How to beat Depression

The weather is getting cold outside and light is fading out gradually. Winter season is just weeks away and leather jackets have become the norm. People tend to get slow and gloomy when winter sets in. This is one of the classic settings to trigger depression. Depression is a mental state where pessimism is the dominant attitude. Negative feelings control the mind and lead it into a chain reaction or avalanche of more negative thoughts. Just like the way we prepare our car for bitter cold weather, we need to prepare our mind for the environments that trigger depression. Many factors can trigger depression and it helps to develop an awareness to these triggers. This will help in avoiding the triggers and handling depression in case you were not able to avoid it. Some of the triggers are weather, negative surroundings - could be friends, life partner, family, boss, office team, health issues, financial issues, some sort of failure or loss.

To be prepared for depression, one needs to analyze his or her own self. This can be done by maintaining a diary or log of state of one's mind. The diary should capture salient points of your life like how you felt on a day, what made you feel happy or sad, did you get depressed about
something or someone, why did you get depressed and how soon you recovered from it, how did you recover from it etc. If you worry about privacy issues, you can always obfuscate your writings using some technique that only you know. This may sound like a long and tedious process but it is well worth the effort. Mind controls your life. If depression controls your mind, you cannot succeed. Understanding the state of mind is like hunting for the treasure. If you persist with this exercise, you will reap huge rewards.

After you capture daily entries in the mind journal for about an year or so, you can start seeing trends, patterns, solutions more clearly. Your behavioural pattern, personality type, dreams, goals will show up more conspicously when you examine this log carefully. There will be footprints of survival, struggle, needless negativity, reptition of mistakes in the pages of mind journal. From this treasure chest of information about your mind, you can deduce the mistakes in your thinking patterns and correct them by applying medicinal thoughts, nurturing winning habits and building a diehard personality.

For the impatient readers, there is a short term approach to beat depression. The steps start on a physical plane at the tangible level. First step, would be to freshen up your physical body and feel the fresh energy flowing through every cell of body. A quick workout, warm shower,
short jog or even fast beat dance to music can do the trick. It will get the blood flowing fast and call the immediate attention of mind. Mind then needs clear direction otherwise it will wander like a mad horse. So chart out a plan for the next 1 hour with couple of minutes break after every 10 minutes. Assign yourself small tasks that can be accomplished in 10 minutes. Now start racing with time. you need to literally race with time. If you have a stopwatch that is great. If not use a cellphone or wallclock. Just race with time in finishing the task cleanly, comprehensively and well ahead of time. It is a game now. Your task could be mail your friends, pay bills, feed the dog, find some info for office work/school, read an assignment - anything that can be done in 10 minutes. you would have completed 5 units of work at the end of the hour. Now evaluate your work and jot down points to improvise it. Take the next 20 mintes off as a treat for your accomplishment. you are officially out of depression. Continue the steps above till get bored out of your mind or run out of things to do. Then take rest if you are tired or go for a ride with the music on. The important step is to understand that depression is being attacked from the physical plane in this approach. You are starting with a workout or a shower and changing the feeling experienced by the body. Body then kick starts mind into positive gear which gets employed in small, calculated tasks that are well within the realms of accomplishment.
The sense of accomplishment further triggers more positive waves in the brain and the chain reaction starts on the positive side. If these activities are repeated for an extended period of time, this becomes a habit and registers into personality thereby changing the depressed person into an active, time challenging, positive person.