How Mother Nature and I Manage My Depression

a post by Amie Gabriel for the Tiny Buddha blog


“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” ~John Burroughs

I sat on the front stoop sobbing, unable to move. Hunched over like a heaving dog hugging my knees and clutching a wad of decomposing tissues. About fifteen minutes before, I’d managed to get myself off the couch where I’d been parked, withered and absent, for the fourth consecutive day, and had made it through the front door.

Once there, I tried to stay upright, but like cool syrup I slid down the side of the wrought iron railing and down onto the steps. Now all I had to do was get up and walk to the mailbox and back and maybe I’d feel better. But I couldn’t do it. It was too much.

I hoisted my ladened head from my knees and stared out the driveway to the mailbox about seven hundred feet away. It may as well have been ten miles… or fifteen feet. It didn’t matter, it was too far.

“Please just help me get up,” I pleaded to a sombre sky. The help didn’t come and so there I sat crying, searching for the energy or the wherewithal to make myself move. Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, twenty-five… the time oozed by thick and distorted.

It had happened before, more than once, and had overtaken me at varying speeds and intensity. Sometimes it leached in with the change of seasons; like an inflatable pool toy left floating past the end of summer, sad and wilted, the air having seeped out in infinitesimal degrees. Sometimes I could fight it off, catch it before things got too grim. Not this time. I’d felt myself spiralling down, hot wind escaping me until I was in a deflated heap, slack and flaccid on the sofa.

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Health is about exercise and green veg. But if you’ve had an eating disorder, it’s not that easy

an article by Megan Nolan published in the New Statesman

A desire to change your body could drag all of that history back.


MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

The fundamentals of health are simple. Move a lot, eat green, leafy vegetables, consume as few harmful chemicals as possible. It’s not difficult, nutritionists and stringy, gym-lean personal trainers tell us on television.

My doctor says it too, when he forces me to be weighed before he will renew my contraceptive pill. I’m not particularly overweight, he tells me, so why don’t I just follow the rules a little better? It wouldn’t take much. It wouldn’t take much for me to be in the green weight category rather than the orange. Just do what you have to do. I know that if I did those things I would be healthy, and I know that I should want to be healthy. But do I?

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Counterintuitive Ways to Combat Anxiety

a post by Tracy Shawn for the World of Psychology blog



Through the years I’ve learned to douse the ongoing wildfire of fear with productive tools such as exercise, meditation, replacing negative, irrational thoughts with positive, rational statements, and tapping into my creativity (studies show that anxious people are often more creative — as it takes a lot of imagination to come up with those what-if scenarios — so it helps to channel that artistry into a positive outlet).

Yet there are other ways I combat my anxiety that don’t sound as constructive. And they certainly don’t sound very positive, either. In fact, some tactics could be construed as downright depressing. But they work. In fact, they work so well, that I feel it’s my duty to share them.

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7 Winter Depression Busters

a post by Therese J. Borchard for the World of Psychology blog



We’ve entered the “dark ages” as the midshipmen at the Naval Academy say — the weeks between Christmas break and Spring break when everyone turns a pasty white and the sidewalks are full of ugly slush. The lack of sunlight and the shorter days don’t help the pursuit of sanity. However, if you approach this time of year with a dose of creativity and enthusiasm, you need not fall down the rabbit hole of depression.

Here are some ideas to keep your mood sunny when the weather is anything but.

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Exercise is good for you – unless it's part of your job

an article by Ian Sample, Science editor, published in the Guardian


Construction workers build new houses on a housing development in Middlewich, England. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Men who work as labourers or in other physically demanding roles have a greater risk of dying early than those with more sedentary jobs, researchers say.

The finding, from scientists in the Netherlands, reveals an apparent “physical activity paradox” where exercise can be harmful at work but beneficial to health when performed in leisure time.

Pieter Coenen, a public health researcher at VU University medical centre in Amsterdam, said the reason for the disparity is unclear, but he believes it may reflect the different types of exercise people get at work compared with those in their free time.

“While we know leisure-time physical activity is good for you, we found that occupational physical activity has an 18% increased risk of early mortality for men,” Coenen said. “These men are dying earlier than those who are not physically active in their occupation.”

Other researchers say the finding may simply reflect a greater likelihood for people in manual labouring jobs to have unhealthier lifestyles in which diet, smoking and alcohol consumption all conspire to reduce life expectancy.

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I follow the argument about people in manual labouring jobs but manual labouring is not the only physically active job. Nurses and other health professionals often spend very long hours walking and they are not alone.

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10 Health Benefits of Daily Exercise

a post by Suzanne Kane for the World of Psychology blog


“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.” – A. A. Milne

You don’t need to knock yourself out at the gym each day to reap the many health benefits of daily exercise. With simple planning and a determination to engage in a healthier lifestyle, you can add easy stints of exercise to your schedule without breaking too much of a sweat. Best of all, you may realize some of these 10 health benefits of daily exercise.

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Hazel&rsquo's comment
If you are anything like me you will have read the above paragraph and thought “yes, but” and not gone on to read anything more.
It’s all good stuff but if someone would send me a bucket of motivation I might, just might, start doing something tomorrow. Not today.

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'Just go for a run': testing everyday advice for my depression

an article by Martha Mills for the Guardian

If you say you’re depressed, people are quick to dispense wisdom on how to deal with it. Martha Mills decided to take them literally, and try them out for herself

So, it turns out I’m getting better at depression. That isn’t to say I’ve stopped suffering it, or that it is any less debilitating when it sneaks up after a two-year hiatus and pile-drives me into a blistering agony of mental carpet burns topped with a patronising tousle of the bed-hair, like a nostalgic school bully. No, what’s “better” about me is spotting it and moving quicker through the self-blame method of diagnosis.

We all have down days, and that’s what you hope these are. Only they stopped being a day or two of feeling blue that can be whiled away with the distraction of a conspiratorial sofa and questionable DVD collection, and have merged into weeks since you were last able to feel anything but disappointment on waking up, and the choice between showering or just smelling like a tramp’s undercarriage has gone beyond struggle into pure resignation.

Being especially practised at denial, I decided that I, a mere mortal with a solid history of depressive episodes since childhood, could fake my way out of this oncoming tsunami of debilitating black fog using the advice that people who have never experienced depression trot out – an experiment that could surely only succeed [sidelong glance to camera]. I would improve my diet and exercise, force myself to take up hobbies, I would “soldier on until it passed” and thrust myself (reluctantly) into social situations. I even tried “looking on the bright side” but it turned out to just be glare on my TV.

Continue reading and discover how Martha fared along the way.

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