Journalling
It can be beneficial to get your thoughts out of your head and down onto paper. Journaling lets you express and make sense of thoughts that are bringing you down. However, if you are going to journal, try to create a balanced perspective.
- After you have written about sadness, guilt, shame, or struggle, make a point of also recording the good intention behind your behaviour or reactions.
- Acknowledge the ways in which you are making progress and putting in effort then, express gratitude for the parts of you that are continuing to hold the flame of hope and persistence.
Exercise
Exercise is proven to create chemical benefits for both your brain and body. It helps you grow brain cells, increases will power and motivation, improves concentration, increases energy and improves sleep quality. All of these things in deficit contribute to depression. The good news is you don’t have to do gut-wrenching, all-out exercise to get these benefits. Just move more than usual.
- Take the stairs, park a few blocks away, walk the dog, do yoga, play with your kids, dance…
- When you get discouraged, focus on the sometimes subtle ways that you feel better when you do exercise.
Sleep
Poor sleep quality and quantity tend to co-exist with depression. Do these things to improve your sleep:
- Train your brain for sleep by developing bedtime rituals (hygiene, journalling, reading, meditating…)
- Support the natural circadian rhythms by slowing down in the evening and dimming lights to reflect what the earth does naturally.
- Avoid screen time for 2 hours before sleeping. If you must be on a screen, turn down the brightness.
- Make your room really dark or use a sleep mask.
- Commit to a fairly consistent sleep schedule.
Mindfulness
The pathways in your nervous system that get used most often turn into freeways. The paths that are seldom used are more like that little thin trail you see veering off the path when you walk in the forest. The stuff you do in life that you want to change but, somehow, don’t, that is a freeway connection, overused and congested.
Practicing mindfulness gets you off the freeway and onto a new path. It redirects your attention from ruminative thought streams to present moment experience, thus unplugging your thoughts from what is keeping you depressed and creating space, so that your mood can begin to improve.
Diet
Aside from poor sleep, your diet contributes significantly to your levels of energy. Energy is created when oxygen “burns” the fats, proteins and carbohydrates that you eat. Food goes into your mouth, gets processed by your digestive tract, and what is kept, ends up in the cells of your nerves, organs and tissues. You literally are what you eat. Eating well will support you to have more energy and feel better both physically and psychologically.
- Make choices that lead you to eating a diet that is high in whole, unprocessed, nutrient dense foods.
- Make meal plans and grocery lists, use recipes, and eat homemade food.
- Avoid sugar to skip the cycle of sugar high, crash, sugar high, crash…
- Remember that your brain is 60% fat. Eat healthy fats from vegetables, nuts, seeds and fish. Avoid hydrogenated fats and trans fats found in prepackaged, processed foods.
