It’s very difficult, and in the end, it comes down to finding things that work for you, but in my experience, doing it “on my own” is virtually impossible. Humans need social interaction and often help, especially when battling with mental illness. That being said, there are some things that help most people.

1. Exercise - you don’t need to run a marathon or lift free weights, but any kind of exercise, including walking, can have a big boost on mental health. If you can, working up a sweat can help release more endorphins (and also helps motivate me to take a shower when I’m struggling with hygiene).

2. Sleep - prioritize getting good sleep. This has a huge effect on your mental health, and lack of sleep makes intrusive thoughts more difficult to ignore. If you suffer from suicidal ideation, this can be very beneficial. It can also help set up a routine for exercise, hygiene, etc. if you have more consistent bed and awake times.

3. Eating healthy- this is hard, because often when depressed we go for unhealthy foods, which make us feel bad, so we eat more of them and it perpetuates the cycle. If you really struggle with this start by making small changes - find a fruit or vegetable you genuinely enjoy and start incorporating more into your diet. Learning some basic cooking skills can also make healthy eating more enjoyable.

4. reduce drug and alcohol use (if any) - these can be excellent short term solutions, but will often make you feel worse in the long run

5. find someone to talk to - online resources help, but there’s no substitute for genuine in person (or over the phone) interaction. This can be harder said than done if you’re older or in an area where it’s hard to meet people. Support groups are also excellent- there’s something very empowering about being surrounded by folks experiencing the same challenges you do every day.

6. practice gratitude- take some time every day to thing of things you are genuinely thankful for. Supposedly, the brain can’t think or negative things while you are thinking of positive ones. Even if that’s not true, taking time to appreciate the good things in your life (even if it’s something small like your morning coffee) can help redirect your thought process.

Lastly, understand you can do all the “right” things to battle depression and still be depressed. No amount of exercise or vegetables will suddenly make you better - you will likely still have bad days. That’s why, for me, it’s important to have people I know I can call and talk to (my brother being a big one right now). We don’t even really talk, I just call him and cry talk for a bit and eventually it doesn’t hit so hard.

Give yourself some credit for all the bad days you’ve been through- if you weren’t strong, you wouldn’t have made it this far. Good luck! I’m rooting for you!

I struggle with depression and choose to deal with it without medication. I have a loose mental health routine… more like a list of things to do on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

Daily:

Shower

Eat

Spend a minimum of ten minutes cleaning my space.

If not working, spend at least 20 minutes outside; preferably doing some kind of exercise, but just chillin’ is ok too.

Weekly:

Attend some kind of social event. Doesn’t mean anything huge. I got in to D&D and that takes care of that one most weeks. Regular social activity is important.

Monthly:

Clean the bathroom! (Preferably bi-weekly)

This is not a complete list of things I do to help my mental health, but they’re the ones I force myself to do even if I don’t want to. It helps.

I also follow a general guideline I learned in therapy. Keep track of things you’re doing and put them in to one of three categories: professional development, self care, recreation.

The goal is to spend your waking hours doing these things evenly. (I suppose sleeping counts as self care in the right situation)

I’m a former addict. Been clean for 4 years now. I learned these things in recovery and the whole time I thought to myself “This should be a high school course. You don’t need to be an Addict to benefit from this stuff.”

Anyway, these things truly help me and I hope they can help you too.

Some of the things that helped me:

• Regularity. I also have ADHD so actually getting me to catalog daily/weekly things that I need to do was hard enough. But now that I have like 5 todo lists things are looking up.
• Cataloging things. I love photography and writing down interesting ideas. Someone looking through my photo collection might wonder why I take photos of random shit. Simple reason: Something managed to brighten my day and I just had to put it in on the record. I feel happier when I know that those moments won’t ever disappear if I can at all manage it. Similarly, if I have cool ideas that made me happy for some reason, I write them down.
• Crap social media is the worst. Be on the social media to fearlessly shout your cool ideas to the void if you have to. Don’t be there to passively and silently afraid to speak up and stick around with people you barely know and watch them slowly turn nazi yes-men. (Yes. It has happened. Before Elon bought Twitter. Can’t even imagine how shit things are nowdays over there.)

Running shirtless at -3 ℃
“On curing sadness with cold showers, excess with Cynicism, and madness with veganism. And if you can’t go vegan, eat the rich.” —https://arscyni.cc/file/cynic.html

Once a day, think of one simple thing that a depressed person would not do. Do that. For some examples:

• Take even the shortest walk around the neighborhood.
• Read just ten pages of any book.

Also, think of something that you do especially when depressed, and avoid doing it. For some examples:

• Don’t watch TV
• Don’t scroll on social media

Sometimes habits become compulsive, you can do a lot for yourself by adding even a small amount of friction to doing those things. For some examples:

• When I notice that I go through periods of poor sleep due to habitually reaching for my phone, I might remove the charger from my phone and put it in a living area and charge it there at night. I might prepare 8 hours of podcasts and connect my Bluetooth before bed so I can have something to take my mind off things in case wake up or cannot sleep.
• Simply logout of social media sites, so that I’m forced to take a deliberate action to log back in to start doom scrolling again.

For more proactive maintenance things I try to do, which are important to establish when I’m mentally in a good place, I might make a weekly list of happy chores, like make sure I talk to a family member, make sure I talk to a friend, make sure I actually see someone in person, or play a video game in a way that I’m making progress at it, or spend 10 minutes practicing an instrument.

You need to exploit your good times to establish patterns of good habits for your hard times.

Persist.

Keep at it; try again tomorrow.

Depression will rob you of joy, erode your appetite for life, and leave you blaming yourself for any/everything.

In those circumstances where you cannot defeat it, you can still outlast it.

Do what you can for yourself. When you can do no more, do what you can for the person you will be later, and, when you can do no more: forgive yourself.

Depression is a parasite and it’s been eating your strength far longer than you realize.

Lots of good advice here, so I’ll add a few easy things that helped me that don’t take much energy. 1: get at least five minutes of direct sunlight a day, not through a window. 2: take an iron and vitamin D supplement, having more energy makes me less depressed. Try a multi vitamen if you don’t know where to start. 3: making sure you have healthier snack foods, I swapped out candy for gummy fruit snacks, yogurt for ice cream. I know how hard it can be to eat real meals when you are struggling so make your snacks count positively.

So much good advice, I find being grateful for things really helps, and I would also recommend CBT. Good luck, and remember, one step at a time, one day at a time.

Recognize that it’s not your fault, you don’t deserve it, and sometimes accepting it for what it is makes it easier.

Look at online options, some of them are fairly. So are some of the drugs. If it’s a chemical imbalance, like it was for me, you literally can’t fight it on your own. All you can do is exist.

Read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. Helped me through a hard time in my life.

Thats a great question, I should know considering ive been depressed for years. I mostly focus on the near future so I can make it through the constant traumatic events in my life.

When hurricane Milton hit I lost power, internet and my cell signal was like using dial up so all online access was gone for about a week. Sent the family to go stay with friends and I stayed behind. With no electricity and no internet all I had was myself. The first 2 or 3 days were tough. I didn’t know what to do with myself so I cleaned and sat outside in the shade to escape the heat. By the end of the week I was in a good place, not perfect, but better than when I started. I was relaxed, my thoughts were clearer, I could comfortably focus on one thing at a time. I think knowing that after I was done focusing on something I could return to a comfortable quiet helped.

When power and internet came back within 2 days everything was back to ‘normal’. No more peace. No more comfortable focusing. Back to my usual habits. I recommend disconnecting from phones and computers for a few weeks. Give your mind time to get into the habit of not using them, it’s so easy to fall back into old habits, you have to set the stage for new ones to slowly grow, like trending a garden it takes time and effort.

One of best descriptions of self mental health care was from Rick and Morty. It’s like wiping your ass, or washing the dishes. It’s not fun but it’s something you have to do everyday. You can suffer the pain of doing it, or suffer the pain of having not done it. Front load the pain don’t offload it to your future self. Give future self a break, do some work for him/her and I know they’ll be incredibly appreciative.

I’m my past when I was at my worst I noticed that I was in a better place when I was around people than when I wasn’t. Be around people/friends if you can. Ask someone to spend party of a day with you doing absolutely anything.

Exercise until you know you will be sore the next day. I didn’t exercise regularly, but I did notice that whenever I did some physical activity that left me sore the next day, within about 2 or 3 days I was a much better version of myself for a day or two.

So in conclusion. Do nice things for future self, even talk out loud to yourself about future you like they’re someone else. Disconnect from Internet and tv so your mind can have some time to itself. Be around people, we are social animals, we need to feel like we are part of a group, a tribe, maybe go take some night classes that will force you to work on a project with others. Exercise or do something strenuous.

Oh and a couple more things, try to establish a regular sleep schedule! Someone mentioned this already and they’re right, change your environment. Your mind and body will default to the feelings it’s used to having in the place it most often has them. As an example, if you’re a home pooper then when you get home your body will go into pooping mode. If you only use your bed to sleep and not look at your phone or watch tv then you will feel sleepy when you get in bed. New environments will put your mind into learning mode not default mode, keep finding ways to keep it from sitting back down into the depression it’s left in the chair. Like that song, you can get used to a certain kind of sadness.

Okay one more thing, video games. I like playing them but I have a habit of using them like a drug. It feels good to use a drug, and when you hardly feel good why wouldn’t you use it. You will play them again, and you’ll enjoy them more after your mind has had some quite time to itself. You’ll get to play again someday, you just have some mental chores that need tending to first.

Last thing I promise. Quite time is even better when done in nature. Any nature. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution designed us to be in nature, part of nature. Quite time means no podcasts or music as well.

Now get out there and do the dishes, wipe your ass, and do something nice for future self, they fucking deserve it.

Professional help moght be as simple as antidepressantants. They are cheap and they do help a lot. I have been taking it for about a year and it does help a lot. Currently on a decent dosage of venlafaxine.

Seriously, they don’t do much the first couple of weeks, but after that they do help a lot.

• LLMs make decent therapists. Try CharacterAI or even just assign a therapist persona to ChatGPT (makes it more accurate - e.g. “You are an experienced psychologist with experience in the following therapies…”). This is both solo and affordable.
• Look into books you can read about managing your mental health.
• There are loads of apps out there that can help you with your depression, e.g. supplement your flagging executive function, remind you to practice rejection of useless self-castigation, help you check in with how you’re feeling, etc.
• Go outside at least once a day.
• Exercise at least once a day for half an hour.
• Set small and manageable goals, and make sure you speak to yourself positively when you achieve the goal, no matter how small.

These are all admittedly easier said than done when you’re depressed, but they are better than nothing, especially if you weren’t doing anything in these areas earlier.

This’ll probably get drowned but I managed to beat depression before flying off the deep end and developing psychotic symptoms.

Had depression for 12 years before I decided to put work in it. 6 years ago, I didn’t know how to, or what to expect. Figured if I spent 10 years depressed, it would take 10 years to recover. It ended up taking about 3.5 to 4 years of remission. I didn’t take any medication or drugs. Only addiction I got is videogaming. Still haven’t beaten that.

I’ll try to keep it chronological, but it’s hazy. What I did was:

1. The opposite of what I had been doing my life up till that point.

I was digging my own grave, but didn’t understand what I was doing wrong. So I did everything ass backwards to find out what did and didn’t contribute to my own misery. For me, that meant saying what’s on my mind, embarassing myself and learning from it. Trial and error is the way to go for paupers. That and radical acceptance that it’s gonna suck. Gotta welcome shit with open arms when cleaning your psychic septic tank.

2. Change of enviroment.

In my case. It meant a change of goals. The first was getting better. The second was learnibg something new. Got lucky I had a 2nd chance at studying towards a new work field. But it can be anything else. Just something on the horizon. Mind you, don’t focus on it. The thing to look out for, is useful as a distraction, and only as a distraction. It’s a bad source of motivation as the future isn’t real. It can become the now, but the future itself never is real. Focus on the now, with just something to look out for. At this stage, you’ll still won’t understand the point of it all, so just accept you don’t. Take it 1 day at a time. Only look back or at the future on occasion. You won’t see a change every week, but over time, you might.

First change in depression I noticed was the ability to feel negative emotions. For me, it was anger. Pure rage. Never had I understood what seeing red, white hot fury or hothead meant. Felt like a hot rock was lodged between my skull and top of my brain. I realised I had never been angry. Anger is a double edged sword. The positive side is that it’s there to fight injustice. Your injustice. The bad side is seeking dominance or control over something. The only thing you should seek control over, is yourself and how you handle life. Not others, or things that can’t be controlled.

Then the hormonal changes occurred. I became restless, and my ADHD symptoms got worse real quick. Had tons of energy. Had no libido before, and suddenly did. Depression affects everything. So expect weird shit during remission. Nothing to be afraid of.

About a year in or so doing step 1 and living inside step 2, I beat anhedonia. It was like background radiation. Except instead of cancer, it gives you energy. Just a tiny hum of joy in the background. Doing new things becomes rewarding. Doing something for the sake of doing it becomes rewarding. Fun is an understatement. And it isn’t some intense dopamine hit either. It just is background joys. And man, it is damn worth it.

3. Exercise. I had tried on and off to hit the gym. I kept trying for years before, and still failed now. Even got sick for a year due to shitty night shifts messing with my circadian rythmn. In hind sight, I wonder how much it contributed to my psychotic symptoms, considering it was cortisol related. Lockdown from the 'rona saved my ass who couldn’t set healthy boundaries.

2 years in, I did something I never done before. Applying for a job just for the hell of it. You start doing stuff because of an intrinsic drive, and not because “it’s the sensible thing to do.”

When you’re depressed and passively suicidal, you don’t understand the point of living. Anhedonia and motivational anhedonia are the reason you can’t understand it. And man, was it a radical discovery. Suddenly, it just “makes sense” why people want to live. Because hell, I wanted to live!

3. Exercise again.

Attempt #godknows. 3 months of weekly exercise it took to learb to enjoy sports. I didn’t lose any weight, but my obese ass was able to keep running 9km/h for 15min straight. Ate healthy for the most part too. Felt good despite being fat as fuck. Did wonders for my confidence.

Got lucky and built up some friends. Never really had any before.

4. Figure out your maturity, and deal with family. Generational trauma galore.

Like anyone else, I have family issues. My parents aren’t mature people, and expecting them to change is… stupid. But I still saw my mom hurting, and hurting others as a result. Mostly my sister and I. I wanted understand her. She was born from a mess, into a mess, and made a mess of her family because she doesn’t know any better. She scores high in narc traits and ADHD. Allround, a difficuly person to be around with.

Perfect for learning how to navigate diffocult relationships. Learning what’s okay, and what isn’t. Learning how to set boundaries, and discovering they mean nothing to someone who doesn’t respect you. Boundaries are only respected by those who respect you. In all other cases, boundaried are only respected if you can enforce them. Seems like a yah-duh moment. But it’s not something I understood. Learned it through trial and error, with the luck of a narc for a mom to practice on.

And by some miracle, we made progress. I know how to get her guard down. The source of her bad behaviour is survival mode. Who could have thought there was a human being behind a manipulative monster? One who beat her 6yo daughter for wandering off. One who aborted a 3 month pregnancy because she felt it was going to be a boy, and she didn’t want a son. I’m sorry bro, but you dodged a bullet. She would have treated you worse than my sister and I.

Point is, you don’t know shit. And your family history shapes you. You take over their bad traits, and it’s your choice on whether you want to become like them, or learn to deal with it and grow as a person.

5. Don’t move the bar.

Shit stranger. You get this far in recovery? It’s a fucking miracle you did. Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t move the bar.

Because if you keep doing that, you’ll end up like me.

Every time you raise the bar on yourself, you’ll lose that background joy. Your motivation will vaporize. Take health for example. Move the bar too often and going to the gym isn’t enough anymore. You’ll start looking too much at the horizon, other people and it’ll all start seeming pointless. You’ll feel less and less in control. Not saying you should take baby steps, but you ought to stick to your own shit. To what you are doing, not what you desire. That’s how you make progress.

Raising the bar, is the fastest way to redevelop anhedonia and relapse into depression.

My fall:

Shit fam. Wish I could offer better experience. But life didn’t turn out well due to some stuff I hadn’t forseen snowballing into an avalanche.

In case you want to know. Had some issues that required mental health care. Jury is still out on it. Most likely untreated PTSD, untreated ADHD and just neglectid autism (diagnosed). DID, bipolar disorder, early psychosis, brain tumor, dementia, etc. Are all good guesses too. Or just the result of things going poorly. Print the DSM-5, strap it onto a board and throw some darts at it. Whatever it lands on, is as good a guess I suppose.

Past 2 years I’ve been fighting chaos, rather than my mental problems. From my GP not taking me seriously and turning 7 months of waiting into 15 (and I still consider myself lucky). Along with downplaying my issues. “You don’t have ADHD, autism makes things difficult too.” Lo and behold. I scored high on a DIVA test, the neuroscientists I got the privilage to work for saw my traits, the professionals who I got lucky to meet saw my traits. But the one person whom I depended on, didn’t think I had ADHD. Must all be in my little woman’s head. Imagining things. Well lady, that’s kind of the problem now. “The hallucinations are stress related.” Geez thanks, tell me something I didn’t know. How do I make sure they don’t get worse? “Just keep me posted.” I did, and it got bad real fast. Personality changes my family saw. “I don’t think I can make you happy with a 1 year waiting list. Luckily this one instance happens to be open for referrals and only 2 months wait.” Those 2 months are almost over and I’m crawling.

Another instance that was supposed to help me, went bankrupt. At the time I was at step 3-4 and thought “I can do it without!” That failure was picked up by a new instance. One that railed me the past 2 years. I was again dealing with trying to get a ball rolling, rather than my issues.

Look. Any place that has a high turnover rate is bad. A mental health facility that has a high turnover rate, is a laboratory waste dumpster fire.

People quit, only psychiatrist available was spiritual. Something I can’t work with. Internally waiting, and waiting. Appointments canceled last minute due to planners fucking up. Next week, 3 strangers and the 1 guy who saved me, are going to make a descision. The 3 strangers are the new folks taking in a spot for those who quit. Never met them. What a circus.

Now I have to face the fact I can’t function at work anymore. Having episodes where I remember shit, feel stress, and forget about it. Can’t sense my own exhaustion proper, while rest and sleep are the only things that stave off the 'chosis. Except cortisol derps make sleep difficult. I’m aggressive and have attacked family members twice in 1 year. I feel bloodlust. Can’t have that happen at work. The only reason I’m allowed to drive, was because I had a grip on my early stages, and work was too important to me. Monday is gonna suck.

Hyperfocus is what got me through the last 3 months. Thank fuck for having a “safe” addiction to videogames.

I want death, but fuck me. Promised myself 6 years ago that I would give it my all. I’ll make sure to off myself before I kill someone else.