Five Months

Your life could change in five months. I know that seems a bit cliché to say, but I'm not talking about a vague promise, I'm talking about real, measurable and visual change. Our society is absolutely inundated with anxiety and depression. Having worked professionally as a therapist for nearly three years, I could not begin to count the number of people I have encountered who, in one form or another, feel stuck in the empty, often nihilistic cycle that is depression and anxiety. While not the most technical definitions of depression and anxiety, I think the two most straightforward definitions are thus:

"Depression is looking at your life and thinking that tomorrow is going to be the same as today, forever." And anxiety is, "Looking into your future and seeing only the things that can (and thinking they will) go wrong."

I can't take credit for or remember where I heard those, but I agree with them. In academic and sometimes therapeutic circles, we sometimes have a tendency to overcomplicate things through our disease and medical mindsets. To be sure, many people who suffer from depression and anxiety have chemical imbalances and need medicinal help, but one of the questions I get most often from my clients is not, "What can I take?" but, "What can I do?"

Granted, I am not a psychiatrist so I do not deal in medication and again, I want to reiterate, if medication is needed it should be taken. However, it is important to strive to be in as much control of your thoughts, feeling, and reactions as possible as that is where our true power lies.

I think one of the reasons depression and anxiety can be so debilitating is because they often seem so massive to us that the thought of taking action against them is overwhelming. In other words, we look at our depression and anxiety and try to eat the entire whale in one sitting.

This is an impossible task that, most often, ends in failure and leaves us worse off than before. So, rather than trying to eat the whale in one sitting, rather than trying to conquer depression and anxiety in a week or a month or even a year, give yourself time. Break it up into bite-sized chunks. Pick a small, actionable thing you can do each day, even if it is repeating the same action every day for a time, and watch how your success builds.

For example, one of the things that helped me start combating my own depression (and mind you I was working as a therapist at the time) was saying, "Life if happening for me, not to me," over and over again to myself. For weeks. This might seem like a small, even infinitesimal step (it was) but over time, I began to see how certain things in my lifer were indeed working for me and, perhaps more important, I began to see that I was not nearly as big of a victim as I thought I was. This small step gave me power and that was huge.

So, what is a small, actionable step you could take today to start eating the whale in your life? Pick something small, start today, give yourself time, and watch how you grow; not over night, but slowly, steadily like the mighty red-woods.

Wherever your life is right now, whatever state you find yourself in, remember, you have more power than you realize and, if you start today, your life could change in five months.

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