Areas › Low mood and hard feelings
Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
What works for this
Behavioural activation
The strongest self help evidence in this whole field says the way out of a flat heavy state is through what you do, not through what you think. You act first and the feeling follows, which is the opposite of what the state tells you.
One move, today
Choose one small thing you used to do and do it today without waiting to feel like it. Ten minutes is enough. Waiting to feel like it is the trap.
What matches
5 practicesIf you smoked or drank during a pregnancy and have spent years holding yourself responsible for how your child turned out, you are allowed to put some of that down.
The picture is genuinely tangled. The same traits run in families, so a parent is both more likely to pass something on and more likely to have been…
If telling your doctor or midwife what you are using feels impossible, you can ask someone you already trust to pass it on for you, with your permission and in your words.
People often stay quiet with the very clinician who could help, because saying it out loud feels heavier than the problem does. Handing the message…
A medicine that lifts drive is not the same as one that settles anxiety, and for some people the energising kind makes the worry louder.
Bupropion is the clearest example: often good for flatness and lack of motivation, often unhelpful on its own when anxiety and a racing, sleepless…
Before anyone concludes that nothing works, go back over the ordinary explanations: a dose that never went high enough, a trial that stopped after three weeks, doses missed on the hard days.
Treatment resistant has a technical meaning, which is that at least two proper trials at a proper dose and length have failed. A great deal of what…
With the fast acting treatments, the plan for what happens afterwards matters as much as the treatment itself.
Electroconvulsive therapy can shift severe depression quickly, and without something in place afterwards the relapse rate is high, which is why…
