I intentionally use the word fight here. Not because fighting depression is the only way to deal with it, nor because it is always advisable. In some cases, feeling your depression, connecting with it, and understanding it is necessary. This is particularly true if you have been through unresolved trauma. You may even need professional help to do this, especially if you think you may harm yourself or someone else. Then call 911. This is particularly true if you have a historical pattern of shoving down emotions, sitting on them and ignoring them. But what if you tend to give in to sadness and depression to the point where you have actually made a habit out of it? Sometimes exactly what you need is to retrain your thoughts and emotions to feel happier.
Recognize the signs
Your body and thoughts give you clues when you are beginning to walk down the path of depression. It may be a sense of heaviness in your heart, a stomachache, or the vision of dark clouds over your head. Perhaps your warning sign is negative thoughts. You start painting doomsday outcomes and hear yourself going through all the reasons why every subject you approach will fail. We have individual defense mechanisms we unconsciously use that we developed because they worked for us in the past and they allowed the expression of our feelings of being stuck or sad in creative ways. Be a detective and start looking for patterns in your body and thoughts that come up routinely. Learn your signs, so that when they come up you can recognize what they are trying to express.
Consciously choose productivity
If you feel depression coming on, it is time to go to battle. Now that you have recognized your unique signs, the moment you feel them coming on, consciously choose what to do with these feelings. Productive distraction can come in any form: a hobby, doing more work, exercise or spending time with loved ones. It does not matter how you distract yourself as long as it’s productive, healthy, and doesn’t harm you in any way. You can change your thoughts by simply watching a Netflix movie or YouTube. There is no judgment here because this is your private space. And sometimes the healing simply comes from doing something for yourself.
Fake it until you make it
Often, we feel fake or strange doing something that is incongruent with how we feel on the inside. It is extremely important to be honest with yourself about your emotions. But your honesty does not have to turn into a pity party. Once you know how you really feel, you can choose to move on if it is bad timing or not going to help you in the moment. A study entitled, *“When you smile, you become happy: evidence from resting state task-based fMRI” showed that people who forced a smile than felt the associated emotion. In other words, by playing out certain motions like smiling, you can cause yourself to feel happier. Over time, if you repeat these actions, they become more natural as your body is accustomed to this feeling. Similar to developing a gym routine, a happiness routine becomes easier with practice.
Focus on gratefulness
What we focus on amplifies in our life. If you start worrying about if humans are causing frog extinction, all of sudden you find more and more examples of this and social media contributes to his with placed ads? The universe is much the same. Whatever you focus on in your mind is amplified in your world. If you choose to focus on angry people in the world. Your thoughts and emotions will be preoccupied with angry people, and then you also may have a greater chance of attracting greater people to your life. The associated emotions and body language will follow suit. But if you choose to consciously focus on what you’re grateful for and want more of in life, your body, mind, and point of attraction will all be focused on what causes positive emotion.
So if you actually have a choice of where to point your energy arrow, don’t you want to point it towards physical activities, emotions, images and habits that make you feel good?
*https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25139308/
Please note that the purpose of this article is purely educational. Nothing written here should be construed as medical advice or diagnosis for an existing problem. Please contact your medical provider or a licensed psychologist, therapist, or psychiatrist if you feel you need mental help or have an urgent problem.