Depression Protocol
A thing I'm trying out
I spoke about this on the ADHD Big Brother podcast this week. Here’s the linkski-poo.
I basically sank one day last week. I went from having a really great day to having one of my darkest. No signs. No warnings. Zero to hopeless in 0.5 seconds.
On the plus side, I’ve gotten pretty good at self-awareness in these moments, and I’ve developed some skills to deal with these awful moments, but so what? In the moment I couldn’t do any of them. That’s a problem.
None of the holistic depresso treatments I’ve cobbled together over the years were resonating. I could go for a walk…nah. I could exercise…ugh, no. I could call a friend…I’m not up for a conversation. I could take a nap…those always make it worse. OK, fine, drink it away…I’m in a no drinking challenge in my community and I’m almost 60 days without any drinks and I know drinking it away is a no-go anyway. I could distract myself with some video games or a movie…that’ll just make me feel lazy and shitty.
Nothing I could think of in the moment felt right or even doable. That’s a problem.
I wished in that moment that I had some kind of depression protocol; something that I could lean on, without thinking about it, that was easy to start and was as close to a guarantee as I could get that it would elevate my mood.
So I created it. It is a checklist of easy to accomplish items that slowly get my body moving, get me outside, get me connecting to myself, and get my environment organized. It starts with me taking my mood temperature on a scale of 1-10. And each subsequent thing is very easy to accomplish. The very first things are the easiest. “Drink small glass of water”, then “Roll my wrist and ankle joints.” Super easy.
My thinking is that this is something to practice, like a free throw in basketball. You practice these things when you don’t need them so that when you are in the game, under tense conditions, it’s easier to execute. My goal is to do this 30 times in 120 days. I’m not going after some daily habit, because this protocol takes about 45-60 minutes to work through.
As I do this 30 times, each time taking the mood before and after, I will end the 120 days with an average. A data point that if I do this thing, then on average it will elevate my mood (x) number of points. That, to me, is an exciting experiment.
I’ve tried it one time so far. And I started with a mood of 4, and ended with a mood of 7. Hopefully that’s not a placebo effect where I just really want it to work! But we shall see!
How cool will it be for me to be able to assess my mood and be able to grab a checklist and say “by the end of this, my mood will be better.” Now that is some good medicine. That’s a pill I could take that won’t give me nose bleeds…(that’s a call back to every time I talk about my experience with medicine and how I love it, but I always have bad side effects…)
Question: do you have a protocol for an upsetting mood? Do you have an RSD protocol? An anxiety protocol? A depression protocol? Share it!