How to Brighten Cloudy Days: Dealing with Depression

Have you ever had those days where nothing seems to go right?  I had one recently.  I woke up early one morning with full intention to do some work-related writing.  Instead of starting work right away, I spent an hour on my iPhone playing games and reading articles on Pinterest.  When I finally did get up to start my day, I sat down at my computer and got distracted by more articles on Pinterest and in blogs.  Once I finally forced myself to write, I was only able to finish an outline for an article before I felt discouraged and “needed a break.”

I felt disappointed in myself that morning, as I couldn’t check much off my to-do list.  As I moved on to the rest of my day, I thought to myself – how in the world do I cheer up after this?

Here’s a few thoughts that came to mind for ways to boost my mood.

Listen to Upbeat Music

True confession: I love boy bands.  One Direction and N’Sync are my pop idols of choice.  For me, putting on a 1D album will almost instantly change my mood.  In fact, a 2012 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology indicated that listening to upbeat music with the intention to boost your mood can cause you to feel happier.  Find whatever music is your favorite and put on a CD or radio station that plays it!  If you’re in search of ideas, I like flipping through Spotify’s mood playlists, like Mood Booster or Confidence Boost – even without a self-made playlist, you can still find some positive tunes.

Give Yourself Credit for the Good

When I reflected on my morning, my first instinct was to see all the things I did wrong, ways I procrastinated, or work I didn’t accomplish.  But, in reality, I did plenty of positive things.  I had time for meditation and Scripture reading in the morning.  I prioritized my to-do list and completed my top 3 tasks for the day.  I showered (that counts, right?)  David Burns, in his book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy*, identifies a distorted thought pattern he names “disqualifying the positive,” in which people can tend to believe negative thoughts or assumptions about themselves, but discredit any positive beliefs.  If I look at my day through the lens of everything I did wrong, of course I’ll feel discouraged.  But giving myself credit for those things I did will give that lift to my self-confidence.

Get Outside in Nature

There’s something about looking at beauty that makes it hard to focus on the negative.  I spent some time that afternoon sitting out in the backyard with my niece, basking in the sun and watching birds and squirrels.  We even saw a baby deer!  One evening earlier in the week a friend and I watched a giant cloud pass to the south of us, heat lightning flashing in the outline of the cloud.  It was absolutely beautiful.  Research shows that spending time in nature (or even viewing it from a window!) can have positive effects on mood, focus, and health.  Use the beauty you see to connect you back with a sense of awe and gratitude for the world around you.

Talk it Out 

A conversation with a friend can be an instant pick-me-up after a rough day.  There’s something powerful about knowing you’re not alone in the world.  Everyone has bad days, and having someone to sit with you in the middle of yours can make a huge difference.  Having a close network of friends has been shown to help people recover from depression. Give your friend a call, send a text, or even send a quick email to ask for encouraging words.

Give Yourself Permission to Take a Break

So you had a terrible morning trying to accomplish something that you couldn’t finish.  So the dishes are piling up in your kitchen, the crumbs have formed a layer on the kitchen floor, and you can’t remember the last time you wiped down the stove.  So your to-do list is a mile long and just keeps getting longer.  When you’re exhausted and overwhelmed to a point where everything feels like too much, it is okay for you to take a break.  Sit down, sip a cup of coffee, read a book, watch a quick YouTube video or TV show – whatever you love doing that refreshes you rather than drains you, give yourself a half-hour to do just that.  By giving yourself a short break with intention to return to your work afterwards, you’ll come back refreshed and ready to go.

On that day, did I remember to do these things?  Maybe not as much as I would’ve liked.  But when I have another discouraging day in the future, I’ll remind myself to return to some of these ideas and make them happen.

This article was originally posted on January 12, 2017.

Self-Care Saturdays: Mastering the Art of Play

Welcome to Self-Care Saturdays, a series of bonus blog posts that will be released on the last Saturday of each month.  In a world where we are constantly faced with demands on our time and energy, it can feel impossible to slow down enough to pay attention to our own needs and take steps to care for them.  These articles are meant to get you thinking about one small step you can take today to practice kindness and care for yourself. 

When we were kids, our main objective in the world was to play.  We could spend hours traipsing through the outdoors, creating our own games and imagining stories we’d act out with our friends.  But somewhere along the line, that sense of play was slowly overtaken by work –schoolwork, university, careers, and family life.

According to the Google, the verb “play” is defined as “engaging in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.”  As adults, this time can feel wasted or pointless because nothing is accomplished. 

But we need to bring play back into our lives.  There’s a simplicity to the idea of play that is missing from our experience as adults.  When we were children at play, we weren’t worried about anything other than the game or the imagined story in which we found ourselves.

There is an inherent value to engaging in play.  Play is an expression of freedom where I choose what I want to do right now and stop my play when it is no longer fun or enjoyable.  In this freedom, we experience greater creativity.  Children are encouraged to engage in play as a therapeutic technique to help them process pain and trauma they’ve experienced.

Oftentimes, play gets confused with leisure time, defined by distraction, disengagement, and emotional disconnection.  This is a sign that we’re using our leisure time to escape instead of rest.  In contrast, when you watch a child at play, you can see how engaged and curious they become in whatever exists around them, even if it seems trivial or unimportant.

Here are a few ideas to get you started on how to incorporate play in your life.

Remind yourself of how you used to play.

Over the course of time, we can lose touch with the playful spirit we had as children.  Dan Allender, in a series of podcasts on play, names a few questions to consider when you think about this topic.  What games do you enjoy playing?  What activities do you engage in that bring a sense of joy?  What did you used to play as a child that you enjoyed?

Be a kid on summer vacation again.

Think about all the ways you used to play in the summertime as a child.  What were some of the activities you loved?  Playgrounds and swings?  Exploring in the woods?  Schoolyard games?  Swimming in the lake?  Drawing with chalk?  Flying a kite?  Playing pick-up soccer or football?  Spend an afternoon doing some of these things!

Go to a museum or park designed for children and explore.

Some of my favorite memories of class field trips or family day trips involved visiting a zoo or a children’s science museum.  There was always so much to see and do, and I’d always learn something new.  Visit one of these parks or museums that you loved as a child with a curious and playful attitude.

Do a summer reading challenge.

As a lifelong book nerd, I always loved tearing through books as a kid to win a prize at our local library for amount of books read.  Many libraries have now extended the fun for adults and have broadened the ways you can earn points to include exploring the library buildings themselves, writing reviews for books, or attending library events.  I’ve joined in on the Ann Arbor District Library summer game for the past few years, which has plenty of options for fun and encourages me to attend community events I may not know about otherwise.

Throw a kid-themed party!

Friends’ birthday parties were always some of the highlights of the summer growing up.  Typically these parties involved themes, games, favors, and all the candy you could eat.  Invite your friends to a party and have a water balloon or water gun fight, get a piñata, or play children’s games like pin the tail on the donkey.

Learn from a child in your life.

Spend a day with a toddler or kid in your life, whether it’s your own child, a niece or nephew, or a friend’s child.  As you interact with them throughout the day, pay attention to how they view the world around them with curiosity and a sense of play.  Find ways to imitate that childlike spirit in your own life.

As you start to incorporate play into your life, pay attention to what emotions you feel.  You might find yourself distracted by embarrassment or shame.  You might feel silly or childish.  This is normal, especially at first, because play isn’t always encouraged in our day to day.  Observe your emotions, give yourself space to feel them, and know that the more you practice play, the more natural it becomes.

How will you begin to play this week?

Pain, Joy, and Longing: What The Giver Can Teach Us About Desire

What comes to your mind when you think about the word desire?  Is desire a familiar friend to you?  Or something that you run from as soon as you feel even a hint of it? We all carry different desires in our lives: desire for food, desire for another person, desire for a promotion at work, desire for a house (or a bigger house, or more stuff for your house).  Or perhaps your desire is more abstract: desire for more peace and calm in your life, desire to be loved, desire to achieve a mission or purpose in life.

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines the verb desire as “to long or hope for;” “to express a wish for” or “to feel the loss of.”  Notice how desire is so closely tied to disappointment or anticipation: we’re looking forward to something, but we haven’t yet attained it.  Or on the flip side, the final definition intertwines desire with loss or grief, as when we desire something we once had but lost.

What are some of the desires you identify most strongly in your life?

A short time before the movie release a few years ago, I read the children’s book The Giver by Lois Lowry.  In this novel, the characters live in a dystopian future where everything exists in shades of gray.  The lack of visible color extends as a metaphor to the citizens’ emotions and longings.  The inhabitants of this community take a pill each day that suppresses desire and emotion.  The plot of the book begins when the main character, Jonas, is assigned to the role of Receiver of Memory.  This assignment requires him to receive all the painful memories that the society has wiped from its memory. 

I listened to a podcast discussing some of these themes in greater detail after reading the book.   This theme discussed in the podcast struck me: because the characters in the book do not experience emotion and have no memories, they don’t experience feelings of pain.

Wouldn’t we all like that?  Our world is full of pain: we have only to open up a newspaper, turn on the TV, or take a walk on the city streets to see suffering in our world.  We grieve the deaths of those we love, we feel pain at broken relationships, we are shocked by the violence around the world, and we weep at images of children who are starving.

As Jonas begins his process of receiving the memories the society chose to erase, he is wrecked by the intensity of the emotions he feels, ranging from joy to sadness.  In the process, something starts to change in him.  He begins to see in color.  He stops taking his pills and begins to experience desire, sadness, and joy in his daily life.  Emotions he didn’t even know existed are now rising to the surface.

Another theme that surprised me in this novel was the assertion that medicating pain through erasing memories doesn't just strip these people of suffering.  Because pain and longing do not exist, there is no opportunity for joy.

There are a multitude of ways that I attempt to make myself happy to feel a fragment of that joy in my day-to-day life.  I’ll obsess over how many Facebook likes I get on that photo, spend hours playing mindless games on my phone when work feels overwhelming, or stop and get my favorite fast food when I’ve had a bad day.   But it doesn’t take long for me to realize that these are all ways I’m simply medicating my pain and deadening my feelings through this false sense of happiness, while denying the deeper desire that bubbles just beneath the surface. 

We all have ways that we choose to escape from our pain and longings. These typically involve us numbing that pain or desire, driving it far away so we don't have to deal with it or feel it.  We can run to shopping, drugs or alcohol, sex, the approval of others, perfection, power…any number of things that quiet the voices inside of us that want something more.

How do you avoid pain and deaden your heart to your desires?

Pain is uncomfortable, that's true.  Longing typically leads to pain, because our longings likely won’t be perfectly fulfilled in this life.  But if I kill my desire and shove my pain into a deep dark corner of my heart where it will never be acknowledged, my life will be flat.  Maybe I won’t feel sadness or longing, but I also am robbed of my ability to experience joy.

I love that joy and pain are juxtaposed so clearly together.  They are two strong and seemingly opposing emotions, but you have to be able to experience one to find another.  As a Christian, I am grateful for the pain God has brought me through, because the deeply rooted joy I can now experience is so clearly an outflow of that.  I can rejoice and be thankful in God.

How can you choose to acknowledge your desire, knowing that it will be painful?

I need to choose to embrace desire every day.  (And to be honest, I’m not always successful.)  It is easy to find ways to medicate pain in our world, because we as a people don’t like to feel these difficult emotions.  But I must choose to sit in pain or sadness when I feel it, rather than running away from it.  I must choose to become alive to my desires, although that often hurts.  And in so doing, I’m opening myself up to experiencing joy and compassion toward others.