265. When You Relapse…continued

2. Practice selective hearing.

If you’re like me, you’re convinced that you are lazy, stupid, pathetic and weak when you are depressed. Oh, and self-absorbed. To confirm this, you call to mind every comment made in the last decade in which someone (typically in an argument or after two bottles of chardonnay) suggests—even in the slightest way—that one or more of these attributes belong to you. And then you say to yourself, “Aha! I am right!” Yeah. Stop doing that. Pretend you are half-deaf, and can only hear the comments of folks that support you 100 percent, who remind you of all your great qualities. And you do have great qualities.

3. Track your mood.

An essential piece of my recovery is keeping a mood journal. This helps me to identify certain patterns that emerge. Bipolar disorder and depression can flair up seemingly out of the blue, like a thunderstorm. But often there are telltale signs that can clue me in as to why I’m feeling so fragile. You can catch these if you’ve been recording your mood over time.

About Patrick Day

In 2010, I escaped from four long years of deep, dark depression. This blog shares lessons I learned from those years as depicted in my autobiography - How I Escaped from Depression - as well as other insights about depression and anxiety that only come from someone who has gone through it. When you have a heart attack, you become an expert in heart attacks. When you have diabetes, you become an expert in that condition. As such, I am an expert in depression, with a four-year experiential degree and graduate studies in how to live a life going forward that keeps the ever-lurking Depression at a healthy distance.

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