Sunday Self Care - How To Care When You Don't Feel Like Caring

Life is often hard, and sometimes they feel even harder. Taking care of yourself when you

just don’t care, oftentimes feels impossible. Sometimes it is, and the only thing you can do is wait for the mood to pass. Depression is intrusive. It doesn’t care who you are, it doesn’t care what you need to get done, it just intrudes like a soul draining entity that zaps your energy and adds 200kg of extra weight to your body. It doesn’t matter if you’re surrounded by friends, or if you’re alone. It’ll pick you if it wants, and like a parasite it’ll make you its host without you ever having a say. 

It’s during these times that everyday tasks feel impossible, and you couldn’t possibly care less whether you eat or brush your teeth that day. Staying in bed feels like your only option, and that’s absolutely fine. Stay in bed, for as long as you need, but because life exists after these moods, we’re going to try a little bit of self care. 

I want you to brush your teeth. Don’t try and force yourself to make a special trip to the bathroom just for this, wait until you need to go to use the loo. That way you’re already in there and it’s a bit easier. If your toilet and bathroom are separate, that’s okay, you’re still out of bed and standing up, that’s a big first step. Do you look at your tooth brush and think “I can’t”, “what does it matter?” or even just “I'm not bothered”. That’s fine, we’re focused on it at least and we’re going to walk up to it. Pick up the tooth brush, rinse it off, and now you’ve done that you may as well use it, right? Put the tooth paste on and start brushing. Don’t focus on the time because we’re not worried about 2 minutes here, even 10 seconds is a really big achievement. Just brush until you’re at the limit of what you can force yourself to do, or until you think you’ve done enough. 

I want you to imagine that the sky above you is covered in nothing but dark clouds. That dark cloud is depression. Now imagine that your teeth brushing, even if you did just a few seconds, has cracked that dark cloud ever so slightly and now the tiniest streak of sunlight is coming through. 

Fed up? That’s fine, go back to bed. If you brushed your teeth, allow yourself to feel that sense of accomplishment, that little bit of pride in yourself because you did one of the hardest things, during one of the hardest times and you recovered just a tiny speck of yourself. If you didn’t do it or you tried to do it but couldn’t, that also took a tremendous amount of effort to even think about, tell yourself you tried, it’s okay and this just isn’t the right step for you. 

Another method I like to use is making my bed. It’s the first thing I do in a morning anyway, but when all I want to do is stay there, it’s a bit more difficult. I like to tell myself I can make it and still lay on top of it if I wanted, or I can make it for now and still climb back in if I really want to. I really like these two tasks because they’re such low pressure, but if you can manage them it can lead to you being able to do more and carefully pulling yourself out of that deep hole the depression threw you into. 

Try and do one or both of those 2 options, then see if you can go get yourself a glass of water afterwards. I spend most of my days with some form of headache or migraine, so getting a dehydration headache because this mood had me in bed, is one of the most frustrating outcomes for me. When that mood lifts a little, I want to try getting back to normal, not recovering from that mood, then having to spend extra time recovering from a preventable headache. So water is one of the things I always try to get myself to keep up with. 

A lot of people experience low moods that aren’t necessarily depression, but I hope these steps are just as helpful for you too. 

I’ve had to accept that my ‘normal’ moods are probably equal to a regular person's low moods, but I've dealt with that for so long that I can cope with it; that’s my baseline. I find that the more extreme depressive episodes come in waves, like the ebb and flow of the tide. So that’s what I’m focusing on here. But I'd also like to point out that these aren’t foolproof. There will be times the mood is so low that these methods don’t stand a chance. That’s fine, don’t feel bad if they don’t work and don’t talk down to yourself either. They’re also not a ‘one size fits all’ kind of method, so you may need to find something that works for you, just start small. 

There will probably be a voice in your head that tells you it won’t work, that’s normal, because deep down you’ll WANT it to work and that’s what you should focus on.

This is part 1, I want you to try these 2 steps and see if they work for you. Let me know if they do, and if they don’t. 

Symptoms of depression

• Persistent low mood

• Feeling hopeless

• Excessive negative reactions over minor things

• Feeling like you don’t want to be here anymore

• Feeling agitated

• Sleeping issues, either sleeping too much or not enough

• Changes in appetite

• Loss of enjoyment in things

• Your body feeling 100x heavier, especially arms and legs. 

• Decision fatigue

• Reaction sensitivity to what you perceive as rejection, criticism or unappreciativeness 

• Feeling like you don’t belong anywhere

• Apathy

• Delayed reactions

• Slower and quieter speech

• Lessening of personal hygiene and care of you and your home

• Drowning out feelings with substance abuse

This is not a full list, and not all symptoms may apply to you. Conversely you may experience some symptoms not listed here. If you have some lesser known symptoms that you’d like me to add here for awareness please do let me know. These are just the ones I could think of when writing. 

Sunday Self Care is for everyone who needs it. Depression is draining, and it's mocked, and looked down on and half the time people don't take you seriously or they'll respond with "everyone's depressed, you've just got to get on with it" and I can assure you, not everyone is, whoever says that is an ignorant Ahole and you do not have to, nor could you anyway 'just get on with it'. Here, you won't hear that, but I do hope that as this series continues, you'll find some of the tips helpful in regaining your spark, your energy and hopefully at least some of your life back.

And remember - Even stars fall sometimes