Being productive on a typical day can be difficult sometimes. However, when you’re feeling depressed, productivity and motivation can feel completely out of reach. Working or exercising while depressed can feel like climbing Mount Everest to many of us.
Fortunately, there are some strategies out there to help us work through depression and find the productivity we’re searching for. Of course, proper management of your depression, if it’s a clinical case, plays a very large role, but we all experience days when we’re feeling depressed. The tips in this guide should help you make the most of your worst days, regardless of what it is you’re looking to do.
Challenge Yourself Each Day
Getting back on your feet when you’re depressed can be a long road. Whether you’re having a bad day, bad week, or a bad month, try setting a little challenge for yourself each day. For example, try challenging yourself to take a shower once every day when you’re depressed. This might not feel like much, but sometimes, it’s all we can do to get out of bed when we’re feeling down.
Even something as simple as taking a shower can have many benefits on your mental state and the state of your body. For one, you’ll feel better when you’re fresh and clean. It’s also a reason to get yourself out of bed, walk around, and do something with yourself.
The above goal might not be the best one for everyone, however. You should set a small goal that feels within your reach, but that still isn’t so aggressive that it won’t stick. Try small goals like the following to challenge yourself each day:
- Take a fifteen-minute walk
- Replace one unhealthy snack with a healthy snack
- Finish one cleaning task around the house (i.e., vacuum, wash dishes, or sweep the sidewalk)
- Read one chapter of a book
- Draw something
- Write in your diary for ten minutes
- Give a loved one a phone call
Even getting out of bed and doing one small thing per day can go a long way towards both maintaining your productivity and helping you get back into your usual groove. Gradually, as doing one thing becomes easier, you can even bump it up to two or three things. With that approach, you’ll be well on your way to more productivity, regardless of how slow or how fast your progress is.
Do Work
Depression can sometimes creep into our working lives, too. When depression affects our productivity, we can end up suffering all the more because working feels like an impossible task. However, even if working feels like the thing you least want to do in the world, do it anyway. Even if the quality of your work is abysmal, do it anyway! Spend some time working regardless of the quality of the work you’re doing.
Sometimes, just the routine of going back to work can help pull us out of a funk, and we can always go back over later and fix up any bad work that we did. Don’t preoccupy yourself with what it is you’re doing or what the result will be. Just do it!
Don’t Feed the Beast
When you’re feeling depressed, the last thing you want to be doing is feeding your depression further. Unfortunately, though, that’s all we really feel like doing when we’re depressed. When we give into our urge to wallow, do nothing, and just feel generally down, we make ourselves more depressed in the process.
Depression feeds your negative thoughts. The longer you wallow in these thoughts, keep from doing productive work, and let yourself neglect essential tasks, the worse you will feel, and the harder it will be for you to pull yourself out of it.
If you can identify what kinds of thoughts are feeding your depression, you can put a stop to them. If you put a stop to these thoughts, your depression will eventually follow behind, too. Do your best to cast aside the thoughts that put you down and replace them with others. Happy thoughts, thoughts of what you’re thankful for, or even simple observations of what’s around you are good options.
Life for Today
Regretting past events and fearing for the future are great ways to make yourself feel depressed and overwhelmed. When you’re depressed, it’s important to take things one day at a time. What things do you need to get done today? Focus on that. There’s no need to consider everything that needs to get done in future days.
Take things a day at a time. If your workload seems daunting or downright overwhelming to you, your productivity will suffer, too. Focus only on what you can do today. Tomorrow can be worried about tomorrow, and so on.
When you start your day, don’t immediately set your mind to work-related topics, either. Starting your day with calm, happy thoughts helps keep stress down, and stress is the enemy of productivity. Taking your time to stop and smell the flowers before you get to work can actually increase the quantity and quality of your work in the long run.
Exercise
The beneficial effects of exercise on the mind and body are well-documented. When you exercise, your body releases endorphins, creating a natural good feeling. Even though you probably don’t feel anything like exercising, if you can bring yourself to do so, you’ll immediately notice the benefits.
Exercise helps combat depression in a number of ways, including:
- Reducing overall symptoms
- Slowing or stopping the effects of weight gain in the body
- Repairing neurotransmitters and muscle cells
Just like with most prescription medications, however, the exercise approach can take several weeks to reach its full effect on your brain. If you want to see the full benefit of exercise on your depression, you’ll have to stick with it, which is doubly difficult while you’re depressed. Obviously, this creates an inherent problem, so it will not be suitable for everyone. However, if you can maintain a consistent exercise schedule, you’ll feel better for it.
Savor Success
When you’re looking to increase your productivity and positivity when you’re depressed, it’s important to savor every little victory that you see throughout your day. Getting out of bed is a victory. Showering and washing your hair is a victory. Eating a healthy meal is a big victory! You may have some good days and some bad days, but try to savor your successes instead of your failures.
If you can find it in you to work and be productive, that’s yet another big victory to be proud of. As you fight sad feelings, it’s important to note as many of these little victories as possible. Even if you can’t work at the level you usually do when you’re depressed, each little bit of work you get done is worth celebrating.
Making a choice is a success, too. Even if the choice is as simple as choosing ice cream or chocolate to have for dessert, it means you’ve made a decision, and that’s good for your confidence. As your confidence can sometimes take a hit when you’re feeling depressed, make a note to make as many choices as possible. Trust your instincts – we guarantee that they’re the same instincts that they were when you weren’t feeling depressed!
Idle is Your Enemy
Although all you’ll want to do when you’re depressed is lounge around and sleep, that’s what you should be doing the least of right now. While proper sleep is important to stay healthy and leave your depression behind, excess sleep will only make your health and your mental state worse. Once you’ve had a healthy amount of sleep, get up and do things.
It doesn’t matter what you preoccupy yourself with. However, pick something that makes you happy, keeps you occupied, and helps you feel better about yourself and your activity. Try to do something different every day, too, if you can. Some ideas include:
- Getting a new videogame to try
- Going to the gym daily
- Adopting a new pet to care for
- Joining a club
- Taking up card games
- Volunteering or serving your community
Volunteering and serving your community can be particularly helpful because of the many things you can do to help others. Volunteering and helping others improves your self-esteem and just makes you generally happier, so it’s an excellent activity to include in your productivity repertoire if you can.
Maintain Relationships
Maintaining a support system full of important individuals is a keystone of fighting your way out of depression. Having a conversation with someone you’re close to, whether it’s about your depression or not, can lift your mood and help you feel more productive immediately. As such, it’s very important that you don’t let your important people drift away from you in your depression.
It might feel like a lot of effort on some days to reach out and contact those who are important to you, but you will be thankful for their support in the long run. Staying socially active and spending time with others is proven to lift your mood and keep depression at bay, too.
It’s also worth mentioning that the people you surround yourself with plays a part in how they make you feel, as well. If you surround yourself with people who are friendly and supportive, they will inevitably lift your spirits. If you surround yourself with pessimistic people, they will make you feel worse.
If you surround yourself with productive people who work hard to get what they want, you will be influenced to do the same thing. As such, if productivity and hard work are goals of yours, even while you’re depressed, make an effort to spend time with these types of people. You’ll soon find that their own hard-working nature is rubbing off on you!
Remove Distractions
When you’re depressed, it’s easier than ever for you to find distractions from your work. In order to combat this and retain your productivity, it’s best to make advanced preparations. To minimize the things that might distract you, consider doing things like the following:
- Turning off or silencing your phone while you work
- Silencing your email
- Turn off the TV, radio, or music
- Visit a productivity-boosting place, like the library
Of course, some distractions just can’t be eliminated completely. If someone comes to your door or if your pets need taking care of, you need to tend to those things. Additionally, you shouldn’t skip out on essential health tasks like showering, exercising, or eating for the sake of productivity. However, small breaks can be beneficial to your focus if you keep them to a minimum, so this works out well in the end.
Delegation
Although keeping active in work and in your own life is important when you’re feeling depressed, feeling overwhelmed by your duties is the opposite of helpful. If you feel like you have too much on your plate, it may be better for you to delegate some of your duties to friends, family, or coworkers to help get yourself back on track. Just because you’ve been feeling depressed doesn’t mean you should punish yourself.
However, this doesn’t mean you should use depression as an excuse to delegate all of your duties away, either. All this means is to treat yourself gently while you’re feeling down or depressed; treating yourself harshly or making yourself feel bad will just worsen the situation. Driving yourself deeper into depression is the opposite of helpful.
Those who support you in your life will understand when you’re feeling down and will be ready to help you. You might feel like you’re imposing on others by asking them to help you out, but those who love you will not mind. In fact, they’ll probably feel thankful that they can help you with your recovery. For your sake and theirs, don’t hesitate to ask your loved ones for help.
Try Something New
When you’re feeling down and depressed, any new activity will probably sound uninteresting or downright unpleasant to you. However, trying something new is an excellent way to rekindle your interest in being active and social. It also just generally combats depression and its effects, helping you perk up and increasing your productivity.
What new things you decide to try are up to you. Of course, if you can find something that aligns with your interests well, you’re more likely to enjoy it, but don’t let that stop you from picking something off-the-wall or something that piques your interest, either. Anything that you can do to get yourself out of the house, active, and socializing has its own intrinsic value, regardless of what it’s about.
Although half the purpose of trying something new is to meet new friends, if you’re nervous about doing so on your own, you can consider bringing a friend of yours along, as well. Having someone you know and are close with there with you to tackle something new and exciting is invaluable.
Diagnose
Sometimes, while you might think depression is getting in the way of your productivity, it might be something else in disguise. The tips and tricks in this guide are meant to help you deal with depression in relation to productivity, so if you have more at play in you than just depression, this guide might not address the real issue! Before you get too deep into looking for solutions, make sure that it really is depression at work.
Speaking with a medical professional is the first step to figuring out if you have diagnosable symptoms. However, the trouble with this is that we all experience depression from time to time. However, not all of us have depression. Having depression means that you possess the mood disorder that predisposes you to depressive episodes, and it’s a very different animal from just experiencing the feeling of depression from time to time.
If you have diagnosable depression, your doctor may be able to prescribe you with medication that can help your condition improve. However, if you only feel the occasional “blue day” like most of us, you’re totally normal. There are many things that are out of our control that can cause us to feel depressed, such as:
- Over-sensitivity to stress chemicals in the brain
- Gloomy weather
- Not enough Vitamin D
- Hormonal imbalances
- A recent failure or another upsetting event
- Childhood trauma
- Too much stress
- Too many negative thoughts
In addition, some issues can end up masquerading as depression, fooling us into thinking we’re depressed when we’re really not! Stress, for example, can quickly pile up and make us feel depressed when we’re feeling too much of it.
You’re Not Alone
When you’re depressed, it can often feel like you’re the only one in the world that can’t function properly. You feel like everyone else has everything all figured out and you’re the only one who’s struggling to make your way. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth! No one else knows what they’re doing, either; we’re all just muddling our way through life and doing the best we can.
The lens of depression can really make it seem like everyone else is moving through life expertly and you’re the only one who’s not, but you just need to remember that this is the depression making things look grim. Most likely, everyone you know can sympathize with you about feeling depressed at some point during their lives. If you need someone to talk to, you may find sympathizers in the unlikeliest of places.
When it feels like you just can’t get anything right, remember that we’re all just doing the best we can. Sometimes our best isn’t good enough, however, and we need to start over. That might be the reason why you’ve been feeling depressed, but don’t feel down – we’re all the same way, and we all fall down sometimes. The important part is getting back up again afterward.
Chill Out
Sometimes, when we’re stressed or otherwise worked up, we work ourselves into feeling depressed because we can’t stop thinking or worrying about something. When this happens, sometimes all we need to do is slow down our brains and relax. Depression and stress both can make you feel angry, frustrated, apathetic, sad, or even dissociated. Taking a minute to relax and reevaluate can help put things back into perspective.
When you’re feeling depressed, angry, or unproductive, take some time to really let the stresses of your mind go and wind back down. Sometimes, all you’ll need to do this is to take some deep breaths and relax your muscles. However, in worse cases, you might benefit from something like a massage, a talk with a therapist, or even a vacation.
Try your best to remove yourself from the thoughts and experiences that are causing you to feel bad. If that requires you removing yourself from the situation, too, then don’t be afraid to do that! The purpose of a vacation, massage, or therapy appointment is to relax and heal, after all.
Set Some Goals
We talked about setting little goals or challenges for yourself every day earlier on in this article, but setting bigger goals for yourself to motivate yourself again is more important than we’ve let on thus far. You might not feel like you can achieve much of anything when you’re depressed, but this isn’t true; the goals you held close to you before you were feeling depressed should still be there!
What is it that you want to do with yourself in the next few days or weeks? Is there something that you’d like to improve about yourself? Perhaps this is what contributed to your depressive feelings in the first place. If this is the case, it should undoubtedly go on your list of goals to achieve.
You can set smaller, step-by-step goals, too. Some ideas to consider are:
- Lose those 15 pounds I’ve gained
- Apologize to my friends for not contacting them
- Start going to the gym every other day
- Throw out old clothes that I don’t wear anymore
- Clean the house from top to bottom
As you can see, the above goals can be big or they can be small, or they can be work-related or not. Any positive goals that inspire you to act are great candidates to add to your list.
Go Outside
Being outdoors is a great way to start lifting the haze of depression and start feeling more like yourself. Spending time in green spaces outside has been known to improve your mood and even increase the health of the body, so even if you’re not working while you’re outdoors, you’ll likely see some productivity improvement when you return to work.
Even if you don’t have much time to spend outside, something as simple as sitting outdoors on a bench for your lunch break instead of eating at your desk can have a measurable uplifting effect on your mood. If you’re in a position where you can take full advantage of the mood-boosting effects of being outdoors, do so!
Healthy Eating
With the many convenient, easy, and fast food options available to us today, it’s easier than ever to make unhealthy eating choices that make your body feel bad. At the body’s most basic level, nutrients are what make you feel good and fatty, sugary foods are what make you feel bad.
Unfortunately, when we’re depressed, we often don’t feel like cooking any significant meals, let alone healthy ones. Fortunately, by replacing our snack foods with healthier munchies, we can make some significant headway here without having to make a significant time investment. Taking the time to head out to the grocery store and do some healthy shopping can even be added to your goals list!
Consider the following ideas of unhealthy snacks that you could replace with healthy ones:
- Replace sugary cookies with grain or nut-filled granola bars
- Replace potato chips with carrots or celery
- Drink a bottle of water instead of a can of soda
- Eat a freshly-made sandwich instead of a frozen entrée
- Replace sugary candy with sugar-free gum in an enjoyable flavor
It won’t take long for you to feel the difference in your body when you replace unhealthy snacks with healthy ones.
Clean Up
Unfortunately, household chores are some of the first things to be neglected when we’re feeling depressed. On top of that, sitting in an untidy house can make us feel even worse, feeding into our already-bad mood. If you can manage to, getting up and finishing these household chores – or even just tackling one or two – is a great way to lift the spirits and get back into a productive mood again.
Don’t forget to clean yourself up, as well! When our bodies are dirty, our minds feel that way, too, and our self-esteem and comfort tend to take a bit of a nosedive. Like we mentioned early in this article, taking the time to clean up and shower at the beginning of a day, even when it feels hard, is a great way to start getting back into our usual groove and pulling ourselves out of a funk.
