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The First Step To Tame Anxiety & Depression

I tend to link anxiety and depression together when I really shouldn’t. They are definitely different beasts but in my mind and in my experience, depression can develop as a response of prolonged anxiety. After your body has lived in a fight or flight mode for an extensive amount of time, being hyper alert and interpreting every external response as an immediate and life-threatening danger, there comes a point when your body and mind can’t take it any longer. And that’s when depression sets in. After your body perceives itself in a helpless state for so long, the brain wires itself into believing it is truly helpless and that idea takes hold. It’s no wonder that we then enter into hopeless states that keep us from any sliver of happiness, causing us to question what the point of this life is and if our existence might be relieved if we were not present on this earth.

The point is, I address anxiety and depression somewhat interchangeably, which is not necessarily correct. Please understand that I am aware they are different beasts but forgive me if I want to use every method I can to tame these two beasts simultaneously, considering how deadly and unforgiving they are.

I like to focus on the relationship between food and mood first and foremost because I think it has the greatest impact. However, there are some intangible methods of taming these beasts that have made a tremendous impact on my own experiences with anxiety and depression.

These might strike you as dull, boring, maybe even cliche. They’re not remarkable or at the cusp of innovation. In fact, they’re well known strategies that some doctors, psychiatrists and therapists prescribe. They have been around for a very long time and people keep talking about them because they work. But  it’s very rare that someone actually takes the time to put them into practice and make a difference in their life. It’s wild how that happens, how such simple strategies that have been proven to help go untapped. But I understand. We all want a quick fix. But, as literally everyone on earth comes to learn, there is no quick fix for happy.

Let’s dive in.

Our Main Goal: Detachment

The main overarching goal for both anxiety and depression, in my opinion, is to detach yourself from your thoughts and your feelings. This is no easy task, especially when they are flooding your mind and overwhelming every corner of your being. But when you can do it, you are leagues ahead of the game and can manage both much easier. What detaching means is finding a way for us to view our thoughts and emotions as visitors, rather than things that control our behavior or things that we identify with. If we can understand that the thoughts and emotions we have will come, but that they will also go, we can ask ourselves what they are trying to tell us. We can be curious about them and see them as messengers from which we can learn about ourselves.

Thoughts and emotions are mechanisms our bodies use to keep us alive. They are survival strategies. That’s really it. It’s true that they also allow us to experience the greatest joys in life: love, connection, laughter; but their main purpose is ultimately to allow us to survive long enough to reproduce. Maybe that sounds harsh and cold but it’s a helpful perspective to entertain because if you view them as simple survival strategies, they lose their power over you.

Detaching yourself from your thoughts and emotions may sound broad and rather abstract, and it kind of is, but let me give you some practices that can help develop this mindset shift.

Practice #1: Meditation

Meditation is probably the biggest cliche and hardest sell. Almost everyone knows about it and knows it’s valuable in some way for their mental health. And even if they understand the benefits and the goal and how to do it (not that it’s rocket science to sit in silence and focus on your breathing), there’s no way in hell they’re setting aside 5-10 minutes, or even 1 minute, in their day to do it. And why would they? Everyone is busy. And when they have a spare 5-10 minutes, they don’t want to be trapped in their mind, especially if they’re feeling anxious or depressed. They want to use that time to do something that makes them feel good, or at the very least, they want to do something that helps them escape from how they’re feeling.

I get it. Even I, the person attempting to persuade people to establish a meditation practice, do not have a consistent meditation habit. I, too, have a very hard time setting aside 5-10 minutes to sit and breathe every day. And I’m single with no children – literally no reason not to fit it into my day 😉. It’s an even harder sell when you don’t feel an immediate positive feedback loop after taking those 5-10 minutes to mediate. For me personally, I don’t even notice an overwhelming positive effect when I do it on a consistent basis. I know, I know, I’m the worst saleswoman ever.

Here’s the “but:” BUT when I stop doing it, when I stop meditating after making the time consistently, that’s when  I notice an effect.

How obnoxious, you only notice something bad, and only after you’ve forced yourself to do this practice consistently, feeling no positive benefit from doing it. I’ve actually observed this quite a bit after healthy lifestyle changes. Positive changes are so gradual and incremental that you barely notice them as you slog through making positive decision after positive decision. But once you stop doing those things – working out, eating healthy foods, getting enough restful sleep – you feel shitty and you feel it fast. And it’s only then that you realize how much you value those healthy choices.

As an aside, there are people who do feel better immediately after meditating, and sometimes I do too but it’s not some overwhelming clarity or feeling of relief. Especially if you’re anxious or depressed, it can be even harder to find the benefit and the motivation to create – and keep – a practice of it.

The biggest value of meditation, of taking even 2 minutes to sit and focus on your breath instead of the thoughts in your head and emotions in your heart, is that you practice redirecting your focus. When you practice training your focus over time you strengthen the ability to focus on things other than your loud ass thoughts and drowning emotions. In other words, you learn to detach yourself from your thoughts and emotions, our number one goal when dealing with anxiety and depression, if you remember. You find yourself acting as an observer of those thoughts and feelings. You begin to see them clearly and become aware of them when they start to come up instead of mindlessly allowing them full control while you feel like someone being washed away by wave after wave, dragged below the surface, desperate  for air.

This process is gradual with incremental growth but it is incredibly useful in learning to detach from our feelings of anxiety and depression. Meditation helps us ground ourselves and learn to recognize when those thoughts and emotions stir up within us, even outside of our meditation practice. And that is step one.

Here’s a simple practice to get you started, for those who haven’t explored meditation before:

1. Sit in a quiet spot, in an alert but comfortable position: shoulders back, released tension, easy breath.
2. Set a timer for 2-5 minutes.
3. Close your eyes.
4. Focus on your breathing. No need to control it but you can count breaths, if that helps. In the beginning I enjoyed counting how many seconds it took for each inhale and exhale. It also helps me to be present by thinking, “I am breathing in, I am breathing out” with each inhale and exhale.
5. When you find your mind wandering to other thoughts, gently bring your focus back to your body, back to your breath.

No need to judge yourself by how many times your mind wanders or get frustrated if you feel yourself tensing. Just keep practicing bringing back your focus to your breathing, gently and kindly, over and over again.

Practice #2: Awareness

When deep in the throws of anxious and depressed spirals, it is beyond difficult to separate ourselves from the way that we feel. But we must. Our thoughts are not who we are and we can’t let them become who we are. We have to find a way to squeeze into that between place, that tiny sliver of space between our thoughts and ourselves so that we can tame our mind.

There’s an idea known as the “monkey mind” in Buddhism that names the thoughts of the ego. In other words, these thoughts that tell us we aren’t good enough and drag us into negative thought spirals are known as the monkey mind. It’s not necessarily the same thing as the thoughts that come from anxiety and depression but it can be. And the idea alone of naming those thoughts is a way for us to separate them from ourselves. It keeps them from controlling us.

We can adopt this mindset of taming the monkey mind but we need to learn to differentiate between the thoughts that are true and those that are derived from it. We need to practice observing our mind – our thoughts, our emotions. Meditation is a great place to start with this but if you need something even easier, start with your meals.

We have to eat anyway, so instead of creating a whole new habit you need to keep up with on top of your already busy life, try observing yourself while eating:

1. Take a breath before the meal to bring your mind into your body (mind-body connection is important).
2. Then, just observe. Observe what it feels like to taste your food, what the texture is like, how it feels in your mouth, how many times you chew. Slow down. Take note of how you feel overall. Take note of what thoughts or feelings come up, then revert your focus back to your meal.
3. It’s best if you do this with little distraction, i.e. no TV or screens. I know that’s not entirely realistic but you can still make progress even so if you tap into being present with your body while you eat.

We need to become aware of every single thought and feeling and we need to begin to question them. Thoughts change our perspective of what reality looks like. Just think about memories and how people remember different things based on their own interpretations. If there’s an overwhelming thought or emotion that comes to the surface, feel it, question if it’s true, question what it’s trying to tell you. Instead of letting it drag you below the surface and drown you, see it as a message, observe it, ask what it’s trying to tell you.

Practice #3: Journaling

The best and most effective way to understand your thoughts and emotions is through journaling, in my opinion. I’ve written my deepest thoughts out sporadically throughout my life, especially when I didn’t have anyone I trusted enough with them but it wasn’t until I was at rock bottom, drowning in pain that it became my saving grace. For those years I did it daily. Most days I did it multiple times a day. Every time a wave of pain, shame or some other overwhelming emotion washed over me, taking me under, I wrote.

I wrote out absolutely everything. I needed to release it all because I couldn’t hold onto it anymore. So I wrote down my fears, my pains, my every thought and emotion. It didn’t matter how embarrassing it was, or how utterly ashamed I was that I felt it or that I thought it, I wrote it down. I freed myself from all of it. But it wasn’t only a release, it was acceptance of myself that turned into love.

I gave permission to myself to feel it all, to think it all. I didn’t judge myself. As time passed and as I released every thought, I began to see more clearly the difference between what was true and what my mind was telling me. Not only that, but as I wrote, and as I let everything out of my mind, I could also argue against myself. I started to talk back to myself and ask myself to take another look, that maybe there was another perspective – that maybe, just maybe, what I thought wasn’t the full picture. I began clarifying what I felt and asking myself why I felt that way. I asked where it came from, what the thought or emotion was trying to tell me. And so I began to heal.

If we don’t release our internal storms in some way or another and suppress them, or let them run rampant about our minds, they circle and circle. It turns into rumination and sucks us down even darker holes. Even if we can successfully suppress them and go about our days, those unprocessed thoughts and feelings will build up and they will come for us in the form of anxiety or depression. We have to allow ourselves the freedom to feel them, to get to know them. We have to learn to clarify them because that is how we get to know ourselves. That is how we understand ourselves, that is how we learn to love ourselves.

Tying It All Together (Hopefully)

Meditation, awareness and journaling are all exceptional ways that we can begin to detach from our thoughts and feelings. There is value in every thought and emotion but they do not define us. When anxiety and depression takes over, we tend to lose our power to our thoughts and feelings. But if we can learn to see them for what they are and take them with a grain of salt and interpret the messages they are trying to tell us, we can keep our heads above water. We can learn to love ourselves through it.