15 Ways to Fight Depression (A Self-Help Guide) www.bettertherapy.com /blog/ways-to-fight-depression/

Rune Moelbak

Are you or someone you know depressed?

Not to worry…

In this comprehensive, yet simple and practical, self-help guide, I will give you an overview offifteen of the most effective techniques psychologists use to help their clients overcomedepression.

Let’s go through each technique one at a time:

1. Get Active:

When we become depressed our body often startsto shut down. We become lethargic, don’t want to doanything, and feel like every little task is a hassle. Tocounteract this tendency, behaviorists have longsuggested that one of the best ways to fightdepression is to get your body reactivated.

One way to do this is to exercise. When youexercise, your body releases endorphins into theblood stream and this produces a calming effect.You might even consider lifting some weights sincethe succession of straining your muscles andrelaxing your muscles mimics another psychologicaltechnique to calm the nervous system calledprogressive muscle relaxation.

Even if exercising seems like too formidable a taskat first, start out by just going for a 30 minute walk,or getting out and about in small ways, even if just to run errands. Any activities you do outsidethe house will help to make you feel that you are accomplishing something, and will counteractthe vicious cycle of shame, guilt and inadequacy that comes from procrastination, sittingaround, sleeping, or giving up.

The behavioral approach to fighting depression very much prioritizes doing over thinking andfeeling. Even if you don’t feel like doing something or can think of many reasons not to, if you

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participate in activities, these behaviors will bring rewards and will ultimately change how youfeel and think.

Think of it a bit like getting into a new series on TV or reading a novel. You sometimes have tojust get started, in order to eventually get interested, and subsequently have an internalmotivation to watch another episode or read the next chapter. What matters is taking the firststep.

Watch a video on progressive muscle relaxation to try it out now:

Also Read: > Depression and Anxiety: Exercise Eases Symptoms

2. Change an Emotion with an Emotion:

Les Greenberg who has studied the changeprocesses in therapy has identified “changing anemotion with an emotion” as one of the keyprinciples of change.

If you are feeling sad, for example, that emotionwhich alerts you to a loss or absence of somethingyou want, also contains a potential for getting intouch with other emotions, which will change thenature of your sadness.

You may for example access your anger about whatyou have lost or wish you had. This would meanturning the sadness outward and expressing yourindignation at the people who were not there for youand the injustice of things not going your way. Theanger that can be healing is righteous anger (orstanding up for yourself), not sad angry complaining,but this is something we will come back to later inthis guide (See principle #6: Be Assertive ).

The sadness you feel can also be transformed through a grieving process which allows you to2/22

actively let go of what will never be or what is forever lost. Oftentimes people stay captive in adepressed state because they are not able to accept their reality. They continue to wish that itbe different. Grieving allows you to move on and focus on building a new reality (See principle#14: Mourn Childhood Losses).

By going into your emotions, rather than avoiding them, and by accessing another emotion thatis contrary to or different from the original emotion, you can transform how you feel.

Marsha Linehan, has made this one of the general principles in her Dialectical BehaviorTherapy. She recommends that when you are sad, you watch something funny on TV, or whenyou are angry, you engage in charity work. She calls this principle “acting opposite youremotion”. Some might consider this “fake” or “inauthentic”, but that would assume that youconsider your real self to be static or equal to your current emotional state. Research, however,shows that we have many selves and that different emotions organize and mobilize differentversions of ourselves. That is why, an introverted person, can become extroverted in certainenvironments and at certain times, or why you can feel different about yourself aroundstrangers than around friends.

Here is a tutorial on using the “Opposite Emotion” Skill as one of the ways to fight depression:

3. Challenge Your Negative Beliefs:

When you are depressed, your emotional state oftenhijacks your thoughts. You feel sluggish and youthink to yourself “I am so lazy, so useless, soworthless”. These thoughts then make you feel evenmore hopeless and depressed. One way to activelybattle this self-reinforcing downward spiral is tocatch your thoughts and challenge them by usinglogical evidence to assess their truthfulness.

First you write down the things you tell yourself thatmake you feel down. Then, when you have becomeaware of the specific statements that run throughyour head, you subject your thoughts to what wecan call “thought court”.

A thought court is a way for both the prosecutor andthe defender to have their evidence heard so that wecan better arrive at a true verdict that takes all theevidence into account,

In this case the prosecutor is the self-critical voice that tells you many negative things aboutyourself. We want to hear the evidence the prosecutor can submit to support the negative

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claims, and we want you to write it all down.

However, we also want to hear from the defender, who in this case would be the more positivevoice that looks for exceptions or evidence to the contrary.

When looking at and comparing both sides, we can then arrive at a more factually and logicallyaccurate verdict, and can write down a new thought which is more balanced and fair.

To get started with the exercise, take a piece of paper and draw separate columns. In onecolumn you write down the evidence for what you are telling yourself (the prosecutor), inanother you write down evidence against (the defender).

You have to imagine yourself making a case for and against your judgment of yourself in acourtroom in front of a judge. This means putting forth your strongest evidence for and against,and really trying to prove and disprove your case. Then when you have all the evidence lined upside by side, you have to take both sides into account and formulate a thought or judgment thatis more accurate and more fair. When looking at the evidence, your thought “I am so useless”,might change into “sometimes I feel useless, but there have been many times when I haveadded value and contributions to others”.

The goal of the exercise is to demonstrate how thoughts influence the way we feel, and how wecan change how we feel, by thinking in a more fair and balanced way.

You can make a copy of the following thought record to get started, or you can click the linkbelow to download it:

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Download: > Thought Record

4. Identify Logical Errors in Your Thinking:

This principle is closely related to the previous, butworth considering in its own right. When emotionstake over your thinking, you are prone to base yourself-assessment on faulty logic. One of the bestways to fight depression is consequently to examinethe faulty logics that are contributing to making youfeel bad about yourself.

Cognitive therapists have identified a wholecatalogue of faulty logics depressed people use.These include:

All or nothing thinking (losing the ability toassess yourself as falling somewhere on acontinuum, rather than belonging definitely toone category or another, F.ex: There is nothinggood about me)

Mind-reading (assuming you know what anotherperson thinks, feels, or intends, withoutchecking with that person: F.ex. this person doesn’t like me, I just know)

Mental filter (ignoring any evidence that would dispute your conclusion. F.ex. ignoring theA you got on an exam, and focusing only on the C you got on another)

Jumping to conclusion (drawing premature conclusions and leaving out consideration ofother possibilities. F.ex., he did not respond to my text-message, so he does not like me).

Noticing when you engage in such faulty logic, will help you when you challenge your negativebeliefs (see principle #3), and will allow you to step back from your emotional conclusions ratherthan be swept up in them and treat them as if they were truths.

A list of some of the most common logical errors are reviewed below:

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Download: > Cognitive Distortion Checklist

5. Identify What You Need:6/22

Emotions are appraisals of an environment inrelation to one’s needs. They tell you whether or notthings are going your way or getting in your way.When you get lost in your anger, your loneliness, oryour sad complaints (blame), without fullyunderstanding what it is you need, and why it is thatyour life situation is being given a negativeemotional appraisal, you end up getting stuck.

However, every emotion gives you information aboutwhat it is you value, want, or need, and if you canget in touch with that, you will have more agencyand control over getting what it is you really want.One of the ways to fight depression is therefore tounlock the unfulfilled need contained in youremotional frustrations.

For example: If you are stuck in a kind of grief thatdoesn’t seem to get better or resolve itself, it may be because you are reluctant to let go of thecomfort and safety that comes from holding on to a loved one. You may be afraid of finallyletting go, because you are afraid of the pain of feeling abandoned and empty. Your stucknessin grief reveals to you that you have a need to feel loved and held. This awareness might spuryou to more actively pursue ways to feel loved and held by other people in your life, which canthen free you to finally grieve your loss.

Another person might be stuck in the angry complaints against their romantic partner for beinginconsiderate or absent-minded, but the angry complaints at feeling wronged might obscure thesadness and longing that comes from the need to feel close.

Once you realize what it is you want or what it is you are missing, you can more directly ask forit or attempt to achieve it. You can then get unstuck from an emotion that will otherwise lingerbecause it can’t achieve its aim.

6. Express Your Anger and Be Assertive:

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An old theory of depression is that it is anger turnedinward. Although this is somewhat simplistic, it isoften the case that people who feel guilty or fearfulof asserting what they want end up feeling passive,sad, and unhappy. Depression can therefore oftenbe a sign to you that you are not standing up foryourself on issues that really matter, or that you arenot allowing yourself to set an important boundary.One of the best ways to fight depression is thereforeto become more assertive and explicit about yourneeds and wishes.

It is important for you to realize that anger is animportant emotion that helps you realize when yourneeds are being frustrated. Only if you can allowyourself to feel your anger, can you examine whatneeds might not be met and take action to correct abad situation.

Some people are scared of anger because they associate it with being out of control, violent, ordestructive, and they may think of it as antithetical to maintaining strong bonds with others.They may fear that if they express their anger, others will leave, get annoyed, not care anymore,and so on.

The truth is, however, that anger comes in many forms, and does not have to be destructive ifhandled skillfully. There is a difference between angry complaining, and righteous anger, andbetween aggression and assertiveness. In the one situation the anger blames and destroys,whereas in the other, the anger asserts and conveys confidence. Learning when and when notto trust and express your anger is a necessary skill for you to learn if you don’t want to live apassive life.

Also Read: > What Do I Do With My Anger?

7. Learn to Accept Yourself as You Are:

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We often grow up thinking that parts of ourselvesare not acceptable or good enough. These kinds ofexperiences of being flawed or not possessingcertain traits, can often lead to a pursuit to becomesomeone we are not.

Many people end up living lives that attempt to makeup for a perceived flaw. If you felt different from yourpeers when you were growing up because yourparents lived in a trailer park, you might feelcompelled in your life to compensate for thisperceived inferiority, by measuring your self-worthagainst how much money you are making in yourcareer. Your life might become a compulsive pursuitof status and prestige, but inside you are still thatwounded child who just doesn’t feel good enough.

Many people pursue some ideal version of who theywant to be that simultaneously passes judgment onwho they really are. Because they are not accepting themselves, but always have to be better,smarter, richer, and so on, they are destined to live a life of dissatisfaction.

Karen Horney, has written an excellent book about all the ways we attempt to make up for ourperceived flaws through what she calls a “pursuit of glory”. I recommend that you read it if youfind yourself having impossible standards that you continue to resent yourself for not living upto.

Also Read: > Low Self-Esteem and the Flight from Self

8. Engage in Pleasurable Activities:

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When you are depressed you often don’t feel likegetting out of the house or doing anything. You justwant to stick your head under the covers anddisconnect your phone line. However, there is goodevidence that if you fight this urge to withdraw fromthe world and force yourself to get out and to dothings, you will start to feel less depressed.

In behavioral activation therapy depressed clientsare coached to schedule at least one activity everyday that involves getting out of the house, and doingsomething active, even if they don’t feel like it.

You can keep the activity small at first, so you don’tfeel overwhelmed, but you do have to commit to itand give it a shot.

Start with an activity of 30 minutes that you couldpossibly imagine would give you some joy. Perhapsgo for a walk in the park, go get an ice cream, go tothe library to look for a book that might interest you, treat yourself to a café latte in a coffeeshop, or take yourself to the movies.

The important point here is that you don’t need to “feel like” doing it, but simply agree to do itanyway and treat it as an experiment.

The experiment is to compare how you felt before you did the activity and how you felt afterdoing the activity. Be a scientist and rate your depression from 1-10 before going out and do thesame after returning. Now see if there is any change in your score. My best bet is that you willfeel less depressed after doing the activity, not more.

Over time, you can increase the time or frequency of the pleasant activities you put in yourschedule, but the important thing is that you stick to your plan even if you don’t feel like it.

Try to follow this advice for one week and schedule one pleasant activity for each day of theweek. Then assess how it went and compare how you felt at the beginning of the week and atthe end of the week.

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Download: > Big List of Pleasurable Activities (created by Lisa M. Groesz, Ph.D.)

Example of an activity schedule you can use:

Simply plug in the pleasurable activities from the list above and rate yourself before and afterthe activity to note the impact it had on your mood:

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Download: > Activity Schedule Worksheet

9. Do Something You Are Good At:

Depression often goes together with feelingworthless or ineffective. An anti-dote to this feelingis to do something you feel good at. The sense ofaccomplishment and mastery that comes from a jobwell done will help rebuild your confidence and isone of the best ways to fight depression.

Remember to leave your all or nothing thinking atthe door: You do not need to be good at everythingin order to grant yourself a victory. If you are havinga hard time remembering something you doparticularly well, think back to earlier times in yourlife when you felt accomplished, or when somebodysaid you had a talent or knack for something.

Even if you come up empty, you can still giveyourself an experience of success simply by thinkingof a small project to complete: Clean your livingroom, look up a recipe and bake a cake fromscratch, take care of some pending issue like gettingyour driver’s license renewed or following up on ane-mail you have been putting off.

You might not feel like doing it, but do it anyway, and make it manageable enough not tooverwhelm yourself.

For starters just do one activity each day, and remember to pad yourself on the back and enjoythe fact that you accomplished it.

Challenge any negative thinking that tries to minimize or undo your accomplishment. At the endof the day, you are better off now than you were before.

10. Express Your Emotions:

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Thinking and feeling things on your own is not thesame as expressing them to others or even writingthem down in a diary.

According to psychologists Robert Leahy, DennisTirch, and Lisa Napolitano: “Simply activating,expressing, and reflecting on emotion may haveameliorative effects for depression”

Something happens when we express ourselvesthat is very healing. Oftentimes we discover what wefeel when we talk. We often don’t know what wethink until we see what we say. This is in large partwhy psychotherapy is so healing. It helps usdiscover ourselves through talking, which gives us abetter sense of ourselves and how we feel.

Of course there are other benefits to expressingyourself as well. If you open up to a trusted person itgives you the opportunity to feel validated,understood, and heard, and this in turn may makeyou feel more normal. It may help you to get your need for closeness met, and may give you theopportunity to ask for what you need.

If you don’t readily have other people available whom you feel comfortable opening up to, youshould consider writing your thoughts and feelings down in a journal, participating in on-lineforum, looking for meet-up groups to join, calling a hotline (or chatting online), or finding atherapist to talk to.

If finances are tight, you can utilize Open Path Psychotherapy Collective, which is a directory oftherapists who offer therapy session for $30-50. You might also look up therapy groups to join,which will usually run you between $50-80 for a 90 minute session.

You can also get involved in charity work, which will help you take your mind of yourself, whilebuilding connections that might turn into lasting friendships. One good place to look forvolunteer opportunities is: Volunteermatch

Open Path Psychotherapy Collective is a directory of therapists who offer low cost counseling:

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11. Learn to Forgive and Move On:

Many people end up being angry and sad aboutwhat they wish were different but can’t reallychange. Maybe they wanted a different father whowas more involved in their life, or maybe theycontinue to feel they can’t meet the expectations oftheir mother, whom they wish would love them forwho they are and not for their accomplishments.

In many situations such as these, people don’t fullymove into the loss, but continue to protest the loss.They become stuck in their sadness and anger(often an undifferentiated mix of the two), and areunable to go through the grieving process of lettinggo.

Emotion research conducted by Leslie Greenbergshows that the way to facilitate the grieving processis to fully experience and express the anger andsadness you feel so you can more fully understandwhat you lost and what need was frustrated.

Once you have fully understood this, you then need to move into an understanding of thelimitations of the other person who did not provide you with what you needed.

A good way to accomplish this is to try to enter into the other person you are angry with or hurtby, and to view them like you do when you are most angry or most sad. Then you write out whatyou imagine them thinking and feeling, speaking as if you were them.

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Inhabiting the voice of your critical mother, you might for example write: “I did not love you. Youwere never who I wanted to have as a child”. Continue to write until you get it all out.

Then once you have written out what this critical/ abandoning mother would say, you shift backinto your angry/ sad self and express how the critical mother makes you feel. You continue touse a 1st person voice and this time you try to get in touch with what you really needed and didnot get from your mother. You might for example say: “You really hurt me when you don’t acceptme (sadness)” or “I hate you for never appreciating me” (anger). Again, continue until you havewritten out everything you are angry or sad about.

Then you switch back to being your mother again, and try to imagine how she would respond toknowing about the pain she caused you. You might for example say: “I never meant to hurt youthis way. I was going through a difficult time in my life and I did not know how to show the loveyou deserved. I tried in my own way to love you, but I realize it wasn’t good enough”. Try toenter fully into the regretful and compassionate voice and perspective that might be evoked inthe other person if they truly understood how they impacted you.

Finally, you switch back to being yourself again and write out a response that indicates whetheror not you can understand where the other person was coming from and can take in their newmessage. In this case, you tell your mother whether or not you can hear that she is regretful andfeels bad. You also express whether or not you can forgive her and accept that she did in factlove you, even if she did not always know how to show it.

Switching roles between yourself and the other person, and writing out the dialogue using first-person voice, is a version of the empty chair technique used by emotion-focused therapists andgestalt therapists to help clients resolve unfinished business.

Example of the empty chair technique to resolving unfinished business:

12. Examine Your Relationships:

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People don’t exist in isolation and how we feel aboutourselves often depends on how others treat us. Weall have a need to have parts of ourselves wecherish seen, understood, and validated by others. Ifit is important to me to feel valued for my intellect,then I need to feel like others around me think I amsmart. If it is important to me to be seen as helpful,then I need to surround myself with people who viewme as kind and considerate.

Oftentimes, we begin to feel depressed or unhappywhen the people we interact with don’t view us theway we would like to be viewed. Maybe we are in anintimate relationship with someone who alwayscomplains about our shortcomings, or maybe wehave friends who take advantage of us or treat uswith disrespect.

One of the ways to fight depression is therefore totake an inventory of the people you spend time withand ask yourself: Are these people good for my self-esteem, or do they drain me or make mefeel bad about myself?

Then make a decision to either cut people out who bring you negativity, or to talk to them aboutwhat you need from them, or what you don’t like about your respective roles.

As with any confrontation, it is much better to keep the focus on your own feelings and needsthan on what the other person has done wrong. Use “I” statements rather than “you” statements.Express how you feel, rather than what you think about the other person. Approach the otherperson in a soft and vulnerable way, rather than in an angry and attacking manner.

13. Practice Self-Compassion:

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Many people who are depressed are veryunforgiving of their own mistakes, but verycompassionate and understanding of those ofothers. You might have a critical voice inside thattells you that what you do is never good enough andkeeps beating you up about past regrets.

One way to challenge this negative self criticism isto deploy technique #3: Challenge Negative Beliefs.

Another is to practice self-compassion.

Self-compassion means adopting a loving andcaring attitude toward yourself that is similar to theone you would adopt toward a good friend orsomeone you love. It is a way to remind yourselfthat you are human, have frailties, and makemistakes, but that you do the best you can givenyour circumstances, and deserve to be loved even ifyou make choices you are not proud of.

The Self-Compassion website by Dr. Kristin Neff contains 8 different exercises to cultivate akinder and more accepting attitude toward yourself.

Visit website: > Self-Compassion.Org

If you find yourself not feeling worthy of compassion or feeling too hateful toward yourself toattempt any of these exercises, try to imagine a kind and wise friend who cares about youunconditionally.

What would this friend tell you when you begin to slide into shame and start attacking yourself?Can you remind yourself that all of us have regrets, fears, and struggles? Can you step backfrom the flow of your thoughts and emotions to recognize that your suffering connects you tothe rest of humanity, knowing that all human beings feel pain, guilt, and regret?

One way to get more comfortable with having loving and kind feelings toward yourself is to17/22

engage in meditative practices, such as the Self-Compassion meditation illustrated in the videobelow:

14. Mourn Childhood Losses:

Some psychologists think of depression as the lackof acceptance of the full scope of all your feelings.According to psychologist and psychoanalyst AliceMiller, for example, depression is what happenswhen we attempt to escape from the childhood painof not being acceptable in some way by trying tobecome what others want us to be.

Maybe we learned that our laughter was too loud,that our needs were too great, or that our anger wastoo destructive, and the implicit message we got wasthat our parents would not love us if we didn’t get ridof these impulses or feelings.

The fear of losing affection therefore started tooverwrite our natural need for self-expression andwe became more concerned with emotionaladaptation than with fully being ourselves.

The problem is, however, that many of us keep onliving our life as if we could redeem ourselves andgain the approval we were missing in childhoodsimply by being different. We still try to win our parents approval, even though the approval weare seeking is an approval we needed in the past. The loss of love we were seeking has alreadyhappened, and no effort can change this fact. Instead of chasing a way to redeem ourselves orrepair an old wound, we are therefore better off grieving the loss and letting go.

This might sound depressing, but it really isn’t. Only when we can allow ourselves to truly mournour losses can we get unstuck from the dynamic of trying to gain approval by being someoneother than who we really are.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, which means the freedom toexperience all of life’s emotions and urges, including those which we previously wanted to pushaway.

Being able to experience envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, loneliness, sadness, and despair,means being whole, and being whole means living life fully and being fully human.

As one psychotherapy patient tells it to her psychoanalyst:18/22

It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight but the ones against whichI had fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean,helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful, or confused; and above all, sad and lonely. It wasprecisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain thatI now understand something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something thatI could not have learned from any book!

(Quote from: The Drama of The Gifted Child)

If you would like to read more about grieving your childhood losses so you can be free to beyourself, I recommend the following highly acclaimed book by Alice Miller:

15. Face Your Fears:

One of the ways depression can look is as apervasive sense of indifference, lack of interests,and lack of zest for life. Some people feel empty,don’t know where they are going, have few or noopinions about matters around them, or avoid closeencounters. They are emotionally shut down,alienated from themselves and others, and say theyfeel numb or that life feels like they are just goingthrough the motions.

Oftentimes this anhedonic type of depression isfear-based. People shrink from life or shut downtheir emotions because they encountered situationsin their life that were too emotionally overwhelming,and too frightening to deal with at the time. Thiscould either be due to a specific traumatic event,such as violence or abuse, or due to a silentsuffering such as emotional neglect orabandonment.

Whatever may have happened, the person learned to survive by getting rid of emotions thatwere too unpleasant, by lowering their expectations of life, or by not risking the rejection anddisappointment that comes from getting excited or caring about something.

Sometimes working through traumatic events requires:

#2 Changing an Emotion with an Emotion

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I have described how this works in the case of a trauma, in the following article:

Read: > How to Overcome Trauma and Making Peace with Your Past

At other times you may confront irrational or unfounded fears head on using something calledexposure therapy:

Exposure therapy helps you take small calculated risks to confront your fears in a way that feelsgradual and manageable.

If you are fearful of rejection, for example, you could go and ask out the most attractive personyou know. But this would likely terrify you, so you have set yourself too big of a goal. On yourexposure hierarchy asking someone attractive out for a date, might be the biggest challenge foryou, and should be saved for last.

Smaller more manageable experiments would be to call up a friend you haven’t talked to for awhile, or ask a colleague out for coffee. It might even be to say “hi” to a stranger or make eyecontact for at least 2 seconds. It all depends on how big your fears are.

The goal of exposure therapy is to construct a hierarchy of activities according to perceived riskand difficulty that gradually helps you confront your fear of rejection.

Exposure therapy works because fear is just an emotion and emotions tend to decrease inintensity over time. By facing your fears, instead of avoiding things that make you afraid, youwill gradually experience that you have “nothing to fear but fear itself” and that the actualsituation is not that scary after all.

To learn how to construct an exposure hierarchy, click to download this handy guide bypsychologist Danny Gagnon:

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Download: > Exposure Hierarchy Instructions

You can also read more about confronting your fears in a step-by-step manner in David Tolin’sBook: Face Your Fears

15 Ways to Fight Depression:

Congratulations! You now know 15 of the most effective psychological ways to fight depression. Pick one skill to practice or learn about at a time, and you will soon improve your confidence,self-esteem, and overall well-being…

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Now that you know what to do, why not take a moment to help a friend by pinning theinfographic or sharing this blog post on social media or in a personal e-mail? (see optionsbelow)

About Me: I am Rune Moelbak, Ph.D., psychologist and depressionspecialist in Houston Texas. Visit my website for more information aboutthe treatment of depression.

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