Introduction
Feeling depressed is a serious issue, and if you’ve been stuck in a rut for a while now, it can seem like there’s no end in sight.
And if you’ve noticed that your feelings of depression have been negatively impacting your daily life and your personal relationships, then we urge you to reach out to a mental health professional or a helpline.
Seeking professional help is one of the best ways to find the source of your depression or simply find effective and proven means for coping with these feelings in the future.
The article below will only explore minor methods for melancholy feelings that are not meant to be perceived as easy solutions to mental health problems.
These are simply methods that can be used to cope with generalized negative feelings that may arise at the workplace or during the course of your daily routine.
Contents
Get in Touch with Your Roots
For some, feelings of depression stem from a lack of perspective on their lives as a whole. In particular, it can be helpful for some to reconnect with their roots, whether that means visiting home or simply speaking with family members.
It could also mean reaching out to your support group, in the form of close friends who live nearby and are willing to speak with you about your problems and anxieties.
Reminding yourself of where you come from and your long personal history that has led to this moment can remove you from a spiral of negative feelings.
Set Goals
Setting goals can be a great way to make your problems and upcoming tasks seem a little bit more manageable.
It can also be a means for motivating yourself to improve in different areas of your life.
Because while the workplace often includes built-in milestones by which you can measure your progress and your performance, life outside of work typically does not include these milestones, not unless you create them.
We’ve listed just a few types of goals that you may want to explore and set for yourself as a way of combating feelings of depressing and stagnation.
And when you meet some or all of these goals, you’ll be much more likely to feel more motivated to tackle future goals as well.
Work Goals
Goals for your work performance can simply be the milestones already set in place by your company, or they can be customizable goals that you set yourself.
For example, if you happen to work in sales for a large corporation, your performance may only be analyzed and highlighted once a year.
A few months into a new year you may have trouble motivating yourself to continue to make sales and look for new potential clients.
You may want to set a yearly goal for yourself and then break that goal down into multiple milestones that you’ll try to reach every couple months.
That way, you’ll have the chance to analyze and appreciate your hard work much more often. And over time, you can work to outdo your previous sales records.
If you’re having trouble dealing with your boss, check out this article on how best to cope.
Personal Goals
Personal goals can refer to just about any area outside of your place of work and your profession.
In their most simple form, personal goals can be made in reference to certain negative habits you’ve been wanting to quit for a long time now.
For example, maybe you’d like to watch less television each day. First, you could take note of how much time, on average, you spend watching television, both on weekdays and on weekends.
From there, you could set mild goals to cut down your daily TV watching by just one hour each week.
As you meet these smaller milestones, you’ll start to notice some serious signs of progress. You’ll likely start to show more interest in real-world interactions or other hobbies you may have.
Emotional Goals
Emotional goals you set for yourself are actually a subset of personal goals. These goals are specifically designed to spur emotional development and progression over long periods of time.
As an easy example, let’s take a look at the common issue of anger and a short temper.
You may notice yourself becoming angry very quickly when you find yourself in traffic, or when you need to stay on hold with a customer service line for long stretches of time.
These negative tendencies can have consequences on your wellbeing and may even contribute to feelings of depression and melancholy.
Once you acknowledge the problem, you can move on to setting goals to minimize your angry reactions to difficult situations.
Remind yourself to breathe deeply when you notice angry feelings coming to the surface. Try to avoid road rage for an entire week at a time, never yelling, never making angry gestures at other drivers.
Take Baby Steps
But of course, setting strict goals for yourself to inspire motivation and self-improvement isn’t the only way to climb out of feelings of depression in your daily life.
It can also be very helpful to focus on the small things, instead of the overwhelming big picture of all the things you still need to do and how many of them you haven’t even started.
It’s a cliche to be sure, but you should try to focus on taking one day at a time. Do your best to be kind, calm, and collected at work, at home, and at night.
Approach each new challenge with a quiet determination and you’ll find it much easier to discover solutions to your problems.
Exercise Daily
Many of us tend to forget that the act of exercising is a natural cure for negative feelings and a lack of motivation.
Physically speaking, we are still animals, and our bodies desperately want to be active during our daily lives, but they rarely get the chance.
Even if your daily exercise routine only consists of a short walk around your neighborhood, it can be very helpful when trying to develop a lasting sense of motivation.
For even more positive results, join a gym and slowly build up a measured workout routine that will keep both your body and your mind healthy.
