How to Build a Self-Care Routine that Works for You During Depression

Depression is something that affects all of us at some point or another.

There are different levels and degrees of depression, but taking care of ourselves during such a time is so very important.

I review some of the points of this article, and share some points of my own journey.


And here is a hotline to call if you find yourself needing help right now.


I also reference Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Bettina M Brown: Greetings. Hello and welcome to In the Rising Podcast. My name is Bettina, and this is the platform I have chosen to talk about living your best life in a way that you will not have regrets in a way that your dreams will come true. At least you give your dreams an opportunity to come true and leaving behind the shame blame game that does nothing for you, that keeps you in a cycle of negativity and really does nothing for you or the people around you.

I like to start off by saying that I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, um, any of those things. I'm not even a, a counselor, but I am. A person who really wants to know what makes people tick. And having been in the healthcare profession for 20 years and seeing the physical ailments along with the emotional and psychological pain and realizing there's a link, I've really wanted to understand how does one precipitate another?

And what can we do? What can we do as human beings and what can we do as healthcare professionals? So, To help one another because ultimately we are all still people and you have a PhD in being people just by the time you end up being in a teenager. So today's topic, I wanted to talk about ways to take care of yourself if you have depression.

And so self-care is quite important, but there are times in your life when. Self-care doesn't just become important. It becomes critical. It's a critical need for you to take care of yourself on all levels because you are in a moment or in a season or episode of depression. Now I am taking this information from Psych Central, so it is written by.

 And it's medically reviewed by the scientific advisory board, but I really like this because we have all known someone, or perhaps we have been through several moments where we realize at that time, we realize later in life that we were definitely depressed, and it's when we need it the most, that we tend to ignore.

The basic things that we do need, we tend to ignore ourselves and the need to take care of ourselves. Correct. So, what about what do we do? What about taking care of the number one person that's going to get us through an episode of pain? Well, the number one thing that you can do, According to this article is attend your therapy sessions.

But the thing is, a lot of us are not attending a therapy session because we're not in therapy in the first place. And there are times when we absolutely need something, but that's exactly when we don't have it. So, we're either not in therapy because we can't afford it or we're not in therapy because we refuse to do therapy.

And now there is an entire research project available on whether or not talking talk therapy is even helpful. But there is this little line in this article that. Says talking instead of walking showed me how self-defeated I really was and showed self-defeating patterns. What that meant to me as I read it was there's a facing of your underlying issues and there's a walking through and walking away, there's a difference.

So, if you want to talk about those issues and face them, and you know, when you talk about things, that is that moment when you are critically vulnerable. And that's exactly what you don't want to be when you're depressed. You don't want to be open for more pain because usually it's the pain that is causing you to have this, this moment in time.

But when you walk away from it, you cannot deal with what you will not walk through. If you can't face it, you can't deal with it. And we want to, as human beings, walk around like beating around the bush. We want to walk around the other end. But the thing is that is just not how we get there. Walking around.

The other end is turning a blind eye. Ignoring the things that hurt, it's turning away, oh, I'll just deal with it another time. Or, oh, if I just ignore it, that's ignoring, that is not facing, that is taking to the other side all of the baggage that we quote, unquote say that you have right now. But if you want to do a dump and move forward, you do have to face it.

So, I wanted to put a caveat with the therapy sessions, and it is important and we have to recognize the bravery It does take to face what you're facing head on at this particular time, especially to face the pain that you're having and recognize the multiple layers that are likely involved with that.

And you can also face this with your journals. You can also face this with your little audio journals. You can face this with just spending time in nature and really going into those moments. But to not think about it, to not do anything about it is another way of, of turning your back on it. And a lot of times, let's not face, let's not take away.

I think from, you know, even myself with certain times in my life, I, I won't take away from what I was able to do because sometimes all I could do was show up. But what research says, and you know, what my own life has taught me is that there is just a little bit more juice in there to take care of yourself.

And when you do, you have the energy to do the facing. You really do. And there is a lot of research that shows when you're very depressed and you take certain medication, right? You always see the 50 side effects. And one of the side effects of a lot of antidepressants is suicide. And you really wonder like, well, if this is supposed to be what helps me, why is suicide even a side effect?

And what the research has showed is that if you're depressed enough, you don't even have the Go Juice, you don't have the ability. To even do something like that. But as you are moving up in your energy level, up in your, in your physical means, you do pass that phase where you actually would do something.

You're not absolute rock bottom. And I, that was something that was really, interesting for me to see that person's perspective. And it was a, a PhD. That talked about that, but there is that risk. There is that risk. So, the other thing of talking is to get enough sleep. Sleep has one of the biggest impact on any mood disorder and it's important to keep a cycle, and it's important to realize that your fatigue can actually help bring you back down into.

Additional depression. Cause when you're exhausted, you can't deal with things either. And sleep is the one thing I think that a lot of us just feel like is escaping us when we are depressed because we are in a place of where our mind is going and our body is just completely done. But we can't give in.

We can't give in.  I was watching an interesting show that even talked about people being afraid of what they might dream. People having recurrent dreams, people having dreams at night that are so vivid that they're like, I might as well stay up. I can't even get the rest, even if I'm asleep. So, this is where part three comes in and that's actually moving.

So, when you are completely depressed, you know, exercise seems like you might as well climb out Everest, you know, just to go for a walk around the block that's asking your body just too much. I mean, you can barely get out of bed and keep up that fight, but because you're doing small movements of stretching and breathing and household chores walking around, you actually help fight your depression.

And so just moving your, around your house and, and maybe this is something that you've seen from other people or acknowledged yourself. My house always looks in better shape when I'm not sad. It always just has, sometimes the, your environment looks a lot like how your brain feels or your emotions feel, and so something of like changing your environment, physical environment helps.

Alleviate or remove or clean up your emotional clutter as well. And there's an entire book called Emotional Clutter that really talked about how much your environment and space makes a difference. So, if you cannot directly work on yourself, just working on your environment is something that you can work on yourself through.

And of course we know about eating well. Eating well, yes. Eat at all, eat less. Some of us, stress eat and some of us just, we can't seem to find the food. And that's, that's okay. But when you're not able to eat, do things as, drink your smoothie, put all the vitamins in that you know you need, you need this to move forward.

And lastly, I want to talk about this one, and that is, Staying in a place where you can stay connected. A lot of times when we are depressed, we notice people withdraw from us. We notice that we do it ourselves. I didn't call people just my personal story. I didn't call people. I didn't text back. I didn't write back.

And I really just wanted to be alone. But there is a point when you want to be alone to decipher through your own feelings. There's a point when you don't want to talk about things, which is respecting your space, but then there's also a place in time when you think you can deal with it on your own and you want to deal with everything on your own.

But in that moment, What you're dealing with is already too big for you. It is okay to ask for help. It is okay to say that you need help. It is okay to say that you don't know the answers. You don't. I, but you are letting people in and you are connecting and getting another emotional support you're having, you're doing.

So the body and the mind are, are kind of interesting. The more I learn about it and when I apply it to even instances in my own life, if my body does something, my mind will follow. If I do nothing with my body and I just let my mind catastrophize everything, everything's good, everything, everything, everything's bad, will never be good.

My body will start to reflect that. So, if I can't seem to change my mind, I can't seem to change that aspect. I can't start to change my physical and let my mind go the other way. It's like a tug of war going one way to the other. But I try not to think of our own body being at war. But sometimes you are.

You're in at war with a situation, with a time with a person, and you're just title tired of the battle. So, if we don't get these things out, we will hold them in and we will self-destruct. Uh, the energy is still there, so there isn't much that you actually have to do when you're dealing with depression.

But those small things are huge when you are that person, and they're also huge to the amount of effects and positive things that they can do in your life. So I'll put this article down and I'll even put, um, Kinda the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and on those basic needs and how we need to go from one to the other and realizing that the entire pyramid is a need, even though there's a foundation.

You know, we can have a foundation to the house, but that still means I need a toilet. Like the foundation's great, but I still need a bathroom. Like there's just other needs that we have. And even though we can be grateful for food, water, and shelter, that's not what makes us human beings. Those are basic.

But love and attention and psychological wellbeing is also critical to our wellbeing and getting us out of, any continuous place of depression. Having self-esteem, having belonging, and the desire to be the most that you can actually be self-actualizing, that's the complete opposite end of depression.

So those things are important. So, you know, it's also important our time, and I appreciate every single minute that you spend listening to me on my podcast. I really appreciate it. I encourage you to leave a review so that it can continue to rank and reach out more people, reach out to more people, and until next week, let's keep building one another up.