If this winter feels dark

don't commit to depression

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This post is not about writing and publishing, but some people who know me as a writer might not know that I’m also a psychologist. Not a clinical psychologist—I’m a social psychologist who studied the relationship between psychology and politics. But I’m not going to talk about politics here, just mental health. Many things in the world lately have seemed overwhelming, and I’ve been struggling to answer the question of how to live, how to experience joy in between the moments of suffering, and how to not slip into depression. I’ve been talking about this issue with other psychologists, writers, and people who are a lot more woo-woo than the former two (I just got back from a weeklong breathing workshop where there was no cell phone or internet service.)

What I came up with is this: I am making a commitment to joy and good intentions and avoiding a commitment to misery. I have had clinical depression before and what I noticed is that there are things that the depressed mind does to prevent you from getting better. I know that isolating myself makes me feel worse, and yet someone will ask me to hang out and some part of me will want to say no; this is the part of you that doesn’t want you to get better. Maybe you secretly feel you deserve to feel miserable. Maybe some part of you is scared of getting better—because what then?? Because then you’d have to go and like, be a person?? The way you combat this is with behavioral activation: you do things. You do things that will make you feel better. More on that later.

First I want to talk about what I think are the key four pillars. The three non-negotiables, as in, you have to do these, no ifs ands or buts.

No Doomscrolling

In the past decade, we observed a lot of doomscrolling and it’s not even like the people doing it think that it’s good for them—they know it makes them crazy but they do it anyway. They might say they are doing this to keep informed. I think this is incorrect in two different ways. First, philosophically, I think they are ostensibly doing this to keep informed, but actually doing this because it’s an anxiety coping mechanism. ie, if I do this thing, it will make it a little better. It will prepare me for The Thing (whatever that may be.) Anxiety preparation does not make you better prepared to deal with conflicts, it actually makes you worse off. But also, it makes you feel like you are doing a thing (become informed), and that thing helps the world, but I think it does neither of these things.

IMHO, not just as a random asshole on the internet, but as a person with a PhD in political psychology, doomscrolling and other casual methods of attempting to be informed actually lead to be being less informed. Think of walking into a massive warehouse buffet. Some of the dishes are fine, some are mediocre, some are literally teaming with listeria. Doomscrolling is the equivalent of running around, choking down as many small bites as possible, shoving food into your mouth from an assortment of dishes, not even tasting the food or wondering if it has listeria. You end up, not surprisingly, with projectile streams out both ends. Worse still is if you accompany this with shoving dishes into other people’s faces (ie, constantly sharing news)—other people might not want or need that news, and they may also lack the ability to detect if its misinformation.

If I were in grad school still, I think I’d want to study this, but it strikes me that the current media age has led to people being less informed, rather than better informed even though there is more “information” (I’m not even talking about political polarization, which is a whole other can of worms). When I hear that today people’s main sources of news are social media and friends and family, it fills with with terror, because yes, you can find out that there’s a boil water advisory that way, but you can also find out about QAnon that way, and that’s actually how a lot of people got into QAnon.

Find some reasonable limit for staying informed, and doomscrolling is off the table. Say you spend 10 minutes a day on news. I would strongly advise 2 things: one, don’t get it watching cable network news. The content on those channels tends to be driven by “what makes ratings” rather than “how do I create a public that is well-informed?” I guess I would make an exception if the news network is running a longform documentary about one particular topic. Trust me you are not missing out. There are probably a handful of topics that I am a legitimate expert in (ie, a college would pay me to teach a class) and none of that expertise came from watching cable news. Two, pick a reasonable number of issues you care about and decide to substantively follow these. I know it feels like 4000 things are simultaneously crumbling, but there is a limited number of things you care about that you can develop reasonable expertise in, and its more likely that those limited number are things you can actually do something about. Because I actually do have to read a lot of news in the context of my work, outside of work I’ve made the decision to only read longform investigative journalism. This can be about any topic, because rather than panic devouring an assortment of odd foods, I am going in deep on one topic written by a journalist who has devoted significant time and effort to it.

If you feel overwhelmed with the idea that it’s impossible to tell good information from bad, be aware that this is something some people want you to feel. Developing this ability is called media literacy, and you can develop it pretty easily. You can take a class, for example. And if you have that limited number of issues you are following, the more you read, the more you are able to see certain quirks—that the reporting on this particular article wasn’t that critical, or this webpage seems to have sell a lot of doomsday equipment while also writing lots of articles about how civil war is nigh.

Exercise

There is just untold amounts of research saying that exercise is good for your mental health, it’s not even worth arguing. It doesn’t have to mean Crossfit and training for a grueling marathon. Just commit to moving your body some reasonable amount of time, ideally, in the ways that you need. I’ve always been someone who weightlifts and does cardio, but I learned to ride a bike as an adult and find that it is something that I both genuinely enjoy AND it’s something I can’t do while also ruminating on how the world is ending. I’m also committing to doing yin yoga and stretching as regularly as I can because as I’ve been aging I feel increasingly like a tin can accumulating creaking rust and that is not sustainable.

Community

We’ve all been that person who pouts about how lonely they are while simultaneously turning down invites to hang out. We also know that social isolation is bad for human beings—you are literally more likely to die early if you are socially isolated than if not. The depression part of you doesn’t want you to hang out with others. The part of you that wants to feel better does, but maybe feels helpless—maybe you don’t have enough friends, or maybe you don’t have any at all where you live right now. It is a fact that making friends as an adult is harder. I can tell you as someone who prioritizes it, building friends and community takes sustained, intentional effort over the course of years. Many of us fell into friendships via school, but once school is over, there is no automatic mechanism to make friends. By sustained effort, I mean you need to keep trying over a long period of time even if there are duds. I was on a skeeball team for an entire year before I actually hung out with one of the girls alone—a girl I had thought I had nothing in common with—and now she is one of my closest friends in DC. (We are coparenting cats together). I met one of my other close friends at a “20-30s girls in DC” meetup and I didn’t meet her till maybe the 6th event I went do. One of the writers in my critique circle I met over a decade ago in a writing meetup, the other I met at a conference and she reached out to me when she moved to DC. (she had to be willing to reach out!) The thing is, you need to be the sort of person who says, “let’s hang out” and actually follows up. Create the things you want. I created a monthly writers brunch group. I want to start a regular bookswap, so I’m going to do that next year. I also have fallen way out of the loop on the DC restaurant scene so I’m going to put together a dinner club. Maybe you have an interest that your current friends don’t—go find that community.

It’s not just that hanging out with other people makes you feel good in the moment. When it really feels good is when you realize you’ve created a safety net for yourself. You have someone you can call for career advice. You have a different someone you can talk to about your dysfunctional family. You have someone who could drop off food if you have covid. It’s when you have these things that you truly feel cared for. But we also know that you would feel good caring for others, and you can’t care for others if there are no others.

For me, I’m kind of a to-do list kind of person, so I use Tasks in Google calendar and literally schedule time for things like “email friend I haven’t talked to in awhile” or “schedule book party.” It might feel weird to block off time for something like this, but again, having a community takes time and some planning. Especially in a world where it is so much easier to just zone out alone in front of the TV while doomscrolling. I try to keep my social calendar pretty busy and also plan things like trips with friends ahead of time.

Part Two: what do you do to self-sabotage?

The second part of this is parceling out what you do that’s hurting you and what you could be doing that could be helping you. I started with making a few lists:

What are all the things I keep doing that I know are bad for me?

For me, this is things like watching YouTube on my phone before I go to bed instead of reading. Panic scrolling news. Eating when I am anxious rather than hungry. Fixating on people on Instagram who I think may be more successful than me. Then take a moment to jot down why you think you may be doing this. Some part of me thinks I don’t deserve a restful sleep. Knowing the news will prevent the Bad Thing from happening. I can’t sit with my feelings. I want to make myself feel bad with comparisons to an imagined other even though I know Instagram life isn’t real.

What are things you know you could do more of that make you feel better?

Put at the top of the list things that make you experience flow. Flow is when you are so into doing something that you lose sense of time and everything else. For me this is writing, riding my bike, solving puzzles, some elements of day job, and very engaging movies. These are very obviously activities you should go out of your way to include in your life. But that doesn’t mean people automatically include them. I’m normally a really efficient writer who goes through periods of time where I write really really fast, and then “fallow” periods where I am thinking up the next project. But this year has been really, really hard for me so it’s been slow going on Book 3. The schedule I had committed to during Book 2’s drafting sort of fell apart. Because I wanted to wallow instead. But now that the end of the year is approaching, I went back into gear, and I feel good when I am working. Maybe you experience flow at work, but have you thought about if there is another position, or tweaks to your current job, where you could experience more? Recently a group of friends and I traveled to Scotland. We had planned to do some hiking in the Isle of Skye but it was pouring rain. One of my friends brought one of those very cheesy “mystery in a box” games and we played that for a few hours. Honestly, it was extremely fun and we had four grown ass adults totally into it. So now I am on the hunt for activities like this, particularly if I can do them with others. But honestly, if you like doing jigsaw puzzles or something, don’t feel guilty about doing them just because there is suffering happening somewhere on earth. At the absolute worst times of my life in terms of personal suffering, at no point did I ever thing, “I hope some asshole isn’t doing a jigsaw puzzle.” If at some point I die and you are sad, please do a jigsaw puzzle.

After listing the things that bring you flow, just come up with anything else that you know makes you feel good but you don’t always do. Here are a couple of mine: Parties. Going out to dinner. Stretching/ Yoga. Getting good sleep. Mentoring people younger than me. Reading. Keeping my condo reasonably clean. Small trips to see friends. Learning how to cook better. Having people over for dinner. Taking classes in things I’m interested in. Listening to music.

These are all reasonable things I could be doing. But I’ve been invited to parties and not gone even though I probably would have had fun if I had gone. I never “have time” for yoga or meditation. I have always loved reading but struggle with my attention span. I’m actually just committing bit by bit to incorporating these things more. Rather than doomscrolling, I troll the internet for recipes I want to try. I set aside 20 minutes to clean while listening to music. With planning, I can set aside the money for a class and pick out when it makes sense to do it. In other words, all these things take commitment.

Okay, I’ve droned on long enough—time to get back to that actual writing thing. I hope this helps someone.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash