It’s Time to Take Control of Your Depression– Start By Changing Your Mindset

Your mental health defines how you experience life. It shapes how you exist in the world. And yet, so many of us are walking around, going through life, passing the days by, completely depressed. Whether you’re a functioning depressed person who holds a steady job and maintains relationships but still feels overall depressed or you’re in a major depressive episode where you barely leave your home, you isolate from most everyone you love, and you take better care of your cat than yourself (that’s no joke, I’ve been there). Or maybe you’re somewhere in between. 

No matter where on the spectrum your depression lies, some of us have been stuck in the same feelings of depression for years or longer. Here’s the thing, and this is going to be hard for a lot of you to hear and you might even hate me for it, but at some point you have to decide to change and put in the hard work to do it. 

In social justice there’s this saying that if you do not to take a stance against oppression then you are, by default, choosing the side of the oppressor. Well, depression is the oppressor in this analogy and if you continue on living your life without actively challenging your depression, you have ultimately given in to your depression. You have accepted your depression as a fact of life, quite possibly without even realizing it. 

This might feel invalidating for some of you but I am in no way saying that your depression isn’t real and isn’t hard, maybe even the hardest thing you’ll ever experience in your life. The reasons for which you initially became depressed might have been and maybe still are completely out of your control. I am not denying that or trying to invalidate that in any way, shape, or form. 

What I am saying is that your depression will continue to exist until, at some point, you decide to change it. 

You may not be at this point in your recovery yet. You might still be at the point where you need to lay in bed and cry it out. But if you choose the path of recovery, somewhere along your journey you will have to confront this truth. It is your body, your mind, your life. Before anyone else can make any significant change or be helpful in any major way, you have to make the decision to begin your recovery journey. 

I had a lightbulb moment recently. I’m living in San Diego where the weather is almost always beautiful. I’m pursuing my dream career of acting. I have time to do all the things I love to do. I’m financially stable. I live a 6 minute drive from the beach. I have a supportive partner and the most astounding friends. But still, I was utterly depressed. And I caught myself having this exact thought: Well, I guess I’ll always be depressed and I just need to find a way to get by.

I’m sorry, WHAT?!?! I had this same exact thought back in 2019 when I got depressed after landing a dream job in the theater world. Even though I thought I had let that mindset go, clearly it had snuck back in.

That, my friends, is the stealthiness that psychologist Alia Crum calls “mindsets.” She defines mindsets as “the core assumptions that we make about the nature of ourselves or things in the world.” Meaning, they are belief systems that we have accepted as truth without ever actually deciding that they are true. Take the idea that something that has a bigger price tag is a better, more reliable product. A BMW is not actually a better car than a Toyota, it’s just the marketing that we have been hearing since we were babies that has tricked us into believing so. 

Before we go any further, Alia Crum also warns against believing that changing your mindset will completely change your life. It can empower you, it can propel you take action and begin to make changes, but ultimately, unless we have a major shift in our cultural mindset as a whole, mindset can only get you so far. That, however, should not and does not discredit the power of mindsets.

I was floored to hear my inner dialogue telling me that there’s no hope for my life and that I will always be depressed and yet, it makes sense given that I’ve been depressed for a couple months now. It’s a chicken and egg scenario in terms of is it depressed thinking that is telling me I’ll be depressed forever or did I get depressed because I’ve been telling myself I’ll be depressed forever. Quite frankly, I don’t think it matters. The point is, my mindset, nonconscious or not, is telling me that I’ll be depressed forever, even though that is not a conclusion I actively decided on.  

This is not me saying that a simple mindset change will cure your depression. On the contrary, a shift in mindset is only the beginning; it is step one. You are identifying that your depression has taken control of your life and your mindset, and you are now on a mission to reclaim that control. What has your inner dialogue been saying? Notice the thoughts that you have. Are they thoughts you agree with? Are they conclusions you consciously made? What about your current circumstances? Are you happy with your job? Have you succumbed to the idea that you’re stuck without actually deciding that you’re stuck? 

A helpful way to dig deep into realizing your current mindset or challenging negative or self-defeating mindsets is to be actively openminded and creative. Ask questions that might seem obvious because oftentimes, it is the obvious that we are overlooking. I can’t tell you how many times since I began asking myself questions surrounding my mindset that I found myself saying, “oh, well duh.” It’s not about feeling dumb for missing something obvious. It’s about realizing that we get so caught up in the day to day, what we hear from friends, see on social media, that we lose sight of who we are, what we want, what we believe to be true. 

Our mindsets control how we perceive the world, our circumstances, and ourselves. Are your mindsets helping or hurting you? We spend so much time learning and absorbing information about our jobs, the things we like to do, and the people we love. Put that same energy into learning and rediscovering yourself. On the way to self-improvement you might find that there’s already so much about yourself that you never learned to love and appreciate or parts of yourself that you’ve forgotten to be grateful for. Doing this might be exactly what you need to catapult you into a mindset transformation— one that moves you to take charge of your mental health and no longer accept your depression as a fact of life. 

*Main photo is of Upper Yosemite Falls, taken from The Four Mile Trail in Yosemite National Park