In this excerpt from the "Anxiety - Short Bites" podcast, the hosts discuss personal strategies for managing depression and anxiety, emphasizing how their approaches differ. For depression, the speaker describes it as a loss of meaning and energy, best addressed by physical action—exercise, movement, and getting into motion—regardless of the specific activity. For anxiety, the speaker finds cognitive approaches more effective, focusing on reconnecting with core values, meaning, and existential reflection, while also noting that exercise still helps. The conversation also touches on reframing depression as a temporary "emotional flu" to reduce existential dread, and highlights the heightened suicide risk in younger individuals due to a loss of temporal perspective. The tone is conversational and reflective, with a balanced, cautious optimism toward the discussed coping methods.
Chapters
And I think back to the question about, you know, how do we cope with these things? And, you know, how do we make this stuff practical? Something I'm very focused on. And I think depending on whether it's depression or anxiety, I actually cope differently. Depression to me is a complete loss of meaning and feeling and just anything. It's a deadness. And I can't seem— there seems to be no thinking my way out of that in any way, shape, shape or form, I usually try and act my way out of it. As we talked about things like exercise or going in nature or lots of different things that I do. And, and Janica, I think it was important you stated like, we need to be careful when we're talking about mental illness, not to, not to generalize. Cause I know people who are so far into chronic depression that for me to say, well, exercise might help is just right. And so I'm kind of talking about my own experience. I often have used the phrase depression hates a moving target, right? Like for me, depression is about how do I get in some kind of motion? It almost doesn't matter what kind. I just need to infuse some sort of energy. Anxiety, on the other hand, for me is something that I find wrestling with meaning to be more useful. Because if I can, if I can sort of get back to— I find anxiety responds a little bit better for me if I can get back to core meaning. What really matters to me? What's really important? What matters deeply? And when I do that, I tend to get anxious about things that are happening in the world. And I know Kierkegaard said that that's a cover for a deeper existential anxiety. And I believe that to be true to some degree. But I find that anxiety responds to cognitive restructuring to some degree, whereas depression for me just doesn't. And I find myself needing to be in action. Although, and as unglamorous as it is, I still find exercise to be the best treatment I know for both those things for me. They seem to be very physical. And then the other thing I've thought about, I said earlier on about how these things are often a question of meaning, and we've talked about how the medical model often oversimplifies things. And yet I've found a lot of comfort sometimes, particularly in depression, when I just go, you know what? I'm not going to chalk this up to an existential crisis. I'm not going to think my whole life sucks. I'm just going to treat it like I've got the emotional flu for a few days and hope it blows over. And actually that, that works because what I used to do when I was younger is depression would just throw me into this.
And I think that's also why it leads to suicide sometimes, because at least with younger people, they lose a temporal perspective.
