Ask HN: What are the best hacks to fight depression?

Increasing exercise has been a big help. I have a routine I go through every morning for the last month or so. I find I have a focus I don't have otherwise and it's important to start my day off with that focus.

I've made a point to leave work no more than one hour later than normal (unless the situation truly warrants it) and I do not look at email outside of work hours (my employer certainly knows how to reach me if needed). Its been very tempting at times, but the feelings of guilt around not looking at email throughout the evening have largely gone away. Home is no longer that extension of work and has become a place I can chill and relax. After about a month of this I really do feel genuinely relaxed at some point in the evening and I start the day more refreshed and ready to tackle what comes my way.

Lastly, talking with a therapist. My first visits weren't great because I really wasn't present or willing to really open up. Differences between what I think and what I feel and other issues along those lines. Several months later I tried again and was willing to discuss how I feel and hold nothing back (wasn't afraid of looking weak, etc.). I'm learning coping mechanisms that have lead to more awareness and that awareness in turn has increased my ability to cope with whatever comes my way. For example, I recognize patterns I'd fall into far sooner.

These steps have provided a forward momentum that I'm working to maintain. Step by step.

You need the strength and courage to seek therapy and then stick to it. Sometimes therapy takes years and the result is not guaranteed. And when you're in the worst possible place mentally, trying to go to therapist and then trying to open up to him is incredibly tough. And then you have to keep doing it again and again and again.

As someone with two dogs and occasional bouts of mild depression, I would caution against getting a dog for this purpose.

It's a lot of responsibility, and it helps some people with depression but hurts others. A plant is a much better idea. If it doesn't work out, just throw it away. You can't (easily/responsibly) get rid of a dog, in many cases.

In particular, one element of the hacker mindset is not wasting any time saying, "But it doesn't make sense!" It was very useful to me to accept that my body and brain was a meat-robot built by genes so they could get around in a hostile environment. My moods were just part of a poorly-balanced control system.

I didn't have to have a narrative reason for feeling sad. It could just be, say, part of a system for keeping me indoors when the weather was bad. If refined sugar threw off my mood regulation, well no surprise. It wasn't part of my evolved diet. The only reason I was eating a lot of it was foods engineered to maximize purchase frequency while minimizing cost. If other people were hacking me, I certainly could hack back.

Once I gave up the expectation of narrative sense, it became just another experiment-driven systems-tuning exercise. And hackers are good at that.

And anyway, your absolute faith in professionals is unwarranted.

Psychiatry and psychology remain largely unsupported by good science. There is no verified and widely-accepted predictive model of overall brain function.

Many therapists operate entirely on personal bias and superstition; at least one major university touts their M.Div. program as a preferred gateway to clinical psychology.

The evidence in support of pharmacological treatment is polluted by the fact that almost all large-scale clinical studies of psychoactive drugs are underwritten by those who intend to profit from them. Double-blinding is not an absolute guarantee against manipulation if you fund multiple studies and simply drop the results you don't like.

Truly endogenous depression, meaning that which has no legitimate external factors underlying it, may be a mythical beast. All the drugs and therapy in the world will not resolve a bad situation, particularly when that bad situation happens to be a social norm like working at a meaningless job.

SSRIs may get you functional again, but is that really a positive outcome when all they are doing is revving you up to feel good about wasting your life as a corporate cog? Stimulating you to participate gamely in the destruction of the planet through mindless consumption? Convincing you to squeeze out more little consumers to propagate the system?

Evolution has not prepared animals to live in zoos; they often develop symptoms analogous to human depression. Neither has it prepared us to sit around all day in offices doing shit jobs for the primary enrichment of those at the top.

Here's my hack: if you find yourself depressed, have a look at your situation. It probably sucks. Get up, walk out, don't come back. But realize that you cannot easily escape our shitty system that constrains you to participate in economic slavery in order to afford basic shelter and minimal health care. Good luck.