Over the next few days I'd like to offer some tips to help people heal from depression, but it's important to say upfront that everybody's depression is different and so some of these tips will help some people and they won't help others.💙

And some of these tips are more likely to help if you're at the earlier stages of depression, mild to moderate depression and less so for severe depression. Severe depression will often need more intensive work and that could be psychotherapy, things like that.💙

Also depression is often something that comes on over many years and gets worse over many years, in which case these tips probably won't reverse that type of depression overnight or rapidly. It's something that you may see gradual improvements over time.💙

So the first thing I'd like to mention is stress. So stress is often in the background of depression and it can be an acute stress such as bereavement or divorce or it can be a long -term stress such as caring for elderly relatives, looking after children, dealing with a boss you don't like, a job you don't like, financial troubles, poverty, racism, stressors like that.💙

So you can deal with stress in one of two ways. You can either reduce the actual stressor or the stressors and reduce them in your life. If there are toxic people you can try to cut them out or limit your exposure to them.💙

If there's problems at work you can address them, talk to maybe psychological support at work, talk to your boss, things like that. Or the alternative is to recognize that a stress is only a negative stress if we perceive it as such.💙

So you can try to do some kind of mindful work such that stresses that trigger you may not trigger you if you look at them differently, look at yourself differently, recognize that you're capable of dealing with these stressors and they haven't beaten you in the past and so they're not going to beat you in the future.💙

You've dealt with them in the past, you can deal with them in the future and look at them a bit more positively. So there's two ways of dealing with the stressors, either reduce them actually in the real world or reduce their impact by seeing your ability to cope with them as larger, better, more improved compared to what it was.💙