Dealing with a Depressive Episode

Dealing with a Depressive Episode
If you have prolonged, incapacitating depression, please seek professional help.

Basic:
Please note, following advice won’t magically make you feel better. It’s just a guide to what to do to make something constructive out of your situation, instead of just taking the most likely route of distracting yourself with something that may or may not be counter-productive.

Take your notebook and write down what you’re feeling. Describe your sensations to the best of your ability. You can also draw or just scribble. Doesn’t have to be coherent, so long as you put something down on paper. Then answer these questions:
-Is there some thought pattern going through your head? What is it?
-If not, are there some images or words floating in your head? What are they? Again, doesn’t need to be coherent. If you can only muster a swirl, great, draw that.
-Are there any physical sensations? Pressure in your chest? A chill? Something heavy above your head?

Get detailed. Describe the words or pictures as carefully as possible. Imagine if you must. Dig deep. Use synonyms. Search dictionary for a synonym if you must. Write down anything that feels right. If you have any interest in some other language, look up words in that language as well.
Can you come up with any song that resonates with you when you feel depressed? Write down the lyrics, at least the most relevant parts. Can you pick at them at all? Why do those lyrics feel appropriate to you? Or maybe there’s just a melody that feels right. Why do you think that is?
Is there some show, movie, book or game that draws you in when you’re feeling like this? Why is that? Is there a character you relate to? Why? Is there some particular scene that appeals to you? Again, why? Write all this down and explain it to yourself as well as you can.

You might get a feeling that this is childish, or makes you feel like a teenaged girl or whatever. Don’t judge. This is your private thing that you’re doing. Nobody else knows about it, so the only one giving you shit about doing it is you. Do you think there’s any benefit to that? Go ahead and write these thoughts down as well. Accept whatever thoughts come and do this anyway. Nobody needs to know.

Keep doing the above when you’re feeling depressed until you have at least some idea on what thoughts are giving you that feeling.

It may take months that you can come up with anything tangible – or minutes. Also, if you really can’t come up with anything, you should look into getting professional help as self-inquiry just may not be enough.

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Intermediate:
Hopefully, following the advice on Basic or by previous insight, you’ll have uncovered some reasons to your depression. Maybe not all of the reasons, but some of them.

Maybe you’ve landed on something like “I feel bad because I’m not in a relationship”, or “I’m too stupid to ever have a good job”, “I’m so ugly that even if I lost weight I’d still be worthless”.
I obviously can’t address every individual problem here so I hope you can just try to apply the following to your situation.

What your reason most likely boils down to is the sense of not being good enough as you are.
That feeling sucks. Of course you’d be depressed if you think that way about yourself. It would be weird not to get depressed when you believe something like that. So try to be understanding of yourself. You believe something about yourself that doesn’t match the ideal you have. Something about yourself differs from how you’d like things to be. It’s perfectly natural to feel sadness about it.

I know this may sound a bit weird but even if you feel bad over something like this, you don’t need to immediately dig yourself out of that feeling. Eventually, yes, you need to do something about it but for now, at least for a moment, accept that feeling. Don’t wallow in self-pity, egging yourself on about how awful and worthless you are, but just accept that you had a thought that made you feel bad. Don’t try to distract yourself from feeling this. Don’t look for external validation. Don’t even try to comfort yourself with anything, be it a pint of ice cream, your pet or some push-ups. Sit your ass down, turn off your phone or computer, and feel what you need to feel. Cry if you feel like it. Process. Give yourself at least 5 minutes to just be alone with your head and that feeling.

All of the above applies for sadness stemming from injustice as well. Don’t snowball your emotions with trains of thought, don’t try to push the feeling aside. It’s okay to just feel. That is doing something about it: you are priming yourself to have the best capacity take the optimal action to fix whatever needs fixing. You are specifically not acting on an impulse, you are not being irrational: you are taking the logical first step of de-cluttering your mindscape so that your brain has the capacity to figure out the objectively most helpful and optimal plan of action without being distracted by a thought-emotion-thought-emotion loop. Clearing your work-space. Pushing emotions aside with another emotion or action is the same as “acting emotionally”.

Finally, sadness from loss is no different. Maybe your loved one died. Then there really isn’t even anything else to do but to feel sad about it, and that’s okay.

When you feel like you’ve become able to process your depression and no longer become incapacitated by it, you may want to read the Advanced: Emotional Intelligence section.