How to cope with depression, in 3 key ideas

Several tips on how to manage the symptoms of depression on a day-to-day basis based on habits.

In this article we will see a brief and simple explanation of what depression is and what you can do to cope with it.

Distinguishing between depression and sadness

The first thing will be to review the differences between depression and sadness.

Sadness is one of the basic emotions and helps us to adapt to the environment, it is natural to human beings and healthy in a situation in which we have lost something or someone.

When sadness lasts over time and increases progressively in intensity, it becomes pathological, and is no longer adaptive, natural and healthy, we would be talking about depression.

But there is good news: depression is a problem that is largely based on learned behaviors. Only rarely can it be caused by a Biological problem, by an imbalance of neurotransmitters.It can be caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters, and since it is a learning process, we can modify it.

Symptoms

Depressive symptoms are behaviors that appear in all areas of the human being's environment.. Thus, they will be present in the family, work and social areas. It is very common that these symptoms are valued as if they were part of other diseases. The person who has depression may experience pain, tiredness, lack of energy, problems in food intake, sleep, digestion of food....

There are three types of symptoms or signs:

• Of what we think (cognitions),
• From what we feel (emotions).
• From what we do (behavior).

In psychology we know that when we suffer from depression we have what we call the depressive triad. This appears when there are negative thoughts and a negative view of oneself, one's environment and what is to come.

How to cope with depression?

Let us now look at the causes and how to deal with depression.

1. Lack of desire

One cause is not having incentives, you do not feel like doing anything and apathy appears. What you can do then is do not wait until you feel like doing something. The motivation, in short, is to have motives; not desire. Therefore, we must try to do what we want to do, even if we do not feel like it. In this case, if there are reasons to move, everything else does not matter; the desire to do it will come later, when we have become accustomed to that level of energy and activity. Something that I think is very important is to remember this simple principle: before depression, action.

The pessimistic bias

Negative thoughts are another cause. This type of thoughts are inherent to the human being, we all have them; the problem is when we give them too much importance. In this way, we can end up having what we call tunnel vision.

Put your hands as you see in the picture. What do you see? You only see in one direction, and it is a negative direction. What we have to do is to open that tunnel, to get another perspective. To the extent that you have another perspective you see other things and you don't just focus on the negative. So part of what is involved in dealing with depression is practicing the skill of not giving so much importance to negative thoughts.

3. Avoiding learned helplessness

A third cause would be what we call in psychology learned helplessness. For you to understand me in a simple way, learned helplessness appears when we repeatedly do something, we do not get it, and we give up, we give up. In order not to get into learned helplessness, which is the prelude to depression, it is necessary to learn to accept the unfair part of life that has touched us. In life we are going to find things that we are going to fight for and we are not going to get. To the extent that we are able to accept that there are goals that we will not reach even if we fight for them, we will be protected against learned helplessness.