Depression Fighting Tool. Here is a great idea.
Photo by Liam Welch on Unsplash
Suffering from depression can affect you physically, mentally, and emotionally. It is something millions of people go through every day, desperately trying to find the
magical cure. While you can’t cure depression, there are many ways you can relieve the symptoms and learn to live a healthy, well-adjusted life.
One excellent practice to start is journaling.
Journaling is an amazing depression fighting tool for this and many other mental health disorders. It provides a way for you to distract your mind, find triggers
for your depressive episodes, and gives you something healthy to do during your worst moments.
Here are some things to know about journaling as a depression fighting tool.
1. Why You Should Keep a Journal
Have you ever kept a journal? If you’re looking to make certain types of self- improvements, keeping a journal might be a really great habit to start. Making manual
and process based augmentations to your mental health can be exhausting, but the new studies have shown that there can be far reaching benefits to journaling. It will help you to understand yourself and others.
The following article discusses a few reasons why you should keep a journal.
Tame Your Emotions
As you gain more experience with the ebb and flow of your own emotions, it will become a lot easier for you to document and observe what kinds of things are occupying your
mind. When you journal, you are recording the instances that put your responses on display. You can go back to moments and gain insights into how these patterns work.
This allows you to see patterns that give you entirely new sets of information.
Learn to Problem Solve
What do you do with the information you’ve collected? Well, that all depends very heavily on you, but the main focus it to be able to look at the picture that your patterns
create.
Do you react to certain things differently during certain times of the day or season? Who were you around when you did these things?, what was the weather like?,
and so on.
Recall Sharpens Cognitive Skills
How good is your memory? Some people can only remember song lyrics and phone numbers while other can remember entre lines of dialogue from childhood movies.
When you have to recall information from your memory, you are strengthening your cognitive abilities. The more you do this, the more you will become proficient at recalling
stored information in your mind. The longer you do it, the more easily you will be able to remember bits of stored information.
Be More Creative
When you’re in the habit of writing, it becomes second nature. Hence, you will become more aware of the paths that you can travel to achieve goals.
Achieve Clarity
Therefore, by studying your patterns, you can discover the most likely causes for triggers, and devise ways to soften the blow. With hard work over time you will be able to
overcome many of the issues that are taking away your time and effort.
2. Recording Your Triggers
Have you experienced some strange sensation from a triggering event recently? When you’re examining your triggers, it can be very difficult to know exactly when you are
experiencing a triggering event. For some people, the symptoms can be very obvious while others could manifest in very different ways. This can vary from person to person,
and even from situation to situation, so here we share valuable information on the importance of recording your triggers in a mental health journal as a powerful depression fighting technique.
Self-Awareness Is Important
One of the most difficult parts of this process is getting to the point where you can identify when you have had a triggering event and what your response was. If you are
seeking some help from a professional, knowing this information will make your recovery faster. You will have a better understanding of your behaviors and reactions to stimuli.
Display the Full Month
additionally. when you are making your chart to record your triggers, be sure to include the entire calendar for the month. This will allow you to easily track when the event took
place and see if there are correlations between the time of month, time of week and so forth. You’ll also be able to see how many time per month just by flipping through each
day. The goal of making this kind of journal is to have the information available within seconds of looking at each page.
Recount the Day’s Events
It’s important to record everything that happened, especially anything that sticks out in your mind as to what may have triggered you, whether it be encounters with people,
animals, situations, or sounds. Sometimes you may even need to reconsider what you’ve recorded after some time has passed. You will be very surprised to find that some things bothered you more than you first thought.
Describe How You Felt
This is another important step to pay close attention to. You want to leave space at the bottom of each page where you can write some descriptions of your feelings that came about as you responded to the trigger. It can be extra helpful to color code these emotions so that you can make a chart and see how your mood changes and how it relates to triggers.
3. Practice Depression Self-Care with Journaling
Do you ever find yourself having a hard time getting out of bed, or wanting to take that shower before work? When you’re dealing with deep depression, it can be very difficult
to do the daily activities that need to be done to care for yourself. It’s okay to need to have reminders of these things because all people go through times where certain tasks
aren’t at the top of their list of things to do. This article is geared towards sharing a fewtips on using a journal for self-care.
Ruminate on Your Feelings
How often do you typically sit and think about how you really feel? Sometimes it takes a while to really know how you feel about certain things. Emotions can be very difficult to
process, and if you’re missing certain bits of information, then you could be in for a shock. Don’t try to do it all in your head, use the journal to know when you got upset.
Record who was in the room, and how you felt.
Create A List of Gratitude
One very solid way of grounding yourself is to make a list of tall of the things that you are grateful for. This can show you just how wrong you are when you’re feeling like the
world has turned its back on you. Write down how you feel knowing that there are people who care about you. Are there any colors that you would associate with those memories.
Be Patient with Yourself
Above all, it’s very important to remember that you are a work in progress. You have the right to make good healthy choices about what you want to do. Feel free to forgive yourself for mistakes. Mistakes can teach you about yourself in shocking ways. As you record these different time periods you are slowly building evidence to help you to find out what might be causing you to have intense reactions of different kids. Just be sure to have time to yourself every so often.
Make Time for Exercise
Use your journal to help you give yourself reminders about what needs to be done. Seeing them in your journal repeatedly will usually give you the re-enforcement that you
need to stay motivated. Take a moment to work out according to the plan you have in your journal. Once you’ve finished it, cross it off the list.
4. Journaling Exercises for Depression Fighting
Learning to cope with depression can be quite a journey, but it can be extremely rewarding to find ways to cope and overcome the feelings that can prevent so many people from being able to effectively carry out tasks in their daily lives. What are the ways that you’ve chosen to deal with depression? There are tons of ways to do so, but one effective and healthy way to work out depression is through the act of journaling.
The first exercise to look at is one where you choose positive memories to recount. Think deeply about the experience and try to put the entire thing to paper. Remember smells, tastes, how the air felt, and anything else sensory that you can remember. Focusing on this can help you to see how impactful the good times have been and help you to focus on more of the positive experiences that you’ve had. Record each aspect in detail and see what you come up with.
Learn to Be Separate from Emotions
It’s important for you to separate yourself from your emotions. It’s been said by many wise people that it’s difficult to see what’s going on until you’re out of the situation. This can be even more true than you expect so it’s good to practice thinking logically about the things that are going on and avoid looking at them through the lens of sensitive emotions because those things could steer you into the wrong direction.
Define How You’re Feeling
To get to the root of how you feel it’s absolutely essential to give a real name to the emotions that you experience during recall. When you’re dealing with or confronting a certain memory, be sure to include something like,” When I thought of (this situation) I felt ______.” It’ll be easier to know what’s going on when you isolate each section of thought as you go through. This will give you a better picture of how the entire situation affected you and not just one singular moment.
Be Aware of Physical Sensations While Recalling Memories
Lastly, when you are remembering things, it can be tremendously helpful to record the responses that you are having during the recall. If you feel somewhat ambiguous about your feelings, this will be likely to give you a clearer picture of how you’re reacting to memory.
5. Tips for Journaling as a Depression Fighting Tool
I can be really hard to do what you need to do when you’re in the middle of a serious bout with depression. The feelings of futility and frustration can be massive challenges for anyone. It’s at this point that you will have to make a choice about what you are willing to accept. Research into cognitive therapies has shown that keeping a log of your emotional responses can give you insight into how you feel about what you experience and how much control you have over those emotions.
Devote Time to Writing
If you don’t spend time writing you’ll not be likely to ever really get anything down. Too many people worry about when it’s a good time to get something down or if what they say has any merit. Just get it written. The goal is to simply record your thoughts and feelings. You want to discuss details so you can discover any patterns.
Discover What May Be Triggering Depression
The primary purpose of keeping a journal is specifically to find anything occurrence, encounter, or moment where you might be discovering a triggering event. By having it aligned with a calendar and a list of events that took place, you can figure out if it’s the time of week, time of month, or if your emotions are tied to a recent event that may haveaffected you on a deeper level.
Things That Depression Takes from You
Write down the things that depression makes difficult, or impossible. Depression is highly responsible for isolation, and self-esteem issues. These powerful insecurities can bleed over into other areas of life, thus creating groups of self-imposed roadblocks. These can be some of the hardest to remove because they come your worst critic. You. Focusing on the many positive experiences can be a road to health and contentment.
Appreciate A Good Memory
One exercise that can help tremendously is that of focusing on a positive experience and documenting all that you can remember. What things did you see? What colors are present? This is intended to not only show you that you have some really great memories, but also so that you can recall vivid sensations associated with the memory. This will put you in a better mood and occupy your mind with more pleasant thought.
In conclusion, journaling is a depression fighting tool that works!
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