I obtained the list from my friend Bryan Childs, creator of NineBullets.net, who is also battling Depression. He had watched his father slowly die from cancer along with watching his marriage crumble. We bonded over the course of a few weeks this past summer, swapping coping strategies and commiserating about how painfully slow progress can be at times. He has a list that he found in The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression taped to the mirror of his bathroom so he can see it every day.
It reads:
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I’m putting this list up here first because it really gets to the crux of battling depression. It’s so easy to get stuck in the mud that just making one small effort each day can be enough to make a huge shift in thinking. So often, I will be cooped up in my apartment feeling so anxious and unable to concentrate that I forget that simply stepping outside is a cheap and easy way to completely change my mood. I printed out my own copy of this list and put it on my refrigerator for convenient reference so that when I am having a particularly rough time of it, I can pick just one thing to start with.
When followed daily, this list outlines a pretty effective plan for living a depression-free life, or at least one that is manageable. With future blog posts, I will go into more detail about some of the items on this list as well as adding some simpler, in the moment strategies for shaking free from catastrophic thinking. The idea is to compile a resource of things that WORK, so that on those inevitable bad days, there will be a myriad of choices.
For people that live with Depression, daily life can become a constant struggle just to maintain the status quo. Bathing, eating, and showing up for work can become enormous undertakings when living in the shadow of this disorder. A few months ago, my therapist diagnosed me with Major Depressive Disorder, something I have been dealing with since the age of 16. Over the years, I had always turned to weightlifting for its depression fighting side effects, and alcohol for its ability to take me into another state of consciousness. After a psychologically traumatic event, these avenues were no longer available to me. The breaks between weightlifting sets proved to be enough free time for my mind to delve back into my problems, often leaving me crying at the gym. Alcohol became a poison, crippling my ability to socialize. Rather than giving me the confidence to interact with strangers, I would often be reduced to tears when men approached me in public if I was under the influence. With Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and recovery from alcohol addiction added into the mix, and without weightlifting to provide relief, I finally turned to counseling and began exploring other ways to find peace.