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How I Survived A Recent Bout Of Depression · The Daily Writer

• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome everybody to the Born to Create Podcast.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Kent Sanders, and I'm your host.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm an author, musician, and teacher.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: But most importantly, I'm a husband and a dad.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here on the show we talk about practices, habits, and strategies that help us live out our creative calling.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode 43, and today I'm going to be talking about how I survived a recent bout of depression.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can find the post that accompanies this episode at Kent Sanders.net slash survived depression.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: When I first considered doing this episode, I hesitated for a bit.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, after all, would anybody really be interested in this topic?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not in my normal wheelhouse of creativity, productivity, worship, or related topics.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: But then I remembered that a post I wrote on depression a couple of years ago on my blog had gotten a good amount of attention, at least for my blog.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people wrestle with depression, and I thought maybe I could help somebody by sharing my own struggles, including a recent struggle with depression.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've been dealing with depression since my late twenties, and I'm now age 42, so this has been an ongoing battle with a demon that'll be lurking in the shadows until I die.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've just kind of resigned myself to understand that depression is something I'm always going to be dealing with on some level.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of months ago, I went through a wave of depression that lasted for a couple of weeks.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in this episode, I want to share what happened and what I learned from it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're struggling with depression, I hope that you'll come away knowing that you're not alone in your struggle.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: But my main goal really is to urge you to do whatever's needed to get healthy and to get help if you need.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it should go without saying that I'm not a medical doctor, nor am I qualified to diagnose or recommend treatment for depression or any other type of medical condition.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: We all know that, but I gotta put that disclaimer in there anyway.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't really know everybody's experience with depression, but I can tell you about my own journey, and hopefully this will be helpful to you on some level if you're interested in this topic.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: To me, depression doesn't feel like sadness.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And people who haven't dealt with depression before sometimes think that being depressed is just a matter of feeling sad or having the blues for a prolonged period of time.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, that's not the case.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I would describe depression more like a fog.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: For me, depression is not a feeling of being sad or of being quote unquote down or having the blues.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, it's like feeling that you can't think straight.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's like feeling that your life is going in slow motion, or that you just want to sit and stare at the wall.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: For me, feeling depression is like having your emotions deadened to the point where really you don't feel anything at all.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, it's not an intensity of sadness, rather, it's really the absence of any feeling or any emotion at all.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you hear about people struggling with depression who say they can't even do things like get out of bed.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And to some people who haven't experienced depression for themselves, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, it makes complete sense.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because depression, if you leave it unchecked, it sucks away your motivation to live and to exist.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And at its worst, everyday life when you're struggling with depression becomes such a burden that even simple things like getting dressed or taking a shower or brushing your teeth or getting out of bed, those things take all the emotional energy that you can muster.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let me just be totally frank with you.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've never considered seriously taking my own life.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I have been in very dark places in my own mind and my own battle with depression over the years, and I've been in those places enough times to understand why some people choose to commit suicide and choose to take their own life.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying it's a good choice.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying it's the right choice, or, you know, I mean, how could that ever really be the right choice or the best choice?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I am saying that I understand how people emotionally get to a place in their lives where they feel like that's the only option.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I have sympathy for people who are struggling emotionally in a place in their lives where they feel like the only out or the best out is to take their own lives.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I've never seriously considered that myself, and I've never gotten to a point in my life where I've been in danger of doing that, but I understand emotionally and psychologically how people get to that place in their life.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, throughout my whole adult life, and this is a completely true story, I've had a recurring dream, and I've had this dream probably at least a couple of dozen times over the last 20 years.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: In this dream, and this dream takes place in different times and situations and different forms.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's very hazy.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing that all these dreams have in common is that in the dream I'm running somewhere, and there is some kind of a shadowy, unseen force that is holding me back.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes all the effort I can muster just to move a short distance in this dream.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like I'm running, running, running, but I can't seem to get anywhere.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know enough about human psychology to understand what that dream means or why I keep having that dream.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: But in some ways, I do feel like it's like a metaphor for my life in general, in some ways.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to take an extraordinary amount of effort for me just to make a little bit of progress in my life.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've never understood why that's the case or what's going on there, but that seems to be emotionally how I seem to process things, is it just takes a lot of effort for me to make even a little bit of progress.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: One thing that I do know is that I've always felt like I am my own worst enemy.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to overlide, overanalyze everything.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to be a perfectionist, and I find it really hard to focus on one project for an extended period of time because I constantly get distracted.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, before I was putting together this show, this never occurred to me, this insight.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: But something that does occur to me as I think about it is that maybe in this dream, I am the shadowy unseen force that's holding myself back.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe I'm in a room full of mirrors.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, the shadowy unseen force that I'm experiencing, maybe that's just a reflection of my own self and the way that I hold myself back.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just an insight that I've had while putting this episode together.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: So back to the main story and what this episode's really all about.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: In this recent bat of depression that I've experienced, I was dealing with a lot of anxiety.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was also experiencing some heart palpitations, and I had a lot of I had a lot of acid reflux, and generally I just felt kind of checked out of life.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Depression and anxiety, in my experience, have always been bedfellows.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: They go together.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I feel anxious or stressed, my depression seems to kick in and get a lot worse, and it messed it and it manifests itself physically as well as with emotional symptoms.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: So in the rest of this episode today, I want to explain three reasons why I think this flare-up happened and what I did to address it.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I think I was working too much.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not here referring to my college job.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: I love my college job, I love my teaching job, and that is not the source of any of this depression or anxiety.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to make that clear.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think where it really was coming from is that, you know, on top of that job, I have a bunch of freelance, well, not a bunch, maybe five or six freelance clients who I do various kinds of work for.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: But also I do two blog posts a week, a couple of podcast episodes a week, a newsletter, and some other stuff as well.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that is all work that I love.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love all that stuff, but when it comes down to it, it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's still work.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever I think about my schedule during this time that this depression flare-up happened, I realized that I hadn't taken a full day off in probably at least a month, probably a lot more, to be honest with you.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, I know that's stupid to not, you know, take a day off uh religiously to rejuvenate and get renewed and all that stuff.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, the bottom line is that whenever you're motivated in life, whenever you're trying to make progress toward your goals, it's really easy to get blinded by momentum and activity and the desire to accomplish things.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, during this flare-up or this bout of depression recently, I was emotionally and mentally fried.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that was basically an open door for depression to come into my life and wallop me over the head.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one thing.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Second of all, there was a stressful situation in my side business that was causing a lot of anxiety.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't really so much that the situation itself was a big deal, it was that I, in my own mind, was making it a big deal.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And actually the solution for the issue was was really simple.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And as I look back on it now, I just think, why was I making that such a huge deal in my own mind?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what I tend to do sometimes with my personality, is I tend to take these little things that are not significant and I blow them up in my own mind and I worry about them and I stew about them, and I kind of work myself up into this almost um, you know, sort of emotional lather sometimes out of these little things.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it all takes place within like my own psyche and in my own mind.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not an external thing, it's all internalized.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that was something that I think contributed to this uh recent bout of depression and anxiety.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: And thirdly, I wasn't doing anything to rejuvenate or renew myself.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had been pushing myself so hard to achieve that I wasn't reading anything fun, I wasn't watching any movies, and those are two things that really kind of rejuvenate and renew me.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: As Stephen Covey would say, I wasn't sharpening my saw.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So those three reasons that I just discussed are, I think, some major factors in my recent flare-up of depression.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did I deal with this?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me share a couple things.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as I felt myself succumbing and sort of going, you know, down the rabbit hole, so to speak, emotionally and mentally, I knew that I had to take action.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've been dealing with depression a long time in my life, and I know exactly what it feels like, and I know what kind of things cause it, and I also know how to get out of it.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that I'm always successful with it or that, you know, I'm always like obedient to the things that I know I should be doing, but it does mean I know myself well enough to know what causes it and how to deal with it.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And one way that I chose to deal with this that I knew was really important was getting up and away from my computer.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: The reason for that is that, you know, the vast majority of the work that I do, including writing blog posts, freelance work, uh, a lot of my college work, and you know, recording this podcast episode right now, those things all take place by the use of a computer.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, and all that's good, and I appreciate technology and all that stuff, but you have to get up and away from your technology and your computer sometimes, and remember that there's a real world out there waiting to be experienced.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: One afternoon, in the middle of this crisis, if you will, I got up away from my computer and I told my son, hey, let's go geocaching.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, geocaching is where you go and you find all this cool stuff that's you know sometimes hidden, you know, in parking lots or in the woods or at businesses or whatever, and you use an app and you go find these things based on um based on coordinates, and it's really, really fun.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that was really rejuvenating for me to go out and to do that because it's something I love to go do with my son.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh something else that I did as well is I went and bought a novel that I'd been wanting to buy for a while.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh actually a Stephen King book.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been wanting to read it for years, but just never had.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went and bought that and browsed around at a bookstore for a while, found it, and started to read it.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really kind of a rejuvenating fun thing for me to do.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I enjoyed that.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Another important step, I think, in recovering from this little bout of depression was talking to my wife about what I was going through.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my wife, Melanie, knows me better than I know myself, and she could see that I was under a lot of stress, not necessarily from outside things, but just stress that I had internalized.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And she was very compassionate, very gracious, and is always great to listen to me.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, even sometimes when I'm you know whining about things that aren't really a big deal, I suppose.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: She knows that most of my stress and anxiety is self-imposed due to my analytical and my melancholy personality.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: So she still loves me and appreciates me, which I definitely appreciate in return.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and the lesson there is just having a sympathetic, understanding person who will listen to you is a huge part of dealing with anxiety and depression, I think.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Another key part of getting through this crisis that I just experienced was setting better work boundaries, which I hadn't been doing as much as I needed.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem with being a writer and a freelancer is that you can work anytime.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good thing and a bad thing because the good thing is that you can determine your own schedule for the most part.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: The bad thing is that, well, you can determine your own schedule.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't have clear-cut boundaries and the self-discipline to stick by those boundaries, that can be a huge problem.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes I would find myself checking email as soon as I woke up in the morning and checking it a million times during the day and right before I went to bed.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And other times I would find myself, you know, after the whole rest of the family had gone to bed, checking social media, messing with email again, and doing some work things.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And not having kind of a wind-down period at the end of the day is not really healthy because, you know, if you're in front of computers and computer lights and screens, and then you try to go to sleep right after that, that usually doesn't help very often.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So something that I have tried to implement the past couple months, I've not been totally successful with this, but I've been more successful than not, is that I've tried to not do any work past 9 p.m., not, you know, check Facebook or social media, uh, do email, that kind of stuff.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, again, I will admit that I'm not perfect with this by any stretch, but I've made some progress, and it's at least made me aware of the need to have a better system in place in my life.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: By all accounts, I live a pretty charmed life, I would have to say.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: My family and I are all healthy, I have a steady job, and I've had some minor successes in my business this past year, so I don't want to give the impression that life is horrible or anything like that because it's definitely not.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Life is great most of the time.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: However, this recent episode of depression really did throw me for a loop quite a bit.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on the other side of it now, and I'm really thankful to say that these actions that I have mentioned in this episode have helped me a great deal.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when it comes to depression, the biggest lie that we tell ourselves is that we should be able to handle it alone.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: We sort of whisper to ourselves, I should be stronger.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I so weak?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't I do this on my own?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the forces are working too hard against you, and you cannot possibly be strong on your own.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends were running through the poppy fields and they were trying to reach Emerald City?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what happened in that scene is they were, you know, trying to go to Emerald City, but the wicked witch put a spell on them and they all fell asleep in the poppy field.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, Glenda the Good Witch, she made it snow, and then they all woke up.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the lesson for us there is that you can't always do it on your own.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to have some help, and that's totally okay.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you struggle with depression, the most important thing I think I can say to you is that you cannot get through it on your own.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Reach out to a trusted friend, contact a professional counselor, or see your doctor.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I hope that this episode encourages you to take action, to get healthy, and to ask for help if you need it.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Your life is too valuable, and your creative work is too important to let it wither at the hands of depression.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you need somebody to chat with or talk to, you can always reach out to me via email at Kent at KentSanders.net or by sending me a private message on Facebook if you want.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are some attitudes, practices, or habits that have helped you cope with depression?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear your thoughts.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can join the conversation and find the post and the links that accompany this episode at KentSanders.net slash survived depression.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: When you visit my site, you'll find all kinds of great resources to inspire your creativity.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'd also love to share a gift with you when you subscribe to my newsletter.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can check it out and learn more about my books, writing, and services at KentSanders.net.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: I love to connect and you can tweet me at Kent Sanders or find me on Facebook and Instagram as Kent Sanders.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that you'll also check out our Born to Create Facebook group by visiting KentSanders.net slash Facebook group.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember that you were born to create and designed to make a difference.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: What will you do with the time you have left?