How To Depress Yourself And Get In Your Own Way

[flamingsword]

[Many of you are new enough to have missed this, and it's about time I reposted it. This may be one of the most important things that I have to share., Also, ALWAYS PUT EXTRA AWESOMESAUCE ON YOUR COPYPASTA.]

How To Depress Yourself And Get In Your Own Way, starting from the simple stuff and proceeding into the land of the padded walls:

Be Lazy

• Don't get to know yourself. Hinder yourself with ignorance.
  
• Invest no effort into complying with your principles. Self-respect will work out issues that you will need later on.
  
• Don't think about how you can improve your habits. Don't improve yourself. Don't take pride in your own growth.
  
• Make no contingency plans. If one thing goes wrong it was meant to, to screw up the rest of your day. Don't recover smoothly.
  
• Listen to your insecurities, instead of fighting them. Feel like a coward.
  
• Brood. Dwell on things and make them important instead of getting on with what you're doing.
  
• Don't pay attention.
  
• Don't learn from your mistakes, lest you better yourself from them.

Maintain Your Illusions

• Listen to gossip. Believe what you're told without checking facts at the source.
  
• Feel betrayed by the truth when your illusions break down and you are forced to deal with things as they are.
  
• Ignore the differences between things. Treat them the same so that you get different results each time and confuse yourself. It will make your bad mood easier to maintain to have something to complain about to your friends.
  
• Compare yourself to people you're not like. Comparing unlike things is guaranteed to separate you from what's real, and using an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to will keep you too busy to question the internal consistency of your context.
  
• Ignore your weaknesses so that you get unexpectedly beaten at things you thought you were good at. Then berate yourself for your failure.
  
• Don't listen to yourself to see if you're making sense. Find ways to justify your reasoning that don't apply to logic.
  
• Submarine your self-image by not trusting in your abilities. Get used to the paralysis of uncertainty instead of ability to reach for what you want.

Focus On The Negative

• Expect it to be about you whenever something goes wrong.
  
• Use high-contrast "weighted" adjectives when thinking about your life to increase drama.
  
• "Qualify" your joys. Don't take the good with the bad. Think that if something were really good, it wouldn't have a downside.
  
• Think of the good things that happen to you as deviations from the norm. Then take them off the bell curve of your expectations entirely. Skew your statistical universe.
  
• Focus on what's missing rather than on the things you have.
  
• Hold your friends to an unrealistic standard so that you can dwell on their shortcomings.
  
• Accept that any backsliding you do negates all efforts you put into crawling out of the depression you've now made.

Betray Yourself

• Teach yourself not to want things. Have no goals. Give up hope.
  
• Use your depression as an excuse to not help others. Convince yourself that you are not capable of doing good.
  
• Make time to do things that are bad for you physically, and can lead to health problems. Pain and illness will help your rough patch stand firm in the face of overwhelming joys.
  
• Use self-fulfilling negative prophecies to prove to yourself that your self-hatred is reasonable.
  
• Push away people who care about you.
  
• Ask people for good advice. Don't take the advice, then beat yourself up for not taking it.

Advanced Rectal Haberdashery

• Re-prioritize meeting the needs that you can get met now 'til after the needs that you can't get met until later.
  
• Invest effort and frustration into impossible schemes trying to make those needs get met now.
  
• Distract yourself from your need to fix your problems with drugs. Use people-related drama, religion, or illegal narcotics to keep your mind occupied and off-balance.
  
• Deny responsibility or ability to fix your problems. Cripple yourself with despair.
  
• Hurt other people so you can feel ashamed and horrible.
  
• Be angry with your friends for interfering in your unhappiness. They're on your side, but you're not on your side, and that means they're against you.

Some people have medical reasons for being depressed. I am SO aware of that, hello. Even so, I dare you to say you've never done any of this to yourself. Or comment me with ways I've missed, and we'll add them to the master list. Because this is just the ways that my friends, family and I have messed ourselves up, and I'm sure there are creative ways to self-destruct that we've missed.

Comments

[numb3r-5ev3n.livejournal.com]

Some of this is like a checklist of things I have been doing to myself lately. I used to be a lot worse though. Thank God I'm a little bit more self-aware now, and a little bit more proactive. Thanks for posting this.

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reading this. The less suck we train ourselves to perform, the more available free actions we have to increase our awesomeness. I think it's important.

Also I edited the post to fix a few things like spelling. /o\

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

You should have THIS (http://headtripcomics.comicgenesis.com/d/20090309.html).

[numb3r-5ev3n.livejournal.com]

:D Hahaha!

Ah, Depression...

[nyyki.livejournal.com]

My Abnormal Psychology instructor told us that spending just an hour thinking about all of the bad things in one's life and none of the good was a sure recipe for depression. She also stated that 100% of all people get depressed, so it's a very common phenomenon.

I've noticed a lot of people recently who are dwelling on what didn't work out in the past instead of doing things to bring about change in the future. As the saying goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. But for people used to being depressed it's got a comfort to it, a familiarity, and not being depressed, even being, gasp, happy, is scary and unknown.

Re: Ah, Depression...

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Sometimes dwelling on what went wrong lets you spot what tripped you up, and is beneficial. Sometimes people forget that's the entire evolutionary point of having the correct sort of memory to go over the situation and instead use it to beat themselves up, which ... may have a purpose that I am as yet unaware of.

Ineffability. *shrugs* I'm sort of named after it.

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

This is brilliant, thank you for sharing.

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Welcome, though I'm sure there are ways to trip yourself up and make your headspace horrible that I've missed out on. Got anything I missed?

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

Well, there's always "Use your depression as an excuse to not help others," and "Don't accept your mistakes, lest you should learn from them."

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

Well, it's hard to build on what you have, but perhaps: "Don't learn from your mistakes, lest you might learn from them." and "Use your depression as an excuse to not help others, lest you become convinced that you are capable of doing good."

[flamingsword.livejournal.com]

Thanks. They're going on the list now.

[jslorentz.livejournal.com]

Wow, those look silly between the computer errors and my flu-ish state of mind. Sorry for the double-post. I meant to say, "Don't accept your mistakes, lest you might learn from them." But I am honored for their inclusion.

I hope you are feeling better!