Get It Done When You're Depressed (17 page)

During depression, the mind starts to develop tunnel vision to mostly negative things. Some depressed people can also become very rigid in their thinking. They have trouble exploring creative alternatives to getting things done and instead listen to the voice that says there’s only one way to do things. Finally, pessimism and a loss of self-confidence lead to predictions that what they decide to do will ultimately fail. To combat this, focus on small, simplistic, or concrete steps you can do fairly quickly. Your success will keep you moving.

If you tried to do your task all at once, whether it was learning an acting role in one sitting or trying to speak a language before you’ve studied the grammar, there’s a very good chance you’d get anxious, overwhelmed, and more depressed. You don’t want that. You want to get things done, step by step. You can train yourself to look at every project like a recipe and know that you have many steps to go through before you get a beautiful and delicious cake—or an acting role or a second language.

Here are some other thoughts to consider:

Remember:
Everything feels impossible if you look at it as a whole instead of as a process with individual steps. In reality, the steps are all that matter, especially when you’re depressed.

Depression can make even the most mundane tasks feel impossible. It makes sense that doing a focused job at work when you’re depressed would be difficult, but why is making dinner so hard? Why is it so difficult to hang up your clothes or get gas in the car?

Depression can take away your ability to do even the simplest of tasks. No matter how many strategies you use in this book, there will be some days when you simply can’t get all the little stuff done.

If you’re usually able to do the little stuff with ease, it might be a shock to see how depression can totally take away this ability. You might start to feel like a burden if you can’t fulfill your normal duties, and that can lead to the feeling that you’re a failure simply because it’s so hard for you to do the things others do with ease. This is when you need to ask the people in your life to take over and do the little stuff for you.

There’s a difference between asking someone for help with a task, which implies a form of collaboration, and simply saying, “Please do this for me.” Asking someone to actually do the stuff such as making a lunch, cleaning a room, or organizing a book shelf makes sense. If you simply aren’t able to do what you have to do, getting someone else involved who can accomplish the tasks with ease is a good idea. Why put the added pressure of the little stuff on yourself when someone else can do it for you?

Look around you. Do you see any of the following signs that you would benefit from letting someone do the little stuff?

Depression will tell you that this should all be easy! When you can tell it’s not going to be easy at all, this is the time to ask for help.

I have a 1969 Mustang that usually gives me a lot of pleasure. I’ve been restoring it for over a year. The engine is done, but the body needs a lot of work. When I got depressed last year after a layoff, my car no longer looked interesting to me. I didn’t want to touch it. It seemed like an obstacle in my garage and only made me feel worse when I looked at it, as though it was saying, “Failure, failure, failure.”

But there was a spark in me, even in the worst times, that said,
If you just go out there and do the work, you’ll feel better.
My roommate would say, “God, Pat! Get out there and work on your car!” But I couldn’t do it. This lasted for almost six months. My dad kept talking to me about it, but I blew him off.

Then one day I had an idea. I called my dad and said, “Would you come and take out the car and wash it, check the oil, and drive it?” He did. The car looked more friendly after that. He then started coming over once a week. For the next few months, we worked on the body together, and now I’m back to having fun with my car. I had to ask him to just do everything for me at first. I needed a model of “normal” behavior.

Depending on the seriousness of my depression, there are certain things I can and can’t do in my life. When I get really depressed I stop cooking completely. It’s just too much effort. I used to
really
get upset at myself about this. I’ve left clean dishes in the dishwasher for weeks now, even though I need to use them. I have clothes on the floor of my room. I have beautiful roses in my yard that I would love to have in my house, but I don’t have the energy to cut them. This stuff happens when I’m quite depressed. I can take care of all this stuff when I’m moderately or mildly depressed, but there are just some times in my life when I need people to do things for me.

Depression is a struggle against feeling completely powerless, so you might not ask for help because you don’t want to feel like you’re powerless or to appear that way to others.

And depression seems to reignite old emotional issues such as being shamed or remembering a “you need to stand on your own two feet” message from your parents. It might be that you hear an old message such as “you are incompetent,” which could make it even more difficult to ask for help.

Asking for help might open an inner door that’s full of sealed-off longings for others to take care of you. These longings can develop for many reasons. Many people had to grow up too fast and learn how to be autonomous before they were ready. Sometimes kids had to be a parent to their own parents. If you experienced this, it’s normal that you would hold on to the “I’m completely self-reliant” persona. If that’s the case, asking for help doesn’t fit your self-image but may touch on deeply buried longings to be taken care of by someone else.

Or you might feel embarrassed to have others see your home or apartment because you haven’t been able to keep it clean when you’re depressed.

Asking for help and letting others help you with the small things is a positive and effective way for you to get the space and time you need to do the big things. There’s no reason you have to do
everything
. When you’re depressed, it’s often the everyday things that get in your way. When you ask someone to do these small things, you can feel better knowing that they aren’t hanging over you and pointing out what feels like failure.

Here are some ways to ask for help:

When you’re feeling better, you can return the favor.

Remember:
The people who care about you want to help you. When you’re too depressed to get things done, swallow your pride and ask them to do what you can’t.

A
non
depressed person might take on too much and get stressed and overwhelmed if they say yes too often. As a person with depression, saying yes can have even more serious consequences. For one thing, saying yes when you need to say no is a surefire way to increase your depression. And not only will you have added to your workload, but you might also get down on yourself for not being strong enough to say no when you’re asked to do something you don’t want to do.

Depression is not very nice. It either says you don’t do enough or that what you do is no good. This can lead to a lot of saying yes on your part in order to please others. Depression can also take away your reasoning ability. When you’re depressed, you probably have trouble asking,
Do I have the time and energy to do this project?

Think of saying no more often. At first you might feel a lot of guilt as soon as you say no. Often the worry of how others react can increase this guilt. When you’re depressed and you say yes due to the pressure from others or simply out of habit, you add more stress to your life. This basically guarantees that your down mood will last longer than if you had honored your own needs.