Statistics show that the highest rate of people suffering from depression and/or anxiety start from an age as young as 12 up till 25. Medications, such as anti-depressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers have allowed depression and anxiety sufferers to be relieved of their symptoms – symptoms that can often be debilitating. Therefore, medication combined with therapy leads to a road of recovery.
However, some of those things are not always accessible to everyone. Here are some tips to combat depression and anxiety at no cost.
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy exercises
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Thanks to the internet, almost anything is readily available to us, one of them being cognitive behavioural therapy exercise sheets. But first it is important to ask: what is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a simple way of understanding challenging situations and problematic reactions to them. It consists of three components: thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
By providing a distinction between these three things, difficult emotions and feelings are easier to dissect and it is easier to pinpoint where intervention is needed when a negative issue arises. If a negative thought is causing a chain reaction of negative emotion and behaviour, the best approach would be to re-examine the thought. If a behavioural pattern seems responsible, new behavioural responses to the situation is the solution.
An example: If you think of the death of a loved one, that thought provokes an emotion – sadness – and that emotion provokes a behavioural response. We as humans are habitual creatures, so what we do once, we often repeat. Behavioural responses become patterns. CBT helps us trace back the root of our issues, and once we have the root, it is easier to solve the problem. There are numerous CBT exercises, of which I will link below, but the main one is cognitive restructuring. Cognitive restructuring is a way to help examine unhealthy thinking patterns and devise new ways of reacting to situations. Think of it in a sense as rewiring your brain. This often involves keeping a record of your thoughts. In doing so, tracking dysfunctional automatic thoughts with that data, allows you to devise better alternative responses. One way to do this is by bullet journaling, which is discussed in a little more detail below.
Here are some CBT exercises you could try.
- Emotion regulation techniques featured in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
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As with CBT, it is important to first discuss what Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is. DBT provides people with valuable skills to keep our emotions in check and avoid emotional dysregulation. Some of these skills include interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, acceptance of reality, emotional regulation, and mindful skills. These skills help us understand and accept our emotions in order to decrease our emotional suffering.
The most important aspect of treatment in DBT is to accept that we will, without a doubt, experience negative emotion in our lives – no matter how well balanced we all may seem. Instead of avoiding or denying feeling negative emotions, DBT focuses on keeping it in check instead.
Emotional dysregulation is the inability to control one’s emotional responses. Think about the CBT cycle mentioned earlier. In people who suffer from emotional dysregulation, they react in a much more emotionally exaggerated manner to situations. These reactions can be detrimental to relationships and on one’s own life. Emotion dysregulation is primarily made up of four components: emotional sensitivity, heightened and unstable emotions, lack of appropriate emotion regulation or coping strategies, and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies.
In other words, people with emotional dysregulation often have unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Again, there are many techniques and strategies in DBT – of which there will be a link that discusses it in much more detail – but the main one is understanding and labelling emotions. One thing that scares many depression and anxiety sufferers is the unknown, because the unknown is something you can’t control.
Once you identify your emotions by labelling them and thereafter, distinguishing them from thoughts and behaviour, makes it easier to control them. Identifying and labelling your emotions makes it easier for you to manage the emotion and develop healthy coping skills.
If you would like to learn more about emotion regulation in DBT, click here.
- Bullet journaling
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Bullet journaling is a little bit different from regular journaling. Bullet journaling entails drawing up rows and columns with tiny little squares. The columns typically are labelled according to the calendar and the rows can be anything from mood or exercising. It serves as a colour coded mood and habit tracker.
For example, red means ‘no’ or ‘anger’, green means ‘yes’ or ‘happiness.’ So, if you were feeling sad on Monday, you colour in the square red. If you exercised on Monday, you colour in the square green. This process should be repeated every day, every month. At the end of the year, or even at the end of every month, you can see your documented progress and improve things from there on.
- Routine
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Sufferers of depression and anxiety often feel troubled by what they perceive as a lack of control caused by the unknown and uncertainty of things. One way to establish control is to create a routine. A routine creates structure and is something that we can control. A routine also helps to manifest productivity. Set a specific time for you to wake up, and wake up at that time every day, as this creates a feeling of consistency.
Likewise, for night-time, set a specific time for when you are to go to sleep. If you struggle to sleep at night, it often helps to reduce screen time an hour before bed. Studies have shown that the blue light that emits from phones have a negative effect on our cognitive abilities. So, by reducing screen time, you can improve your cognitive abilities and your sleeping pattern. Get your eight hours!
A final thought as something to think about. My therapist once said: “Sometimes happiness isn’t the goal, growth is!”