Personally, I find that some weeks anxiety takes the wheel and my depression is lessened, other weeks I feel the opposite.
If you’re experiencing just depression or anxiety right now, don’t be shocked if the other one makes a surprise appearance. This isn’t another thing wrong with you; this is just the other side of the coin you already had.
7. Try not to stick around here too long if you can help it.
There are a lot of habits that can make symptoms build upon themselves to make you more anxious or depressed. For example, if something is making you anxious, you might avoid that thing. The next time you have to face it, you’ll feel even more anxious, so you’ll increase your avoidance.
I, myself, have never excelled at breaking bad habits, but I think if you didn’t have specific bad mental health habits before, try to get back to your old habits as best as possible to avoid forming new habits.
Again, I am absolutely no expert, but I know what I’ve experienced, what I’ve learned in therapy and what I’ve heard in group. I do think that some people just come to visit the world of mental illness when things are going wrong. And things are about the worst that they can be right now. My hope is that everyone who never struggled with mental health before will find healthy habits in this new normal and be back to themselves, just with a bit more empathy and understanding of the people who are still struggling.
