This is largely a note to self for days where I struggle to take care of myself, and I hope some of these points might help someone else too. It is quite subjective, but also quite broad. I've found the accounts of others to be one of the most useful tools and motivators for dealing with my shit, and I think that having a wide variety of self-reports is a valuable resource. I once logged everything I ate and how I felt for an entire year. I've found treating myself as an experiment is a helpful frame. It takes me away from identifying strongly with my reactions and instead I get to look on them with more curiosity.
This guide touches on a lot of different points. If you're depressed right now, it's probably going to look a bit overwhelming. You're probably going to open it and think, "I can't do all of that," and want to close it immediately because it looks too difficult.
My suggestion is to pay really strong attention to the first point, which is about habits and doing the smallest possible thing you can — taking the tiniest step in the right direction. When you're depressed, doing anything complex is pretty overwhelming most of the time. One of the best things you can do is to build teeny tiny habits and do small activities that activate the body's reward system, and build to bigger interventions from there.
This guide includes the following sections:
Habits
Sleep
Medication
Therapy, Counselling and Support
Nutrition
Chronic Pain and the Body
Exercise
Doing the Next Best Thing
Runway
Curiosity and the Golden Thread
Relating to Other Humans
Habits
Depression can make even really simple-seeming habits feel exhausting. There have been times when I've been depressed and the only thing that felt worth doing was drinking my coffee in the morning. The fact that I still had motivation to do that — to get up and make my coffee — meant something. Sometimes the only thing getting you out of bed is just needing to pee really badly. That's a hard place to be in.
The difficult thing about habits is that they require practice, and are needed as a foundation for the rest of your well-being. Once you have a habit, it takes away the tiring decision-making process. If you're in the habit of eating particular healthy foods, you don't have to resist buying the wrong things, because you're just in the right habit, and the habit is the correct thing for you. If you have a habit of exercising, you don't have to coax yourself into doing it every time; it's just a routine you can follow through with.
Sleep, food, exercise, and elimination (you've got to excrete waste from the body) — these four things are the foundation of the bodily machine. You've got to form good habits around them, because otherwise the machine won't function, and overcoming the depression is even harder.
I also think depression is sometimes a habitual thing. Neurons that fire together wire together[1] — so if every time something bad happens you think "I wish I could die," this becomes your locally optimal[2] way of dealing with bad situations. You're choosing temporary escapism through thoughts of death over fixing a real problem in your life. A lot of the behaviours I adopted growing up were no longer suited to my environment as an adult. I had these locally optimal behaviours that were necessary for child me but were doing a disservice to adult me. You have to eliminate some of these behaviours and spot where you're doing things that were useful for a different version of you.
Several sections in this guide are things you will need to form habits around. Perhaps you've solved some of them already, and you don't need to change these habits.
It's important to start small, for example, if you're struggling with tidying your space, and a messy space is making you feel sad and overwhelmed, the answer isn't to try and tidy the whole space. The answer is to make your bed and then enjoy the fact that your bed is made. Give yourself some congratulations for that, and maybe even some kind of reward: a tiny block of dark chocolate, read a paragraph of a book, or something else that feels like a little treat. Maybe it's just flopping down on that freshly made bed and enjoying the feeling of calm for a moment, knowing that there's a small part of your life that no longer feels chaotic.
Sleep
Sleep is probably the simplest foundation to address because it's quite passive. You're probably going to sleep some amount even if you're very depressed and only managing two hours and waking up in the middle of the night, or if you're sleeping for 14. If you're not getting much sleep, this is something you can probably increment — by making sure you have the correct food during the day so your body is nourished, that you don't have too much screen time, and that there is no sound or light disrupting your sleep.
Sleep is really important for your metabolism and your ability to exercise. This is a cycle you need to build up, and it might take a really long time to just get that first cog working properly — the sleep cog. It might look like simultaneously working on sleep and putting a tiny bit of effort towards other habits, creating gradual change.
To work on sleep, make sure you get sunlight first thing in the morning. Maybe the thought of actually walking from your bed to somewhere sunny is just exhausting. In that case, the best thing you can do is just get bright light. Open the curtains, sit near the window, or if getting out of bed is too difficult, maybe you can order a super bright lamp and switch it on when you wake up. Once that's a habit and it feels okay, you can introduce a walk — maybe just out to your front step and back. You ramp up, you build these tiny habits, and you don't expect a lot from yourself. You can't expect much. Your mind is in a broken and tired space.
Maybe you're managing to sleep enough hours. Maybe you're oversleeping, because depression causes that too. When I was depressed, I could sometimes sleep for twelve or fourteen hours and still feel groggy in the morning. I think I probably needed to pay more attention to sunlight and walks.
Cortisol is key to waking up in the morning. It rises as you sleep, and in response to bright light. If cortisol levels aren't high enough during the morning, they sit around medium all day, and don't go low enough to encourage you to fall asleep at night. If you fall asleep with higher than ideal cortisol, you're more likely to wake up in the wee hours, because the raised bedtime level causes it to peak too early.
Adenosine is a neurotransmitter that builds up during the day, as cortisol lowers, and causes sleepiness. Caffeine blocks adenosine from building up, which is why caffeine late in the day can make it difficult to fall asleep at night.
Improving Your Sleep Environment
Avoid blue light and strong lights in the evening. Avoid harsh light during your wind down time. Use salt lamps, fairy lights, or candles from around eight o'clock. Journal, or read, ideally using analog materials. I really enjoy reading substack in the evening, and do so with the strongest possible red light filter on my iPad (I use the red colour filter in accessibility settings). By nine thirty/ten pm, you should be in bed, ideally lights out by ten. Adjust this to your own schedule, but this is what works for me — asleep by ten thirty, awake at around seven. Eight and a half to nine hours is my happy place.
Eat a balanced dinner. Try to eat dinner by six o'clock (or ~4 hours before bedtime, so there's no chance of digestion causing a disruption to your sleep, and your metabolism is able to slow down and enter rest mode). I find that some protein and fat help with satiety, plus a little bit of complex carbohydrates calm my nervous system[3]. It shouldn't be a large portion of carbs, as this can cause reactive hypoglycaemia in some people. (More on food in the nutrition section.)
Block out external light. If you live in the city with a lot of unnatural light outside, blockout curtains are very helpful. If you can't get blockout curtains, a thick eye mask is a good option[4].
Manage noise. If you're sound-sensitive, try earplugs. I've struggled with this and I haven't found earplugs that really work well. The best I've used are the silicone ones, and they aren't always sufficient. In noisy environments, I sometimes play very peaceful music. A few musicians I find soothing to sleep to: Atrium Carceri, Apocryphos and Low Roar.
Get your temperature and clothing right. Pay attention to how your body feels in different clothes and fabrics. I find a t-shirt comforting to sleep in. Cotton is really important because it's breathable — it helps you avoid getting hot and sweaty and having nightmares. In winter I prefer a hot water bottle to layering up or sleeping in socks, because I find I'm more likely to wake up and struggle to undress, whereas I can just roll away from a hot bottle. I'd love to try something like the Eight Sleep bed. For now, a fan is the best option I have for staying cool in summer. I don't really like the way aircon dries the air out.
Get comfortable pillows. Test a couple of pillows so your head is at the right height and your neck doesn't get sore. I currently use a blend of wool and poly-fiber with a quilting texture on top that keeps them firm. I hear that memory foam pillows are also great. One of my old favourites was a pillow from Kid Interiør in Norway filled with the kapok plant (which is like a cotton type fiber) — but after six years it lost its structure and I've had to replace it.
Consider skipping the alarm. I personally don't like alarms. I struggle with anxiety, and I often wake up too early, so I like to let my body sleep to its natural waking point. If you're struggling with oversleeping, an alarm may be useful, but I think it's good to allow your body the space to find its natural rhythm, even if it seems like an absurd amount of sleep. It's quite possible that there is something going on inside (psychological or physical), that your body needs downtime to process.
Medication
Antidepressants only have a minor effect compared to controls. A recent meta-analysis found 24% of drug-treated patients had a large response versus only 10% on placebo.[8] For this reason, I would not reach for medication as a first line of treatment, unless:
You have a family history where medication has been useful.
It has been a useful line of treatment for you in the past.
The severity of your symptoms disables you from acting on any other treatment options.
My experience with medication — and I tried a few different antidepressants — was that it quieted my suicidal thoughts and OCD type habits. I used to just wish I would die anytime anything happened that was even remotely uncomfortable or stressful or not according to plan. This became a thought pattern that was just how I responded to everything — imagining my own death, fixating on ways I could die. There was a period where I stopped looking before I crossed the road. I used to have very intrusive thoughts while driving, about crashing into things or suddenly swerving, or jumping off tall buildings, and I'd often find myself stepping back from edges because I felt very compelled by these thoughts.
Antidepressants played a huge role in quieting this for me. They also made my OCD habits switch off, which was very helpful. When I was depressed, my OCD was quite a lot worse — I used to have to do word counting and letter counting things, which was very distracting while driving because I'd be staring at a billboard instead of focusing on the road. It also made a lot of other things, like reading, very unenjoyable.
I found that antidepressants took the harsh edge off how I was feeling, but they didn't make me feel better. My symptoms were no longer as severe, but I also wasn't experiencing joy. When I was depressed without medication, I used to have many, many days of low but then the occasional crazy high day where things felt great and I felt a bit hyped. Antidepressants just took those good days away. I couldn't really enjoy anything, but I felt a lot more stable.
I think antidepressants can be quite useful as a tool for creating enough stability to form other habits, and aren't necessarily a final treatment for depression. But I acknowledge this is coloured by my subjective experience — there are people for whom medication is the ideal treatment, and I'm very glad that this solution exists.
The reason I don't see them as a good first option is because I found it very disappointing when they didn't really help me, and this caused me to spiral at the time, because I was quite desperate then. I couldn't really handle something else not working. There's a tendency to over-index on antidepressants as the solution because, at least from what I've seen and heard, doctors are very happy to prescribe them without treating the holistic causes of depression. I would caution against pegging your hopes on anti-depressants, because it's quite likely that they will be disappointing. You should probably be trying to address other habits and aspects of your life in tandem with — or even without — antidepressants. What actually helped in the longer-term was slowly building the cycle of habits, and paying close attention to it, even after I was no longer on the antidepressants.
The other thing about medication is that you will probably need to try a bunch of options, and this is typically quite an arduous process. You might test one for six weeks, see if it's having an effect, and if it seems to have negative side effects or isn't really working, your doctor might test upping the dose. If that still doesn't help, they might try a different medication. Trying a variety of options can feel pretty slow and disheartening in the face of acute symptoms, and you've got to be willing to grind it out and take some notes about how you're feeling until you find something that works. Make peace with the fact that it's going to take time and that you would be unusually lucky if the first option just works.
Therapy, Counselling, and Support
I have found counselling useful for compartmentalising and organising what is happening inside my mind. I've seen various therapists over the years. The first therapist I saw helped me deal with family relationship issues, and I was able to gain some perspective and boundaries on those. The next therapist helped me with gender and body identity things, and again was very useful for making sense of what I was experiencing and finding a framework to think about myself.
I've found therapists helpful for addressing specific areas I need to talk about, but I don't think they've been able to relate to or access where I'm at when I'm depressed, and haven't been very helpful. With this in mind, I think that if you have a concrete thing that is making you depressed, therapy is probably more likely to be helpful. But if your life seems mostly okay and it's really unclear why you're depressed — you go to a therapist and don't manage to dig up anything that feels especially difficult, your fundamentals seem sorted (you have an income, somewhat fulfilling work or studies, no massive family traumas or relational issues, community or friends of some sort) — therapy might not be the most helpful thing. It might still be useful, and you might get to the bottom of something, but I've personally found therapy more useful for dealing with bounded issues than for "I just feel really bad all the time."
What I did find useful, were support groups, researching and recording changes in my symptoms and cognitive behavioural practices[5].
Support Groups
I went to a weekly mental health support group for a while. I didn't find the group especially helpful because being around a lot of other people who were mentally unwell often became a bit of a pitiful exercise, with a fair bit of dick-measuring. Sometimes people seemed to be competing for their version of mental health issues being the worst. But for a time, going to the group was a useful exercise just because I didn't have any other weekly routine in place. If I'd had another weekly activity that involved people, that would have probably been almost as good, or maybe even better, because it wouldn't have been about fixating on the mental health struggle.
That said, if you're having a mental health struggle and not managing to relate to others, having a support group is useful because it means you can hear from other people having a similar experience, and this can help you to feel less alone, and potentially try solutions that others have found useful.
Cognitive Patterns and Self-Help Tools
Something I did find kind of useful was a chatbot called Youper. It would help you identify cognitive patterns that were limiting you or reinforcing your depression — things like black-and-white and all-or-nothing thinking, where you fail to see the nuance in situations, or identifying spiralling thought patterns, and a few other cognitive distortions. This at least helped me spot when I was engaged in those patterns and try to reframe what I was thinking about. It was based on cognitive behavioural therapy. It helped me to observe my thoughts, instead of being engrossed and overwhelmed by them.
There's also a YouTube channel called Therapy in a Nutshell[10] that I found quite helpful. Emma, the creator, has explanatory videos about why we experience certain things and how to deal with different types of mental health challenges, and often has useful actions you can take in your life.
Nutrition
My depression was compounded by multiple factors — there wasn't one single thing making me depressed, but many aspects that individually could make someone depressed. Nutrition is a very important contributing factor.
My depression really took hold during my first year of university. I think the reason a lot of university students are quite susceptible to depression and malnutrition is that knowing how to cook isn't something everyone learns at home, and understanding nutrition isn't something all parents are good at teaching. Eighteen-year-olds are quite wilful about what they want to eat, even if they did have parents who taught them about having a balanced diet. For me, this was compounded by the vegetarian food in the university residence catering system.
When I finally went for blood tests about four or five years on, I had iron, B12, and vitamin D deficiency. I think this was partially because of problems with my gut not digesting food correctly — so what iron I was getting from vegetarian food, my body wasn't actually managing to absorb or synthesise. But also, the iron in veggie food is non-heme iron, and most people's bodies only absorb a much smaller percentage (2-20%) of it compared to heme iron from meat (15-35%). [6]
Vitamin B12 is also essential and is not really found in plant sources. It's often cited as being present in spirulina (green algae), but this version is not bioavailable. B12 is found in B12-fortified nutritional yeast though. So if you're vegetarian and you're not putting a lot of effort into consuming nutritional yeast or going for B12 shots, you're probably just not getting enough — unless you eat quite a lot of eggs. Unfortunately, I had a strong aversion to eggs for many years, so when I was vegetarian I just wasn't getting B12.
Soy is a common veggie alternative but is also a food that can cause endocrine disruption.[7] When I was depressed, I was eating quite a lot of soy and have since had various endocrine disorders, so it's quite possible this was an influence.
All of this said, everybody's bodies are quite different, and food triggers for disruption can be quite varied. But it is worth ruling these out as a cause of depression.
Elimination Diets
I suggest trying various elimination diets, but this is quite an effortful thing to do when you're depressed. Try pulling some other levers first though, because making food can be quite exhausting when your mental health is bad. Elimination diets take can be expensive, and require a lot of diligence and willpower to be effective.
If you're doing an elimination diet of common drivers of inflammation — because depression is sometimes driven by inflammation — this means cutting out caffeine, sugar, alcohol, dairy, soy, and gluten. This is a high-effort diet because most food you encounter in restaurants and simple options to make at home often include these ingredients. I can make really good suggestions for meals that don't include any of these, but it does require quite a bit more effort, and if you're exhausted and under-resourced, this kind of cooking can be very difficult.
So I'd recommend prioritizing simply eating a balanced diet of meat, veggies, and complex carbohydrates if you're depressed, and not worrying about elimination dieting unless you have obvious gut disturbances.
That said, if you do want to try an elimination diet, Izabella Wentz's Hashimoto's Food Pharmacology has a recipe list where all meals are part of a low-inflammation diet. These were very helpful for resolving some of my gut issues, and I have since been able to phase some foods back in. Although this book is targeted at thyroid disease in particular, I think the recipes are probably applicable to a wider range of elimination protocols.
Finding a Manageable Baseline
If you're very exhausted and just getting into the habit of making food, a good baseline might be one balanced meal a day that includes a variety of foods, and then the other meals are something simple like eggs on toast and a bowl of oats with fruit and yoghurt. This is fine. The point is that you're not just eating simple carbohydrates and sugars that disrupt your whole metabolic system. The goal is to focus on complex carbs, protein and fat. You can always ramp it up and put more effort into meals over time.
Chronic Pain and the Body
I think chronic pain plays a role in depression. I had bad reactions to a lot of foods, and was in pain often, and when your body is constantly in pain, it's quite difficult to avoid getting depressed.
If you have any repeat sources of pain in your life, you should try and address those, because pain is a signal telling you that something is wrong. I think that ignoring pain signals to your body that you don't care about it, and is a constant reminder that you don't value your own well-being. Common sources of pain that I think a lot of people soldier through include joint pain, dental pain, headaches, menstrual or cyclical pain, ovarian pain, stomach pain, eye strain, or fatigue. Trying to identify what is going on in your body and eliminating sources of suffering is very important.
More broadly, if you have nutritional deficiencies, chronic conditions, or disabilities, these are all contributing factors to depression, and treating them is crucial. I'd suggest trying to rule out hormonal disturbances and other bodily contributing factors as a reason for depression, and treating these factors seriously. Just because a condition is common, or your symptoms are mild in comparison to others, doesn't mean you should just push on and get on with it. If your body has a problem, you should find ways to deal with it and try to create affordances in your life for that difficulty.
For me, this currently means sleep is still a massive priority because my fight-or-flight system seems to get triggered very easily. I don't set alarms because I know I need to provide my body as much of a sense of restfulness as I possibly can, in order to encourage it to be in a restful state — and alarms send a signal of urgency, which is the opposite. For the same reason, I'm quite lenient with myself around food. I aspire toward a keto-style diet, but I also know I need a decent amount of carbohydrates to feel calm, so I don't put pressure on being rigid about it.
Exercise
If you've got the sleep engine and the food engine going — you're roughly getting eight-ish hours of sleep (this might be six, this might be ten, depending on what your body needs) and you're having two to three balanced meals a day — then you want to try and bring exercise into your daily habits.
When you start exercising, do not worry about outcomes. The whole point is to train yourself into having a decent habit.
The way I did this was that I had an agreement with myself that I would move at least every second day — I wouldn't go more than a day without moving, and I would do movement for at least half an hour. Initially, this looked like going to the gym and walking on the treadmill for half an hour, or going for a walk outdoors depending on the weather. I also really liked swimming, so I'd sometimes spend half an hour in the pool. This first form of exercise should be something you have a mild inclination toward, something you actually like, or something that feels like a really low barrier to entry. Walking was a very low barrier for me, as was swimming. But every person is different — if you have other forms of exercise you enjoy, focus on those.
Having this rule in place meant I didn't have to make a decision every day about whether it was an exercise day. I just asked: did I exercise yesterday? If the answer was no, it was an exercise day, and I'd just go and do it.
The other thing that helped was the sunk cost fallacy. If I'd gone to the effort of going to the gym and getting on the treadmill, I'd think, "Well, I may as well try and run a little bit." It wasn't a lot — a couple of minutes doing a little jog and then reverting to walking. But because I was at the gym, I'd think, "I may as well spend a little longer here and try some other things."
As I got more comfortable being in the gym environment, I started trying out different exercises. This built up really slowly — each time I'd add one new thing to the routine. First it was just walking or running, then I tried cycling or rowing, push-ups, squatting. I was careful not to overload myself with new challenges, adding just one of these at a time. After about six months to a year of exercising, I had a full workout going: twenty minutes of cardio, then some squats, pull-ups, and muscle-strengthening activities. But it was really important that I brought this on slow and had very little expectation of outcomes. It was just about showing up.
Doing the Next Best Thing
This was a concept from one of the mental health support groups I attended. The idea is that you don't need to plan out all of the perfect actions for the rest of time. In each moment of your day, if you feel uncertain, you just need to figure out what the next best thing you can do looks like.
So if you're waking up in the morning, you don't need to figure the whole day out. You just need to figure out the next best step. That might be a shower, yoga, a run, eating something, getting dressed, journalling, phoning a friend, phoning your mum. Figure out what is a good thing to start your day with — not doom-scrolling, not eating a donut — figure out what the next thing is that you know will nourish you.
I found this idea really useful because it freed me from having to plan too much, and it also built resilience for adapting to changes throughout the day.
Runway
If you don't have financial runway, you are trapped in your financial situation. I really recommend trying to build up six months to a year's worth of financial runway. Six months is enough for spending some time figuring things out. A year is enough that you can find a job after that period.
It's quite possible to become depressed because you're trapped in a job or study situation that is not actually nourishing you. Runway is really useful because if you can afford to take a couple of months off and explore yourself, a quite likely result is that you won't be depressed anymore and you'll find something more interesting. But this does require quite a lot of active participation and thoughtfulness in how you spend that time off.
Be Like the Wolf: Sleep When You're Tired, Eat When You're Hungry
When I lost my job during COVID I had about six months to a year of runway. This meant that lockdown became a reflective period where I could better attune to my needs. I spent time getting in touch with how my body was feeling and what I needed, without the usual pressures of work or social obligations influencing my decision making so strongly.
I think this laid the groundwork for my proprioception and body-listening practice — the fundamentals of hearing hunger and hearing the need for sleep. At one point my sleep cycle shifted completely — I was awake at three AM and asleep in the afternoon, doing a very weird sleep cycle until it normalised again. But it meant I became in touch with my own rhythm.
Curiosity and the Golden Thread
During my runway period, I also gave myself the freedom to doom-scroll, and I spent a huge amount of time on Twitter exploring what I found interesting and who I related to. By following people on Twitter and getting linked to interesting blog posts, I reconnected with what I find interesting in the world and with what I wanted to work on and the problems I was concerned about. I felt quite active in choosing who I wanted to follow and very aware that I could choose not to follow people or engage with certain types of content. The whole point of Twitter for me was to find people I could relate to and learn from — I found an intellectual peer group. Even though I was quite a lurker and didn't interact a lot, knowing there were other people I found inspiring and relatable out in the world was very encouraging.
One of my really big influences here was Visa (@visakanv), who is quite a prolific writer on Twitter (and more generally on his blog). Finding someone I related to so strongly, who acted as a source of other interesting material, was quite important for rediscovering my curiosity. Something I'd lacked for quite some time was a peer group I felt I related to and wanted to engage with.
Connecting with your drives and curiosities is very useful for building an interesting life that you want to keep living. I think of this as the golden thread. I regularly check in with myself on the extent to which I am following the golden thread, and I pay super close attention to when something feels like a golden thread — being willing to drop everything and chase it down, because I know that if I'm alive and feeling dull, not chasing these threads, this leads to depression. Even if it might be financially less lucrative or a slightly weird choice, I'd much rather follow the golden thread than do something that feels wrong and boring.
So far, this has repeatedly paid off. Last year, I took quite a risk joining a nonprofit when I had a pretty good UX design job lined up and was about to sign a contract. It felt very wrong to be signing that contract, so I put pressure on the possibility of joining the nonprofit instead and was in quite a financially precarious situation for a little bit. But my conviction about that being the right place for me has now paid off, and I'm in a good full-time role that is much more closely aligned with my priorities. I'm not sure if this is just luck, risk tolerance, or a combination of many factors — including having a unique taste in what I think is important in the world.
Relating to Other Humans
I think what's really important for sustained mental health — at least for me — is being surrounded by an intellectually engaged community of earnest, thoughtful people. For others, different types of social activity might be more valuable, eg. group exercise, or family meals. I really value having peers I can talk about interesting ideas with. The ideas part of myself wants to be nourished and loved and interacted with, and doing routine tasks that don't give nourishment to this part makes me feel disengaged and disappointed.
It's important to try and understand yourself and figure out what sort of peer group you need, in what quantity, and at what frequency — because too much social can also be a big burnout factor. Putting pressure on yourself to be an eternally social person is no good either. Figure out the cadence of social you need — whether that's online or offline, in person in big groups or one-on-one.
Conclusion
I started writing a guide like this several times in the past, but kept getting stuck. Finally, one night, I decided to try something different: I used voice-to-text transcription with Claude.[8] I copied the resulting text into Obsidian, and edited it substantially. There were a few things that I was sure were roughly true, and I got Claude to explain them in more detail in the footnotes. This is quite different to how I usually write, but was useful because speaking enabled me to get a lot more onto the page before I got tired. I really wanted to get this out, because I feel myself slipping into a difficult state of mind lately, and I want to make sure I have a record of what has worked in the past, so that I can try and implement it in the future if needed.
Self-reports on health and well-being have been quite useful to me in the past. I don't think it's necessarily the exact interventions that others reference, but rather the way they reason about their struggles. I'm sharing this as a contribution to this type of work that has helped me in the past — I hope it helps someone in the future.
"Neurons that fire together wire together" is a popular summary of Hebb's rule, proposed by psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949. The actual neuroscience — called long-term potentiation — is more complex, but the core idea holds: when the same neural pathways are activated repeatedly, the connections between them strengthen, making that pattern of firing increasingly automatic. This is the basis of both habit formation and cognitive behavioural therapy, which works by identifying entrenched thought patterns and consciously practising alternatives to weaken the old pathways and build new ones." - Opus 4.6
"Complex carbohydrates trigger insulin release, which clears competing amino acids from the bloodstream and allows more tryptophan — a precursor to serotonin — to cross the blood-brain barrier. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in mood regulation and calm. This is why a moderate portion of complex carbs like sweet potato in the evening can promote a sense of relaxation and support better sleep, without the spike-and-crash effect of simple sugars. This mechanism is also why very low-carb diets can sometimes worsen anxiety or disrupt sleep in some people." - Opus 4.6
If you can afford to treat yourself to something special, like a silk eye mask, this is extra nice, because it's a reminder that you can love and value yourself. It says, I am worthy of sleep, and of nice things. A common theme in my depression is reminding myself that loving myself is good for me, and finding ways to signal this with real but practical things feels easier to me (than, eg. going on holiday or getting an extravagant meal).
I'm currently exploring somatic therapy as I think that some of my dysregulation might be better treated through working on the mind body connection, rather than talk therapy alone.
Abbaspour N, Hurrell R, Kelishadi R. "Review on iron and its importance for human health." Journal of Research in Medical Sciences 2014; 19(2): 164–174
"Soy contains isoflavones, which are phytoestrogens — plant compounds that can bind to estrogen receptors. Chemically, they are classified as endocrine-disrupting compounds. The scientific consensus is that typical soy consumption probably doesn't cause significant endocrine disruption in most people. But the research also acknowledges that individual susceptibility varies, and people with existing thyroid or hormonal conditions may be more sensitive." - by Opus 4.6
My prompt was: "Hey, Claude. Um, I want to write a guide to dealing with depression. Um, anyway, my laptop's battery died, so I'm not gonna type right now. Um, and I wanna try dictating in this chat and then having you, um, update what I'm saying. Uh, so, like, try and remove the arms and, uh, yeah, help it just formulate into, like, uh, good sentences and paragraphs without, like, changing the actual words that I'm saying, just getting rid of any, like, random, um, verbal text. And then I'll probably also, like, go back and forth between subsections. There may be things that we need to add to different sections. Um, like, for example, I might talk about habits and then start talking about food and then go back to habits, and then I'd like you to go and insert that into the habit section. Do you think you can, uh, help me with that?"
This is largely a note to self for days where I struggle to take care of myself, and I hope some of these points might help someone else too. It is quite subjective, but also quite broad. I've found the accounts of others to be one of the most useful tools and motivators for dealing with my shit, and I think that having a wide variety of self-reports is a valuable resource. I once logged everything I ate and how I felt for an entire year. I've found treating myself as an experiment is a helpful frame. It takes me away from identifying strongly with my reactions and instead I get to look on them with more curiosity.
This guide touches on a lot of different points. If you're depressed right now, it's probably going to look a bit overwhelming. You're probably going to open it and think, "I can't do all of that," and want to close it immediately because it looks too difficult.
My suggestion is to pay really strong attention to the first point, which is about habits and doing the smallest possible thing you can — taking the tiniest step in the right direction. When you're depressed, doing anything complex is pretty overwhelming most of the time. One of the best things you can do is to build teeny tiny habits and do small activities that activate the body's reward system, and build to bigger interventions from there.
This guide includes the following sections:
Habits
Depression can make even really simple-seeming habits feel exhausting. There have been times when I've been depressed and the only thing that felt worth doing was drinking my coffee in the morning. The fact that I still had motivation to do that — to get up and make my coffee — meant something. Sometimes the only thing getting you out of bed is just needing to pee really badly. That's a hard place to be in.
The difficult thing about habits is that they require practice, and are needed as a foundation for the rest of your well-being. Once you have a habit, it takes away the tiring decision-making process. If you're in the habit of eating particular healthy foods, you don't have to resist buying the wrong things, because you're just in the right habit, and the habit is the correct thing for you. If you have a habit of exercising, you don't have to coax yourself into doing it every time; it's just a routine you can follow through with.
Sleep, food, exercise, and elimination (you've got to excrete waste from the body) — these four things are the foundation of the bodily machine. You've got to form good habits around them, because otherwise the machine won't function, and overcoming the depression is even harder.
I also think depression is sometimes a habitual thing. Neurons that fire together wire together[1] — so if every time something bad happens you think "I wish I could die," this becomes your locally optimal[2] way of dealing with bad situations. You're choosing temporary escapism through thoughts of death over fixing a real problem in your life. A lot of the behaviours I adopted growing up were no longer suited to my environment as an adult. I had these locally optimal behaviours that were necessary for child me but were doing a disservice to adult me. You have to eliminate some of these behaviours and spot where you're doing things that were useful for a different version of you.
Several sections in this guide are things you will need to form habits around. Perhaps you've solved some of them already, and you don't need to change these habits.
It's important to start small, for example, if you're struggling with tidying your space, and a messy space is making you feel sad and overwhelmed, the answer isn't to try and tidy the whole space. The answer is to make your bed and then enjoy the fact that your bed is made. Give yourself some congratulations for that, and maybe even some kind of reward: a tiny block of dark chocolate, read a paragraph of a book, or something else that feels like a little treat. Maybe it's just flopping down on that freshly made bed and enjoying the feeling of calm for a moment, knowing that there's a small part of your life that no longer feels chaotic.
Sleep
Sleep is probably the simplest foundation to address because it's quite passive. You're probably going to sleep some amount even if you're very depressed and only managing two hours and waking up in the middle of the night, or if you're sleeping for 14. If you're not getting much sleep, this is something you can probably increment — by making sure you have the correct food during the day so your body is nourished, that you don't have too much screen time, and that there is no sound or light disrupting your sleep.
Sleep is really important for your metabolism and your ability to exercise. This is a cycle you need to build up, and it might take a really long time to just get that first cog working properly — the sleep cog. It might look like simultaneously working on sleep and putting a tiny bit of effort towards other habits, creating gradual change.
To work on sleep, make sure you get sunlight first thing in the morning. Maybe the thought of actually walking from your bed to somewhere sunny is just exhausting. In that case, the best thing you can do is just get bright light. Open the curtains, sit near the window, or if getting out of bed is too difficult, maybe you can order a super bright lamp and switch it on when you wake up. Once that's a habit and it feels okay, you can introduce a walk — maybe just out to your front step and back. You ramp up, you build these tiny habits, and you don't expect a lot from yourself. You can't expect much. Your mind is in a broken and tired space.
Maybe you're managing to sleep enough hours. Maybe you're oversleeping, because depression causes that too. When I was depressed, I could sometimes sleep for twelve or fourteen hours and still feel groggy in the morning. I think I probably needed to pay more attention to sunlight and walks.
Cortisol is key to waking up in the morning. It rises as you sleep, and in response to bright light. If cortisol levels aren't high enough during the morning, they sit around medium all day, and don't go low enough to encourage you to fall asleep at night. If you fall asleep with higher than ideal cortisol, you're more likely to wake up in the wee hours, because the raised bedtime level causes it to peak too early.
Adenosine is a neurotransmitter that builds up during the day, as cortisol lowers, and causes sleepiness. Caffeine blocks adenosine from building up, which is why caffeine late in the day can make it difficult to fall asleep at night.
Improving Your Sleep Environment
Medication
Antidepressants only have a minor effect compared to controls. A recent meta-analysis found 24% of drug-treated patients had a large response versus only 10% on placebo.[8] For this reason, I would not reach for medication as a first line of treatment, unless:
My experience with medication — and I tried a few different antidepressants — was that it quieted my suicidal thoughts and OCD type habits. I used to just wish I would die anytime anything happened that was even remotely uncomfortable or stressful or not according to plan. This became a thought pattern that was just how I responded to everything — imagining my own death, fixating on ways I could die. There was a period where I stopped looking before I crossed the road. I used to have very intrusive thoughts while driving, about crashing into things or suddenly swerving, or jumping off tall buildings, and I'd often find myself stepping back from edges because I felt very compelled by these thoughts.
Antidepressants played a huge role in quieting this for me. They also made my OCD habits switch off, which was very helpful. When I was depressed, my OCD was quite a lot worse — I used to have to do word counting and letter counting things, which was very distracting while driving because I'd be staring at a billboard instead of focusing on the road. It also made a lot of other things, like reading, very unenjoyable.
I found that antidepressants took the harsh edge off how I was feeling, but they didn't make me feel better. My symptoms were no longer as severe, but I also wasn't experiencing joy. When I was depressed without medication, I used to have many, many days of low but then the occasional crazy high day where things felt great and I felt a bit hyped. Antidepressants just took those good days away. I couldn't really enjoy anything, but I felt a lot more stable.
I think antidepressants can be quite useful as a tool for creating enough stability to form other habits, and aren't necessarily a final treatment for depression. But I acknowledge this is coloured by my subjective experience — there are people for whom medication is the ideal treatment, and I'm very glad that this solution exists.
The reason I don't see them as a good first option is because I found it very disappointing when they didn't really help me, and this caused me to spiral at the time, because I was quite desperate then. I couldn't really handle something else not working. There's a tendency to over-index on antidepressants as the solution because, at least from what I've seen and heard, doctors are very happy to prescribe them without treating the holistic causes of depression. I would caution against pegging your hopes on anti-depressants, because it's quite likely that they will be disappointing. You should probably be trying to address other habits and aspects of your life in tandem with — or even without — antidepressants. What actually helped in the longer-term was slowly building the cycle of habits, and paying close attention to it, even after I was no longer on the antidepressants.
The other thing about medication is that you will probably need to try a bunch of options, and this is typically quite an arduous process. You might test one for six weeks, see if it's having an effect, and if it seems to have negative side effects or isn't really working, your doctor might test upping the dose. If that still doesn't help, they might try a different medication. Trying a variety of options can feel pretty slow and disheartening in the face of acute symptoms, and you've got to be willing to grind it out and take some notes about how you're feeling until you find something that works. Make peace with the fact that it's going to take time and that you would be unusually lucky if the first option just works.
Therapy, Counselling, and Support
I have found counselling useful for compartmentalising and organising what is happening inside my mind. I've seen various therapists over the years. The first therapist I saw helped me deal with family relationship issues, and I was able to gain some perspective and boundaries on those. The next therapist helped me with gender and body identity things, and again was very useful for making sense of what I was experiencing and finding a framework to think about myself.
I've found therapists helpful for addressing specific areas I need to talk about, but I don't think they've been able to relate to or access where I'm at when I'm depressed, and haven't been very helpful. With this in mind, I think that if you have a concrete thing that is making you depressed, therapy is probably more likely to be helpful. But if your life seems mostly okay and it's really unclear why you're depressed — you go to a therapist and don't manage to dig up anything that feels especially difficult, your fundamentals seem sorted (you have an income, somewhat fulfilling work or studies, no massive family traumas or relational issues, community or friends of some sort) — therapy might not be the most helpful thing. It might still be useful, and you might get to the bottom of something, but I've personally found therapy more useful for dealing with bounded issues than for "I just feel really bad all the time."
What I did find useful, were support groups, researching and recording changes in my symptoms and cognitive behavioural practices[5].
Support Groups
I went to a weekly mental health support group for a while. I didn't find the group especially helpful because being around a lot of other people who were mentally unwell often became a bit of a pitiful exercise, with a fair bit of dick-measuring. Sometimes people seemed to be competing for their version of mental health issues being the worst. But for a time, going to the group was a useful exercise just because I didn't have any other weekly routine in place. If I'd had another weekly activity that involved people, that would have probably been almost as good, or maybe even better, because it wouldn't have been about fixating on the mental health struggle.
That said, if you're having a mental health struggle and not managing to relate to others, having a support group is useful because it means you can hear from other people having a similar experience, and this can help you to feel less alone, and potentially try solutions that others have found useful.
Cognitive Patterns and Self-Help Tools
Something I did find kind of useful was a chatbot called Youper. It would help you identify cognitive patterns that were limiting you or reinforcing your depression — things like black-and-white and all-or-nothing thinking, where you fail to see the nuance in situations, or identifying spiralling thought patterns, and a few other cognitive distortions. This at least helped me spot when I was engaged in those patterns and try to reframe what I was thinking about. It was based on cognitive behavioural therapy. It helped me to observe my thoughts, instead of being engrossed and overwhelmed by them.
There's also a YouTube channel called Therapy in a Nutshell[10] that I found quite helpful. Emma, the creator, has explanatory videos about why we experience certain things and how to deal with different types of mental health challenges, and often has useful actions you can take in your life.
Nutrition
My depression was compounded by multiple factors — there wasn't one single thing making me depressed, but many aspects that individually could make someone depressed. Nutrition is a very important contributing factor.
My depression really took hold during my first year of university. I think the reason a lot of university students are quite susceptible to depression and malnutrition is that knowing how to cook isn't something everyone learns at home, and understanding nutrition isn't something all parents are good at teaching. Eighteen-year-olds are quite wilful about what they want to eat, even if they did have parents who taught them about having a balanced diet. For me, this was compounded by the vegetarian food in the university residence catering system.
When I finally went for blood tests about four or five years on, I had iron, B12, and vitamin D deficiency. I think this was partially because of problems with my gut not digesting food correctly — so what iron I was getting from vegetarian food, my body wasn't actually managing to absorb or synthesise. But also, the iron in veggie food is non-heme iron, and most people's bodies only absorb a much smaller percentage (2-20%) of it compared to heme iron from meat (15-35%). [6]
Vitamin B12 is also essential and is not really found in plant sources. It's often cited as being present in spirulina (green algae), but this version is not bioavailable. B12 is found in B12-fortified nutritional yeast though. So if you're vegetarian and you're not putting a lot of effort into consuming nutritional yeast or going for B12 shots, you're probably just not getting enough — unless you eat quite a lot of eggs. Unfortunately, I had a strong aversion to eggs for many years, so when I was vegetarian I just wasn't getting B12.
Soy is a common veggie alternative but is also a food that can cause endocrine disruption.[7] When I was depressed, I was eating quite a lot of soy and have since had various endocrine disorders, so it's quite possible this was an influence.
All of this said, everybody's bodies are quite different, and food triggers for disruption can be quite varied. But it is worth ruling these out as a cause of depression.
Elimination Diets
I suggest trying various elimination diets, but this is quite an effortful thing to do when you're depressed. Try pulling some other levers first though, because making food can be quite exhausting when your mental health is bad. Elimination diets take can be expensive, and require a lot of diligence and willpower to be effective.
If you're doing an elimination diet of common drivers of inflammation — because depression is sometimes driven by inflammation — this means cutting out caffeine, sugar, alcohol, dairy, soy, and gluten. This is a high-effort diet because most food you encounter in restaurants and simple options to make at home often include these ingredients. I can make really good suggestions for meals that don't include any of these, but it does require quite a bit more effort, and if you're exhausted and under-resourced, this kind of cooking can be very difficult.
So I'd recommend prioritizing simply eating a balanced diet of meat, veggies, and complex carbohydrates if you're depressed, and not worrying about elimination dieting unless you have obvious gut disturbances.
That said, if you do want to try an elimination diet, Izabella Wentz's Hashimoto's Food Pharmacology has a recipe list where all meals are part of a low-inflammation diet. These were very helpful for resolving some of my gut issues, and I have since been able to phase some foods back in. Although this book is targeted at thyroid disease in particular, I think the recipes are probably applicable to a wider range of elimination protocols.
Finding a Manageable Baseline
If you're very exhausted and just getting into the habit of making food, a good baseline might be one balanced meal a day that includes a variety of foods, and then the other meals are something simple like eggs on toast and a bowl of oats with fruit and yoghurt. This is fine. The point is that you're not just eating simple carbohydrates and sugars that disrupt your whole metabolic system. The goal is to focus on complex carbs, protein and fat. You can always ramp it up and put more effort into meals over time.
Chronic Pain and the Body
I think chronic pain plays a role in depression. I had bad reactions to a lot of foods, and was in pain often, and when your body is constantly in pain, it's quite difficult to avoid getting depressed.
If you have any repeat sources of pain in your life, you should try and address those, because pain is a signal telling you that something is wrong. I think that ignoring pain signals to your body that you don't care about it, and is a constant reminder that you don't value your own well-being. Common sources of pain that I think a lot of people soldier through include joint pain, dental pain, headaches, menstrual or cyclical pain, ovarian pain, stomach pain, eye strain, or fatigue. Trying to identify what is going on in your body and eliminating sources of suffering is very important.
More broadly, if you have nutritional deficiencies, chronic conditions, or disabilities, these are all contributing factors to depression, and treating them is crucial. I'd suggest trying to rule out hormonal disturbances and other bodily contributing factors as a reason for depression, and treating these factors seriously. Just because a condition is common, or your symptoms are mild in comparison to others, doesn't mean you should just push on and get on with it. If your body has a problem, you should find ways to deal with it and try to create affordances in your life for that difficulty.
For me, this currently means sleep is still a massive priority because my fight-or-flight system seems to get triggered very easily. I don't set alarms because I know I need to provide my body as much of a sense of restfulness as I possibly can, in order to encourage it to be in a restful state — and alarms send a signal of urgency, which is the opposite. For the same reason, I'm quite lenient with myself around food. I aspire toward a keto-style diet, but I also know I need a decent amount of carbohydrates to feel calm, so I don't put pressure on being rigid about it.
Exercise
If you've got the sleep engine and the food engine going — you're roughly getting eight-ish hours of sleep (this might be six, this might be ten, depending on what your body needs) and you're having two to three balanced meals a day — then you want to try and bring exercise into your daily habits.
When you start exercising, do not worry about outcomes. The whole point is to train yourself into having a decent habit.
The way I did this was that I had an agreement with myself that I would move at least every second day — I wouldn't go more than a day without moving, and I would do movement for at least half an hour. Initially, this looked like going to the gym and walking on the treadmill for half an hour, or going for a walk outdoors depending on the weather. I also really liked swimming, so I'd sometimes spend half an hour in the pool. This first form of exercise should be something you have a mild inclination toward, something you actually like, or something that feels like a really low barrier to entry. Walking was a very low barrier for me, as was swimming. But every person is different — if you have other forms of exercise you enjoy, focus on those.
Having this rule in place meant I didn't have to make a decision every day about whether it was an exercise day. I just asked: did I exercise yesterday? If the answer was no, it was an exercise day, and I'd just go and do it.
The other thing that helped was the sunk cost fallacy. If I'd gone to the effort of going to the gym and getting on the treadmill, I'd think, "Well, I may as well try and run a little bit." It wasn't a lot — a couple of minutes doing a little jog and then reverting to walking. But because I was at the gym, I'd think, "I may as well spend a little longer here and try some other things."
As I got more comfortable being in the gym environment, I started trying out different exercises. This built up really slowly — each time I'd add one new thing to the routine. First it was just walking or running, then I tried cycling or rowing, push-ups, squatting. I was careful not to overload myself with new challenges, adding just one of these at a time. After about six months to a year of exercising, I had a full workout going: twenty minutes of cardio, then some squats, pull-ups, and muscle-strengthening activities. But it was really important that I brought this on slow and had very little expectation of outcomes. It was just about showing up.
Doing the Next Best Thing
This was a concept from one of the mental health support groups I attended. The idea is that you don't need to plan out all of the perfect actions for the rest of time. In each moment of your day, if you feel uncertain, you just need to figure out what the next best thing you can do looks like.
So if you're waking up in the morning, you don't need to figure the whole day out. You just need to figure out the next best step. That might be a shower, yoga, a run, eating something, getting dressed, journalling, phoning a friend, phoning your mum. Figure out what is a good thing to start your day with — not doom-scrolling, not eating a donut — figure out what the next thing is that you know will nourish you.
I found this idea really useful because it freed me from having to plan too much, and it also built resilience for adapting to changes throughout the day.
Runway
If you don't have financial runway, you are trapped in your financial situation. I really recommend trying to build up six months to a year's worth of financial runway. Six months is enough for spending some time figuring things out. A year is enough that you can find a job after that period.
It's quite possible to become depressed because you're trapped in a job or study situation that is not actually nourishing you. Runway is really useful because if you can afford to take a couple of months off and explore yourself, a quite likely result is that you won't be depressed anymore and you'll find something more interesting. But this does require quite a lot of active participation and thoughtfulness in how you spend that time off.
Be Like the Wolf: Sleep When You're Tired, Eat When You're Hungry
When I lost my job during COVID I had about six months to a year of runway. This meant that lockdown became a reflective period where I could better attune to my needs. I spent time getting in touch with how my body was feeling and what I needed, without the usual pressures of work or social obligations influencing my decision making so strongly.
I think this laid the groundwork for my proprioception and body-listening practice — the fundamentals of hearing hunger and hearing the need for sleep. At one point my sleep cycle shifted completely — I was awake at three AM and asleep in the afternoon, doing a very weird sleep cycle until it normalised again. But it meant I became in touch with my own rhythm.
Curiosity and the Golden Thread
During my runway period, I also gave myself the freedom to doom-scroll, and I spent a huge amount of time on Twitter exploring what I found interesting and who I related to. By following people on Twitter and getting linked to interesting blog posts, I reconnected with what I find interesting in the world and with what I wanted to work on and the problems I was concerned about. I felt quite active in choosing who I wanted to follow and very aware that I could choose not to follow people or engage with certain types of content. The whole point of Twitter for me was to find people I could relate to and learn from — I found an intellectual peer group. Even though I was quite a lurker and didn't interact a lot, knowing there were other people I found inspiring and relatable out in the world was very encouraging.
One of my really big influences here was Visa (@visakanv), who is quite a prolific writer on Twitter (and more generally on his blog). Finding someone I related to so strongly, who acted as a source of other interesting material, was quite important for rediscovering my curiosity. Something I'd lacked for quite some time was a peer group I felt I related to and wanted to engage with.
Connecting with your drives and curiosities is very useful for building an interesting life that you want to keep living. I think of this as the golden thread. I regularly check in with myself on the extent to which I am following the golden thread, and I pay super close attention to when something feels like a golden thread — being willing to drop everything and chase it down, because I know that if I'm alive and feeling dull, not chasing these threads, this leads to depression. Even if it might be financially less lucrative or a slightly weird choice, I'd much rather follow the golden thread than do something that feels wrong and boring.
So far, this has repeatedly paid off. Last year, I took quite a risk joining a nonprofit when I had a pretty good UX design job lined up and was about to sign a contract. It felt very wrong to be signing that contract, so I put pressure on the possibility of joining the nonprofit instead and was in quite a financially precarious situation for a little bit. But my conviction about that being the right place for me has now paid off, and I'm in a good full-time role that is much more closely aligned with my priorities. I'm not sure if this is just luck, risk tolerance, or a combination of many factors — including having a unique taste in what I think is important in the world.
Relating to Other Humans
I think what's really important for sustained mental health — at least for me — is being surrounded by an intellectually engaged community of earnest, thoughtful people. For others, different types of social activity might be more valuable, eg. group exercise, or family meals. I really value having peers I can talk about interesting ideas with. The ideas part of myself wants to be nourished and loved and interacted with, and doing routine tasks that don't give nourishment to this part makes me feel disengaged and disappointed.
It's important to try and understand yourself and figure out what sort of peer group you need, in what quantity, and at what frequency — because too much social can also be a big burnout factor. Putting pressure on yourself to be an eternally social person is no good either. Figure out the cadence of social you need — whether that's online or offline, in person in big groups or one-on-one.
Conclusion
I started writing a guide like this several times in the past, but kept getting stuck. Finally, one night, I decided to try something different: I used voice-to-text transcription with Claude.[8] I copied the resulting text into Obsidian, and edited it substantially. There were a few things that I was sure were roughly true, and I got Claude to explain them in more detail in the footnotes. This is quite different to how I usually write, but was useful because speaking enabled me to get a lot more onto the page before I got tired. I really wanted to get this out, because I feel myself slipping into a difficult state of mind lately, and I want to make sure I have a record of what has worked in the past, so that I can try and implement it in the future if needed.
Self-reports on health and well-being have been quite useful to me in the past. I don't think it's necessarily the exact interventions that others reference, but rather the way they reason about their struggles. I'm sharing this as a contribution to this type of work that has helped me in the past — I hope it helps someone in the future.
"Neurons that fire together wire together" is a popular summary of Hebb's rule, proposed by psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949. The actual neuroscience — called long-term potentiation — is more complex, but the core idea holds: when the same neural pathways are activated repeatedly, the connections between them strengthen, making that pattern of firing increasingly automatic. This is the basis of both habit formation and cognitive behavioural therapy, which works by identifying entrenched thought patterns and consciously practising alternatives to weaken the old pathways and build new ones." - Opus 4.6
See Chris Lakin's "Locally Optimal" - an inspiration of mine.
"Complex carbohydrates trigger insulin release, which clears competing amino acids from the bloodstream and allows more tryptophan — a precursor to serotonin — to cross the blood-brain barrier. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in mood regulation and calm. This is why a moderate portion of complex carbs like sweet potato in the evening can promote a sense of relaxation and support better sleep, without the spike-and-crash effect of simple sugars. This mechanism is also why very low-carb diets can sometimes worsen anxiety or disrupt sleep in some people." - Opus 4.6
If you can afford to treat yourself to something special, like a silk eye mask, this is extra nice, because it's a reminder that you can love and value yourself. It says, I am worthy of sleep, and of nice things. A common theme in my depression is reminding myself that loving myself is good for me, and finding ways to signal this with real but practical things feels easier to me (than, eg. going on holiday or getting an extravagant meal).
I'm currently exploring somatic therapy as I think that some of my dysregulation might be better treated through working on the mind body connection, rather than talk therapy alone.
Abbaspour N, Hurrell R, Kelishadi R. "Review on iron and its importance for human health." Journal of Research in Medical Sciences 2014; 19(2): 164–174
"Soy contains isoflavones, which are phytoestrogens — plant compounds that can bind to estrogen receptors. Chemically, they are classified as endocrine-disrupting compounds. The scientific consensus is that typical soy consumption probably doesn't cause significant endocrine disruption in most people. But the research also acknowledges that individual susceptibility varies, and people with existing thyroid or hormonal conditions may be more sensitive." - by Opus 4.6
My prompt was: "Hey, Claude. Um, I want to write a guide to dealing with depression. Um, anyway, my laptop's battery died, so I'm not gonna type right now. Um, and I wanna try dictating in this chat and then having you, um, update what I'm saying. Uh, so, like, try and remove the arms and, uh, yeah, help it just formulate into, like, uh, good sentences and paragraphs without, like, changing the actual words that I'm saying, just getting rid of any, like, random, um, verbal text. And then I'll probably also, like, go back and forth between subsections. There may be things that we need to add to different sections. Um, like, for example, I might talk about habits and then start talking about food and then go back to habits, and then I'd like you to go and insert that into the habit section. Do you think you can, uh, help me with that?"