According to a recent report from the World Health Organization, “depression affects more than 264 million people worldwide.” It can affect a person’s ability to work, to form healthy relationships, and can even destroy their quality of life. At its most severe depression can lead to suicide and is responsible for approximately 800,000 deaths every year.
With this statistic you may be wondering, am I one of these people? Am I clinically depressed or am I just a bit sad? What are the symptoms of depression?
Symptoms of Depression
- Sadness throughout the day, nearly every day
- Stopping yourself from enjoying favorite activities like hobbies, exercise, or going to events
- Stopping yourself from being social with friends and family and desiring instead to be alone
- Feelings of worthlessness along with lowered self-esteem and self-confidence
- Excessive feelings of guilt, worry, and anxiety over things that are beyond your control
- Thoughts of death or suicide
- Having difficulty with making decisions
- Having difficulty with concentration, focus and memory
- Having a black and white viewpoint of the future that has unrealistic expectations and a tendency to judge things in stark all or nothing terms
- Feelings of irritability and a tendency towards being pessimistic
- Sleeping too much or too little due to dreaming excessively
- Fatigue or lack of energy and feelings of exhaustion
- Body Aches and pains (such as headaches, stomach pain, joint pains, or other pains)
- Change in appetite or either weight gain or loss with a tendency towards either overeating or under eating
- Feelings of restlessness or being slowed down with a general lack of energy
How can you break the Pattern or the Cycle of Depression?
Here are a few things you can do for yourself to break this cycle or pattern of depression on your own:
- Change your posture or your body position immediately – ex. If you are often slouching then stand up straight, if you are sitting for hours on end then stand up, stretch, maybe even go for a short walk anything to change your body position and general physiology. This simple change in your body sends a message to your brain to change your thoughts.
- Create something! Anything! If you love to paint, draw, scrapbook, sew, build birdhouses, garden, bake cupcakes, work on old cars, make fishing lures, making jewelry, or anything that you love to do that is your favorite thing to do than just do it! Do it for you and no one else, do it just for the fun of it!
- Write down your thoughts in a journal for a day. By writing down your thoughts it helps you to get them out of your head onto paper. It helps you to look at it in a more detached analytical way and thereby helping you to realize that there may be other solutions to look at than the way you have been thinking. Take control of your black and white thinking by looking at solutions and possibilities.
- Talk to good friends or supportive family members and socialize with them. By this I mean talking to someone not texting or face-booking but having a conversation with someone! Just talking to someone either face-to-face or on the phone helps tremendously in lifting your mood. Go out for coffee or lunch or have a friend over for dinner…meet with someone you like and hug them and laugh with them and tell stories or listen to stories…it is all good!
- Change your exercise routine or start a new one. Exercise is well known to stimulate various brain chemicals that can leave you feeling happier and more relaxed. So, go for a walk, run, do Yoga, Tai Chi, anything that gets your body moving which helps you to feel happier. For those who already regularly exercise, change your regular routine. If you run all the time do something with less impact like Yoga or if you only do Yoga, then do something with more aerobics as well…the important thing here is change. Stop the boredom and change the routine.
Do any of these statements describe your depressive thinking patterns?
- Too much worry about stuff that you cannot fix stirs you up. Your brain tries to deal with the strain by doing lots of dreaming.
- Too much dreaming means too little deep restorative sleep. So, you wake up exhausted, and start worrying all over again.
To stop going around in circles and getting more and more exhausted, you must somehow stop all that worrying. But how do you do that?
Hypnosis helps you tremendously by reducing the amount of worry that you are doing and by guiding your sub-conscious mind with mental solutions and suggestions by using creative imagery and visualizations designed to help you towards releasing these negative thoughts and letting go of past negative experiences. Also, hypnosis helps you to relax your body and mind completely so you can restore your body once again and sleep better and more soundly.
It may take you up to 6 sessions to help you to learn how to relax your body and mind and by creatively releasing the negative thoughts, so they no longer seem to fill your mind constantly. Many people find after just a few sessions a feeling of relief like a tremendous weight being lifted from their shoulders.
Now there are many things that a person can do to help themselves when they are feeling depressed. Besides taking the above advice to heart you may also like to see your medical doctor and decide to go on anti-depression medications for help. But before you decide, here is a link that shows you the many side-effects of anti-depression medications for you to look at first: