Summary: If you want to know how to get through the day when you have depression, we can help: we have five solid tips that can help make it through the tough days.
Key Points:
- When you have a full day of adult responsibilities to meet and manage, major depressive disorder (MDD) can create significant challenges.
- Depression at any level of severity can be disruptive
- Having clinical depression is far different, and far more serious, than typical sadness or low mood
- Clinical depression can make the simplest daily activities feel overwhelming
I Need Help Managing Daily Symptoms of Depression: What Should I Do?
When a person with MDD fails to get treatment, there may be significant negative consequences, including:
- Disrupted/impaired work and school achievement
- Problems with family, peer, and romantic relationships
- Difficulty sleeping
- Changes in brain structure and function
- Increased risk of chronic physical illness
- Impaired immune function
- Increased risk of other mental health disorders
Those are serious consequences that can affect every major area of life. That’s why articles like this one are important. If you experience the symptoms of depression, it’s essential to take them seriously.
Untreated depression rarely resolves on its own, and most often increases in intensity and severity. However, with an effective treatment plan and good daily habits, you can learn to manage the symptoms of depression and live life on your terms.
In the rest of this article, we’ll share our best tips on how to get through the day while managing the symptoms of MDD. In addition to going to treatment and sticking to a treatment plan, here are our top tips for managing your days with MDD.
Five Tips: How to Make it Through the Day With MDD
Tip 1: Seek Support
Support can come in different forms. You can:
- Make an appointment with a counselor or therapist
- Go to a mental health /depression support group
- Seek out social support from family and friends.
Establishing connection can help feel less alone and begin to create small moments of positive interaction.
Tip 2: Practice Flexibility
Depression is more than the emotional symptoms most people know about. It can impact:
- Sleep
- Energy levels
- Thoughts
- Movement/motivation
- Concentration
To help make it through hard days, adjust your expectations to align with your current capacity, which can make you feel less overwhelmed.
Tip 3: Break Tasks Into Smaller Steps
When your physical and emotional energy levels feel depleted, focusing on priority tasks is key. Here’s how:
- Identify your task
- Identify the separate components
- Make each component a separate task
- Check them off as you complete them
Breaking down larger responsibilities into smaller tasks and focusing on one step at a time makes things seem less intimidating. It helps you build on small achievements, and meet your goals – i.e completer your tasks – in a logical, step-wise manner.
Tip 4: Practice Self-Compassion
Experiencing depression can often bring out harsh self-criticism and judgement. Here’s how to start countering those impulses:
- Acknowledge depression makes everyday tasks more challenging.
- Practice speaking to yourself with kindness.
- Remind yourself managing depressive symptoms is not easy.
- Remind yourself you’re doing the best you can under the circumstances.
Many people underestimate the power of self-talk and the effectiveness of self-care. Simply adopting a basic self-care routine and changing the way you think and talk to yourself about yourself can make a big difference. You can practice positive self-talk and get better at it. The more you practice, the better you get, until positive self-talk – as opposed to negative self-talk – become your default mode.
Tip 5: Create a Healthy Routine
Establishing a structured routine can provide consistency, which makes it easier to get started and complete daily tasks. We advise setting regular, consistent times for:
- Waking up
- Going to sleep
- Eating meals
- Getting some fresh air
- Getting exercise
- Social activity
A healthy and predictable routine with consistent and regular times for all the items on the list above can help you mitigate and manage the symptoms of depression.
Daily Practice Makes a Difference
Developing healthy and productive habits is becomes a protective factor that can reduce the negative impacts of depressive symptoms. With each day that passes, you reinforce your good habits, which in turn increase their power and effectiveness. Before long, you won’t even know it’s there. It will simply be what you do every day. And on days that test your patience, resolve, and emotional wellbeing, you’ll remember it, and be happy you have it in place to help keep you healthy, happy, and on track.
Gianna Melendez
Jodie Dahl, CpHT