Introduction
It lurks for several days before it hits me. Litte signs, here and there, remind me that I'm about to have an episode. Eventually, when I can no longer ignore the signals, I accept that my depression is back and go through the same existential dread each and every time. "Is it here to stay this time? Will I be able to pull myself out? Will I reach the point where I don't want to live?"
Living with depression is hard to explain, but I like to imagine a heap of sand. Everyday life takes one grain of sand, but you never notice. It looks like the same mound as these tiny changes are invisible to the naked eye. Before we know it, the pile of sand is gone leaving a colourless, but indelible mark where it once stood.
That heap of sand is our vitality, and the colourless imprint that is left behind is depression. You see, many of us won't notice while negative, but imperceptible changes happen in our lives. Depression is insidious. It's invisible and feeds on your joy. It stops you from envisioning your future and robs you of the present moment.
For many years I was unaware of these signs. I was unaware that the pile of sand was getting smaller and became acclimatised to my symptoms. Depression, for me, is cyclical, and I live the vicissitudes of my mental well-being like an equities investor trades the Market's peaks and troughs. As a younger guy, these peaks and troughs were wild.
I'd look at a ten-year goal and try my hardest to achieve it in a year. Coupled with my propensity for rumination, this meant that the cycles were usually intense. I experienced crashes where my whole world felt like it was crumbling down for weeks or months at a time.
Other extremes usually followed these bouts of depression. "I'm going to get well," I'd tell myself. "I'll never let this happen again". So I would become obsessed with my diet, exercise regime, and reading everything I could to make me feel good. Name a book with "happiness" in the title, and I've likely read it.
I would unwittingly hit the bullseye with one of the many wellness darts I threw at the dartboard. Then the cycle would begin again—vitality, depression, vitality, depression. It played out like a poorly scripted drama. If written well, I would have accepted and embraced depression as part of me and used my newfound awareness to turn that negativity into a force for good.
Alas, that took many years of introspection and self-discovery. Looking back, I could see this as lost time, but I prefer to look at it as experience gained.
I now know myself well enough to recognise the signs and accept that the waves of depression and the sea of wellness are the same. I have developed what I like to call a "Toolkit". This toolkit is my repertoire of mental and physical activities that allow me to maintain some semblance of psychological equilibrium.
It's hard to accept, but no one can pull you from the abyss except you. Everyone will try, but you're the only person that can bring you back to life.
Amongst the habits in this "Toolkit" are three essential tools. They are my crutch and my "go-to" in the eye of the storm. I have developed many more habits that allow me to feel well, but these three come first in order of importance.
Psychotherapy
If you're like me, you find it more challenging to speak to the people closest to you than random strangers. I feel this reluctance is because you know from experience that people in your immediate circles will coddle you.
It takes a high level of emotional intelligence and self-restraint not to intervene in the life of someone you love who is struggling. I know that all they want is to protect me, but sometimes protection can hamper healing and growth.
It takes a village to raise a child, yes; But that child must defeat her dragons if she is ever going to believe in herself.
The availability heuristic essentially means that your loved ones will heavily rely on what they can recall. They offer advice based on what direction they received, and so on.
This is why psychotherapy is so widely successful. It provides the objectivity your loved ones never could. The majority of people who attend therapy sessions for more than a few months see an improvement in their well-being and optimism (1). Interestingly, as I have spoken openly about in our Podcast, the longer someone attends therapy, the more they tend to benefit (2).
I think about therapy, and the time it takes to be effective, like peeling back an onion's skin and layers. When I first met my current therapist, Noel, I was playing a character. This character was shaped by my upbringing, my social life, my habits and my aspirations. This was the onion's delicate outer skin, and it doesn't take long for it to peel away.
My character was incongruent with who believe I am, so gradually my self-deceit waned until I admitted this to Noel. I didn't want to professionally pretend any longer, so I began to introspect on a deeper level. Who do I want to be? What in life offers me a sense of purpose? Who do I truly value?
These more profound psychological and philosophical questions are the thicker onion layers - more time consuming to peel off, but possible with effort.
So which type of therapy should you attend, you ask? Each modality has its philosophy, its theories and prescriptions to help you alleviate the symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Interestingly, and this is the case for many things in our lives, it doesn't really matter (3). The sheer fact you are discussing your interior world with a qualified listener seems to be what matters. Their credentials or the psychological doctrine they have chosen to follow seems to be irrelevant (4).
This was a profound realisation for me and explained so much of why I have been able to develop emotional intelligence and self-awareness.
The value of my relationship with Noel is not the Person-Centred Therapy modality he adopts; instead, it's our relationship. It's the warm, relaxed and forgiving atmosphere. It's the familiar "how are you?" to start every session.
This is why therapy will always be a part of my toolkit.
Meditation
People close to me know that I am interested in language's limits. The fact that naming something does not always convey its full essence has made me wonder if we're all referring subjectively to shared experiences. When I say love, and you say the same thing, are we sure we are speaking about an identical phenomenon?
Nothing characterises this idea more than meditation. Meditation is the ultimate enigma because it deals with consciousness. I've never heard a conclusive argument for what that is, or more importantly, where it is.
Describing meditation and consciousness is a little like explaining how art makes you feel. It does something to you, but does it do the same thing to me?
I started to meditate in 2013 by accident. I first tried a quasi-Wim-Hoff technique and thought it was a bit jolting. I then downloaded an app called Headspace and hated it. Why would I want some guy talking in my ear when I'm trying my very best not to think? All I could do was think, and primarily about the fact he was using clouds as a metaphor for my thoughts. That lasted two days.
Then, something unexpected happened. A few days of just tracking my breathe for several minutes in the morning became weeks and weeks became months. I had formed a meditation practice only through sheer habit. I was doing fifteen to twenty minutes every morning by the end of that year. This is profound to me because I never "just do" something. I'm an over-thinker and like to analyse, so accidentally learning to meditate was special.
Meditation is en vogue. There's no denying that. It's marketed as a sort of Avante-Garde stress ball for highly productive executives. This, in my opinion, is complete bullshit. Meditation is antithetical to capitalism. It teaches acceptance of the here and now, not perpetual growth.
Most of us are unaware of the automaticity of thought. This is the single most significant cause of psychological suffering for us sapient beings. We think and think without awareness. This is unfortunate because something can be good or bad entirely depending on our perception of it.
What meditation taught me, very gradually, was metacognition. This concept that I am the thinker of my thoughts is entirely wrong. The separation of the "seer" and the "seen" means I can often transcend being the thinker to view my thoughts as objects to witness. They are to be noticed, rather than felt.
Much like Montaigne says in his Complete Essays (6), I would "rather shape my soul than furnish it", and that's just what I am doing when I practice for thirty minutes or an hour.
Meditation didn't make me more productive, like my favourite businessmen and businesswomen. It made me question why I needed to produce more. I didn't make me a better solitary thinker; it made me appreciate the collective.
We live in an epidemic of hurrying, and I have realised that I am just not in a rush. It's counterintuitive, but when you physically slow down to notice things, you acknowledge that the vast majority of your frantic, rushed behaviour is down to being harried by your thoughts.
When you learn to observe these thoughts, you realise that a curmudgeon lives inside you and wants to hijack every experience. In his book The Art of Travel, Alain De Botton explains that the only problem with going on holidays to beautiful places is that you have to bring yourself with you (7). How true.
I can be compassionate, optimistic and positive when I choose to be. Much of this is down to the ability meditation provides you to notice. That feeling of "I" does not have to define every waking moment. It's hard for me to feel the same way about the notion of an internal self after seven years of meditating almost daily. Is "he" in my head or my body?
If I could duplicate my conscious mind and download it into the body of a different person, would that still be "me"? What if we did the same experiment and now there was two of us with identical minds? (8)
If I suddenly developed amnesia and lost all of the memories up until this very moment? Would this tabula-rasa version of Chris still be the "me" that I refer to now?
These interesting thought experiments bring the subject of experience into question. Questioning the subjective self is immensely helpful when you are late for work and someone side-swipes you, knocking you off your new €600 electric scooter.
The anger you feel, when thought about objectively is just a primal emotion that will pass. You can reframe and put this situation into perspective. After all, you're alive - It's just your ego and that kick-ass scooter that took a knock.
So, do I have a prescription for meditation? No. Just do it. Don't think about it too much. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth for 5 minutes, then 10 minutes, and so on. There is nothing to tell, other than this: Do it every day, and you will notice a difference in the way you view yourself, time and the external.
I would be remiss to rob you of finding mindfulness in your own way, and in your own time. That said, it's a tool I can never see myself giving up, and it has changed my life for the better.
Journaling
Little girls keep journals. That's what I thought.
I maintained that opinion until I started my final year at university. I had a hectic schedule and had so much on my mind that I just needed to write some of that word vomit down. It shocked me to realise how cathartic the act of putting pen to paper was.
If getting in a room with a therapist is so effective, then, of course, the act of writing my thoughts down on paper was going to help too. Journaling allows me to chip away at thoughts and feelings, and then respond to them in a nonjudgmentally way.
After I meditate, I take out my Leuchtturm 1917 notepad - yes, I'm a geek when it comes to notepads too - and I write. I write about any of the thoughts that arose during meditation and try to evaluate them. I find that, once surface level thoughts quieten several minutes into a meditation practice, any ideas that do occur are more profound and more consequential.
I then proceed to write about why I feel grateful. This one act of specifying thanks for what I already have has been enriching. I will frequently write out all of the things in my life that I could not live without. I then imagine my life as if all of the superfluous was taken from me. Surprisingly, I always feel fine.
I won't attempt to highlight the body of research because it takes away from the core message. Today, therapists and psychologists worldwide ask their clients to write about how they are feeling. It just works(9).
Incorporating journaling will help build emotional resilience. As with all things, it will only work if you do it consistently. Try it for yourself. I conclude our weekly newsletter with a question. Why not use that question as a journal prompt to get you started?
Conclusion
These tools are what I use to live with depression. I must advise that nothing will work to make me feel better during the most acute period of a depressive episode. I can't eat, I cry and don't want to leave the house. This usually lasts a few days. Then, I can incrementally reintroduce the habits that make me feel well consistently.
I could have talked about diet, exercise, reading, quality connections and a sense of purpose. All of these are also part of what constitutes this toolkit I keep referencing. Psychotherapy, meditation and journaling are the foundation for the myriad of other tools I use. This is why I exclusively referenced them here.
I also want to take the opportunity to say this: I don't want you, dear reader, to fall victim to the halo effect. This is a type of cognitive bias whereby our impression of a person influences how we react to their advice. This type of bias is pervasive when it comes to things like "Morning Routines" and self-help. We see an influential person extol the virtues of a cold shower and a 4am wake up time. We immediately add those to our newfound morning routine, expecting to be just as successful as them.
Always take advice with a pinch of salt. Trust but verify. These habits work for me because I can stick to them, and I believe in them. If you find meditation to be nothing more than a quiet sit, then try something else. If you end up landing on something that helps combat your depression and anxiety, add it to your own toolkit.
Take care of yourself. Take action and take responsibility for your health.
Trust me, it will keep you alive.
