My Personal Depression Survival Guide

Hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel today we are talking about depression and before I get started here I want to make it very clear that I am not a licensed counselor or therapist or psychologist I am a master student studying attachment Theory and most of what we talk about today is going to be drawn more from my own personal experiences as someone who has dealt with depression on and off for as long As I have a recollection of being alive on this Earth and someone who has done a ton of just

personal reading about it trying to find strategies and philosophies that are helpful for me personally so the things that we're going to be covering in this video are not clinical mental health advice I highly advise you to seek professional help if you're dealing with depression finding the right therapist or support groups can be humongously Tremendously instrumental in navigating difficult periods of Mental Health I like to think less of it in terms of mental health and more of it in terms of kind of holistic emotional well-being I feel like the term mental health kind of makes

something very human and very normal very clinical if that makes sense um so I prefer to talk about things like depression anxiety a lot of these kind of common seasons of life that we go Through common responses to living in a very distorted Society um I like to think of them in terms of the impact that they have on our emotional body our emotional well-being rather than using the kind of more clinical language of mental health but all of that is to say that this is not clinical mental health advice this is me talking human

being to human being about the Best strategies tools and philosophies that I have found for navigating seasons of depression and if any of this is helpful to any of you feel free to take it and leave what does not work for you we're going to start with a book recommendation so one of the best books I have read this year if not ever is the book lost connections by Johann Hari I am positive I could take an entire video to do nothing but talk to you about this book and how phenomenal it is if you

Struggle with depression or if you know someone who's struggling with depression it's probably the number one book that I recommend on depression um because it takes an incredibly critical and intelligent slant on how we look at depression and how depression is framed in our current Society in ways that aren't always accurate and that don't actually help people get better from it so lost connections by Ohana sorry an amazing read is the first thing I'm going to recommend but what I wanted to bring out of that book into this video is a particular metaphor he uses

that I personally loved and that helped click things in for me really hard which is the metaphor of mental health challenges like depression being like the smoke that alerts us to a house fire so when a house is on fire the first thing you usually see is the smoke and in the book he says if we were to treat house fires based on the most visible Symptom we would treat them with fans we would just blow away the smoke and then the house would burn down underneath it but because we have firefighters who understand that

smoke is a symptom of fire they know to go in and treat the fire and the smoke will disappear and he uses this as a metaphor for mental health so things like depression and anxiety and other challenges are often the smoke not the fire so mental health challenges are often the signal the Symptoms that are alerting us to something deeper that's going wrong in our lives maybe we're lacking meaningful connections meaningful work a sense of purpose a sense of self-esteem a sense of direction there are Myriad things that could be going wrong under the surface

that things like depression and anxiety crop up in our conscious awareness to alert us to and I want to combine that metaphor with another metaphor that is in Robert Greene's 33 Strategies of war and there's a section in that book where I'm going to paraphrase it wrong so I'm going to read directly what I wrote down from that book essentially what he says is the man with Center if suddenly fire breaks out he does the right thing immediately and quietly he ascertains the direction of the wind and rescues what matters and then he contrasts this

with the man who lacks centeredness and he says this is someone who acts haphazardly and is Unable to distinguish what is important and essential from what is unimportant and unessential and in this video I'm going to be talking about using periods of depression as that moment of pause that will allow you to respond more appropriately so the last thing that most of us think of doing when a fire breaks out is to pause and then determine quickly what it's important to do next most of us panic and run in the first direction we can think

of and I Also think that this is how many of us deal with conditions like anxiety depression or other challenges as soon as we start feeling like something is deeply wrong the natural response is to panic and to run in whatever direction we think is going to get us out of that emotional state the most quickly and what I want to propose in this video is that what can actually be tremendously helpful through seasons of depression is if we take that moment to pause Recognize that we're seeing smoke in our lives right we're having these

emotional issues we're having these physical responses crop up and it's indicating to us that there is a fire somewhere in our lives and if we can take that moment to pause look at the smoke figure out which direction it's blowing in and then figure out what matters what we need to take out of this fire and which direction we need to head in In order to make sure that the fire does not follow us we're going to be using our depression to our advantage rather than simply reacting to it and ending up in a worse

place than where we started out and the reason I want to make the philosophy around that clear is because for the first half of this video I'm not going to talk whatsoever about how to combat depression I'm actually going to recommend tools for leaning more fully into depression listening to what your Body and your mind and your emotional state might be trying to communicate to you and then in the second half of the video we're going to talk about how to consciously navigate out of depression and the reason I want to make that clear is

because I know that depression can be life-threatening it's not a silly or trivial matter so I'm definitely not recommending wallow or stay stuck in your depression but what I am recommending is stay long enough take That moment of calm and centeredness and be very aware of exactly what's happening before you try to get out of depression because when we leap too quickly and too haphazardly out of it we're at the highest risk for that smoke in that fire to just follow us right step one is figuring out which way the wind is blowing and that

is what the first half of this video is going to be all about so I'm going to talk about this in terms of steps and these don't Have to be done in order you can discard or circumnavigate or replace any steps that don't work for you but I'm going to talk about my process when I'm going through a depressive episode and what I do to help myself use that depressive episode to eventually make my life more enriching I'm not going to say better because it doesn't always make me happier it doesn't always make me more

successful or rich or whatever kind of worldly measures of success we might be Used to associating with the term better but it always makes my life deeper richer more fulfilling and ultimately more meaningfully directed when I use this process so Step One is admitting to yourself that you are in a depressive episode and that doesn't have to be the language that you use you can use the language I am going through a difficult season of my life you can use the language I am experiencing a lot of loss you can name directly what it is

that You believe is causing your depression you can say I am feeling exceptionally lonely right now I am lacking a purpose in my life right now I am missing elements of how my life used to be I am mourning my youth I am struggling to figure out where I belong in the world but I think that the number one thing that keeps depression persistent for most people and unresolved and cropping up again and again and again without resolution in our lives is when we Refuse to admit what's happening to ourselves so when we resist the

depression when we try to make our bodies and our minds perform at their usual level when our bodies and our minds are not performing at their usual level depression manifests physically it manifests in the body it impacts our energy levels it impacts our concentration it impacts the way that we show up in relationships so it has this very large and wide reaching effect on Our lives and failing to name that and acknowledge it is kind of like failing to name and acknowledge having cancer and I don't love by the way the disease model of mental

illness I think that mental and physical illnesses are alike in some ways and not alike in other ways but I think that what they have in common is their impact right when you are physically compromised you give yourself lenience and understanding around the fact that you cannot do Everything you can normally do and with depression it's no different you cannot do everything that you can normally do with the energy level that you normally have and if you are chronically resisting that what's going to happen is that often whatever part of you is feeling depressed is

going to feel unacknowledged and it's going to up the ante more and more and more until you pay attention to it at least that's how it works for me so step one is just Naming what it is that you're feeling now if you want to take this a step further and I personally recommend you do I would challenge you to find some legitimacy for your depressive episode so I think that a big reason why a lot of people struggle to acknowledge depression in themselves is because they feel as though they don't deserve to be depressed

right so there isn't enough challenge in their life or they should Be happy based on all of these things that they have that they have been told will make them happy my personal belief my personal philosophy is that depression is always legitimate it is never random it never falls out of the sky into your brain the chemical imbalances that it leads to are the natural consequences of your neurons firing over and over in a particular pattern based on the conditions of your life and so this isn't always easy to Figure out but if you have

some sort of gut intuition or gut feeling about what it is that is causing your depression I encourage you to give that thing as much legitimacy as you can even if it doesn't make sense on the surface so an example of that is at points in the past that's meant me looking at my life and going wow I am exceptionally lonely I have so few real-life connections right now right I imagine that's been a common one for a lot of people over the pandemic And honestly in the years that followed because I think we adjusted

to a lot of forms of digital connection that don't give us that same kind of deep embodied felt sense of human to human interaction and for a lot of us that's become the norm I think a lot more people are a lot more lonely than they realize and that can be a massive massive if not I would say the number one prevailing cause of depression right now so looking at something like I'm lonely I am maybe Exceedingly stressed maybe I feel purposeless whatever it is that you think might be causing your depression try to give

that thing a name and just try it on and see how it feels and I'm actually going to plug lost connections again here as a book that is really brilliant for highlighting some of the reasons why people tend to become depressed that I believe in Western Society we really don't talk about enough so I really recommend picking up That book if you're kind of stuck on the why behind your depressive episode and just trying on some of the different ideas and seeing if anything fits if anything feels right when you read it but don't worry

for now Step One is enough enough just saying to yourself I'm noticing that I am experiencing depression is all you need to do for step one step two put yourself under observation and try to become as conscious as humanly possible about Which stories you're telling yourself as well as which real life events are leading to which body States now this step is an ongoing life skill that I encourage you to develop whether or not you are depressed and it's also very difficult and takes a lifelong process of honing in order to get this skill down

pat so do not panic if you can't do this particularly well at first but what I encourage you to do if you are struggling with depression is become Very mindful about things like which time of day do you feel the most depressed versus which time of day might you feel less depressed on average do you wake up feeling okay most days and then watch your mental and emotional wellbeing being slowly decline over the course of the day or is it sort of the opposite so for myself the kind of danger zone tends to be afternoon

for whatever reason and after a lot of self-observation I've learned that if I Hit a depressive slump in the afternoon there is nothing I can do if I am home alone trying to do my work that will allow me to focus my focus will disappear my body will sink deeper and deeper into a feeling of helplessness and the best thing I can do is get outside and be around people doesn't need to be people I'm interacting with I can go to the mall I can walk to a coffee shop I can walk around the park

but I need to be outside and around People in order to avoid dissociating so that's kind of part one of this is noticing when and in what situations you feel more or less hopeless overwhelmed depressed anxious whatever you want to call it and step two is notice if there are any particular recurring thought patterns you have that are triggering a body state of those feelings so there is one period where I realized that I was becoming incredibly anxious in my body anytime I even thought about answering My work email and the amount of time I

would actually spend answering my work email was maybe an hour or two a day and that's even including time where I would just be like in my kitchen thinking about how I was going to respond and it didn't really make sense to me because at the time I loved my job I really liked what I did I found it interesting and engaging and overall I cognitively thought this is a really good addition to my life but there was something going On in my mind where every time I knew I had an email to respond to

you for work my entire body would kind of tense up and panic and I felt like I wanted to shrink away and disappear and that was just information to be noticed and the longer this period went on and the longer I continued to answer those emails the more and more depressed I became and again this didn't make any conscious sense to me I really truly did love that job but that was my body's Response and so I noted it so this is just about gathering information on yourself right and the information you gather does not

have to make any sense to this day I don't know why afternoons are my hot spot I really don't I imagine I'll find out someday but for now I have no idea what it is about the hours like 1 to 5 p.m that give me so much grief when the rest of the day I have a more natural sense of optimism when I'm depressed so this isn't about cracking The codes it's just about noticing what happens when as well as which thought patterns create which body States in you right which obligations or tasks or recurring

Loops of thinking tend to lead you to either a depressed down regulated or anxious and upregulated State all we're doing here is noticing the patterns now step three not everyone is going to have the ability I suppose the privilege to do as Expansively as I would recommend but number three is about adjusting your expectations for yourself during this period so if I were to boil this entire video down to one sentence it would be stop resisting depression this does not mean let depression win this does not mean don't get help but it does mean stop

expecting yourself to perform at the same level when you are depressed that you perform at when you Are not depressed this step is going to be very difficult for anyone who has grown up internalizing the belief that you are as good as your accomplishments or you are as good as the help that you give other people or you are as good as your ability to seem competent and capable on the surface so for a lot of people there's a lot of mental blocks in the way of this step but if you are continuously expecting yourself

to perform at the same level That you perform at when you are not depressed you are almost guaranteeing yourself that your depression is going to get worse and worse and worse during my last really bad depressive episode I had to accept that I was not going to be able to work for a little while that I was not going to be able to hand in my school assignments on time I had to ask for extensions on my assignments I had to accept that I would be living off a bit of a lower salary For a

while and I firmly believe that if I had not made those decisions and instead tried to force myself to perform at a level that I was not capable of Performing I would have absolutely tanked everything I tried to take on we do our best work in life when our body state is aligned with our goals and what we are trying to achieve so if your body state is not aligning with your goals you have two options right one is to try to change your body State sometimes that Works usually when that works is when we

are not in a period of extreme mental health difficulty right so if you're feeling a bit lethargic one day and you drink a coffee and give yourself a pep talk you can probably make yourself go to work and pull off a killer presentation even though you woke up feeling a little bit out of it right but when we are in a period of depression and our bodies are really struggling to muster up the energy the focus the Dedication the attention that we need in order to complete our day-to-day tasks sometimes the solution is to ask

ourselves what tasks could I actually just let go of right now which ones particularly the ones that I spend the most time struggling with resistance to could I just accept I'm not going to get done right now these things can be put off or discarded until my energy returns to me and what I would recommend here is think about what you Noticed in step two so which activities are causing the greatest amounts of internal resistance and can you let some of those go can you put strategies in place that allow you to not deal with

them for a little bit and tell yourself you can come back to them when you need to afterwards this step is crucial because now you're telling your body State hey I notice you I take you seriously I hear that you are trying to tell me something I don't necessarily Understand what it is or why you are telling me it but I'm not going to try to change you in order to fit my life circumstances I'm going to listen to you step four is a natural extension of step three which is find a way to welcome

and contain your depression now these things are different things they're kind of the bookends of how we take care of ourselves through these periods so when we welcome something into our awareness and welcome something into our body We're saying to it hey I see you and I allow you to be here and some people like to think of depression or whatever else it is they're struggling with is almost like a little Gremlin that you like picture and if that helps literally picture yourself holding your depression your anxiety whatever it is you're struggling with in your

hand look at it like is it a creature is it a shape is it a cloud of fog what is it that for you how would you visually represent Your own depression and then literally look at that thing and go I welcome you you are allowed to be in my body you are allowed to be in my life I trust you're here for a reason and I'm going to listen to you and integrate you and then what you need to do to make sure that this thing does not take you over is you need to

find strategies for containing your own experience the difference between a contained and an uncontained experience Is that one takes us over and we have to struggle with the chronic anxiety of not knowing when the feeling will end versus when we contain our own emotional experiences we put boundaries around the extent to which we will engage with those feelings so I could do a whole video on this step I could do a video series on self-containment when it comes to emotions and probably will at some point but essentially what you need to know is that what

keeps us phobic of Certain feelings and when we are phobic of certain feelings it means we will do almost anything to avoid feeling those feelings that's what causes resistance to them and what we resist persists right so if we are terrified of going into our own grief our own pain our own suffering what's often going to happen is our brains will try to do everything to get us to not feel those things and often depression is actually a resistance to True suffering and true Pain like it's this kind of chronic low-grade dull ache that prevents

us from feeling the actual losses and the actual vulnerabilities that are happening inside of our body and if we want to get to that stuff and we want to be able to process that stuff we have to find a way to let our bodies know it's safe to process this and there will be an end to the feeling if I go into it and the reason this is hard for some of us is because we didn't always have safe Containers as children for those more vulnerable emotions to exist within so when we were sad as

kids we may never have had someone sit with us and really examine and help us understand and learn the lessons from our sadness and then teach us what it feels like to lift ourselves out of those States right and so if we don't know that there will be an end to sadness and that there can be a point to sadness we tend to find ways to dissociate from it instead and so how You decide to contain your own sadness is going to be completely dependent on what works for you as an individual so some tools

that I like to use are when I'm in a depressive period finding something that I know without a shadow of a doubt is likely to change my physiological State and then make a ritual of doing that thing at a designated point in time every day so my body begins to learn let's say at 3 pm every day I'm gonna go for a hike and From three to four I'm going to get my body moving I'm going to get the endorphins flowing and I'm going to feel pretty good around 4 pm and if I make a

practice out of going on that hike every day between 3 and 4 pm my body starts to learn it's safe to feel sadder softer more vulnerable emotions in the morning and early afternoon because come 3 P.M I know without a a shadow of a doubt I'm going to feel okay again I've created an anchor point for myself Where I know that my physiological state is going to change and because I've done that thing over and over and over again my body learns to trust that that's going to happen and so now what happens is my

body starts to realize ooh if I'm a little bit sad one day let's try that out and see what happens maybe from one to two I cry a little bit and then at three I go on the hike and I feel different and then the next day when sadness starts to creep into my Awareness again my body goes I remember what happened last time my inner parent took me on a hike at 3 pm and pulled me out of the sadness which means now maybe I can sit with it for a little bit longer and

then the next time a little bit longer and then the next time a little bit longer so we have to create these conditions for ourselves to feel safe going into these more vulnerable and difficult emotional places by creating the self-trust to know that we Will get ourselves out of them another one I like to use is fasting so for myself I notice that when I am hungry I get angry which is definitely not an uncommon correlation which is why we invented the term hangry but sometimes when I'm going through a period of depression where I

know that I have a lot of anger I need to process I will intentionally fast because I know that the longer I fast the sharper and the more precise my anger is going to feel And then as soon as I eat my body is going to relax and that is a purely biological response because when we have gone for a while without food our body pumps us with cortisol and adrenaline to try to get us to go find food and that cortisol and adrenaline if we are not out hunting and Gathering helps us to feel

our anger more clearly but then once we eat our body stops over producing that cortisol and adrenaline that it was giving us before and so I Know if I'm fasting my anger is going to spike and then when I eat it's going to dissipate not entirely but fairly substantially because now the energy in my body is going to be redirected towards digestion so when I'm going through a depressive state where I know that I need to process a lot of anger what I will do is get in the process of fasting and noticing and allowing

an inviting anger are into my body during those fasted periods and really noticing It and really following it where it leads knowing that once I eat at the end of this 24 hour period that anger will lessen and knowing that it will lessen in the future allows me to feel it more fully and precisely and intensely in the present right because I've created a condition for myself that my body now has proof of in the form of memories that when I'm feeling that sharp hot anger it will end there's something I will do to physiologically

change my State right so the activity that you choose to let's say bookend whatever emotion it is that you are trying to do more processing around is going to depend on what that emotion is if you're trying to welcome more sadness and grief into your body you might want to pick an upregulating activity like hiking to end that period with if you're trying to welcome in a very activating experience anger or rage or even joy for some people you might want to pick a more Down regulating activity to bookend that with so that your body

knows there will be an end to this unusually excited state so you have to think carefully about how to contain your own emotional experience here and it's going to be very helpful in a lot of cases to talk to a therapist a coach someone who can help you get a sense of what it is that maybe you're emitting from your processing that you need to pull into your conscious awareness a little bit More as well as what is a safe way to take yourself out of that because you also don't want to trigger yourself too

much and then resort to like really bad unhealthy coping mechanisms to change your physical state take that from someone who has made every mistake in the book when it comes to this particular step so the whole point of step four is just allowing whatever emotions are asking to be felt in your body to exist in your body and also Acting as your own parent by creating an end point where your body knows that the state is going to be changed and I want to emphasize one more time you can't just like tell yourself I'm gonna

go for a hike at three your body won't be believe you your body needs repetition and it needs to notice what has happened in the past before it's going to believe you so try actually doing the thing for several days in a row or on whatever schedule makes sense for you before you Really expect those emotions that you're trying to pull out to start emerging right because your body needs to fully know and have memories of it being safe before it's going to be willing to go deeper into those more vulnerable experiences okay step five

and this is the last step in the kind of pausing and noticing the fire phase is just notice as much as possible the ways in which you are out of alignment with yourself so when I say out of alignment with Yourself I'm referring to anything that you might look at as self-sabotage that you might look at as your energy not aligning with what your conscious mind wants you to do or the ways your conscious mind wants you to be showing up in the world so I will give you some examples of this like for myself

a massive sign that I'm out of self-alignment is that I am eating really unhealthy and I am not exercising So my energy is not orienting itself towards health and vitality it's like this part of me is just begging me to stop to stop what I don't always know but a really big sign for me that I'm out of self-alignment is that I am not feeling energized and I'm choosing unhealthy habits another big sign for myself that I'm out of alignment is that I'm not feeling social whether you are an introvert or an extrovert it does

not matter you need social interaction it is A basic human need and often when we are trying to hide ourselves away when we are trying to detach from our close relationships it can be a really big sign that we're out of alignment with ourselves and I want to say that neither of these things are necessarily bad temporary States I think there is humongous value to withdrawing and introspecting when that's what we need I think there's humongous value to resting relaxing letting ourselves eat a little Bit more unhealthy for a period if that's what we need

giving ourselves Comfort but take note that these things are signs they are not a new way of life to adopt permanently when we permanently adopt living in an unhealthy way as our lifestyle or isolation as our lifestyle that's when these things become problem in their own right rather than temporary signals that we need to listen to to get to the core root of the problem but these things are just that they're signs They're signals isolation and wanting to be alone could be a sign that we are not happy with the ways in which we're showing

up socially maybe we don't feel like we are being ourselves in most social situations so if it feels like being alone is the only time we can be authentic and be ourselves of course we're going to want to isolate right maybe it feels like we are chronically pushing ourselves and living wildly outside of our comfort zone and so the Only comfort we find is through alcohol or overeating or sleeping and sleeping and sleeping right so figuring out what these signs are that our bodies are giving us is the entire job of figuring out which way

is the smoke blowing right whatever it is that is showing up in my awareness whatever self-sabotage I'm doing whichever way in which my energy is not aligning with what I want consciously out of my life is a sign that maybe that area of my Life is not what I think it is maybe that job I had that I was chronically experiencing distress around every time I thought about opening an email actually was not my perfect job maybe it was my perfect job on the surface but my body knows that that was not the job I

wanted to be working didn't matter how prestigious it was how it looked on the outside how it should have been a perfect fit for my skills or how much money and resource I was getting out of It if my body was not aligned with it my body is going to protest and I have to listen to those protests if I want to get out of the line of fire the protests do not have to make conscious sense to me I just have to notice what they are responding to and I have to be willing if

I want this depression to lift to listen to those signs and to trust that they're saying something real even if I don't want it to be true and we experience the most resistance Between what is true and what we want to be true right I imagine for myself all of the times when I have felt incredible chronic persistent resistance and experienced incredible chronic persistent self-sabotage it's because there's been a giant discrepancy between what I wish were true and what is true so noticing where you're out of alignment is all about noticing what is the truth

of what my body wants what I want versus what am I trying to force Myself to want in which ways am I trying to live that are not authentic to me and that I am creating an incredible amount of internal resistance around and that is the core if you can get there of where we can actually start healing our lives from the inside out for from all right so that is part one of this video which is all about how to accept without judgment what is happening in a depressive episode and how to notice what's

important that you need to take Out of it step two is going to be about actually taking the steps to get out of a depressive episode I encourage you not to rush this process I encourage you to actually invite depression into your life and tell it it can stay as long as it wants to you will make a guest room for it inside of your mind and you will furnish the guest room however depression wants and you will allow it to stay there for as long as it would like to be a visitor but whenever

Depression comes to you and says hey I'm ready to start moving out a little bit looking for apartments where I can live on my own then we are going to use all of these strategies that we are going to talk about now in part two of this video to help you move forward in a more conscious and intentional way so for myself the key to all of this is to think of myself as though I am a child who has not yet learned how to consciously navigate the world so when You have a three four

five year old child you don't expect them to have the moral fortitude to make all the right decisions what you try to do for that child is set up conditions for them in which it's going to be as easy and effortless for them as possible to make the right decision so this stage only works if you can remove moralizing from your world view when you think about your own actions this is incredibly difficult to do and will take a lot of Practice and it's okay if you don't do it well all of the time I

definitely do not do this well all of the time but it's essentially about removing as many shoulds as you can from your own thinking about yourself and instead starting to think of yourself almost like you are a child and you are trying to get the child to do something that you want without applying direct pressure so if you want your kid to be happy you don't yell at your kid be Happy you like buy your kid a scooter and send them outside on a sunny day and hope for the best right and that's what this

is all about it's about designing your own life in such a way that the feelings you want to have motivation concentration Joy will start spontaneously emerging out of the situations that you're putting yourself in so step one of this phase is noticing which nodes in the system are creating the most disruption to the rest of the System so what I want you to do at this phase is really start to notice which actions you might take that lead to more actions that make you unhappy and then we're going to work on removing just one of

those nodes so for myself when I get depressed often there is kind of a chain reaction that happens where insomnia is one of my main symptoms so I will not be able to get to sleep I'll be up at 4 or 5 a.m and then the next day I will sleep in and then I'll wake up at that hot Spot in the afternoon where I'm already starting to panic for some reason because afternoons are bad for me and then I wake up in a depressive State stay in it most of the day and then at

night I might go okay tonight I really need to make myself sleep so I'll have a couple glasses of wine at night but then I'll wake up the next morning maybe at an earlier hour of the day but I'll be starving and I'll go eat something really unhealthy for breakfast because Alcohol makes me want to eat unhealthy foods and then because I ate something unhealthy for breakfast I'll be more likely to make further unhealthy choices as the day goes on and the more unhealthy choices I make the more lethargic I feel the more lethargic I

feel the less motivated I am the less motivated I am the less work I get done the less work I get done the less money I make the less money I make the more stressed I become so a couple of Difficult challenges lead to this giant unfurling system of other things going wrong right so what you want to do at this point is figure out which small choices that you're making are are leading to an entire system collapse so for myself I know that when I'm feeling depressed alcohol is a node I need to take

out of my system and in order to take that note out of my system I need to find a way to go to sleep and not have insomnia without drinking so when I Become really depressed like when I'm down in the pits I have one goal every single day and it is go to sleep without drinking alcohol and it does not matter what I have to do to get that done usually it means I have to exercise for about four hours a day which is Extreme and it is that type of extreme commitment to removing

that one hyper problematic node from my life that starts in upward spiral out of Depression every single time so you can call this a hot spot you can call it a hub you can call it a potent dysregulating agent whatever it is your goal at this step is to figure out which nodes in your depressive system have the furthest reaching tentacles towards the rest of the system right so for me it's alcohol it's insomnia and in some cases it's this bizarre mid-afternoon anxiety so I know without a shadow of a doubt I have to do

everything I can when I get Really depressed to go to sleep on time without alcohol and you have something I can do if I start getting really depressed and anxious around mid-afternoon and for me again that's just going out and being around people but it is going to be different for every single person so step one is to figure out what you need to remove that is disrupting the rest of the system and find a way to remove it at any cost if the thing that disrupts the rest of your System is sleeping until noon

find a way to stop sleeping until noon at any cost if the thing that disrupts the rest of your system is getting really anxious over your partner not answering your text messages and that throws you into dysregulation the entire day tell yourself I will not text my partner period I will call them if I need something and I will communicate that to them but anything that is throwing your system into chronic dysregulation and Impacting the rest of your system needs to be stopped step two notice what is going right and what tends to lead to

those conditions so I like to literally use Detachment intentionally at this point to look at myself as though I am a child I am parenting and I'll have these ideas of like things I want the child to do like I want the child to eat healthy I want the child to go on walks I want the child to do her homework and I will not necessarily tell myself I need to do Any of those things but anytime I catch myself doing one of those things I stop and I go what led to this why is

it that today I spontaneously wanted to go for a walk when yesterday I wanted to stay at home with all the blinds drawn why is it that today I wanted to make a salad for dinner when yesterday I wanted to order pizza why is it that today I sat down and started reading my textbook when every Day before this day thinking of my textbook made me panic and we want to as much as possible move backwards and try to figure out what little things are going right that we can then intentionally recreate in order to

start motivating ourselves to make more of those Positive Choices spontaneously a great example of this is this afternoon I was having my midday depression and I decided I'm gonna get up I'm gonna go to the mall I need to buy a few things so I Was getting ready to go to the mall and I was listening to an audiobook while I was getting ready and the audiobook I was listening to gave me an idea to make a YouTube video and so then I sat down and started filming this video and I noticed as I was

setting up oh cool I'm doing something that I often hope I will do which is film a YouTube video what led to that and what led to that was the fact that I was putting myself in motion I was getting ready to go out and see People and do things and so I was switching out of a depressive headset and into to an action-oriented headset and it so happened that in that action-oriented headset I had the thought actually I could make a video now and go to the mall after and so instead I sat down

and did that and now I know for future reference I am more likely to make a video spontaneously if I am already in motion if I'm already thinking about getting stuff done and Going out and doing things and I'm listening to something that's intellectually stimulating I'm more likely to end up doing something productive even if it's not the thing that I intended to do so sometimes when something that we want to do feels like too big of a leap just finding something that is a similar type of energy but that is less intimidating and repeating

that small thing over and over again like I frequently will get up put on Makeup and do my hair and go outside and be around people when I'm feeling my mid-afternoon dread that action of changing your energy and getting yourself into Motion in some capacity might eventually start to morph into you getting into a more meaningful sense of motion but in order to figure out what things help you get there you have to notice when something is spontaneously going right and then unpack what led to those Things going right the more you get in the

habit of doing this and just noticing more of these little tricks and tools you're going to start accumulating because you are now reverse engineering your own happiness and well-being another tool I love to use for this I advertise this journal all the time they do not pay me or endorse me in any way but I use this journal called the five minute Journal where at the beginning of every day you say what you're grateful For and what you think would make the day great and then you put a mantra down but then at the end

of every day you write down three things that went well that day so I've been doing this consistently for a couple of years now and I really find that the end of the day looking at what went right is really helpful for me as a practice using non-judgmental self-awareness can be really really helpful when we're in these states where we are struggling to Get our energy to do what we think it should I believe there is not a single unmoted motivated person on the planet there are only people who are fighting their Natural Energy I

believe every single one of us from the bottom of my heart I believe this has a natural inborn sense of motivation and if you believe yourself to be unmotivated the problem is probably that you are actually deeply out of touch with yourself out of alignment with your own Authenticity and you don't know what it is that you need to be tapping into to get that sense of intrinsic motivation flowing out of you but I fully believe and there are very few things in this world that I fully and holistically believe that every single person has

an internal well of natural motivation that if they were to tap into it would give them all of the energy on Earth right we just go through varying degrees of being in and out of touch with that Thing and that doesn't even mean it's going to be like happy excited like manic upregulated energy right it could just be like a very focused calm directed awareness that's actually a lot of what comprises motivation at the end of the day right okay next step and this one is extremely important this is the first thing I'm going to

ask you to do that is not just noticing but is actually taking concrete decisive action you pick one thing one thing you can do Every day that feels intrinsically meaningful to you that feels like when you are doing this thing it is good for your soul you are not doing it for any greater end than the fact that it matters to you in life and committing to that thing as your only measure of success every day so for myself right now I know that when I am living in a healthy way when I'm active and

moving my body every day and when I'm feeding my body healthy nourishing foods it Makes every day of my life feel better than if I have a day where I am not doing that so every day right now the only measure I use to judge myself on whether or not I've had a successful day that day is did I treat my body lovingly and with respect and do I feel good in my body today did I feed it healthy foods that it wanted to eat and was craving did I move it did I become stronger

and fitter today and if the answer to that is yes I have succeeded Today even if I phoned it in at work I phoned it in at school I phoned it in on my relationships the only thing I'm choosing to hold myself deeply accountable to is how I feel in my body every single day a day where I feel good in my body is a good day where I've succeeded and set out to do everything I said I would do that day and a day where I do not feel good in my body is a

day where I let myself down and I encourage you to pick Something you love and feel intrinsic satisfaction out of doing and go as long a period of time as you possibly can without letting yourself down this is going to build self-trust it is going to elevate your energy levels and it is going to be you saying to yourself I see who you really are what you really need to be happy and I am going to commit to giving it to you and if there is a single thing you can do a single thing you

can do to lift yourself out of A depressive episode I swear on my life it is this it is looking right into your soul noticing something that makes you intrinsically happy motivated excited to get out of bed in the morning and giving that thing to yourself and making it your only priority if you can't make it your only priority make it your number one priority and routinely remind yourself that that is your priority and this does not have to be something that takes over your entire Life right it can be something that takes you 10

minutes every day it can be something that you easily bake into the rest of your routine the point is that this is now your standard for what a good or a bad day is your standard for a good or a bad day is no longer did I complete a long list of tasks that when I'm being honest with myself I could not care less about on a deep level your metric for success is did I listen to myself and show up for myself in an Authentic way today even if it was only for the 10

minutes that I've allocated do that thing for 90 days in a row I'm on day I think like 18 of my respecting my body kick this is a tool I developed when I was I think in my early 20s when I decided that any time I was feeling depressed or in a slump I would pick something that really mattered to me and I would do it for 90 days and I promise you on my my life anytime I have done this and I've actually committed to Prioritizing something I find intrinsically meaningful for 90 days I

have always always every time ended up in a radically different place in my life 90 days later than where I was when I began that's what happens when we choose to make our true selves and our true needs a priority we prove to ourselves that we matter to ourselves and that is the single best thing you can do for your mental health possible prove to yourself that you Matter to yourself pick a promise that is Meaningful to make to yourself and then keep it keep it even when you have a good excuse not to keep

it even on the days it makes your life a little bit more inconvenient to keep it keep it for 90 days and I promise you you will not be in this depressed place you are in now 90 days from now but again you have to make sure this is something you actually care about that feels fulfilling to you on a deep intrinsic Level authenticity self-respect and keeping your deep intrinsic commitments to yourself is medicine for depression now the reason this works is not random it works for many reasons one it creates lasting changes in your

life two it promotes healthy habits three it builds self-accountability but the reason it works that is really important and is that depression is very often the result of overwhelm and helplessness when we feel disempowered and like we're not Capable of making meaningful changes in our life depression is the natural result of that so this step is about reversing that feeling and proving to ourselves in at least some small way I do have the power to change my circumstances I do have the power to turn this situation around and every time you prove that to yourself

it gives your brain a spike of dopamine and every time your brain gets a spike of dopamine it's motivated to take more and more Future action this step is about ending your disempowerment and taking your sense of autonomy and sovereignty in the world back now step four is about starting to reintegrate or discard of some of the things that you have put on hold so as you start to feel better as this kind of medicine starts working in your system as you start to show yourself hey I love and value and care about your well-being

and I will not neglect you Inner self you're going to start getting stronger emotionally and physically and mentally and as you get stronger mentally physically emotionally you will have the opportunity to return to some of the things that you've put on hold maybe the projects that you haven't been working on for a while maybe the relationships you've been neglecting you now have the opportunity to reevaluate do I want to invite this thing back into my life and If I do how can I do so without feeling overwhelmed by it this time how can I do

so in a way that feels more natural and more intrinsically fulfilling and sometimes this means acknowledging I actually can't reintegrate this thing when I try that same panic stress overwhelm body shutting down thing happens and I think there are times to figure out if we're getting triggered in those situations and if so can we overcome the trigger but I also think There are things in life that are just not for us and there is an art to recognizing what is just not for us and if there is a little consequence to letting it Go just

Let It Go I remember reading in this random self-help book when I was like 17 this line line that said let go of the parts of your life that you honestly don't want and I think that when we make a practice out of integrating the things that we intrinsically do want we get a lot Better at noticing what we just honestly don't want and if at this point we can let go of as many of those things as possible I think that is a phenomenal win so this step is all about opening up all of

those things you shoved into a box and said I will deal with later because I'm making some room for my depression this is your moment to run back into the fire and pick only what matters to bring out of the fire with you Right which relationships bring you that deep intrinsic sense of love and fulfillment which habits and routines bring you that sense of fulfillment which projects which types of work bring you that sense of fulfillment those are the things you run back into the fire to grab intentionally right and to reintegrate into this new

life that you are building for yourself where you are walking in the direction that is going away from the smoke so as you are Consciously planning your next steps ahead figure out what do you need to let go of what is it actually good to let burn down in that fire of your depression what is it actually good to not reintegrate versus what do you want to take with you because you are now noticing in a moment of calm you've created for yourself inside of Crisis really matters and as kind of a cheat sheet if

the thought you're having around certain things is ooh that should Really matter because mentally and cognitively I know it's important and your body kind of retracts and clenches up as you have that thought unfortunately that might be something you want to think about leaving behind and if it's something that doesn't make sense but your body expands and relaxes and energizes itself at the thought of reintegrating maybe that's something you do want to think about bringing forward with you so this step is all about Tuning into the question what matters what matters what do I want

in a way that feels like I want to run enthusiastically towards it with open arms rather than just accepting it because it's there and I feel like I should want it and how do I fill up my life with more of that just like we said at the beginning we are ascertaining the direction of the wind so that we know how to walk away from the fire in a way that does not have it follow us And the way we do that is we notice where our Depression was following us which of those situations that

we talked about way earlier in this video are causing the body to clench up retract feel depressed experience brain fog experience anxiety all of those things are the direction of the smoke right and if you want to start walking in the other direction away from that fire so it doesn't follow you you have to be able to recognize where the smoke is not Flowing and that's what the last step is all about which is how do you re-emerge from this cocoon that you have created for yourself and your own suffering and find a pathway forward

that is as smoke-free as possible so how do you figure out what it is that on a deeply embodied level you truly want to run towards you truly want to explore and embrace even if it does not make the sense that you want it to make even if it is not the direction you've Been going in even if it is very different from what you thought you wanted out of your life how do you use these periods of depression to let what was inauthentic to you burn and move forward carrying only what actually matters to

you because if you can do that you have now leveraged one of the most powerful tools available to you which is your own mental health you have listened to yourself you have integrated what your body is telling you And you have used that information to actually change your life for the better not to numb yourself out to your feelings about your crappy life but to actually make the literal changes that maybe you identified yourself as needing to make back in step one of this video and you've set yourself on the path to creating a new

version of your life where suffering is not a natural byproduct of it where joy and creativity and good healthy fear and excitement are Now your guiding principles and this might sound idealistic and I want to tell you that it's not because this new life I'm proposing to you is not a problem-free life it's not a consequence free life it's just a life where you are actually aligned with the problems and consequences that you have consciously chosen for yourself and that you are more willing to persist with and to fight for because they are obstacles that

you have chosen based on an Identification of what actually matters to you so by paying all of this attention to what was not working and focusing so intently on what was on a micro and a macro level you are now going to be able to start walking away from that fire in the direction that the wind is not blowing and if you can do that your depression has been a success and not like a small success a huge success like the kind of success that you can look back on and go thank God For those

signals that I was not happy thank God that I stopped and listened to myself thank God I brought myself here instead of continuing on the path that I was going down because really difficult feelings feelings of resistance and panic and anxiety and depression are often the natural consequences of a life where we are not listening to attuned to and meeting our true needs but rather a life where we are listening to the needs other people are telling us we must have Because we created this entire Society based around fake consumeristic needs that we convinced people

via chronic brainwashing we're going to make them happy and now nobody's happy so all of this is the process of getting back in touch with who you actually are and what you actually want even if it doesn't make sense to you on a conscious cognitive level and being willing to trust the signals your body is sending you enough to actually start designing The life that you want so this has been a very long video this might actually be the longest video I've ever filmed with just me talking um and I want to once again tell

you I'm not a clinical mental health counselor I am just a person who has dealt with so much depression in my own life and I do really believe I'm coming around to a point where I'm able to drill into my depressive episodes and find the gold and that drilling hurts and it's hard it Is not for the weak or the faint of heart but if you can be willing to stay present with yourself through these periods and take what matters out of them I promise you you are on the path to a sense of aliveness

and purpose in your life that absolutely no amount of numbing out pain and sadness will ever bring you to but doesn't help to get help along the way so I do recommend if you are really struggling look for a counselor a therapist a coach someone You can work with who can help you figure out what directions you want to go in there are support groups there are books there are so many resources you can reach for in these periods there is no shame in getting help as frequently and as persistently as you can get it

and I want to know in the comments what you guys use to navigate your own period of emotional challenge because this is my process but it is not everybody's process and I would love to hear what in This video resonated did not resonate for you guys what you're struggling with now how you are pulling yourself out of the struggles you're facing as always I love all of you I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again soon [Music]