Simply getting to work when you’re depressed can feel like an impossible task. Dealing with people in the workplace and doing the most basic parts of the job seem to take more energy than you have. The routine becomes hard labor, and the stress and depression feed off each other. Over the past year, several […]
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Self-Starting When Depressed
How can you activate yourself to get anything done when you’re depressed? Several readers have asked about this basic need to keep functioning when your mood, mind and body do not want to cooperate. I’ve written before about working when depressed, but it’s not only about work. It’s about self-starting when depressed so that you […]
Before ACT – Doing Depression Right
When I started learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the idea that I was doing depression rather than having it as an illness didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I could understand that avoiding painful situations could worsen depression and that I often acted in self-defeating ways. But weren’t those the effects […]
Inner Beliefs and Outer Action
A few months ago, I found a picture of myself from college years that gave no hint of the turmoil of inner beliefs I held at the time. There I was, a lean young guy, sporting a cigarette for a role I was acting. The strange thing about this is that at the time I […]
Conversations with Myself: Accepting the Past
Accepting the past is hard work. Avoidance of any part of the past that makes me uncomfortable used to be my go-to strategy, even though it never worked for long. I guess it’s the opposite of the tendency to obsess about everything I ever did wrong. (For example, reliving that humiliating interview 43 years ago, […]
Time Off as the Storied Mind Blog Turns 5
2007 seems a world away from my life today, and many of the changes have come about because of the writing I started five years ago on the Storied Mind blog. Depression felt a lot more dominant then than it now does, and prospects for living as I hoped to a lot less bright. All […]
Judy’s Story of Depression and PTSD
In this post, Judy tells her compelling story of lifelong depression and PTSD as well as her gradual healing and recovery with the aid of innovative therapies such as hypnosis and EMDR. Background As is the case with many people who live with depression for a number of years, it’s wreaked havoc on my marriage […]
The Friends of Depression at Work
(Here’s an edited journal entry from early days of this blog when I was trying to survive depression at work.) I keep looking for a ray of humor in the ongoing torture of trying to work when depressed. This has not been easy. In fact, I’ve been falling into dark memory holes and getting a […]
