11 Tips to Overcome High Functioning Depression | Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Tools

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this presentation in which we're going to be talking about 11 tips to cope with high functioning depression. I know 11 tips. I tried to make it 10, but I really thought that we needed that 11th one in there. And that for some reason bugs me. I like to have round numbers or whatever, but, you know, we're just gonna deal with 11. There is a lot more information on our YouTube channel, but this is just hitting the highlights. If you are clinically depressed right now, this is not a replacement for therapy by any means, but these are some tips that you can add to your therapy to help recover more quickly. And these are things that you can do when you are feeling well to prevent or mitigate the onset of another episode. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is sunlight and circadian rhythms and quality sleep. They all kind of go together because when we are exposed to sunlight, it helps set our circadian rhythms. Sunlight tells our brain it's time to wake up, and darkness tells our brain it's time to go to sleep, which helps regulate our cortisol and a bunch of other hormones that help us know when it's time to be awake and when it's time to have energy and when it's time to eat. All of that contributes to quality sleep. If our circadian rhythms are out of whack, then we are likely not going to get tired at the right times and we may not get good quality sleep. We know that when we are sleep deprived, our threat response system, our HPA axis, is activated, which contributes to anxiety and distress and potentially depression. So believe it or not, good quality sleep at the right times is really important to coping with depression. Hydration is another really easy intervention. When we get as little as 2% dehydrated, we start having difficulty with energy, fatigue, concentration, and decision making. Staying hydrated is not hard to do. Keep a cup with you or a water bottle with you, you're going to be more tempted to sip on it throughout the day. Eat colorfully is the third suggestion our body makes. The hormones and neurotransmitters that we need to feel happy and healthy and energized from the food that we eat. A lot of people aren't into counting calories and macros and micros and this and that and the other, and that is fine. That is totally cool. A dietitian friend of mine suggested to my class one time to eat colorfully. If you can aim to have three different colors, not different shades of white or brown, but three Actual different colors on your plate at every meal. You're probably going to have good nutrition. If you are a vegan, it is possible to get very good nutrition. Being a vegan, you have to be a little bit more attentive to what you're eating to make sure that you're getting all of your essential amino acids, but it is definitely possible. Minimize stimulants. When we are depressed, we often feel fatigued, foggy headed, have difficulty concentrating, and we reach for those stimulants to help us focus and have energy and maybe feel just a little bit better. But those stimulants are basically just turning up our threat response system, turning up our HPA axis, which means we're going to have just like when we eat sugar, we're going to have a harder crash at the end. Additionally, stimulants tend to stay in our system for a while. Caffeine being one of the worst. It stays in our system for up to 12 hours after we consume it. So what you're consuming at noon may still be impairing your sleep quality at 10, 11 o' clock at night. Minimizing stimulants is going to help you in the long run. Don't go cold turkey. You'll probably have headaches and all kinds of other things and you're going to really hate the notion. If you're going to minimize them, start weaning off slowly. If you need to connect with your doctor to see how to do this effectively, do so. If you tend to have migraines, definitely consult with your doctor before you start altering anything about your nutrition, including your including your ingestion of caffeine or nicotine. Number five is something we forget to do and it's add in the happy. And what I mean by that is we need to actually proactively do things that make us happy in order to prompt our body to secrete those happy neurochemicals. The dopamine, the serotonin, the things that we really want to feel. Add in the happy. Pay attention to your senses. What do you smell that makes you happy? What things? Go to Target or Walmart or one of those places and smell some of the little wax tarts and see which ones that you smell that make you go, oh, that smells good. That's adding in the happy that is triggering your brain to send out relaxing neurochemicals. You can look at essential oils if you want to. You can go into your kitchen and smell certain spices that you have. For me, cloves is a big one. When I Was a little kid, we used to take oranges and put whole cloves and cinnamon sticks in the oranges and make Christmas ornaments. So the smell of citrus and cloves together reminds me of a happy time in my life. You may not have that same experience. It's important for you to know what smells make you happy. Look for things that make you happy that are sites. What kinds of memes, what kinds of pictures do you have on your phone? Maybe you have pictures of your kids or your dogs or flowers. Whatever it is that makes you happy, keep an online scrapbook if you will. It may be in your Google photos of memes and pictures and things that make you happy. Add things in your environment, your car, your home, your office, if you're allowed, that you can look at that are present for you, that you're noticing on a regular basis throughout the day that make you smile. That is going to be really important. You don't have to do anything, you know, super extravagant. Just pictures, memes, smells, sounds. What sounds make you happy? I love the sound of eastern towheez and black capped chickadees. I love the sound of their calls. So having bird sounds on in the back makes me happy. Makes me even happier if they're actually birds at the feeder, at the window. Those are things that I do to make me happy. What makes you happy? Increasing the happy triggers in your environment is going to prompt more calming chemicals throughout your body. Eliminate depression, anxiety and anger triggers. And in the next video, we're going to talk a lot more about triggers. But you know, it's important to remember that when we look around, there are things that we see, hear, smell, do that can trigger depression and a sense of or anger or anxiety and a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. All of those things may make depression worse or may make you feel increasingly overwhelmed. So eliminate some of those things. For me, having chaos, having piles of stuff everywhere increases my sense of being overwhelmed, which can make me feel a little bit depressed or edgy or irritable. Sometimes it's important for me to keep things organized. In our house we call it flat surface. Itis where if flat surfaces start to swell with crap, mommy tends to get a little bit stressed out. We have bins. I am not one of those that is super organized, but I want things to stay in their appropriate bins and just not pile up everywhere. Smells that irritate me, animal pee. Our dogs right now for some reason are going through a territory dispute. And when I smell that, it makes me frustrated and upset. And I Just don't like that smell. I would much rather smell something that makes me happy. The news. Turning on the news right now is almost guaranteed to be a trigger. So I eliminate that as much as possible from my daily life. And some days, I'll be honest, I don't even check the news most of the time. I do once a day because I feel like it's my duty as an American to be informed. But, you know, that's 30 minutes and then done. Get physical or get aphysical. You can get physical, too. Exercise increases serotonin and dopamine as well as your endorphins. You don't have to exercise hard. You don't have to going out for a walk. They've actually found that exercising at 40 to 50% of your target heart rate, which for me would be like 90 beats a minute, it's not like you're working hard at all. It's walking the dog actually reduces cortisol and reduces your stress chemicals, which can be helpful. So when I say exercise, I'm not saying you have to go to the gym. You can if you want. That's going to give you a bump of endorphins. But if you just want to reduce cortisol, do something mild. Clean the house, play with the dog, play with your kids, do something like that. You can do a lot of things to play with your kids that are fun, like playing hide and go seek or tag, or getting a balloon and trying to keep it from hitting the floor. Believe it or not, the amount of activity and trying to do that is probably going to get your heart rate in that 40 to 50% zone, which helps reduce cortisol for plus, you're doing something fun, which increases the positive chemicals. My kids are too old, they think to play those balloon games anymore. So I play them with my dog. My dog loves balloons and we have a lot of fun. But what I meant to say here was get aphysical a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times. There are certain physiological causes for for depression, such as low thyroid or low testosterone or altered levels of estrogen or progesterone. Those are easy to test for in a blood test. Low levels of vitamin D can also contribute to depression. So if it's been raining for a long time, or if you're in an area like Alaska where it may be dark for a long time, or you work in an environment where you go into work and it's dark and you come out of work and it's still dark that will potentially mess with your circadian rhythms. But a physical can rule out any physiological causes of your depression. And, you know, isn't it better to address the root cause than to try to start, you know, guessing? Let's start with the basics. Is my body machine functioning as it should in order for me to feel happy? And if so, then I need to look at what's causing the me to feel the way I am. Spend 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes, that's not that long. Spend 10 minutes each day journaling or reflecting on the positive. If you drive to work or ride the subway or whatever it is that you ride, you probably have 10 minutes that you can think through the day and reflect only on the positive. Think about what happened during the day that went well, that you did well, that made you feel good, or even just things that you're seeing as you're driving that make you happy. I was driving to work yesterday and I saw a little baby groundhog. And I love groundhogs. They are so cute. And this one wasn't much bigger than a squirrel and he was just sitting up like a little meerkat. So cute. And that made me happy. Reflecting on the positives for the day makes your brain switch gears. It doesn't mean work ignoring the negative all day long. We're not just ignoring the threats to our own detriment, but we have to force ourselves to also notice the positive. And this can help us become more psychologically flexible and able to notice both the threats as well as the safety and positive factors in a situation and in an environment. Check for medication side effects. There are a lot of medications out there that do have mood side effects, and they just put out an article today from the fda, and I can't remember the name of the medication, but it's one that's used for asthma as well as allergies that has been shown to contribute to increases in depression and suicidality in a fair number of people. And the FDA is now requiring them to add a black box warning on it, just like they do on some of the antidepressants. So you wouldn't have thought that a seasonal allergy medication could make you depressed. Blood pressure medications, statins, your cholesterol medications, there are a lot of different medications that can contribute to depression. So how do you find that out? Well, the easiest way is to go online and search for the name of your medication and the word depression to see if it is associated or search for medications associated with depression, side of depression side effects. And that will tell you if people commonly have depression as a side effect of that medication. Another one that often causes people depression is the Dramamine. So if you're taking Dramamine, some people will find that contributes to their feelings of depression. Be aware if you're taking something sporadic like Dramamine, and you notice that when you take it, you feel really awful. Well, that's what we call a clue. And you may want to talk to your doctor about alternatives for that kind of medication. Finally, address negative, extreme, or personalized thinking styles. When we are in a negative mindset, when we are seeing the world as dangerous, scary, threatening, we feel helpless and hopeless. You know what? We notice the negative. We are on high alert, trying to protect ourselves from that big bad world. We're not noticing the positive things. It is important to address those negative thinking styles and look for the facts. If I feel like this is a particularly dangerous situation or a particularly depressing situation, what are the facts for and against it? What is positive in my life? There are a lot of different ways to address negative thinking styles. Extreme thinking is when you use words like always, all, never, none, everybody, Rarely are things 100% one way or another. So whenever you start using extreme words, replace them with more mild words. Many people, instead of everybody, and look for examples of exceptions to when this happened. Instead of saying everybody always leaves, which is one of the favorite phrases of one of my best friends, thinking about who has left and who has stayed, and do they always leave? And generally, you know, if you find somebody who has stayed, then that disproves both aspects of that extreme thinking. Now, many people could leave, but does everybody always leave? So we want to address this extreme thinking in terms of right now, the coronavirus that's going around. I've heard a lot of extreme thinking and extreme statements like everybody is eventually going to get it, or everybody who gets it gets super ill. And that's just not the case. If you look at the facts, if you look at the actual data, there's thousands and thousands of people who've gotten this virus and haven't gotten sicker than anything except for, like, a mild cold. And. And there are also, you know, probably tens of thousands of people who've been infected, whose symptoms were so mild they didn't even get tested. We do want to pay attention to our extreme thinking and see if we're catastrophizing or confusing something that is low probability with something that is high probability. A lot of times when we use extreme thinking, we start thinking that things are probable, that this is probably gonna happen, when in reality it's possible. You know, just about anything's possible, but the probability is pretty minuscule. And finally, those personalized thinking styles where we take everything personally, it's my fault, or they did it because they don't like me, or they are angry with me, or think of three examples. Whenever you have a personalized thought like that that's negative. Think of three examples or three explanations of why that might have happened that had nothing to do with you, Absolutely nothing to do with you. This helps you become more psychologically flexible and consider all the options, and it can help you feel less hopeless and helpless. And finally, one more. I guess I could have put in 12. Focusing on what you can control. Two of the key features of depression are feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Well, when we feel helpless, we're going to probably feel hopeless. It's important that we focus on aspects of the situation that we have control over. You have control over some aspects of virtually every situation and figuring out what you do have control over. And those aspects you didn't. You can't get too tied up in. That tornado just came through Middle Tennessee. I had no control over that tornado. There was nothing I could have done about that. What was I able to do? I was able to get my family down into our safe space before the tornado came through. Those are things that we want to focus on. What are we able to do? I wasn't able to prevent the destruction and loss of life, and that is devastating to me. However, what can I do in this situation? I can help the survivors rebuild, remembering to focus on. Have the courage to change the things you can. I hope those 12 tips were helpful for you, and I will see you in the next video.