81–90 of 115 posts
Cardio helps a lot for me personally. I'm a firm believer that most people (myself included) don't get enough exercise when compared to hundreds of years ago. It gives me a dedicated hour or two block of time to listen to podcasts, and exercise in general is healthy anyways so its a win-win.
What style of cardio do people like? Some people have knee issues for example, or long winters. What do they do?
The most important thing to know about depression is that it is an illness. It has no moral dimension. Get treatment. People telling you to buck up and get hold of yourself are much, much worse than useless. The second most important thing to know is that "depression" is a label for at least a half-dozen, probably more, unrelated illnesses. What helps with one does nothing for another. The third is that no matter wha…
That's not to say medication doesn't have its place. It's that suggesting we eschew all other measures in favor of medication is ridiculous.
The most important thing to know about depression is that it is an illness. It has no moral dimension. Get treatment. People telling you to buck up and get hold of yourself are much, much worse than useless. The second most important thing to know is that "depression" is a label for at least a half-dozen, probably more, unrelated illnesses. What helps with one does nothing for another. The third is that no matter wha…
The most important thing to know about depression is that it is an illness. It has no moral dimension. Get treatment. People telling you to buck up and get hold of yourself are much, much worse than useless. The second most important thing to know is that "depression" is a label for at least a half-dozen, probably more, unrelated illnesses. What helps with one does nothing for another. The third is that no matter wha…
I hear the "depression is an illness" trope repeated over and over but I still fail to understand what it means. I'm sure for some definition of the word illness it's true. But it's certainly not an illness in the way a cold or malaria or shingles or cystic fibrosis are illnesses. Those things can be objectively diagnosed. They entail physical measurable changes to a person's body. Depression is a set of guidelines i…
As someone who has been catatonically depressed for a couple years now, I'm not so sure about this! People with chronic pain also often can't identify any physical source, but obviously you would never start posting "is this really an illness though?" or "aren't we distracting and misleading people??" in a thread about that.
The undercurrent of your post is that depressed people need to snap out of it, and falling back on the "illness" label reduces personal responsibility. Trust me, many people feel like imposters claiming they have depression, despite being completely non-functional. Thanks but no thanks to this proposed contribution to the discourse.
Are you really here to understand, or is it just to judge? Want some MRIs and EKGs of depressed brains?
The most important thing to know about depression is that it is an illness. It has no moral dimension. Get treatment. People telling you to buck up and get hold of yourself are much, much worse than useless. The second most important thing to know is that "depression" is a label for at least a half-dozen, probably more, unrelated illnesses. What helps with one does nothing for another. The third is that no matter wha…
I hear the "depression is an illness" trope repeated over and over but I still fail to understand what it means. I'm sure for some definition of the word illness it's true. But it's certainly not an illness in the way a cold or malaria or shingles or cystic fibrosis are illnesses. Those things can be objectively diagnosed. They entail physical measurable changes to a person's body. Depression is a set of guidelines i…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436791/table/t...
I have never sought professional help, mainly because of the cost, time, and shame. If you can, of course, get professional help, but since you asked me how I treat it, here it is.
First, one of the main reasons why I felt that depression was not meeting my parents' expectations. There is always someone better than me and my parents always compared our successes, directly or indirectly.
Then I had a great religious crisis when I learned about truly evil and disgusting human behaviors. It simply made me lose my faith in God and in humans.
And finally I was never good with the opposite sex. Although I had many friends, I still slept alone.
At one point, in my life I simply didn't see any point in it. I realized that I can never make my parents proud, there is no God and humans are evil, and I will never find love.
I exercised regularly and ate decent. There was no need to add more exercise to fight depression.
I had some thoughts about suicide but nothing serious. It scared me though and I began to enter Buddhism and meditation. But Eastern philosophy did not work for my logical mind. The meditation was too boring for me.
That's when I discovered stoicism, it seemed to click better with me. Almost at the same time, I also found an online CBT software that also helped my anxiety.
Then, after trial and error, I developed an external observer mentality. I think of life as a boring video game. I think of money as points of video games. And I only focus on getting the maximum scores. I know this sounds superficial, but it helps me on difficult days.
Before this mentality, I was changing jobs without thinking about career change in general. Now I am very strategic and I progressed a lot in my career.
I really don't care about my parents' approval anymore and they seem to respect me more. When I stopped chasing the opposite sex, I started to attract them and now I am happily married. I still see the world as a dark place and this is something I still struggle with.
But I have to play this video game, control my character, and try to get a high score. My character needs sleep and exercise to keep its mind sharp for work. My character must do chores and do nice things for spouse or spouse will leave it.
Life is just a video game.
First what depression was for me was a lack of positive emotion. Not that I felt sad all the time or that I was always down. It was just nothing felt good. I could eat something nice, do something for someone, watch a great movie and I felt nothing.
This was not so bad at first but as the months rolled past it got very hard to live with. Nothing motivated me. I didn't want to get up and do anything. Why do anything there was no positive feedback to do anything.
But I did. For some reason I kept my routine. I worked as hard as I could. Probably about 70% of my normal. But I just kept going. There was something in me that said this can't last forever. I was getting suicidal and was struggling to keep going but I just kept one foot in front of the other. Not thinking about much other than the day ahead.
Relationships were hard, I didn't have much patience for others. But I lived in close quarters with people, kept my job and maintained church commitments. I just kept going.
My hope was that one day things would get better and I didn't want to wake up one day finding I'd walked away from everything just to find things had gotten better. You know what they did! They got so much better. It took a year or so and little things started to feel good again. I was so happy when they did that things just spiraled upwards.
I've learnt a thing or two about my emotions and thoughts. Trying to keep from becoming fed up and down seems to stop me rolling back to that depressed state.
Looking back I think it was the routine that pulled me out. It was the keeping on going that gave me something to think about, instead of the negative thoughts. I couldn't create positive feedback but I could stop the negative (a little bit).
Other people have it way harder than I ever did and I don't want to say they could do the same thing but I do think that there is reason to have hope. Hope wont make you feel better but it can keep you going 'till you do.
Not very well.
Then i remembered a wise one said that opposite of depression = expression.
So when you express yourself fully - depression falls off.
That is exactly what happened to me after ~10 yrs of depression.