How To Break Out Of The Cycle Of Depression, Self-blame, Meandering Purposelessness, and Mediocrity

Get help.

Getting into a cycle like that is horrible.

It’s not normal, it’s not good, and it’s not easy to get out of it.

First of all: GET SOME HELP!!

You go to a doctor if you’re sick and you go get help from a therapist, psychologist or other professional if you are depressed.

It is a Mental Illness. Do not take it lightly.

Other than that, do anything you can.

Do something. Fail. Try again. Try something else. Have as much fun as you can. Do something! Anything!

Basically, just do whatever it is you can put your mind into and do it as fully and as long as you can!

At this point you do not have much to loose so really take as much effort as you can muster and put it into something of value for you.

Your whole objective for anything you try for the next 60 Days should simply be: JOY.

Ignore everything else to the best of your ability and switch tasks as soon as the task you are doing becomes less enjoyable.

I know there isn’t much out there like that for you right now, and you won’t find much unless you go to the root cause, which is why you want to get help as soon as you can.

But it’s all that will really help and all that you can really do.

Do what you can, even if it just makes you crack a smile.

If you attempt to be more positive now, to stop the self-blame or to find value in your current, depressed, state, it will only start you off on a track you are bound to fail, because you haven’t dealt with the underlying issues yet.

If you can’t find anything like that, try to improve a skill.

Sit down and work on improving something, no matter how stupid it is.

The better you feel about that skill the more effective it will be, obviously, but at this point take what you can get.

Improve your Instrument playing, improve in a sport, improve an artistic skill or learn about productivity.

But if you start to improve you will see progress and progress is a sign of change.

It doesn’t matter.

It might not mean a lot to you consciously, but subconsciously it will lead you to realize that the state you’re in now doesn’t have to stay.

And for now, that’s good enough!

Originally published at http://quora.com.