CynthiaWVirginia
Posts: 1915
Joined: 2/28/2010
From: West Virginia, USA
Status: offline
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I'm climbing out of a bad one myself.
Doing more house work has helped, so has sanding and painting and sanding and re-painting new panels to cat proof some areas of my home. The wood was boring, and now it's...lovely. We're painting them with pecan gloss polyurethane.
Getting back on my daily multi vitamin, taking my D3, and Vitamin C pills helped too. It's a rare day when sunshine gets to touch my skin and I dislike drinking milk, so I try to remember to take D3 at least several times per year for maybe a month at a time.
My eating these past months had been awful. Mostly grains and poor quality protein (bologna anybody?) and the rare canned veggie. I bought decent meat this month, cut back on grains, and bought fresh fruits and fresh veggies. To get myself to eat more raw veggies, I bought a bag of mixed chocolates (the kind given out for Halloween) and told my son we can have a chocolate or two IF we've eaten some raw veggies that day. A salad every day these past two weeks is making me feel significantly better. (I'm missing the parboiled rice served with cinnamon and warm milk though, and the pastas.) What I eat can affect how I feel, as well as my energy level.
Spending money. Deciding on a set amount to spend for fun and then searching three sites to find out where I can get the best deal. And then the happy anticipation of waiting and waiting for our new stuff to come in the mail. From one site the stuff is very cheap, the shipping extremely low cost, but it takes 2-5 weeks to arrive. Yesterday I got four of my rings in the mail and I've been looking at my new pretties all day and it makes me smile. Each ring cost me just $1 each, plus another $1 each for shipping... Oh, and my (two) $19 each (plus $6 each for shipping) violet wands arrived too. I needed some fun to bring balance into my life, and if this means I won't be able to save up for a new computer in time and have to be offline for several months, oh well...I'll find something else to do.
Too many things were upsetting me all at the same time, so I stepped away from the computer (except for letting myself leave one or two posts per day, maximum, and letting some mail wait)...because I became so oversensitive that small things started triggering me into downward spirals. I have real time drama I'm dealing with, and real time threats from an asshat. Too much on my plate right now and more and more stuff kept happening. My refrigerator died. Our oven died. One of my furbabies died. Someone decided to keep my floggers and stuff that would cost me around five to six hundred to replace. Lots of other stuff happening too and I was overloaded...and stepped away from the keyboard. (Yay for stepping away from the keyboard.)
I'm deciding to turn back to hobbies I left behind and I've sent off for a 152 count Crayola box of crayons, all in different colors. I've got my eye on a set of 72 different colors of coloring pencils (will buy next month, as fun money is all gone for this month). I bought one of those adult coloring books that are showing up at Sams and Walmart that's for helping people to cut back on stress (no pencils yet though), and I bought acrylic paints and some flat canvasses. Sometimes we leave too much of ourselves behind and need to reconnect by rolling up sleeves and using our hands to build or make something. You did this in a more practical way than I'm choosing to do but...tonight it was just FUN to draw something with crayons and hear my (adult) son say "Wow mom!"
I've gotten more sleep. Went from 7 hours per night to 9 or 10 and I think it's helping.
Depressing, looooong phone calls full of energy suckage stopped for a week too, because Frontier had something goofed up in their building and made my home phone unusable (though the internet still worked). It was hugely liberating not to have to be there for friends and family who are going through their own hells and need someone to be strong for them. It was almost as good as going camping and being unreachable. (Yes, the neighbors knocked at my door because their daily phone calls always met with a busy signal. BUT...it was freezing cold outside and talking only lasted for a few minutes. Yay!)
What else has worked for me? Finding a decent day to meet up with my bottom. THAT really helped reset my brain chemistry. (We had to skip last month.)
Instead of thinking of all the things I wish I could change but can't, I'm focusing on finding as many ways as I can to create genuine happy thoughts. Things to balance out all the cr*p life throws at me. I'm being reasonable about this though.
I've also borrowed a friend's former Daddy type. For almost the past year. It's part time headspace, nonsexual, no "scenes", just...headspace, energy. It's better than talking to a diary. (This is the same family of friends we went to New York City with late last year.) Basically, I have a friend who is not vanilla, who won't advise me about anything unless I ask him to, and I feel it's a no strings thing other than friendship. They're going to visit me again this March, and if I want to hang out while wearing a cosplay type hat, nobody is going to send me waves of disapproval.
What I'm saying in that last part is...some friends and family can add to our stress. Wind us up beyond all reason and there's nothing we can do to put a stop to this other than shutting them out of our lives completely. (Which most of the time I'm not willing to do.) In times of high stress and deep depression, I can't let these people see how overloaded I am because they're not going to understand, unless they have PTSD and panic disorder. They're not going to be helpful and my family is not going to respect my boundaries. Yes, my darling sister also phoned this week and she's pushy about her religious beliefs. (Which is funny considering that we're both Christians.) It sent me into a death spiral of resentment and depression (BUT...I did NOT reach through the phone to wring her neck).
I've also found out that watching too many murder/death/kill type shows on Netflix messes up my brain chemistry. My son loves to watch crime shows one after another until I want to scream and/or think that the whole world is so beyond effed up. I had him play video games instead while I took over the tv and watched animal documentaries...yes, and even ones about the ocean, deserts, Antarctica, blah blah blah. (If something died it's because another animal with babies needs to eat and I can deal with that.)
I can't have a zen garden in my home because my cats would use it as a litter box, so...I watch documentaries that talk about the evolution of coral reef polyps and algae and krill, and how water trickles down from mountains to flood plains on Africa, etc. Nothing triggers my adrenaline on these shows. I hate adrenaline.
Okay, this is my post for the day. 
I need to get offline, look at the pretty chocolates in a jar (they're pretty, and I already ate mine for the day), watch some peaceful type documentary, take my BP meds and my Dexilant stomach meds, and go to bed. I'm going to run my violet wand for a while to find out (eventually) what it does for my complexion and hair follicles (okay, and to feel the nice pleasant zaps and look at the pretty red spots it leaves on my arm when I crank it up high), and then I'll go to bed. Tomorrow I'm going to wake up and try to beat my son to the mailbox so I can see if any more stuff has arrived in the mail.
This is how I'm dealing with deep, unexpected (I know I should have been, but each time when it hits me especially hard it always takes me by surprise) depression. Years ago, before I was so disabled I used to just work it off, going two to three days in a working frenzy before finally falling to sleep. I think I like this way better.
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RE: 'First Aid' for sudden depression - 
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