6 Steps to Take if You Feel You’re Struggling With Depression

According to statistics taken from the National Institute of Mental Health, the major depressive disorder affects about 17.3 million American adults each year. That’s over 7% of the U.S. population, ages 18 and older who goes under depression each year.

📝 Here’s the thing to note about depression.

It's a very real mental disorder that can really mess up your life.

The definition of depression is pretty simple. It’s a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think, and how you act.

Symptoms can include feeling sad, having a depressed mood, losing interest, or pleasure in activities that you used to enjoy, losing your appetite, having trouble sleeping, sleeping too much, losing energy, and more.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are all kinds of ways in which depression manifests itself. But in this blog post, we’re going to talk about some steps to take if you feel like you may be struggling with it.

Let’s dive into it.

✅ 1. Talk To A Friend

If you’re struggling with depression, then talking to a friend or a loved one is probably the best place to start. Just talking about your feelings and being honest about what’s going on with you can be very therapeutic.

In fact, this can sometimes help you to feel a lot better, especially in the short term.

✅ 2. Get Professional Help

Don’t get it twisted. There’s nothing wrong with getting professional help. In fact, getting a good therapist (or talking to a psychologist) might actually really help you to overcome some of the issues that caused you to be depressed, to begin with.

Getting a therapist isn’t necessarily a silver bullet for depression, but it certainly helps.

✅ 3. Get More Sleep

Sometimes, when people get tired or sleep-deprived, their mood can take a downward turn.

And guess what?

If you’re spending a lot of your life chronically fatigued due to a lack of sleep, this might be causing you to feel seriously depressed on a longer-term basis.

So try getting some better sleep.

It actually matters.

✅ 4. Improve Your Diet

Sometimes, people who don’t eat a healthy diet, and/or people who don’t get adequate nutrition every day, also suffer from mood changes that can lead to depression. For example, eating a healthy, balanced breakfast to start the day can actually make a huge difference in your quality of life. And it may help to alleviate some of those depression symptoms.

✅ 5. Exercise

Exercise isn’t always easy. But then again, you don’t have to go so hard at it that you beat yourself up. You don’t have to become a powerlifter or an Olympic runner to gain some serious happiness benefits from moving your body. You can dance, swim, play a sport, run around at the park, or even take up an activity like hiking or canoeing. All of these things will get you up and moving, and will help to make you happier.

✅ 6. Try Cannabis

A lot of people don’t think that cannabis can help them with depression. But this is actually sometimes false.

The truth of the matter is that there’s a lot of evidence to support the fact that cannabis can actually help people who are suffering from a major depressive disorder.

Once again, it may not be a silver bullet—and it may not necessarily help in each specific case. But there’s a reason why people have been smoking and ingesting marijuana for literally thousands of years. Our ancestors probably wouldn’t have done it if there weren’t any benefits. And guess what? Those benefits exist for us in the modern world today as well.

Find out which states have legalized cannabis for mental health disorders by checking Veriheal’s state legalization list.

📌 Conclusion

Hopefully, this post has helped you to understand some steps that you can take if you’re starting to struggle with depression. Listen, this is not fun stuff. Depression is a terrible thing to have to deal with. However, there is hope—and there is help.

Just make sure that you take some steps to get it taken care of, to get your life back on track so you can start to feel healthy and happy again. Get out there and get it done.

You’ve got this!