I have struggled with depression my entire life — all 40 years of it. I don’t struggle nearly as much as I used to, though. My rock bottom was a period of about eight or nine years, during which I was probably depressed 98% of the time. There were occasional days when the clouds would lift a little, and I actually felt worse on those days sometimes, because I knew they wouldn’t last — I had something to lose. When every day is awful, you at least aren’t surprised. You can’t fall if you’re already at the bottom. So sometimes I almost wished those good days wouldn’t happen at all — they felt like torture.
I used to be so depressed that I wasn’t even sure if I was real. I felt like I was looking at my life and the world through glass — like I couldn’t quite connect to anything, like I was inside an invisible shell that followed me everywhere. This was mostly during my high school and college years. I barely graduated high school; I barely even went. I had pretty much no healthy relationships, and I would do just about anything to get through a day, because being inside my own mind felt like constant torture.
Once I got to college, I couldn’t make a job or a relationship last more than three months. I didn’t really want to do anything, and I didn’t really care about anything. And here’s the most embarrassing part: freshman year of college, I failed Introduction to Psychology. I’m a psychologist now, so that’s not great. In fairness, I failed it because I didn’t take the final — I had a panic attack on the way there and went home instead. But there’s still an F on my transcript for Intro to Psychology.
During that period of my life, I would do or take anything that would make me feel even a little bit better.
Where I Am Today
Things are quite different for me now. I feel good 90% of the time or more. I’m not going to pretend my depression is cured or gone — that would be a lie, and I’m not about being disingenuous. But it’s so different in terms of frequency, intensity, and duration that my life is not the same. I went from being depressed 98% of the time to about 5% of the time, and from severe to typically mild. It’s a different life — 100% a different life.
In the past few years, I’ve been able to start intensive outpatient programs for people experiencing moderate to severe depression and anxiety. I wrote a book called For When Everything Is Burning (it helps if I actually remember the name of my own book). I started this YouTube channel and this podcast, and most recently — still a work in progress — I founded a new clinic called the Northstar Psychological Center, which specializes in treating moderate to severe mood and anxiety disorders.
There were a lot of things I did to go from the person I was to the person I am today. But I think what may have been even more important are the things I stopped doing — because there were certain habits and patterns my life had fallen into that were perpetuating my depression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these things were keeping me stuck at that level of severity, and my symptoms probably didn’t have to go on for as long, or be as all-consuming, as they were.
My entire life has basically been a 40-year mental health research project, because I never found anyone or anything that helped me all that much. So today I’m going to summarize the six things I found I needed to stop doing in order to get my life back on track. I’ve mostly won my battle, but I still remember how I fought it.
1. I Stopped Using Drugs and Alcohol — Completely
I need to give a little asterisk here: I understand this is easier said than done. I don’t believe I ever had what would be considered addiction — patterns of abuse, certainly, but not addiction. If it is addiction for you, you’re probably going to need some help with this.
My big revelation about substances and depression was this: any substance with mood-altering properties takes you to a fairly predictable, consistent mood state when you use it, assuming dosage and potency stay roughly the same each time. So you’re chugging along at rock bottom, and a certain substance brings your mood up for a few hours before slowly decaying back to baseline.
The biggest problem with that pattern is this: when you go from miserable to feeling pretty all right for a while, you stop doing anything else to try to make yourself feel better during that time — because you’ve escaped, at least on the surface, the distress of being trapped inside your own mind. So you’re not doing anything to improve your life, because you already feel better. That means your baseline — where you inevitably drop back to once the substance wears off — never moves. Your life ends up constantly chasing that feeling, because you fear the return to just being yourself again. That’s where the misery is: just being you on a normal day.
The only way this changes is if you start working on raising that baseline, so the gap between how you feel sober and how you feel under the influence isn’t as wide. The narrower that gap is, the less reason there is to use any substance in the first place. But when something brings you up quickly, you have no real motivation to do anything else. So for me, stopping the use of those resources was crucial — it was the only thing that got me to actually start making changes in my life that created long-term benefit.
2. I Stopped Chasing Acute Feelings of Joy
This is a bit like the first one, but it has implications far beyond substances. So many things in our lives have no purpose beyond creating acute feelings of joy, excitement, reward, or pleasure — and they’re often very good at it. It’s easy to think that if you stack enough of those things throughout your day, you’ll end up with a pretty good life.
But if you know anything about depression, you know that when you hit those really deep, dark periods and experience anhedonia — where nothing connects to your pleasure center anyway — all your ability to feel reward is gone. So all the tools you’ve developed, all the things you’ve brought into your life to create joy, suddenly stop working, because you can’t feel joy in the depths of a depression.
I’ve found that feelings of achievement or accomplishment are more durable when it comes to depression. If I take time I would have spent on things that just feel good, and instead invest it in things that make me feel like I’ve done something worthwhile, those feelings are more likely to still be accessible to me even on days when I’m extremely depressed.
In other words: if I play a video game on my phone when I’m in a good mood, it works fine. If I play a video game when I’m depressed, it does nothing — it feels like the biggest waste of time in the world. But even when depression grips me, when I’ve done things in my past that I’m proud of, that I know helped other people, my family, or my environment, I can still feel those things while depressed. They’re definitely dulled compared to how they normally feel, but they aren’t completely gone the way joy tends to be. I don’t fully understand the physiological mechanism of that — it’s something I hope to study in the future. But my takeaway is: achievement is more durable than joy when it comes to depression, so sometimes it’s a better investment of your time to chase achievement instead.
3. I Stopped Staying Up Late
That doesn’t mean I always go to bed at exactly the same time every night — I aspire to that, but I’m not rigid about it. What I mean is I don’t stay up two, three, four, five hours beyond the time I know I need to go to bed in order to get enough sleep for the next day.
Obviously, depression and anxiety can cause disruptions in sleep — insomnia, interrupted sleep — so I understand this isn’t fully within your control. You can do everything right and still have a rough night of sleep. I’m not talking about insomnia; I still get that sometimes. What I’ve cut out is what I call behavioral insomnia — meaning you could sleep, you’re just choosing not to. You’re not really trying to fall asleep; you’re scrolling social media, playing games on your phone, watching TV downstairs, not making an actual attempt to fall asleep. And you end up underslept — and a tired mind is an emotionally dysregulated mind.
I know this one is hard to take in, because most people do this, and most people don’t have to be crazy rigid about it. But for me, the stakes are higher — I have a chronic health condition, and if I don’t focus my life on managing it, it will consume me. So I basically have two choices: I can learn to take excellent care of myself and follow through on that — which is rigid, disciplined, hard, frustrating, and unfair, but keeps my condition well managed. Or I can try to live like everybody else and watch my life fall apart, because my brain can’t handle things like alcohol or staying up too late — they can send me on a spiral that lasts months, during which I find it hard to do anything.
Neither of those is a great choice. I wish there was a third option — just living like a normal person and having a good life — but that wasn’t the choice I was given. If you have any chronic medical or mental health condition, you likely have a similar set of options, and I’m sorry for that. I know what it’s like to have to choose between two things most people don’t have to worry about. But given that choice, I believe focusing your life on taking care of yourself — and enjoying the best possible quality of life as a result — is the best option. That’s the one I’ve chosen, and the one I encourage you to take. It’s a hassle, but it’s worth it.
4. I Stopped Restricting My Food Intake
This can mean a lot of things. Sometimes we just skip meals — maybe because we’re busy, or because when we’re depressed we don’t care about food and it isn’t appealing. But sometimes it’s on purpose — because we hate our bodies, hate ourselves, or don’t think we deserve food. There are many reasons a person might choose not to eat a meal.
Nutrition follows the same logic as sleep: if your brain doesn’t have access to one of the core resources it needs to function, it won’t function as well. For someone like me, that means falling into a pit of despair for an unknown amount of time, during which I’ll be miserable and struggle to function. So I don’t diet, and I don’t restrict my food intake. That doesn’t mean I eat whatever I want — I’m actually fairly careful about what I eat. I make sure to eat three meals a day and one or two snacks, and I try to keep them reasonably balanced, containing proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, because all three play an important role in the bioavailability of caloric energy — one of the resources your brain needs to be at 100%. The costs of my brain not being at 100% are high, so I don’t skip it.
5. I Stopped Allowing Myself to Be Inactive or Spend Too Much Time Indoors
These could technically be considered two different things, but for me they tie together. My brain gets under-stimulated really easily, which is difficult when I also don’t always want to do things. It can feel like two paradoxical pressures pushing on you at once — I don’t want to do anything, but I also don’t want to do nothing. Frustrating.
Through excruciating trial and error, I’ve learned that if I don’t use my body to some degree every single day — and ideally outside, if possible — there are downsides for me. One is that I’ll have a hard time sleeping at night; inactivity is a huge insomnia trigger for me. It also isn’t good for my mood. I don’t know if it’s because of where I grew up, or just that I love being out in nature, but my mood slowly starts to decay when I’m inside or sedentary for too long. So I know I have to get up, get moving, and get outside every day to some degree, or it becomes a risk factor.
6. I Stopped Getting Overly Invested in Fantasy Worlds
This one might be a little unusual — the first five you’ve probably heard people talk about before, but I’ve never heard anyone else mention this, and I’m curious whether it’s just a “me” thing or if others experience it too.
What I mean is: I’ve stopped getting really invested, even obsessive, in things like anime, video games, TV shows, and movies. That’s not to say I never engage with those things — but I’ve learned I have to be really selective about which ones I allow myself into, because something has happened to me many, many times: I’ve had a large number of depressive episodes triggered by overinvestment in a fantasy world.
Inevitably, I end up wishing I could live in that world, or be one of the characters. And when I really think about that, my own life starts to feel hollow, unsatisfying, incomplete — and there’s no way to change it, because these aren’t achievable goals; they’re not things I’ll ever actually be able to do. So it makes me feel miserable, like everything is pointless. At some point in my life — I don’t remember exactly when — I decided I had to cut those things off, and accept that as stimulating and acutely enjoyable as it is to get lost in a fantasy world for a while, it was going to end badly for me. I’d end up spiraling, and struggling to appreciate all the wonderful things in my own life, because I’m constantly comparing it to an unreal fantasy.
I think my brain just doesn’t do a great job of staying present and grounded in the real world — something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. So that’s an area where I keep very narrow parameters, and I’m very careful about what media I expose myself to, because I know it can create a downward spiral for me.
Closing Thoughts
Those are the six most important things I stopped doing to minimize my own struggles with depression. Like I said, it’s been a night-and-day difference for me, and I hope it will be for you too.
What it all comes down to is that I have to accept I’m a high-maintenance person — it takes a lot to keep me going. I’m not a simple person, not an easygoing person, not a go-with-the-flow kind of guy, not laidback. I’m complicated, I have a lot going on, and I have a lot of parts inside that can break easily. If you think of me like a car, I know that if I take very, very good care of myself, I can do some pretty spectacular things and live a great life. I also know that if I don’t, the downfall will be equally spectacular, in a very different way. I’m high-risk, high-reward — that’s just how I’m built.
If you’re still reading this, I suspect you might be built in a manner similar to me. If so, please consider trying some of these strategies, and let me know how they pay off for you.
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