Tips on Dealing with Depression and Anxiety

For dealing with depression and anxiety effectively, implementing the tips in your life is critical. Many people read but few take the action steps.

Depression often occurs with anxiety and badly effects your personal and professional life.

Effectively dealing with depression and anxiety is essential for a healthy living.

Depression results in mental disturbances and hopelessness while anxiety is your normal behavior under stress and uneasy situations until it exceeds the limits of normality and becomes a disease.

Exercise and Lifestyle changes

For dealing with depression and anxiety you need to make some lifestyle changes.It has been proved by many researchers that exercise and physical activity support in overcoming depression and anxiety disorders.

It enhances your mood and releases anxiety. The people who exercise daily and keep themselves involved in physical activities are found less prone todepression and anxiety.

Exercise is a great coping mechanism. It diffuses your stress. Stress is the trigger for depression and anxiety.

Exercises like running, jumping, playing different sports and weight-lifting improve your mood. In addition, simple physical activities like washing your car, driving bicycle, watering plants or other simple measures make a good difference as well.

If you do not want to do tough exercises, just add simple activities in your daily routine. Write these in your daily to-do list. Involve yourself in exercise for 20-30 minutes daily. Pull yourself for it. Break your sedentary routine and you will feel better.

Deal your stress when dealing with depression and anxiety

Be simple in your life and never get stuck to situations, learn to move on. Schedule your routine work, plan ahead to avoid undue stress and adopt healthy stress coping techniques. All these steps add up to reduce the factors that triggers stress for you.

Sleep hygiene and alcohol

Poor sleep hygiene also creates supportive environment for depression and anxiety disorders. So fix a bed time and awakening time for you. Avoid prolonged sleeping in the daytime because it would make it difficult for you to sleep at night. Further, make your sleeping environment comfortable. Use comfortable bedding with no intense light and noise in the bedroom.

Studies have shown that heavy drinking and binge drinking increase the risk of depression. So avoid or limit your alcohol intake. Keep an alcohol intake diary and you will be surprised to see how much alcohol units you consume in a week.

Vitamins and omega 3 fatty acids

Deficiencies of vitamins or folic acid also contribute to depression and anxiety disorders. Healthy diet means healthy living. Keep a regular eating pattern. Eat natural foods at maximum. Include carbohydrates (banana, baked potatoes, rice, fish, and whole-grain breads), citrus fruits, green leafy vegetables, beans, chicken, fish and eggs in your diet.

Omega-3 fatty acid is another food component that stabilizes your mood. So try to include fatty fish, trout, soybeans, vegetable oil and nuts in your diet. 

Avoid eating refined stuff, bakery products, pizza and junk foods. All these attractive but junk foods worsen your mood.They should be not a major portion of your diet frequently. 

Medicines

You can also go for professional help in the form of medication and talk therapy when dealing with depression and anxiety.

Various anti-depressant and anti-anxiety drugs are available. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitora, SSRIs, (sertraline, paroxetine, fuoxetine) are commonly used and are well tolerated. SSRIs also have anti-anxiety effects.

Benzodiazepines such as alprazolam and clonazepam are anti-anxiety medicines commonly used. Benzodiazepines cause sedation as well. Do not drive or handle machinery when taking benzodiazepines. They can also cause dependence so always consult your doctor.

Talk Therapy and Breathing Exercises

Psychotherapy or talk therapy is another effective way of dealing with depression and anxiety. You talk with a trained therapist about your feelings, thoughts and emotions.

Together with your therapist, you learn to identify your negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts. Positive thoughts lead to positive behavior.

You can be your own therapist as well. Self CBT is a self help tool that enables you to deal with depression and anxiety on daily basis.

Breathing exercise and progressive muscular relaxation exercises in which you systematically contract and relax different muscles are also helpful. These relaxation techniques make it easier for you to get rid of your stress and negative feelings.

Meditation and EFT

Meditation is another famous technique to reduce depression and anxiety. It involves an internal effort to systematically focus on a particular task. Deeply involved meditation may help you in getting more control over yourself and beating stress, depressive and anxiety.

Emotional freedom technique (EFT) is an emerging and promising technique for healing depression instantaneously. It is simple, easy and effective. You can easily learn it and tap your energies to release the negative emotions.

The negative emotions cause turbulence in your energy channels. This results in depression and anxiety symptoms. You tap specific energy points in your body with your finger tips and correct the ‘Zzzt’ (disturbance) in the energy channels. This gives rapid relief from depression and anxiety symptoms.

In general, whatever technique you use, by overcoming depression and anxiety, you can improve your quality of life under all circumstances.

References:

1. Andreas Ströhle (2009), Physical activity, exercise, depression and anxiety disorders, Journal of Neural Transmission, 116/6, pp 777-784

2. Sy Atezaz Saeed, Md; Diana J. Antonacci, Md; And Richard M. Bloch (2010), Exercise, Yoga, and Meditation for Depressive and Anxiety Disorders, Am Fam Physician, 81(8), Pages 981-986.

3. Joseph M. Boden, David M. Fergusson (2011), Alcohol and depression, Addiction,  106(5), Pages 906–914

4. Melinda Smith, M.A., Robert Segal, M.A., and Jeanne Segal (2013), Online Article, Dealing with Depression