Top 10 Depression tips

Travel can be a bit difficult due to time constraints. One way around this limitation is to rethink what it is to “travel.” We needn’t take a flight to somewhere, book an expensive hotel, or arrange transport. Simply getting away from it all is good enough.

“The other way to get rid of (depression) is to travel alone. Plan a trip to any hill station ( a town in the low mountains of the Indian subcontinent) … When you come back from the trip you will find your mind healthy.”

You probably don’t live in India as this young man does, but you get the idea. There’s a beautiful and peaceful place not too far from you. Will you go? Researchers find that travel, in and of itself, does not impact depression, specifically. However, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University’s Department of Psychology says that exploring new environments studied how new activities help to stimulate the brain. She concluded the following:

“Our results suggest that people feel happier when they have more variety in their daily routines—when they go to novel places and have a wider array of experiences.”

And an abstract published in Nature notes that “daily variability in physical location was associated with increased positive affect in humans.” These sound promising. So if traveling to a new place helps uplift you, then you could at least give it a try.

We all have our share of losses and challenges in life, but the main cause of depression is not usually our life circumstances. It’s the way we think about and interpret them. Unfortunately, when we’re depressed we tend to have a lot of negative beliefs and believe our thoughts. When I was struggling with depression, I wholeheartedly believed every thought that popped up on the screen of my mind. My thoughts seemed and felt so true. I even gathered evidence to support them and ignored evidence to the contrary. If I was depressed about being single, my mind only saw happy couples out in the world. My well-worn beliefs refused to allow me to take in that there were millions of single people around me as well. Not to mention millions of unhappy couples. Read more: Andrea Wachter proposes and reflects on six ways to overcome negative body image epidemic that has sickened our society. If I was struggling with my body image, my mind zeroed in on people I was convinced were confident and comfortable in their bodies and I was sure that I never would be. It was as if my depressed self was on trial and my mind was the prosecuting attorney gathering evidence that I was not okay and that everyone else was. Eventually, after lots of help from others and a good dose of willingness from within, I learned that I could take a stand against my internal programs. I learned that I could disagree with discouraging thoughts and eventually delete them, and you can, too. One thing that helped me challenge my depressed convictions and retrain my brain was a little rhyme I would recite when negative thoughts were getting the best of me. It went like this, I have no clue if that’s true. So if I caught myself thinking that someone else had a perfect life, I would challenge myself by saying, I have no clue if that’s true. If I thought I’d never feel any better than I did, I’d say to myself, I have no clue if that’s true. We really can’t know anything other than the facts in this very moment. So challenging our pop up thoughts with a little reality check can really help. We may not have a choice about the automatic thoughts that pop up on our internal screens, but we do have a choice about whether we want to believe them or delete them.

Who doesn’t love a homemade gift? I’m not talking about macaroni picture frames. Although if that’s your thing, go for it. Today’s society is very . So much so that has lost some of its specialness. Items are mass-produced and available for purchase 24 hrs a day. Homemade gifts are the way to go if you want to save money gift giving. Handmade gifts are also more special since the gift giver spent their time creating it. Some popular gift suggestions are to make your own soaps and jellies.

Purposefully wasting something was unheard up in our grandparent’s time. Take a page from their book and reduce your waste. Before you’re about to throw something away, think of whether the items can be used in a different way instead of filling up a landfill.

• Make sure to use all of a product up before tossing it. This tool is perfect for getting every last bit.
• Use less product than you think you need. Often times, your hair would be equally as clean had you used half the amount of shampoo.
• Vegetable scraps can be saved for making broth.
• Table scraps can be composted or vermicomposted.
• Extra produce/herbs can be saved and stored for later use.