Everyone feels depressed at one time or another. They feel depressed in different ways for diverse reasons. Some people experience a mild form of depression, others experience it more severely. While a milder version goes away as difficult circumstances improve, severe depression is a chronic condition.
Depression is an overwhelming sense of sadness, loneliness, isolation, worthlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness. If left untreated, it can lead to severe mental or physical problems as well as various difficulties in life. It's a mood disorder that usually gets worse over time.
It is estimated that one out of five people suffers from it due to the high level of stress we all experience in the modern world. Additionally, women are more likely to get depressed than men.
Symptoms of Depression
Many signs and symptoms can help identify depression.
If you’re not sure if you’re depressed or just going through a passing mood because of recent setbacks or losses in your life, here are some typical signs and symptoms of depression:
* You're experiencing a loss of interest in life. Everything seems rather pointless.
* You lack the motivation to do anything, including things that you once loved.
* You’re experiencing physical health problems like insomnia and weight gain or loss.
* You’re having a hard time focusing on tasks you need to get done every day.
* You’ve withdrawn, avoiding spending time with family and friends.
* You’re experiencing increasing social isolation.
* You're finding it increasingly harder to get out of bed each morning because you don't look forward to doing anything.
Fortunately, there are many natural ways to beat depression. These include exercising, spending quality time with family and friends, eating healthy, meditating, and working with a therapist or counselor.
Let’s look at each one a little more closely.
1. Spending Quality Time With Your Family and Good Friends
Depression is a mood disorder that can affect anyone. Since it causes feelings of intense sadness, it affects your ability to function normally. One simple solution is to spend more time with family and friends. Spending quality time with people you love will help you feel a sense of belonging, which will naturally lift your self-esteem.
Your feeling of connection will lift your mood. By talking about the things that are upsetting you, you can then put them behind you. Surrounding yourself with positive, loving people interested in your well-being will take your mind off your sense of frustration or loss. You will feel better about yourself and your life situation.
2. Exercising
There’s a significant link between depression and inactivity. A sedentary lifestyle causes your body and mind to feel sluggish. Depression even causes physical changes in the brain.
Since depression has a physical basis, a result of hormonal imbalance, muscular inflammation, and decreased levels of mood-regulating neurotransmitters, exercise can reduce depression.
Improving blood and lymph circulation, breathing more deeply, and stretching out taut, tense muscles will increase serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins to improve your mood.
Exercise not only clears your mind of fretful thoughts but also reduces stress and makes it easier to sleep better every night. It’s a positive habit that helps you feel good about yourself.
3. Healthy Eating
Healthy eating can help you beat depression. Conversely, eating unhealthy meals—foods loaded with preservatives, food dyes, and too much salt, sugar, and saturated fat—can make you feel lethargic, which in turn leads to depressive thinking.
Eating healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains increases energy and reduces bloating and other gastrointestinal discomforts. The biochemical composition of nutrient-rich foods can help you fight depression, feel more mentally alert, and sleep well at night.
4. Meditating
Meditation has been used to reduce anxiety or depression for centuries. Meditating daily can help you cope with mental stress and physical fatigue.
If you do it regularly, you will achieve better mental health. If you can do it more than once a day, say, two or three times, you will notice a significant change in your mood.
One reason why meditation is so effective is that you drop your brainwaves, dropping from the beta state to the calmer alpha state. The beta state is characterized by high alertness. The alpha state is one of relaxed awareness. You experience this state when reading a good book or doing something else as relaxing.
5. Working With a Therapist
Therapists come from different schools of thought when working with depression. However, all approaches view depression as a debilitating mental illness that causes a prolonged sense of sadness, grief, and loss. If left untreated, depression can even result in suicidal thinking.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, for example, is one popular approach for treating a mood disorder like depression. It’s a combination of cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy. If you see a cognitive behavioral therapist, they will address issues such as poor coping skills, low self-esteem, and poor relationships. Once they identify what triggers cause you to have depressive thoughts, they will suggest new behaviors to adopt to counteract these triggers.
Final Thoughts
If you feel depressed, then you might automatically conclude that finding a cure for depression, particularly a natural cure, one that doesn’t require you to be on medications, is difficult. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
If you spend more time with family and friends, exercise regularly, focus on healthy eating, and meditating daily, you will notice a significant improvement in your moods.
If these things don’t help you feel better, then you are wrestling with some unresolved issues related to low self-esteem and self-worth. In that case, it would be advisable to see a therapist to work through the subconscious issues causing you to feel depressed.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional consultation or advice related to your health or finances. No reference to an identifiable individual or company is intended as an endorsement thereof. Some or all of this article may have been generated using artificial intelligence, and it may contain certain inaccuracies or unreliable information. Readers should not rely on this article for information and should consult with professionals for personal advice.