Sad, Tired, and Alone: My Ongoing Battle With Startup Depression

Yep...know how you feel bud. Thanks for sharing out loud.

I want to add one additional suggestion. I think lack of light and Seasonal Affective Disorder gets mixed into the normal startup depression quite frequently. It's never surprising to me when people feel depressed during winter months. The lack of light, lack of vitamin D—it contributes heavily.

Now, the OP mentioned this is a once-a-quarter pattern, so S.A.D is clearly not the only thing at play. But I would be willing to bet that it contributes.

For those that know me, I'm a huge evangelist of light products to solve insomnia. In the winter, these same light products solve for S.A.D. My old post on insomnia has lots of good links: http://www.humbledmba.com/become-a-morning-person-how-to-end...

My new favorite light product is the NatureBright Per 3 (http://www.amazon.com/NatureBright-PER3-Deluxe-Light-Therapy...). It's well worth a try.

Whatever you buy, make sure it provides minimum 5000 lux and that you use it at least 30 minutes a day.

And finally— Regardless of all this, props to you for writing a wonderfully authentic post. And it's already quite obvious with the comments here that you are not alone. Keep at it.

No you are not alone. But that might be part of the problem. Get a dog. I know I know. You don't have the time to care for a dog. But you do. Cause you'll make time. And hire a dog walker. I do. She comes in every day and walks my 95lbs lab/dane mix. Most dog walkers will feed your dog too, if needed.

Coming home to an empty house gets old fast.

Hi,

Thanks for writing this, it's a brave and open and honest thing to do where people are afraid of doing those things. At a certain point, we have to get over what others think and get to figuring out what we think, and how it should be.

I believe a person does whatever they do to find a certain amount of peace in themselves and their lives.

I'd like to share some scraps I've scraped together on finding, and keeping a positive and healthy inner-dialogue and energy. This discipline has helped me more than any education, talent, skill that I have. It fuels them all. The below is not perfect, no one is perfect, there is no perfection to attain, only better discipline.

I put the pursuit of a better-self like taking a shower, I have to remind myself daily, in my words that have meaning to me, or my energy will stink.

Every action, every choice we take is ultimately geared at getting to a peaceful flow, focused and purposeful.

Whether the actions are dietary, physical, sensory, emotional, mental input, all aim at getting a neurological hit of the great peace that comes from great understanding / accomplishment.

Deep, meaningful, fulfilling, satisfying, lasting peace and contentment that fuels us forward. Soak that idea up.

The thing is, the things we pursue to find this peace / flow / focus / presence in the present / attention don't provide it. The things that we need to do (build healthy habits and discipline to over-ride and reset us when we're in a rut), we don't build enough muscles of.

Strengthening weaknesses and weakening what we need our strengths to be doesn't work, and ends up feeding the monster of ineffectualness. Sounds easy enough to understand, but pay attention to what you say, do, and say you do and increase the discipline of consistency between those three.

Whenever I look around me and say this sucks, it's usually because everything around me is moving, and I'm not.

My most favorite reminder; Keep moving. Inward, onward, upward.

A lot of folks take logical thinking to the extreme of building so many doubts that they seem so insurmountable that they lose the spark of possibility in themselves. They then turn to spreading their belief in the insurmountability of their doubts by helping others doubt themselves, partially to validate the fact that their own doubts were insurmountable. I call this spreading confusion and doubt. Everyone does it, some worse than others.

Filters and finding doubts in something are really important. Having it be the only way you see life fuels imbalance.

I like living in possibility and creativity, more than doubt and elimination of possibility. So I try to stay there more, than doubt.

Consider if a lack of peace comes from trying to understand something with our mind when we should be trying to understand it with our heart, or our gut, or vice versa. A lot of pain happens here and wears anyone down.

If something is becoming a zombie like experience, throw a wrench into it. Change your perspective. Get out, Get away, change it up. Instead of fuelling doubts in a negative downward spiral, learn, and then remember to hit the reset button to start fuelling possibility and forever spiral upward.

What if, instead of why not. How can, instead of how can't. The mind is amazing. It will see what you want, connection, or disconnection, relation, or unrelatedness and deliver time and time again.

I'm a big fan of logic. I'm a bigger fan of awareness and understanding, which isn't black and white, but a lot of colours that make up the picture.

If we don't like what we see, change how we see it. It's all there.

Our dominant world viewpoint is the true religion through which we see and process the world inside, and outside of us.

A threatened person lives in a threatening world. A scared person lives in a scary world. An untrustworthy person lives in an untrusting world. A trusting person lives in a trusting world.

Prolonged visits in one ups or downs aren't productive, or fun. I pick centered, serene, calm, focus over ups or downs any day and try to saturate my life with it. Reminders all around me.

Why peace? It's the closest to the flow. We keep getting what we've been getting, when we keep what we've been doing. If we don't want what we have, we have to change what we're doing. It's important to work on your awareness of your awareness, and your awareness of your thinking to catch it.

The main culprit; thinking. We aren't supposed to figure things out before we do them all the time, or where would the journey and discovery of ourselves be? All we can work on is developing the best mindset for the journey and head in the best direction we know how.

It's too easy to get into a cycle of analysis paralysis. Of trying to understand everything to the end, before doing anything.

For me, I tend to notice thinking rarely solves problems worth solving. Problems worth solving come from going on the path of experiencing them, not staying in them,and going through them.

Let me know what you like, or don't.

0.02

As someone who has been in the same place, I agree completely. My reaction to SSRIs was first a minor euphoria (just bubbly but a bit numb) and ever since then I have been, well, normal.

Zak, what you're saying is true, up to a certain point. Life has lows, because sometimes, it just fucking sucks. However, you don't and can't see the difference between a low and depression. They are worlds apart. Please, please, give medicine another chance.

Good advice. It's amazing how we manage to convince ourselves that we arent human, and forget that we need to move around, smell, feel and see new things, talk to other people, eat relaxed meals, walk around, etc. We are animals, and I mean that in a good way. Only a small part of our brain is "rational"... Make sure you keep the rest of it happy too!