I wrote an article last week talking about strategies for fighting depression. This article should not be as long winded, but is not meant to be taken lightly. Once again I must preface this with my own experience. I am basing this on my personal struggle, but I feel that others like myself can somewhat relate. I’m going to talk about two things that you need to avoid while in a trough during your depression: drinking and over-caffeinating.

I don’t know many people who don’t enjoy a drink, especially as a means of cutting loose and laying back. I can attest that towards the beginning of the buzz that you will feel, you’ll experience a small sense of jubilation, but that feeling is quite fleeting. Upon having as little as one drink, your feelings of sadness can be multiplied. I describe it as feeling hollow, or empty, drained even. Whatever level of hopelessness you are feeling, it is only going to be compounded by the introduction of a depressant into your system. Drinking is most certainly not the solution to this problem, or any problem really and you will just be digging yourself deeper into your woes. When you’re part of the problem, when you find yourself in a hole, and I’ve said it before, the best thing to do is to stop digging. Drinking is effectively motorizing the shovel. You will feel worse than you have been recently feeling and you will think about stupid and terrible things. Don’t even give them the chance of being entertained. Strengthen your resolve and willpower, and don’t give in.

The final thing I’d like to encourage people like myself to not do when feeling down might only apply to those of us suffering from anxiety of some form alongside this other mental malady. What you also must not do is drink too much coffee, or imbibe other products that contain high levels of caffeine. Coffee, which is the base word I’m going to use as an umbrella term, will, like alcohol, only make you feel worse if you have a lot of it. One cup while you’re eating something is fine, but it is possible to make yourself more anxious from even that. The caffeine, from my experience, will speed up your thought process on all the things you don’t want to think about. You’ll start over-analyzing and that will quickly lead to ruminating, which is a large challenge to stop. Once you reach that threshold with whatever you’ve been drinking, eating, or rubbing into your skin, the only way you can stop feeling it is for the chemical to be processed by your system. The best course of action is to just avoid situations that can cause a spike in negative feelings or a period of time where you have no feelings.

Depression won’t always manifest itself as a feeling of extreme sadness, or a series of negative emotions. Sometimes the beast will manifest itself as an eon of not feeling anything, something that could be even worse. You need willpower and stalwart vigilance against things that could make you feel more of that downward pull those psychological troughs have and you shouldn’t try to use alcohol as an escape or caffeine as a means of speeding the feelings up. You’ll have to go through it minute by minute, and you should plan to keep your mind occupied. That in no way means you can’t relax, I do studying and other work in 45 minute blocks, and I make sure to have an hour to myself each day. Do what makes you feel more positive, or less negative. We all have skeletons in our closet that we have to face, or we can at least make them dance.