How To Depress Yourself And Get In Your Own Way

[flamingsword]

Starting from the simple stuff and proceeding into the land of the padded walls:

Be Lazy

• Don't get to know yourself. Hinder yourself with ignorance.
  
• Invest no effort into complying with your principles. Avoid self-respect.
  
• Don't think about how you can improve your habits. Fail to improve yourself. Don't grow or take pride in your own growth.
  
• Make no contingency plans. Feel that if one thing goes wrong it was meant to, to screw up the rest of your day. Feel judged by higher powers. Don't recover smoothly.
  
• Listen to your insecurities, instead of fighting them. Discover more fears. Feel like a coward.
  
• Brood. Dwell on things and make them important instead of getting on with what you're doing.
  
• Don't pay attention.

Maintain Your Illusions

• Listen to gossip. Believe what you're told without checking facts at the source.
  
• Feel betrayed by the truth when your illusions break down and you are forced to deal with things as they are.
  
• Ignore the differences between things. Treat things all the same so that you get different results each time you come into contact with them and confuse yourself. It will make your bad mood easier to maintain to have something negative to fixate on.
  
• Compare yourself to people you're not like. Comparing unlike things is designed to separate you from what's real, and using an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to will keep you too busy to question the inconsistencies of your context.
  
• Ignore your weaknesses so that you get unexpectedly beaten at things you thought you were good at. Then berate yourself for your failure.
  
• Don't listen to yourself to see if you're making sense. Find ways to justify your reasoning that don't apply to logic.
  
• Submarine your self-image by not trusting in your abilities. Get used to the paralysis of uncertainty instead of ability to reach for what you want.

Focus On The Negative

• Expect it to be about you whenever something goes wrong.
  
• Use high-contrast "weighted" adjectives when thinking about your life to increase drama.
  
• "Qualify" your joys. Don't take the good with the bad. Think that if something were really good, it wouldn't have a downside.
  
• Think of the good things that happen to you as deviations from the norm. Then take them off the bell curve of your expectations entirely. Skew your statistical universe.
  
• Focus on what's missing rather than on the things you have.
  
• Hold your friends to an unrealistic standard so that you can dwell on their shortcomings.
  
• Accept that any backsliding you do negates all efforts you put into crawling out of the depression you've now made.

Betray Yourself

• Teach yourself not to want things. Have no goals. Give up hope.
  
• Make time to do things that are bad for you physically, and can lead to health problems. Pain and illness will help your rough patch stand firm in the face of overwhelming joys.
  
• Use self-fulfilling negative prophecies to prove to yourself that your self-hatred is reasonable.
  
• Push away people who care about you.
  
• Ask people for good advice. Don't take the advice, then beat yourself up for not taking it.

Advanced Rectal Haberdashery

• Re-prioritize meeting the needs that you can get met now 'til after the needs that you can't get met until later.
  
• Invest effort and frustration into impossible schemes trying to make those needs get met now.
  
• Distract yourself from your need to fix your problems with drugs. Use people-related drama, religion, or illegal narcotics to keep your mind occupied and off-balance.
  
• Deny responsibility or ability to fix your problems. Cripple yourself with despair.
  
• Hurt other people so you can feel ashamed and horrible.
  
• Be angry with your friends for interfering in your unhappiness. They're on your side, but you're not on your side, and that means they're against you.

Some people have medical reasons for being depressed. I am SO aware of that, hello. Even so, I dare you to say you've never done any of this to yourself. Or comment me with ways I've missed, and we'll add them to the master list. Because this is just the ways that my friends, family and I have messed ourselves up, and I'm sure there are creative ways to self-destruct that we've missed.