Image credit: Thomas Bormans on Unsplash Welcome to Mental Health Moment (MHM) #13! MHMs are short posts that I write every once in a while as a break from my usual 1500- to 1800-word posts, for your convenience. 😊 This one is a list of simple and effective ways of feeling productive, even on the days when you don’t think you can do anything. LIFE IS NOT BLACK AND WHITE As one of my therapists told me several years…
Image credit: Valentin Petkov on Unsplash The holidays are upon us once again! And whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or any other holiday, you might be feeling a little extra stress. How am I going to make it? you may be asking yourself. To that, I say that you’ve survived every previous holiday, and you’ll survive this one, too. THE STRESS OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON There are a few extra variables involved when we celebrate the holidays….
Photo credit: Christian Erfurt on Unsplash So, Lisa and I went to a concert last week by a band called Badflower. They’re a heavy alternative rock band, and their performance was awesome! We decided to make an evening out of it – dinner and the show. Sounds good, right? Well, my anxiety had other plans for me. It was out of hand from the moment we left the house until after we got to the concert. I was shaky,…
Image credit: Priscilla Du Preez It’s hard to talk about what’s bothering you, isn’t it? When my depression first started, around age fourteen, it was bad. Really bad. In fact, I was suicidal. I apparently told my parents how bad I was feeling (I don’t remember doing that), because I soon started seeing a psychologist. But I wasn’t ready to be “in therapy.” I saw it as a failing, an embarrassment, a sign of weakness, so I didn’t say…
Image credit: Isaac Quesada on Unsplash I’ve felt really good for most of the last year and a half now, and for literally the first time in my 52 years, my depression is in remission. That’s a BIG freaking deal! 😊 But that does not mean I’m completely out of the woods, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it can’t come back and take me down at any time. While I’m feeling decent and going about my life, my…
Image credit: Ryan Searle on Unsplash Welcome to MHM #11! Mental Health Moments are shorter posts that include tips and suggestions for getting through your day without letting your depression get you down. I tend to be a bit wordy in my regular posts; MHMs are my attempt to be a little more palatable for those who don’t want to read longer posts. And now, onto the show! Spring has sprung and we’re on our way to a nice-looking…
Image credit: Amin Moshrefi on Unsplash If there’s one thing I hope we learned in 2020, it’s that we can’t take our health – mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual – for granted. I mean, let’s face it – 2020 sucked. The entire world was thrown into a situation it was mostly unprepared for. That was especially true here in the U.S. Out of the more than 116 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide as of this writing, there have been…
Image credit: Ylanite Koppens I was born to write. Unfortunately, I was also born to be depressed. Keeping a traditional journal is one way to get your thoughts and feelings out of your head so you can take a more objective look at them. But writing long-form, even if it’s a rules-free method such as free association or a “vomit draft,” in which you write down whatever comes to mind without censoring it, takes time, energy, and commitment. I…
Well, hello there, fellow Warrior! I wanted to let you know that the focus of the Depression Warrior website will be changing ever-so-slightly. I’ve been feeling so much better lately that I changed the tagline to the site from “Fighting the Stigma of Mental Illness and Addiction” to “On Surviving Depression”. I think it sounds more hopeful, maybe even a little positive. It also better reflects what I write about. Now, onto today’s post! FEELING BETTER I was thinking yesterday…
Photo by Ryan McGuire What is a safety plan, anyway? A safety plan is a document that lists everything you can think of that will keep you safe from harming yourself or others, or from dipping way down the continuum of depression. I’ve had one for many, many years. I now need to update it because I moved to another state and I need to rebuild my professional support team. Do you have a safety plan? It can be very…
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash Every so often, I like to publish a post about general mental health care. With Thanksgiving and Christmas now in the rear-view mirror and a new year bearing down on us, I thought this would be a good time to remind you to pay more attention to your well-being than you usually do. Certainly, the holidays can bring out the best in people – their smile may be a bit brighter, their words a little less sharp,…
This is my first post in more than two months – sorry about that! I’ve been going through a lot of huge stuff in my personal life that I will explain someday. For now, I’d like to talk about dealing with change. MAKING CHANGES My whole world has changed completely over the last couple of months. I even moved back to my home state of Michigan, which I never thought I’d do. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Michigan; I’ve…
Photo by Thomas Willmott on Unsplash I learned something new in therapy a while ago. I don’t recall what we were talking about, but the moral of the story is that feeling comfortable and staying in “the known” isn’t always a good thing. “THE KNOWN” IS COMFORTING As human beings, we are creatures of comfort. We get into our routines and habits and do the same things – day in, day out. And for the most part, this is fine. It gets…
Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash I feel small today. Small and quiet. My last post, How to Change Destructive Thinking, has a positive twang to it. It’s all about possibility and how we actually do have the ability to challenge our negative thoughts; we just need the tools to do so. That hasn’t changed. It is still true for me, and it is still true for you. I wrote that post two days ago, published it yesterday, and sent it out…
Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash Every so often, I like to publish a post about general mental health care. So today, I bring you Mental Health Moment (MHM) #6. I’ve been feeling a bit run-down lately. I know a lot of it is because of the stress I’ve been under recently, but the other part of the equation is that my last round of TMS was in November. The effects of the TMS usually start subsiding after about five or six months,…
Photo by Charles Deluvio 🇵🇭🇨🇦 on Unsplash Sleep and I have a long, sordid history. If you have depression, you know how important (and messed up) sleep can be. I think it’s ironic that one of the signs of depression is either a lack of sleep or sleeping too much, but there it is. I know that when I don’t get enough sleep, I get really cranky and irritable, I’m more likely to fly off the handle, and I’m more vulnerable to…
Several years ago, I went through about five years of fatigue that, it turned out, had no medical cause. I finally decided it was all about the stress. I made some changes, felt better, and life went on. Well, here I am again. For the last month or so, I have felt that same almost-debilitating level of fatigue, and again I attribute it to stress. WHAT’S GOING ON WITH ME? Oh, all kinds of things! Chief among them? I am…
I woke up at 6:30 this morning, after about seven hours of sleep. An hour later, I realized that I was feeling down. Please do me the favor of letting me explore this with you. WHY DO I FEEL THIS WAY? I don’t know. That’s the wonder of mood disorders. I’ve been feeling pretty good lately – I’ve even done my yoga three mornings in a row and plan on doing it again after I write this. I don’t want…
