What Do You Do When You Don’t Feel Great

When You Don’t Feel Great

What do you do when you don’t feel great? What do you do when things in life don’t seem to be going your way?

If we’re honest, we all have times when we get down and we don’t see things from an optimistic perspective. Feelings of depression are more common than we think and an understanding of them and how they originate provides a starting point for overcoming them.

Types of Depression

First of all, it’s important to understand that there are several different forms of depression. Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia) is a depressed mood that lasts for at least two years. People diagnosed with this form of depression may experience a constant, less severe depression with occasional bouts of major depression. In order to be diagnosed with this, the symptoms must last for at least two years.

Perinatal depression is what some women experience during or after pregnancy and can be more serious. People who experience this type of depression have symptoms that include feelings of extreme sadness, anxiety, and exhaustion.

In Psychotic depression, an individual experiences depression along with some form of psychosis. They are depressed and they have lost touch with reality. This usually includes delusions where people have false beliefs about what is taking place in reality, who they are, and possibly hallucinations — seeing or hearing things that aren’t there.

S.A.D., or Seasonal Affective Disorder, is when people experience symptoms of depression during the winter months. This has been attributed to the lack of natural sunlight and typically goes away during the spring and summer.

Finally, there is Bipolar disorder. Though Bipolar disorder is not technically depression, it shares some of the same symptoms. People with Bipolar disorder can have extremely depressed moods that meet the criteria for major depression but can also have moods of extreme happiness or even irritability.

Get Help

First of all, if you don’t feel great and experience depression to the point that you no longer want to live, you need to get help. There are many online resources and anonymous hotlines available where you can talk to someone and get help. Primarily, find the courage to make the call. The national suicide prevention lifeline is 1–800–273–8255 and you should give them a call if you have these types of feelings.

Second, it’s important to see a doctor in order to get an idea or a diagnosis of what type of depression you may have. There are treatments for depression that range from medication to psychotherapy to brain stimulation therapies.

My grandmother was diagnosed with depression over 20 years ago and she has been struggling on and off with it for two decades. The doctors prescribed brain stimulation therapy for her and after going through the treatments, she did improve. However, her diagnosis had to do with a chemical imbalance in her brain. After a period of time, she would relapse and have to go back for treatment again. These periods sometimes lasted as long as 3–5 years and sometimes they were shorter but the treatments did work and they have helped her to manage her symptoms. A doctor (and a second opinion) is a must so that you can find out what’s wrong and begin to take the steps necessary to get better.

Get a Long-Term Perspective

Another potential avenue of help is to look beyond the current moment. When life isn’t going your way, you don’t feel great, and it seems like the world is against you, try to visualize a positive future for next year. Our existence happens in the present and because of this perspective, sometimes it’s difficult to see what could be in the future. Also, our present circumstances, especially if they are bad, can dominate our thinking.

There are countless stories of people who felt like their lives were over and there was nothing to live for, but they pressed on and things turned around. You don’t know what things will look like next week, next month, or next year. Chances are that things will most likely be much different than they are now.

In fact, the one constant in our lives is change. I talked with a teenager who was thinking about ending his life and though it seemed to him like things would never get better, he didn’t think about the long-term — that he would grow up and move out of the situation that was causing him difficulty. That he would love and be loved and find new interests and experience new and amazing things in his life.

Sometimes we get trapped in our past and present and forget to look to the future with all of its new and amazing opportunities. So try to look ahead and imagine what could be instead of always focusing on what was or what is.

Your Emotional Curve

Finally, someone once told me about our emotional curve. We all have cycles of emotions that we go through in life. For some, the breadth of these cycles is greater than for others. That means that they experience greater highs but also lower lows. Those with less dynamic emotional cycles might be considered more “even-tempered.” These people do not experience the high highs or the low lows of those with large emotional curves but that doesn’t mean they don’t get happy or sad, just that the extremes of these emotions are not as great.

Additionally, the length of time between cycles differs between people. Some people have longer instances of positive and negative emotions while others fluctuate between these polarities more rapidly. The point of understanding the emotional curve is this — it’s recognizing that the curve continually moves up and down throughout our lives.

So if you are in a time of life when the emotional curve is on top and you are happy and life is good, you need to recognize that it will go down at some point. This is simply a part of our emotional cycle. Understanding this can help us to prepare for the times when you won’t feel great — setting our expectations to realize that we can’t always live on the mountaintop.

On the other side, if you are down in the dumps and if you don’t feel so great, you can look forward to the fact that your emotional curve will turn toward the positive, your cycle will change, and things will get better in life.

Conclusion

So when you’re up, recognize that things will get worse at some point and be prepared for it. And when you’re down, remember that your emotional cycle will change and things will get better. This type of thinking has helped me through some difficult times in my life and I believe it can be beneficial for you as well.

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