Here's one giant tip for depression: develop and cultivate awareness of your own thoughts. Most of us have loads and loads of thoughts during the day that just whizz by and they generate feelings but we don't recognize the two are connected because we don't recognize the thought.💙

So we just feel the feeling and we're like, "oh I'm a bit sad about that", but it's not associated with any given thought. So if you develop this mindful awareness you try to listen to your thoughts and recognize them, pull them out of the subconscious, pull them out of autopilot. 💙

I tell you what! If you're depressed you'll hear the same thoughts over and over again. They will be ruminative and they will be negative and you'll get to a point eventually, if you maintain that awareness, where you're like, "these are not helping me, they are not part of my path forward".💙

The thing to do then which is critical is to acknowledge the thought, say, "okay I've heard you, I appreciate you're only trying to keep me safe, you're trying to keep me from experiencing the situation that happened before that resulted in us feeling bad. I appreciate that and thank you for bringing it to my attention".💙

That will then decrease the frequency of those thoughts over time. What's important is not to try to banish those thoughts once you recognize them and stop having those thoughts.💙

If you try to put active energy into stopping those thoughts they will only get stronger and more insistent. So it's about having compassion for the thoughts, they're only trying to help you, they're only trying to protect you but they're no longer necessary.💙

You're not in that past situation, you have the awareness of what would happen if you're in a similar situation next time. So it's not necessary to be reminded every five minutes that something went wrong in the past and that's one of the ways you can calm the situation and regain some energy that you've been using without awareness on these negative thoughts that go round and round and round.💙

That's one of the reasons I believe people are so exhausted in depression because of this constant rumination using all the energy generating all the thoughts. So if you can calm them down then you will start to reclaim some of the energy that's lost within depression.💙