Actively working with overcoming your depression

These two tools should be a natural part of your everyday life, to get the best results in overcoming your depression in the long run.

Writing a diary

Keeping a diary is one of the best ways to look at your problematic thinking, feeling and behaving and change your bad habits into good ones in order to overcome depression, as it allows you to analyze situations where you experienced negative emotions. If you’re in the grip of an unhealthy negative emotion such as depression, you can use your diary to change that into something more positive.

By keeping a diary you can effectively track what you are thinking and feeling and use it as a form of nonjudgmental self-critique. By analyzing your behavior after the event, you will most likely make the realization that your behavior often wasn’t appropriate. As a result, you can use a diary to slowly modify your behavior for the future and help you to focus your aims not on feeling depressed, but on dealing with the effects of feeling depressed. After all, whilst depression is something no-one can snap out of just like that, we can use tools to help us remember what the “depression” is and what really is “us”.

You should also schedule an exact day and time when you will expose yourself to certain depression triggers. An activity plan is a great way to get active which is a vital step to overcoming depression. After all, motivation is one of the biggest factors that play a role in keeping us depressed or not depressed. It will help you to get on with the daily tasks you have been avoiding and help you to challenge your depression and achieve the goals that you set at the beginning of this program. Studies show that the simple achievement of planning your day and allocating specific times to specific activities greatly increases the chances of you carrying them out.

1. Plan ahead, so that you can think ahead. Looking forward one day is better than not looking forward at all, but you should be aiming for a week at a time.
1. Planning an activity is not meant to help you avoid things. Use it to add in things you have been hiding from, such as chores, visiting family, going to work, etc. The hardest part is the first step.
2. Remember that planning an activity isn’t meant to be bad. Remember and reward yourself with things you enjoy so that you always have something to look forward to.
3. While rewarding yourself is important, don’t forget about the necessary evils in life such as housework, chores, paying the bills, etc.
4. Start off small, and build up slowly. Don’t overload yourself from the beginning. The aim here is to build up gradually.

Remember and look at your goals and examine your negative behavior and avoidance tendencies. This is your opportunity to try and do something about them - but gradually!

Planning Activities

Help is available online - use the links below to learn more or to take a test.