Depression: A Journey Through Hell To Heaven.
Some of you might have faced depression or anxiety in the past and are facing it right now, especially in this covid period. I am not going to give you a medical opinion about it; instead, I am going to share my own personal journey from hell to heaven.
This is sincerely a personal experience-based article, so hold tight and keep reading.
Depression in medical terms is a persistent feeling of sadness and lack of interest, but in my opinion, it’s more than that. It also makes you more vulnerable to the social fabric, it resists you to mingle with people, it isolates you in many ways. All of you who are reading this article somehow felt anxiety in their day-to-day life, and anxiety attacks are consistent with depression, anxiety is normal in our fast pace life but when it converts into depression than the real problem happens. Anxiety is nothing but an intense fear or worry, some of us are hard-wired to face the brunt of it, but some of us are not, so I will focus on both aspects of it, how we can prevent and if we are already facing it than how can we cure it.
I will provide you a step-by-step guide to encompass this situation and how to overcome it. So read carefully
1. Acceptance:
In spirituality and in Taoism, acceptance is seen as a virtue of humankind.
Acceptance is a fundamental need for dealing with our personal fears.
Acceptance is nothing but accepting that you have a fear, or you have an illness, once you have accepted that you are allowing you to know what your fear is and how it can harm you if you had acceptance of your only then we can cure your depression.
So what you have to do is just start accepting things, start with little things, like my left toe is bigger than my right toe, I accept the way it is #no regrets. You have to say it loud or just write it on a poster and stick it to your wall. You have to keep watching that poster and saying those fearful lines until you started to laugh at it. Once you get the laugh out of it, you will realize that this is a funny thing, which I was worried about. Start with little and progress towards major issues.
2. Break the coping mechanisms:
You have accepted your fears now it’s time to break other supporting arms of this fear, when we are in depression or even in anxiety, we used to acquire coping mechanisms to deal with it at that instance like overeating, shopping, or just sleeping.
Although these coping mechanisms helped us at that moment, we get used to them over some time and, they became a habit.
Remember when you faced your first failure, you cried and slept a lot or maybe break your crockery, table lamp, etc. you think your anger is justified at that time but when you deal like this with your failure over and over again, you will have anger issues. This mere anger of a minute has changed into a habit and until you have this habit your fear will also be there. These habits are the footprints of your fear, so to clear fears from your system we also have to wash away those footprints too.
So the real question is how to break them?
Here we will win by crook. What you have to do is replace your bad habits with the less impactful bad habit and then replace it with good habits, all I want to say here is that the change should be gradual cause if you shift from a bad habit to a good habit directly. The transition will be tough, and there is a possibility of no transition at all.
Let us take an example, Atul who is depressed for a long time and read my article, and now he decided to break his coping mechanism or bad habits, let us assume that whenever he gets depressed he tries to use sleep as a coping mechanism, he sleeps from 7 pm to 9am next day. Now to remove this he needs a similar kind of coping mechanism which is less impactful, there is no great replacement for sleep, so he decided to sleep less when he got depressed he put three alarms on his phone which will break his sleep and he did this whenever he got depressed and tries to sleep.
It made clear to Atul’s subconscious that sleep is not a good coping mechanism, try a new one. Now he is ready to acquire a new good habit, he can acquire anything like meditation, writing a journal, or just listening soul soothing music.
3. Try to open up
I know talking about you is the hardest thing. But it is the best possible way to get rid of your overpowering emotions. These overpowering emotions are the key reason which makes us feel depressed, and these emotions subside our other emotions like happiness, sadness, etc. Yes, you are probably thinking I feel sadness but no, the feelings you are feeling are just the feeling of anger and fear or a mix of both.
So what we have to do is eliminate them little by little, first, we will start by opening up about our mental states to close ones, if you can’t able to talk to your close friends, or family members then you can talk to strangers, you can do that by writing your emotions on to paper, or you can use online sites where you can talk to strangers for free. Here's advice for "Omegle" users: pick your interest first before proceeding to chat with a stranger.
Randomly talking to strangers or just writing your emotions on paper will give you a passage, it will make you more confident for opening up to others, if you still have some fears visit dating sides. Because in the dating phase people are literally having an accepting attitude, you can talk to them without disclosing your identity, and they will be curious to know about you, this will definitely give you some morale boost.
When you are ready just talk to your close ones, believe me, it will give you a sigh of relief.
4. Don’t rebound
After you had this figure out, and you are confidently talking to people, you are having your moments of joy, and you are not thinking about your previous state, this is the time when you can relapse into that state of mind again. Now we had gotten out of it, it is time to establish some barriers, so we can’t fall back.
So the first thing you have to do is self-evaluation, this can be hard for somebody who is still in a vulnerable state, so try it only when you are quite sure that you are out of that state of mind. So to self-evaluate yourself you have to write about your past, if possible then write about the whole past, don’t regret it just write it down. Think about the causes which propelled you in that depression, think what the things were which causes you anxiety in the first place.
Now if we get the reasons behind that depression, we just have to make some behavioral changes, so this could not happen to us in the future and if it will happen too, we will be ready for that.
5. Emerge victoriously
Victory is not just a win over an enemy, it understands the enmity.
So your real victory over your depression will only be possible if you understand the root cause of it, I think until now you all have figured out the root causes of your depression, now we just have to make some behavioral tweaks, and some habit changes, and then you will be completely fine and ready for your next battle.
Let us take an example:
Assume that Atul got depressed because of rejection from his fiancé; he definitely had a fear of rejection now. Now he knows the cause and effect of his depression, so what he has to do is: he can approach the solution in two manners.
1. he can go boldly and start a new relationship with someone. The another one is that he can sit through his time and do nothing in the fear of rejection and depression.
He chooses to date someone, but he also got rejected there. He got hurt a lot in this process, but he decided to try one more time, what do u think, is he going to get rejected or selected?
Anyway, I don’t know if he is going to get be rejected or selected or not, but this time Atul fought bravely, this time he knows rejection will create a fear in my mind, so why not continue my efforts, if there will be rejection, I will definitely get hurt, but my mind will be habitual to such fears and emotions.
So all I am saying is that get habitual to those fears, those emotions that make you vulnerable. When you are getting habitual, it’s a dead-end for vulnerability.
If you have a fear of anything just think about the end of that situation, think what worse could happen, it will somehow calm you and prepare you for your future.
Let’s assume if you are preparing for your job, and you didn’t get that job, what worse could happen you can’t able manage your lifestyle, or you can’t able to buy a new house. But at least you are alive, and can do a job of any kind; at least you can earn to survive.
Thinking about the end result will keep you out of constant fear. Living in constant fear is the reason for depression.
So next time you saw any fear near you, welcome it, get habitual to it, so it will never harm you.
So these are my tips or suggestions to get out of depression or anxiety, my part is over, it is now you’re time to apply them, experience them, and help others who are in that state. Have patience, “everything is going to be alright”.
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