Feeling Down In the Dumps, This Might Help
Life is a fragile balance of managing high and low moments — sometimes, the highs can be higher while lows can be lower. And when it rains it pours! It’s either your significant other saying yes to your marriage proposal and you getting that coveted promotion at work at the same time or you losing both your job and your marriage in one go. One way or the other, for me at least, there is rarely a middle ground and for better or for worse, there’s almost always a compounding effect playing out.
While the higher moments are high-octane leaving me feeling like I am on top of the world, it’s the lower moments that are truly defining as these leave me fending for myself with the notion that I’ll never be out of the woods. These moments can feel like a continual blow of sucker punches leading to a state of despair with a lack of purpose and disenchantment with life.
What makes this worse is the fact that this can be a very solitary experience — I mean sure I have my family and friends around for support but I need to find the resilience and grit from within in order to come out on the other side. It is my journey and my journey alone.
Getting my body moving
A turbulent mind is a nightmare for the body and if the body is not cared for during this precarious time, it can turn into a vicious cycle impossible to break out of.
When I am down in the dumps, I always try to get my body moving — it’s a great distraction from my ever wandering and depressed mind. It’s not easy as all I want to do is stay in bed all day and wallow in my misery but I remember to be selfish. Selfishly, I want to be happy and I’ll subdue my mind if it gets in the way. Getting movement in the form of long walks, cardio, hike, HIIT or tennis has always gone a long way to making me feel a tad better. A happy mind may not lead to a happy body but to some extent the other way around definitely stands true for me.
Thinking about the worst possible outcome
I invariably curl into a fetal position when I feel like everything that is significant to me is going South. It is crushing and I feel like a defeatist.
One philosophy that has helped me cope with the lows is thinking about and accepting the worst possible outcome. For example, if I get sick, I think about the absolute worst — the off chance that I might have cancer and might end up dying from it. This might seem counter intuitive but it tends to shift the baseline perspective and since humans function on using frame of reference, when using this yardstick the reality suddenly doesn’t seem that bad.
Additionally, something that also helps me is looking back to see where I come from and how far I’ve come. I come from nothing, even if I stop here and don’t go any further, it is still good enough.
Connecting with the higher power
Taking a massive step back to zoom out of my anguish to think about and connect with the wider universe helps me trivialize my pain and suffering. In the grand scheme of things, nothing really matters. I watch and re-watch this fantastic Carl Sagan video Pale Blue Dot that is so evocative that it instantly puts me in my place in the infinite universe and instills in me an expansive sense of wonder that goes well beyond my angst.
I hit rock bottom and find myself in a dark place every now and then. It might take some time but I get up and dust myself off — it’s time to get back on the horse again.
