People live remarkably busy, stress-filled lives and it takes a toll. The stress builds and it causes everything from anxiety to depression. Living in a constant state of low-level depression has become normal in the United States. Working class people tend to get down in the dumps more than any other group of people. Life becomes a never-ending circle of going to work, paying bills, and never getting ahead for the working class of the modern era.
Situational depression is a type of depression that exists due to the circumstances in your life at that moment. As you can see, many of us live with chronic situation depression and it shows in our moods. Moods can be manipulated to a large extent though. There are a lot of ways to cheer yourself up, and not dwell on the situations you cannot change. You may even find ways to change your circumstances if you can break the cycle of depression long enough to stop wallowing in it.
Breaking the Depression Cycle with These 5 Tips
In Order to Change Games, You Need to Change Playgrounds
Remember this phrase and what it means. If you want to make changes, make changes in the place that you hang-out, the crowd you hang-out with, the room you spend all your time in, etc. Spruce your cubicle at work up a little. Ask if you can change desks if you hate your location. If you can’t afford to move, redecorate your apartment or house a little. Just hanging a new painting can work wonders for your mood. You don’t need to spend a fortune either.
Try checking on Craigslist, the Facebook marketplace, or your local papers for second-hand furniture that you can spruce-up with some paint. It’s extremely popular to ‘up-cycle’ with yard sale finds these days. It also can be very uplifting to your mood, to just get your hands involved in some sort of creative project.
Did you paint and color as a child? Try using those skills to get creative with a painting you can hang on your wall, or a craft project that you find on Pinterest. It’s a great way to uplift your mood because it changes your environment and it also gives you a feeling of achievement and satisfaction. When your sense of accomplishment is high, your self-confidence is high, and this makes it difficult to be in a bad mood or depressed.
Chew gum
This amazingly simple tip can increase your mood dramatically. The reason why chewing gum lifts your mood is because you have a gland that releases serotonin near the base of your skull, in the back of your neck. When your jaw is working, this gland is stimulated, and it produces and releases serotonin into your system. Serotonin is a hormone and it is a mood stimulant. In fact, many mood enhancing medications are designed to encourage the production of serotonin. You can do it naturally.
One of the reasons that people eat a lot while depressed is because the body is doing all it can to encourage you to move the jaw and stimulate that gland. It’s a purely subconscious thing. Now, we don’t want to eat non-stop and gain weight because that will be a further depressing situation. Chewing some sugar-free gum won’t add any calories to your daily diet though, and it will encourage you to smile. If you don’t believe this, stop and think about anyone you’ve ever known who chews a lot of gum and think about how often they are happy-go-lucky.
Music
Music stimulates parts of the brain that can specifically enhance mood. The type of music you listen to also makes a big difference. Hard-driving rock and roll is not what works best for most people. If this works for you, great, but in many cases, it can create further irritation for a lot of people.
Try listening to classical music or soft tantric music tracks that you can find on the internet. This is a great way to help your mind release the thoughts that bombard it all day long. When you stop dwelling on the bills, and the work-related stresses, your body relaxes, and your mood is uplifted naturally.
It should also be noted that music, particularly classical music, plays an important role in calming infants and encourages the mind to focus on mathematical sequences in the multiple layers of the musical compositions. This happens subconsciously. Much research has shown that babies who are exposed to classical music do better at math later in their lives. You can also stimulate your own brain and you are never too old to learn new things. Learning new things will make your mood so much better too.
Supplements/Nutrition
Making sure that your body has the sources of fuel, supplements, and nutrition that it needs to carry out the important work of manufacturing what it needs to elevate your mood and keep your body happy at a cellular level is extremely important. A starved body is not a happy body, and it will affect your brain. When your brain isn’t getting what it needs, it sends signals that make your feel depressed.
When the body is nutrient starved, it stops producing hormones, it becomes stressed and strained with daily metabolic functions and the least necessary functions gradually get shut down. Mood enhancing hormones cease to be produced in enough volume for you to feel their influences and your moods grow darker.
There are great supplements that help support your moods. Making sure that you have enough vitamin B (all the B vitamins) will ensure that your brain continues getting nutrients it needs. Magnesium also assists in lifting brain fog, as well as the fact that it is necessary for hundreds of processes within the body. Gingko biloba has an influence on memory and mood. Many people are now using CBD oils and hemp oil products to enhance their mood, which have shown to be more effective than medications for many people with depression. Research on CBD oil products has concluded that it absolutely works within the body to elevate mood and interacts with the gland that produces serotonin, and we already know how important that is. CBD is being touted as a ‘life enhancing’ product because of how effective it has been on mood disorders.
Drink water and exercise
Keeping the body hydrated is essential because we are made of mostly water. Water lubricates your joints, keeps your cells hydrated, improve brain function, flush the intestines and so much more. Water is impossible to live without. You can die from dehydration in only two days. Therefore, it is incredible to find out that most of us walk around in a state of ‘low level dehydration’ all the time. We barely give our bodies enough water to continue with basic functions. This is unacceptable and you’ll start having joint pains, stomach issues, chronic constipation, headaches, sinus issues, and even ear infections. Drinking more water will help your body function as it should and this will make you feel so much better.
It’s hard to be in a great mood when you are constipated, or your sinuses are plugged. If you have a headache, you are not in a good mood. Most of us don’t stop to think that drinking a glass of water might really help wake us or energize us. It does. Try drinking a large glass of water, with a vitamin, each morning and notice how dramatically your moods are improved.
Exercise and water go hand in hand, because the body needs to move for the endocrine system to function properly. This includes the glands that produce hormones – like serotonin. If you exercise, you must replace the fluids you lose in sweat. Therefore, both exercise and water go hand in hand. Water is needed and exercise helps push those fluids around the body where they are needed most at any given moment.
Exercise stimulates the body to start working more efficiently, which goes long way to improving the way you feel, both physically and emotionally. As much as we avoid exercise, it can become a life-enhancing addiction. Exercise is not only mood enhancing, high intensity work-outs can stimulate your body to release endorphins which and cause you to feel a type of euphoria, quite literally.
Long distance runners often refer to this as a ‘runner’s high’ and it legitimately feels like being on top of the world. You don’t have to run to get this sensation, you simply need to any type of high intensity exercise that elevates your heart rate for long enough. You may not achieve this state of euphoria right away. Athletes, whether professional or hobbyist, work a long time to achieve this goal. Once you get there, it is an addiction that could not be more natural and effective.
Making Life Changes
It is essential that you understand how to make changes and implement new habits into your life routines. You don’t want to try to incorporate all these afore-mentioned pieces of advice at the same time. This will likely lead to stress and giving up. That is the opposite of how you want to feel. The necessary thing everyone forgets is that you should set yourself up for success, rather than setting yourself up for failure.
Don’t just jump into the pool head-first without checking to make sure the pool is full of water. Plan for your success by creating a game plan. Maybe you start with drinking some water with supplements for a few weeks until it becomes a morning habit? It’s a great habit to have, regardless of whether you feel many changes at first. Sometimes changes don’t happen quickly. Be patient and be gentle with yourself.
After you’ve successfully taking your vitamins and had more water in your diet, try adding some exercise. If you have been rather sedentary for most of your recent years, expecting to go out and run a mile is not very realistic. Start slower. Getting a pedometer, or a watch that has a step function built-in is a fantastic way to start tracking how many steps you walk in a normal day. Try to set a goal of just walking a little more each day. Eventually, you’ll be setting a goal to take 10,000 steps per day and find yourself meeting that goal. Your sense of achievement will make you feel like a million bucks.
In time, try adding a few of the steps as little jogs. A good rule is to walk a minute and jog a minute. As your strength and endurance improve, you will find that you are running 10,000 steps in twenty minutes and anything else you do all day is just gravy on your potatoes, so to speak. You’ll be able to eat a little more without feeling guilty because you’re burning the extra calories. Your body will naturally crave more water, so that will improve as well.
Listening to some music while you walk, or before bed each night can be added to your routine somewhere. Try listening to the music in your car on the way to work with a cup of coffee. Maybe you put some CBD oil in that coffee too. You’re bound to have a much easier day at work when you start with a stress protector like CBD. Getting your moods under control won’t seem like it is so hard when you take a few steps at a time. If you are walking toward the mountain, no matter how slow you are walking, eventually you will arrive at the mountain. It is inevitable. One step at a time will never fail you. You will always reach your goals. The only time you don’t succeed at something is when you quit or give-up. It takes time to get to a point where you believe this. Training your mind is also a skill that is learned.
Thinking Right
Now that you know how to do things right, you need to learn how to think right as well. Thinking is what defeats most people when they are trying to make changes and implement new habits in their lives. One of the first things that you need to be aware of is that we all have negative thoughts. The difference between successful people and those who are not is how they react to those thought patterns.
It isn’t easy at first, but when you catch yourself beginning to have a negative thought, stop yourself. Recite a mantra in that moment, something that is positive and meaningful to you. You might make up something, as your own battle cry, or you might get inspiration from a quote that you’ve read in a book or seen online somewhere. Whatever your inspiration is, say it to yourself whenever a bad thought creeps in.
Surround yourself with positive vibes. Create happy, inspirational spaces all around your home and at your desk at work. Keep a happy note in your wallet that you can pull out and be cheered up. Some people keep photos of loved ones, notes from a parent or lover. Whatever you need as your source of encouragement, use it.
Be emotionally invested in your changes. When things move us emotionally, when our hearts are involved, we find that we can move mountains. Challenge yourself to have fewer negative thoughts each day. Using meditation is a great way to learn to visualize your positive outcomes and break negative thought patterns. You can also use supplements, such as CBD capsules, to help break negative thought patterns. Because CBD works within the neural pathways, it can effectively block constant negative thoughts that prove to be the undoing of the best laid plans. Arm yourself with the ammunition that you need, because you are learning to set yourself up for success. The more you do this, the less you’ll fail at anything.
Also, remember that birds of a feather flock together. If you are trying to make positive changes in your life, you’ll find that sometimes other people prefer to wallow in their bad moods and depression. If you continue to hang in those crowds, you will find it inevitably difficult to break the chains of depressions and bad moods. Conversely, when you fill your life with people who are happy and positive, you will find it so much easier to emulate their behavior patterns that you’ll hardly notice that you must try anymore.
You simply cannot continue to associate with people who drag you down and you will find that those people will do all they can to continue to keep dragging you back into drama and problems. It’s hard to see other people move on and do better than yourself. For whatever reason, humans try to pull those people back down instead of rising to meet them on a higher level.
One day, the goal will be met, you will suddenly realize that you’ve been in a great mood most of the time and you haven’t felt the slightest bit of depression in so long that you can’t really remember. Then you’ll know that all your hard work and effort to retrain your mind and fuel your body with the right things have been completely worth it.
Sources:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24923339
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500733/