4 Ways to Ease Depression Right Now

You might think of depression as feeling sad or down. But depression isn’t just about experiencing dark emotions. 

Depression actually comes from holding on to negative emotions—and then judging yourself for feeling them.

When you feel depressed, it’s because you’ve swallowed your feelings. They’re stuck inside of you. 

Then, when you tell yourself it’s not okay to feel sad, angry, or apathetic, the depression grows. 

In other words, depression is the end result of judging, denying, or not letting yourself experience your feelings—and repeating this process hundreds or thousands of times. 

If you’re stuck in this cycle and feeling depressed, what can you do?

Here are 4 things you can do to help yourself feel better right now:

1) Reparent Yourself

Alleviating depression starts with accepting the feelings you’re having. The more you can surrender and express, instead of depress, the easier it is for your emotions to move through you. This is what emotions naturally do. 

So how do you develop the ability to experience your emotions? 

It starts with learning to reparent yourself.

Since the idea of expressing stuck feelings is a very modern concept, there’s a good chance that the adults in your life taught you that you’re better off swallowing your emotions. 

As an adult, you have the power to teach yourself a new way to cope with your feelings through the process of reparenting. How does it work? Basically it involves learning to accept whatever you’re feeling. Instead of judging yourself for having emotions like sadness, frustration, doubt, and fear, reparenting is about giving yourself permission to feel them as you experience them. 

When these emotions come up for me, what I want to do is behave as though I were talking to my five-year-old self. I tell myself: “It’s okay that you’re sad, Jesse.”

2) Change Your Environment

Whenever I work with clients who are feeling depressed, I give them one goal to start with: leaving the house every day. Though I realize this can be challenging in a time of lockdowns, it’s important to change your environment, even just a little. 

Why? 

When you’re feeling depressed, your instinct is to isolate yourself. Being in the world seems to take an enormous amount of energy. But it’s the best thing you can do when you’re feeling depressed.

By changing your environment and breaking up your routine, you start to move the energy in your body. This also moves the energy in your mind. 

If you’ve been feeling depressed for a while, I understand how hard it can be to get yourself to move. It might be the last thing you want to do. The key is to figure out the easiest thing you’re capable of doing right now. 

Can you take a 5-minute walk? Do a 10-minute yoga video? It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “healthy” activity. If buying a soda at 7/11 is the only thing that motivates you to leave the house, try that. The important thing is to move the energy so you can start to release it.

3) Self-Care

Why is self-care important when you’re feeling depressed? It’s also part of the process of reparenting yourself, which is an external as much as an internal process. 

When you do things to take care of yourself physically, like eating something healthy or taking a shower, you’re not just improving your appearance. You’re learning to nurture yourself. You’re telling yourself you deserve to be well cared for.

4) Do, then Distract

I know there’s a big gap between knowing intellectually that it’s a good idea to take a walk or eat a salad and actually finding the internal strength to do these things. 

One way to get motivated to take a baby step toward feeling better is to allow yourself to return to your resting state afterward. 

After you take yourself to the park or pick up ingredients for a healthy meal at the store, give yourself permission to go back to lying in bed, binge-watching your favorite TV show, or doing whatever you usually do to soothe or distract yourself. 

In other words, you’re not trying to go from not showering or leaving the house one day, to eating three clean meals, taking a bath, and going to a Zoom cocktail party the next day. 

Instead, the goal is to choose one thing you can do today to help release the depression, recognize yourself for taking that step, and then go back to your usual routine.

If your usual routine is lying in bed, then continue the process of reparenting yourself while you’re there. Rather than telling yourself you’re stuck and can’t move, try to embrace what you’re doing. For example: “I’m going to enjoy this Netflix show right now. And tomorrow I’m going to walk 10 minutes instead of 5.”

To put it another way, if you’re doing something to distract or soothe yourself, try to enjoy it and be in it fully. When you approach your distractions in a positive, mindful way, you may find that you need them less and less as time goes by. 

Do you want to learn more about how to ease depression? In my new book, Life Launch, I’ve included more strategies for working through depression, along with other big emotions like anger and anxiety. Download a sample chapter here.