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.
6 Areas of Self-Care
Your physical health is intrinsically tied to your mental health. Diet can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but I want you to focus on making sure that you are getting the right balance of foods to feed your most essential bodily functions (your liver, kidneys, hearts, brain and lungs). Foods that will help your body maintain healthy blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Just as important, is making sure that you are hydrated. I strongly recommend that you establish a healthy routine to make sure that you are checking the right boxes. If you find that you are unsure of where to start when it comes to eating for your health, than check out my other post dedicated to this topic.
How to Create Healthy Habits
That being said, getting “healthy” is a very ambiguous topic and unless you are careful to really define what that means to you, it is easy to get lost in the sea of semantics. In my therapy sessions, I help others do just that; create healthy habits. Individuals/clients almost always state their reason for seeking counseling as “to get better”, to “be healthy”, be “happy.” But it is very difficult to create a plan around these loose goals, because there is nothing definitive to work from, and defining your health goals is always the first step toward positive change.