Despite what our comparative thoughts may tell us, even the most ideal of relationships are not without their arguments. Disagreements and arguments have three basic themes. If you are able to gain a greater understanding of these themes, you will be better equipped to mitigate the fallout when they occur and focus your energies on protecting the relationship. In learning to be more effective at overcoming barriers to healthy relationships, it is crucial to know what the biggest hurdles are. If you or a loved one is exhibiting symptoms of depression, you will want to assess for the following culprits.
Managing Depression in Relationships.
Let us start off by reflecting on why relationships are so important to begin with. The social interactions we have with others have the potential to produce positive outcomes in the way that we interpret our environment, our sense of self (self-concept), our relation to the world around us (self in context) and our prospects for the future. Our interactions with others also allow for a shared experience of the human condition, which in and of itself, has a comforting impact.
Leverage Healthy Activities To Increase Goal Oriented Behavior.
We know that depression depletes our sense of motivation and with it our notion of purpose. As we begin to make traction in recovery, we regain some our energy. If we have not thought out our goals in some fashion, then our periods of motivation are at risk of being lost to points of indecision. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of striking while the iron is hot, and in order to do that, we need a sense of direction before the motivation kicks in.
Overcoming Barriers To Healthy Activities
This post discusses the third set of skills for learning to cope with depression through managing barriers to healthy activities. In the previous post, we discussed the importance of planning new activities ahead of time and finding balance among activities and support. Now that you have learned some techniques for diversifying your approach to activities, it is time we move on to problem solving barriers to accomplishing planned tasks.
Cope Through Healthy Activity
Our mood follows a series of events that are dictated by the choices we make in response to an initial neutral event. It is our interpretations of the event that influence our reactions. We will get deeper into assumptions in a latter post. For now, let’s focus on how we can cope with depression through healthy activities. I want you to consider the list below, and take note that #5 is reserved for a triggering event. #9 is reserved for the best mood, and #1 for the worst.
Activity and Your Mood
How we choose to engage and interact with our environment will have a direct impact on how we feel about ourselves, our world and those we share it with.
Identifying Your Healthy Thoughts
You see, it is hard to jump right into identifying your healthy and helpful thoughts, because they are often pre-cursors to our emotions, and reactions to events; they are how we interpret the circumstances around us. Thus, it is often easier to search out emotions and correlated events and work backwards to explore our associated thought process.
Exploring the Evidence for Your Thoughts
In this post, we will be going one step beyond thought tracking, and move into thought challenging. Learning to track your thoughts and your mood via use of mood scales, or a related tool, was a preliminary step, because next we will need to write them down and put them in the hot seat (meaning we will seek out facts to either support or negate their claims).
Identify Your Unhealthy Thought Patterns
In this post I will cover some of the most common unhealthy thinking pattens and how to examine, challenge and replace them with more relevant and accurate thoughts true to their context, versus those that are pulled from a reference of past lived experience, such as a traumatic event.
Learn The Connection Between Thoughts and Emotions.
These are the fundamental coping skills for depression and anxiety. Learn the connections between your thoughts, behaviors, communication, relationships and your mood and how to be more effective in them and improve your quality of life.