What to do when you are depressed?

Search for beautiful things to focus upon!

What to do when you are depressed? This is a common question everyone of you has to answer day in day out. When I talk of depression, I am not talking about severe clinical depression. I am talking about everyday garden variety blues.

You may be feeling low because of something that has happened to you today or yesterday, or last week.


Typical problems that drive people to feel low are given below:


• Fight with the spouse
• Made a bad presentation at work
• Troubled with a self-centered colleague
• Overwhelmed with work
• Missed a deadline and your boss reprimanded you
• Didn’t study well for the exam and got low grades
• Lost a match


These are the times when you beat yourself inside through an internal dialogue that can cause your mood to slip down.


How do you know when you are depressed? Here are some of the symptoms to watch out:


• Feeling sad
• Low energy to do anything
• Need to be left alone
• Loss of interest in things that excite you
• Procrastination


Let me give you one tip you can do right now that will lift you out of your sad feeling. It is the easiest one to do and doesn’t cost anything.


Here is the tip:


Start focusing on the external world. Observe carefully what is around you and pick up an object and start observing it through all your senses.

Let’s say you are in front of a tree- touch it, feel the bark, look at the colour, touch the leaves, look up and observe the sway of the leaves.

Keep doing this until you are totally lost in the world of that tree. You will find a magic sweeping all your blues away.


How does this work? You feel better just by externalising your focus and thus stopping that negative internal dialogue beating you up.

The mundane things around you have an unique healing property and focusing on them is what to do when you are depressed.