{"id":413,"date":"2012-06-04T21:50:48","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T05:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/?p=413"},"modified":"2012-06-04T21:50:48","modified_gmt":"2012-06-05T05:50:48","slug":"depression-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/04\/depression-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Depression management"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time ago I wrote a post about my experiences with depression<\/a> (dysthymia) and with therapy and how it had really helped me. At the time I was only six months or so out from the end of regular therapy. The legacy of that work is definitely lasting, but in the years since I’ve also learned that I do have a chronic tendency toward low mood (it’s not clear whether the cause is chemical, habitual, or both), and taking care of myself and keeping certain routines plays a much bigger part in managing my mood than I realized when I was all excited about how much therapy helped. I wanted to record this both for my own reference, and as part of my story.<\/p>\n

I currently take physical inventory whenever I notice myself getting into a funk, mentally evaluating whether I’ve slept adequately, eaten appropriately, had a moderate dose of caffeine, and exercised recently. I become unpleasant to be around, and to be, if I don’t get around 7.5 to 9 hours of sleep and 25 to 250 mg of caffeine daily, eat when hungry, and exercise almost daily at moderate intensity and a couple of times a week at high intensity. Last week I was in a pretty bad funk one day and realized I hadn’t had any high-intensity exercise for a while. The next day I went running, and it was amazing to notice that while I didn’t feel fantastic, it was no longer almost automatic for me to drop into a broody state the way it had been the day before. (My carfree life definitely makes regular exercise easier, since pretty much every I leave the house, I leave it under my own steam.)<\/p>\n

Taking care of the physical inventory is only the first step, but it is often the only step I really need, and if it’s not, it at least puts me into the best possible shape for the rest of the work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some time ago I wrote a post about my experiences with depression (dysthymia) and with therapy and how it had really helped me. At the time I was only six months or so out from the end of regular therapy. The legacy of that work is definitely lasting, but in the years since I’ve also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}