Never Trust What Your Depression Is Telling You

Our natural response to depression is to self-isolate and try to deal with it ourselves. The truth is, it only reinforces the feelings of loneliness and depression, in turn also raising suicidal ideation in some of us.

The one thing that can truly help is reconnecting with friends and family, it is very intimidating to do so, since the depression makes you feel as though you will only bring them down and become a burden. That is not true, however, those people want to share your struggle at least for a little bit if it means you will feel better as a result, according to a study by Helm and colleagues “Existential Isolation, Loneliness, Depression, and Suicide Ideation in Young Adults” (2020).

Three things you can also do in order to avoid isolating yourself are:

Opposite day:

Do the opposite of what your depression tells you to do, for example, if it tells you to isolate, reach out to someone close and spend time with them. If your depression tells you to keep everything in around your close ones, talk to them about it.

Be compassionate:

If confronting your feelings and being kind to yourself is particularly hard, try being kind to someone else, write a kind letter (you don’t have to send it), visit a loved one in the nursing home, or spend extra time with your pets with the intention to connect and show love.

Share space:

Find a place with other people where there is a possibility to connect with others, there are community centres, libraries, coffee shops. You can always reach out to a friend to play video games, draw, watch shows or anything else, what matters is doing them together with someone.

This is also backed up by Russoniello and colleagues’ study “The Efficacy of Casual Videogame Play in Reducing Clinical Depression: A Randomized Controlled Study” (2013)  that found if you play video games even just 30 mins a day, it can decrease depression significantly.

Find Help

On a more serious note, you should seek help from psychiatrists and psychotherapists, because they are qualified to walk you through to full recovery, since depression is very treatable and you can recover, even if it feels as though you already tried everything and there is no point in trying more.

What I hope we learned from this article is that depression lies, about how others feel about you and what you are worth. We should also take away that there are ways to connect with people and there are ways to recover.