Effective ways to deal with anger/depression/anxiety etc.

[slsdly]

It's hard to piece together, as this wasn't something I came up with in a day but over a period of time. My theory at the time was that depression itself was impossible to solve as a whole, but by breaking it down into smaller problems, I could solve those individually. Then I would pray it was either enough or give me new perspective to move forward. I was emotionally crippled, but very rational. I felt like two people.

I was always repeating similar kinds of downward spirals -- e.g. I say something stupid, then I felt bad, and began to berate myself. Then I stopped eating. Then I didn't have any energy to do the things I had to do. Then I felt worse. I would manage to get myself back on track eventually after some rationalizing and cooldown time for my emotions.

I identified the patterns, and forced myself not to continue, regardless of what I felt I "deserved." Not accomplishing my tasks? Oh well, live with the poor grade or chastisement. Did I not eat anything today? Dammit, let's go to the fridge and shove some nutrients down. Berating myself again? You already messed up, do better tomorrow.

I often silenced my brain by reading -- I have always found it easy to get absorbed in a book, even one I know very well. Fantasy was (and remains) my escape of choice. Plenty of flawed heroes to identify with .

For those that contributed to my decline, I forgave them all. Without daily aggravations and/or reminders, this is a much easier task. I had to accept responsibility for dealing with my problems, and raging against somebody else wasn't going to do any good. This also meant less anger for me to manage. Once I managed that, I worked on forgiving myself. No more berating for actions long past. That took a lot longer.

In parallel, I came up with a plan to build up confidence. I choose my career for that. It was really hard to do anything "for myself," but it was really easy to give everything I had to please somebody else. I accomplished stuff, garnered high praise from management and ended up with some nascent self esteem. This became a bedrock for me to fallback on, "Look, you aren't totally useless, see?" Ride the mania wave became a mantra in of itself. It did not take much encouragement to put me on an emotional high, considering how little I received.

Having constructive goals like doing well with my work or school gave me channels for my excess emotions, whether that be grief, rage or, ahem, sexual frustration (ah to be a teen or early 20s again). The focus on a finite goal was useful in preventing my negative emotions gaining a foothold to initiate a depressive episode.

When it came to rationalizing all of this, finding a reason to even bother instead of drowning myself, I worked with a mental debt system. My existence may be contributing a net negative at the moment, but I will attempt to become someone who will do better than that. That is probably the fantasy novels speaking there, too many martyrs. But it was a useful concept to me.

Hopefully I wrote something useful in there for you. It is a bit of a brain dump .

[llorona]

@chenda: I PM'd you.

[7Wannabe5]

I suffer from mild cyclothymia and what often works best for me as a first step is objective rational examination of my internal and external circumstances and patterns. My mother suffered from moderately severe bi-polar disease and my father suffered from mild SAD. I never get very depressed, but my cycles do tend towards being seasonal with my prevailing depressive symptom being a feeling of guilt. Took me years to recognize this pattern of "Days are getting shorter, so I will assign a feeling of guilt to something I did while feeling more exuberant this spring." It might be something as simple as I am assigning my cruddy feelings to the fact that I started a garden that was too big for me to maintain. So, then I will try to recognize that allowing the chicory to overrun the eggplant is not a crime against humanity, and I am probably suffering from a bit of SAD and I will institute many of the self-help measures others have recommended above, such as more exercise, more sunlight exposure, perhaps a short round of herbal serotonin precursors. One less well known trick for breaking yourself out of a minor depression is to purposefully deprive yourself of sleep for a short period, because then the deep sleep that may follow can be curative. I would also note that I have lived with people who suffered from chronic depression and lack of exercise and poor sleep hygiene were definitely complicit. IMO, taking drugs for depression without first attempting to improve your exercise and sleep practices, is like taking medication for diabetes without first attempting to improve your dietary practices.

My tendency towards a bit of cyclical lite-mania will sometimes result in anxiety because it will go something like feelings of irrational exuberance will lead to risk-taking or overly-optimistic behavior followed by sudden return to level-headedness and feelings of anxiety attached to thoughts along the lines of "What have I done?" or "How did I get myself into this situation?" So, what I have learned to do is self-talk myself through these feelings of anxiety by first centering myself on my physical being and observing whether I am actually in any true physical danger, and then I engage in simple self-care routines starting from the core out. For instance, depending on the situation, I might get myself a glass of water, brush my hair and plait it into a braid, check and tidy the contents of my purse or backpack and then update my ToDo lists on my phone. I choose not to do drugs or drink very much or often, because it has been my experience that I will very frequently engage in behavior that will later result in anxiety, if I do.

So, I would generally recommend the practice of good objective record-keeping as a way of observing whether you are changing behavior in a manner that may be indicative of underlying chemical physiology in order to undertake corrective measures sooner rather than later. Sometimes changing the changed behavior may actually be enough to influence your underlying chemistry.