Coping with Depression today

 

No one is spared from depression. Each one of us may have experienced a period of depression in our life, although they may not be as severe as clinically diagnosed depressions that require professional help.

If you’re currently not coping with depression, feeling so out of it, totally out of your normal system and just basically hating and ignoring almost, always everything and anyone that comes along, try to get yourself checked by a psychiatrist because you those little mood swings and erratic Ally McBeal-ish behavior that you’re trying to ignore for some long may actually be symptoms of depression.

Act fast because if you do, it’ll certainly be a lot harder for you to be able to have yourself cured from this illness, especially once self-delusion starts to kick in.

Unwelcome events in our personal life, frustrations from things we expect to happen, rejection and failures may naturally trigger some form of depression. For most people, these can be passing emotions naturally healed by time.

For others, it can develop into a full-blown clinical depression.

As such, it is important to develop coping mechanisms so that we don’t fall easily into the depressive trap.

A healthy lifestyle encompassing physical, mental, emotional and psychological areas of one’s well-being and a solid social support from family and friends are valuable in forming a positive life perspective. Developing these two areas is the basic and most effective way in coping with depression.

Here are practical guides to help you develop these two areas:

1. Take care of yourself. Learn to care for your body, develop your mind, do not push your self to do things beyond its limits, avoid stress and learn to relax.

2. Try listening to music.

3. Cultivate supportive relationships.

4. Have an open communication with family and friends, develop community-level affiliations like school and church.

5. Learn to be genuinely interested with others. It is also very helpful to maintain a social activity like sports, a group hobby or volunteer work.

6. Know yourself. What really makes you happy, what really are the important and not so important things in your life, what do you really want to become?

7. Exert effort in knowing the real you so that you will be able to eliminate pressures from undue expectations coming from yourself and the society.