Depression and what it's really like

back on topic, i would probably be better off being much busier. i think my reactions have been due to living with a workaholic family member who has trouble talking/thinking about his feelings.

the "business" thing is interesting. i wanna say "yes", being busy will help you feel better, especially if the busy in question is at least somewhat physically demanding. days i sit in my room and stare at a screen (or the inside of a blanket mound) are the fucking worst. if i somehow force myself to go for a walk or do some yardwork or w/e, i'm all but guaranteed to feel better by the end of the day. the more exhausted, the more content.

two way street, though. when i feel better, i'm naturally more active. and when i full miserable, any kind of engagement seems impossible. maybe that means it's a chicken and/or egg. yin & yang, you know what i mean (just nod politely).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD_ltIXTaN8

it's not impossible though

no, true. just a heavy "seems".

like this weekend i had all this work-work to catch up on, and it was kind of a big deal, and i really wanted to do it, to get it done. but i just couldn't. it seemed i couldn't. i could look at and think about it, but something inside me made me not actually do it while also doing nothing else for hours on end. i felt horrible the whole time. every minute i spent avoiding it, i felt worse. but that's what the thing in me wanted, and it won.

today was better.

procrastination is the worst, i agree.

I have a creature like that inside me too. It just sits there, saying 'no thank you' to everything. I try to fight it, other times I try to coax it with promises, usually it gets its way. I don't know how to overcome this, and I am definitely in an anxiety avoidance spiral atm (though not, I think, really depressed).

Busy is fine, as long as it's busy with things that aren't loaded with too much significance. I nearly bailed out of doing the bike ride I did Sat night, purely because a lot of people wished me luck and I got self-conscious, and then I got scared of failing, and it v. nearly shut me down. So grapes are all very well (seriously, seems like a good tip), but how long do you gotta spend graping before you get the hang of life?

forever, if (ideally) only intermittently

tlg do u wanna play mini golf on saturday

xp hear both of you on procrastinating. it's the darkest, most miserable feeling in the world watching yourself fail at doing something in real time, and then sit there at the end of it all knowing something important has to get done but you just watched yourself not do anything about it. it's like watching you fail yourself, plus the specter of responsibilities is still hanging over your head.

in the past i tried to overcome that with sheer, brutal will power, but after years of it i ended up having a nervous breakdown. therapy and learning to think differently are much nicer and more helpful, and i'm finally feeling a little sprig of healthy motivation.

but how long do you gotta spend graping before you get the hang of life?

isolated for display purposes

a freudian moment:

i am thinking that in my own life "the creature" is basically an oppositional-defiant stage that i locked down on during my childhood and never outgrew. it seems separate from me-me because i've repressed the emotions that caused me to say "NO!" in the first place. as result, it lingers in the cave, the visible manifestation of a hidden part of myself. worst part is that it controls me like a puppet on strings. (or a puppet on hands. why do we say "on strings"? do the strings make the puppet more controlled? no, it's a fucking puppet. something's gonna control it no matter what. we should just say "like a puppet". note to self.)

that's my take, anyway. and yeah, i feel you 100% (zora) on "loaded with too much significance". if i let too many people know what i'm up to, then they start to get invested in it, and the "NO!" kicks in. in order to actually do anything, i have to keep it private. this does not always sit well with those who care about me.

mini golf is good

for something sufficiently toad-like
squats in me, too;
its hunkers are heavy as hard luck
and cold as snow

our culture undervalues leisure time in that it convinces you that you should be guilty about not working, enables you to be contacted from the office, and sets up bad expectations

the majority of my depression comes from not doing things but from being anxious about things I have planned to do, when in fact what I do instead (binge watch television shows, find excuses to not clean, go out drinking) are what often end up actually being depressing.

if I could somehow have a queue of things to do that I had no idea existed and trust it, I think I'd be content most of the time. the problem is that I know what there is in the queue, and I dread or attach anxiety

mini golf is good

― the late great, Monday, July 22, 2013 7:44 PM (4 minutes ago)

i have not played mini golf since forever basically. it would be good. i think i would have to take up smoking and get cop sunglasses though. and go bald tbh. drunk, stinking and bald seems like the only credible approach.

you are talking about credibility and mini golf. the entire point of mini golf is that there are no pretentions and no credibility!

mini golf is the opposite of depression and no one cares how well you play at all, ime. then you go out for ice cream.

tbh i have no idea where to play mini golf even if tlg didn't live 3000 miles from me, but it's pretty nice that he accepted

the only mini golf i know is 3000 miles away and called "puetz". it is between a home depot and a crack store, across the street from a cemetery. it seems ill-starred.

the majority of my depression comes from not doing things but from being anxious about things I have planned to do

I'm not depressed and this is really just a minor procrastination foible but the other day I had to write a cover letter and I felt not up to the task so I avoided it for a while but everything else I was doing to avoid it took on a frantic tinge and my anxiety kept building until I hated that my other fun activities were being spoiled by it. At that point I got mulish enough to write the damn letter b/c it was ruining my good leisure time NOT to do it.

If the contrary, stubborn part gets contrary enough about the things it's not doing, does it reverse and become useful?

I don't even think I wrote that in English!

What's really bad is when I feel bad about doing "fun" stuff instead of working on important stuff, but the fun stuff isn't even really that fun!

fun stuff is the worst

lots of effs in 'fun stuff,' as in failing

ok jumbo multi-reply post, sorry for length

the activity scheduling is supposed to be every day. happy people are "busy", in general

I prob. agree with the latter as long as there is still some time for relaxing/thinking (obv. in GRAPES there is), and I wd do well to use my time more busily, but there is no way I could go to work and still have time and energy for all six GRAPES every evening. I'd have to make up the numbers with daily basics like cooking, eating, walking home, but that stuff is clearly not sufficient or I'd be less crazy already.

do they have to be big events? e.g. how small can "social" be? Actually meeting people? Phoning, email, a Facebook comment? 2 sentences of smalltalk to a shop cashier? (this is an actual "good first step" that social anxiety books suggest btw)

like this weekend i had all this work-work to catch up on, and it was kind of a big deal, and i really wanted to do it, to get it done. but i just couldn't. it seemed i couldn't. i could look at and think about it, but something inside me made me not actually do it while also doing nothing else for hours on end.

this is my #1 most upsetting problem/symptom and one that ever since my first bout of depression I've never 100% shaken off, even in the relatively undepressed years. even in good phases i feel like i'm treading water with minor busywork while ignoring Big, Complicated, Important things.

does anyone have any tips on beating it? mental approaches, organisational skills, medication, anything. talking of which...

i'm really feeling this book "on depression" lately--the guy is head of the tufts mood disorders program . . . the most sensible thinking i think i've encountered on the use of pharmaceuticals to treat this stuff.

going back nearly 2 weeks here but HOOS could you summarise this guy's angle on medication? (this is the book by S. Nassir Ghaemi, right?)

I'd have to make up the numbers with daily basics like cooking, eating, walking home, but that stuff is clearly not sufficient or I'd be less crazy already.

not quite! one of the things involved in this method is I think that you are looking at it through the frame of GRAPES - say you cook yourself something for dinner, and because you do it every night you don't notice it or you think "ugh i am just shoving whatever together, i never do anything new", but if you go into it thinking "this is a thing I do a lot and I am satisfyingly competent at, and i'm doing this because it will give me a sense of accomplishment" then you are thinking about how you live in a way more positive and involved way, and that's an important thing. It cannot be asking you to add six new things to your routine a night! You would never have any time to sleep.

That makes sense. Thanks! I guess if you get about a 50/50 ratio per day of something you wouldn't have done otherwise to reframing existing drudgework in a fresh and confidence-boosting light that's a pretty good scheme.

(thinks of borrowing it with the S removed, which probably suggests that my attitude to S is malignant and fear-inducing and should be my top priority in any new frame. blah)

busyness seems like another kind of escapism

Heh this is a way more succinct way to describe the last thing I said about myself upthread. I get that busyness doesn't have to be this way for most people, and there were times in my life when making myself more busy was definitely the right move, but it very much feels like escapism for me. Still not sure what the answer is exactly. I think of this song often:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw_IJaHdlts

being busy is only an escape when you treat it like that. healthy eating and exercise can be an escape, too, but it doesn't make it inherently bad. it's how you approach it, but i think it's an essential part of living a halfway decent life. prob depends on what your personal preferences are, too... personally i prefer to be doing lots of stuff which makes depression all the much more worse.

Yeah for sure. There's nothing even necessarily unhealthy about the things I'm scheduling myself to be busy with - but if I'm doing it because I can't face being unhappy with my life as it is (which I think is the case), it's escapism. I will say I'll take being busy over not being busy, if I'm not gonna be content with myself either way.

what are you escaping by being busy? being busy usually involves more engagement in the world outside your home, or at least some sort of furthering of the self.

Thinking about the ways I'm unhappy with my life. Sure, every experience where I'm engaging with other people furthers me in some way. But I notice a lot of things I busy myself with tend to be things that come easy to me. Going to restaurants or playing board games with friends, collaborating on music projects. I use those activities to procrastinate harder, long-term goals that ultimately might help me feel better about myself. If that makes sense.

being busy usually involves more engagement in the world outside your home, or at least some sort of furthering of the self.

― mh, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 7:36 AM (27 minutes ago)

i have spend days "busily" retagging mp3's in a dark, filthy room

not recently, but activity doesn't = health

[spent]

Haha and like contenderizer said, sometimes being busy involves me putzing around for hours on a dumb mashup of Stereo MCs' "Connected" and Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" that no one will ever hear

now you guys are playing word games w the word busy

happy people do a variety of activities and don't spend weekends staring at the wall

if you're unhappy, it's been shown that getting up and doing things will make you feel better than staring at the wall

"facing your unhappiness" - i have no idea what this means tbh

c sharp major otm upthread

the idea is not that you're adding six new things - though you might be if you're doing nothing right now - but that you're using a checklist to make sure you're engaging yourself in all the components of a happy life

"social" can be as simple as a phone call or an email to a friend (though personally i try to schedule things to get off the computer)

"relaxation" can be a fifteen minute stretch

"accomplishment" can be picking up your clothes off the floor, or doing the dishes, or getting something done at work, etc

it's possible to do activity scheduling and still be depressed, that's for sure. doing a variety of things with your time is a necessary but not sufficient condition for happiness

but i wonder about the extent to which "solving big life problems" is a component of happiness. everyone has "big life problems" that they procrastinate on. i don't think most "happy" people have it all figured out either. i think attaining happiness has more to do with lots of small shifts in attitude and lots of small, daily accomplishments

your third eye opens up, you cross off the big life problems of your list and you're never depressed again -> has happened to exactly zero people

it sounds sort of dumb, but my therapist had me write up a list of my Big Life Problems a while back (not including self-negating shit like "i am a loser and everyone hates me"). then i was to break each of those problems into the individual tasks that would be required to resolve them, or at least to begin resolving them.

turned out that they weren't all that big after all. i'd spent so long avoiding really thinking about them that my sense of their scale had ballooned out of all proportian.

^

that advice cannot be said enough.

i feel like i need to get serious about my phyiscal fitness to keep working on my depression; unfortunately it's tied up with some heavy emotional stuff. every time i make progress it's like the nazguls start chasing after me or something.

If nazgul were chasing me I reckon I'd be exercising pretty hard, it's when they catch up you have to hide under a rock. Install Zombies, Run!?

they never catch up, it's just shit from the past. but oh lordy is it not fun: imagine spending every day in abject terror and feeling excruciating, gut wrenching pain so bad you disassociate from everything. and everyone gives you a hard time why you're not smiling and bouncing around like everyone else, and you feel you're disappointing everyone, and yourself, etc. etc. not a good scene. at least I "get it" now, so there's some positive light here.

contend, that's not a bad way to think about things probably

Yeah it's really good advice, not dumb at all. I was following it for a while, and I need to again.

my big life problem is mostly that I opt to worry about all the small problems and do nothing about them. if I actually did them, I'd be able to tackle important things.

worrying about how I need to vacuum and do the dishes keep me comfortably insane

hey spacecadet I can only do stuff when I feel OK and that takes work. I had this on the cover of one of my notebooks so I had to look at it everyday. it is a bit silly but maybe I don't know.. it might help you.

http://theicarusproject.net/files/basics_poster_letter_web.pdf

geez, i'm like the left guy on all those categories, except for the crusty punk thing.