How to overcome depression without medication

Cure symptoms of depression completely with these self-help techniques

1. Create an emergency plan for bad days

2. Understand how to hack your mind to adopt new habits

3. Learn nervous system regulation techniques

4. Change your diet

5. Move your body

6. Challenge your mindset

7. Find a community

8. Take supplements

9. Find a good therapist

10. Understand how trauma affects depression

11. Find a spiritual practice that works for you

Depression sabotages your ability to share your gifts with the world, make money, create a beautiful life, and live up to your potential. It turns you into a person you struggle to recognise, let alone accept. I wish I knew years ago that there are better ways to heal depression than taking a handful of pills with horrendous side effects. In fact, antidepressants don’t cure depression — they mask it.

Acceptance and learning how to cope with depression

For a while, I had no idea I lived with depression. The dark void became part of my life way before I turned 10 and I simply never questioned it. Multiple traumas and a chronic state of fight/flight (standard for anyone raised in a third-world country) contributed to the ongoing hopelessness and lack of motivation. I just kept on living, blaming myself for all the failures and bad decisions ever made. In my early 30s, after I experienced workplace bullying and sexual harassment that left me crippled by severe PTSD, I got diagnosed with depression for the first time in my life.

It took me some time to believe it wasn’t just me and to learn to accept that depression is an illness, not a character flaw. The first stage of my journey was learning to live with depression and survive the darkest days. I created an emergency list that became my guide to coping with depressive episodes and used it every time I felt paralysed by an illness.

50 shades of depressive state

To separate myself from depression I began observing depression and its various forms and shades. I learned that there isn’t just one thing called depression — there are multiple variations that feel like their own disease. There is a hopeless depression that makes you feel like no matter what you do, the future is gloomy, and you have nothing to look forward to. There is a depressive paralysis that nails you to a couch and makes you feel like you can’t even reach for a book that lies next to you. There is fearful depression, it allows you to do things but never fails to remind you that your efforts are futile, and all your decisions are wrong.

After a year-long observation, I could easily spot the depression of the day the moment I woke up. I drew a little diagram in my diary to track the kinds of depression throughout the month. Depressive days were coloured shades of brown. I never had good days, just good enough to function — those were coloured green. I was lucky to have a few green days a month.

The medical system is flawed

I should mention that like a regular Westerner and a good old sport, I was on antidepressants prescribed by my doctor for over two years, which did fuck all to improve my mood. At some point, I got really, really sick of it all. Going from doctor to doctor, paying $350 for a session with a psychiatrist, $240 for a session with a psychologist, ordering a $260 30mll bottle of CBD oil that lasted a few weeks, and endlessly explaining myself to people. The good news is that in my life, the magic happens whenever I grow tired of my own shit.

Simple ways to improve your mood

I began reading books about depression written by MDs, listening to podcasts by leading experts in psychiatry and watching interviews with doctors and people with lived experience, determined to figure out how to cure myself. To my surprise, all the leading experts in the world kept repeating the same words: trauma, inflammation, exercise, diet, omega-3, amygdala, gratitude, sunlight, nervous system regulation, and sleep. When people talked about not wearing sunglasses in the morning and eating fresh fruits and vegetables, I couldn’t believe the simplicity of their proposed remedies. People are dying from depression every day and their suggestion is to eat more vegetables!

I was sceptical but desperate enough to try anything. I thought, if all of this takes away 5% of my depression, it’s worth it. If I can get to 7 green days a month, it’s worth it. That’s a whole week where I can do things!

Adopting new habits and hacking the mind

To take back control over my life I needed to adopt new habits. But how would you go about it when you consider yourself the laziest person in the world? Literally. Whenever a fly on my jeans broke, I chucked that pair knowing I would never get around to fixing it. I hated cooking. I never drank water or exercised. To solve this problem, I turned to books.

I learned that our mind is resistant to change, and its sole purpose is keeping us safe in the familiar. Yes, even if this familiar is not very healthy. To avoid another cycle of self-deprecation, I learned the best way to adopt and sustain a habit before attempting to create one.

Changing your life to supercharge your health

After wrapping my head around habits, I established a morning routine that set the tone for the day ahead. I was religious with this practice. Not because I wanted to do it, but because I wanted to live a full life.

I began waking up early, drinking water, going for walks, and doing nervous system regulation practices. I stopped wearing sunglasses outdoors (little things count) and ate more fruits and veggies, cutting junk food out of my diet almost completely. Every morning, I wrote down things I was grateful for, and my intention for the day and consistently journaled about my emotional states. Journaling was my very first practice and it saved me from numerous tantrums, fights with a partner and bad ideas. I maintain that journaling is the most important habit of all because it improves your relationship with Self.

How to find a good therapist who would help you heal

I kept doing therapy. I doubt my progress would have been so rapid if I didn’t have a talented, wise, and highly intelligent human as my therapist.

Finding a therapist can be one hell of a task. Having worked in the Mental Health sector for many years, I’ve seen too many psychologists and counsellors who should have never entered the field. There are a few principles when it comes to finding a good therapist, but my main tip would be to take your time. A therapist is one of the most important people in your world. They will affect your healing, your self-image, and, ultimately, the trajectory of your life.

Supplements that improve your mood

I learned so much about mineral deficiencies it became very clear that oftentimes mental health symptoms arise as a result of just that. However, when you are in the middle of a depressive hell or an anxious shitshow, it’s impossible to consider that all this can be caused by, say, low iron.

Knowing that no diet is sufficient enough to provide our bodies with all it needs, I wanted to start taking supplements. I did a blood test and consulted my treating doctor about it. However, I found that what GP consider ‘normal’ and what naturopaths or Chinese Doctors consider healthy varies significantly. Ultimately, it was my call to take Omega-3, B12, Magnesium, Safron, Iron, and Vitamin D.

Trauma and its role in depression

I kept learning more and more about mental illness to understand the connection between trauma and depressive states. I was surprised that not one doctor ever told me that there was a connection between trauma and depression, and it wasn’t all ‘in my head’. The popular version is that depression is caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’, which I found to be very, very far from the truth. Today, I hold a very unpopular belief that depression is a very clever, well-functioning, and hard-to-argue-with coping mechanism.

There are many experts with many letters after their names, who explain the connection between trauma and depression using decades of practice and research. Their books are ‘trauma bibles’ that help come to terms with the fact that it’s not just you. But there aren’t many books proposing clear and simple solutions to the problem. In my search for the cure, I came across real gems like It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel and Accessing The Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg.

How long does it take to change your life?

When I put it all together, it took 4-5 weeks before I began to notice a difference. Because I had my mood diagram, I could easily trace the changes. I was having a lot more green days and fewer dark brown ones (the deepest, harshest shade of my depression). Now and again, I would feel almost… content!

Because everything I was doing was so simple, it took me some time to start trusting that it wasn’t a coincidence. Whenever I’d fall out of my routine (because I felt too stable to spend so much time on things like meditation), I’d begin to feel depressed again. It took fair few cycles to realise there is a connection between what I do and how I feel.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time regulating my nervous system and tending to my mental health, but I never felt like I had a choice. I had to take care of myself because I wanted to not only live but thrive, dream big, and have a full, rich life!

How spirituality can help cure depression

Several months into my experiment, I was sitting at my desk staring at a blank screen, thinking of a screenplay I wanted to write. Suddenly, I thought of Jim Carrey. Any writer can relate to a sudden urge to do an unrelated deep dive on the internet whenever they are set to produce several pages. I typed his name into Google and began watching the interviews.

In one of the interviews, Jim talked about the characters he played and then unexpectedly jumped to the topic of depression. It wasn't the usual sympathetic ‘how horrible and devastating it is’, but a piercing insight into the root cause of the illness. He said:

“Depression is your body saying “Fuck you, I don’t wanna be this character anymore. I don’t wanna hold up this avatar you’ve created in the world, it’s too much for me.” A friend of mine who’s a spiritual teacher, his take on it is that you should think of the word ‘depressed’ as deep-rest – your body needs to be depressed, it needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play. The great powerful Ozz – “I’m the great powerful Ozz, how dare you come near me!” And you're just the sweaty guy behind the curtain.”

In this video, Jim Carrey starts talking about depression at [0:45]

I was shocked. Not that the notion was new to me, but it was put so eloquently! Jim’s idea about depression made sense to me precisely because of the stacks of books written by the leading psychiatrists I had at home. It was a perfect metaphor for all the case studies I have ever read. I was just that sweaty guy behind the curtain. I was living out someone else’s ideas about my life. Do I even know what is it that I am? Or have I completely dissolved into the characters I’ve been playing for decades?

That day, everything changed.

Depression-free life, here I come!

It’s been four years since I began healing and two years since I set off on a journey to meet myself. Today, my life is medication-free, and I haven’t been depressed in a very long time. I still wake up early, eat good food, take supplements, and exercise daily, but I see a therapist once a month and don’t feel the need for wrap-around support. I am secure and stronger than ever. I enjoy life, look forward to the day ahead, and consistently work on my dreams.

It all started with giving not wearing sunglasses a go. It all started with a sceptical glimpse of hope. It started with a curious ‘what if they know what they're talking about’. When you have nothing to lose, you might just gain something. After all, how badly do you want depression to go away?

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