Depression is one of greatest causes of unhappiness in the world, and fighting it should be our collective goals as a society. Clinical depression when you reach a stage when you must seek clinical or medical help. The goal is to stop negative feelings from becoming so damaging that you can’t control your daily schedule anymore.

Are you depressed?

You know the moment you are asked this question, you would start looking for reasons why you may be depressed and considering the vicissitudes of life, you will find some reasons why the answer to the question could be yes. However, there is a difference between loosely throwing around the word ‘depression’ and ‘clinical depression.’

At a point in my life, I got severely depressed and it was not really the worst phase of my life. Life was looking up and things were good. However, perhaps it was a sickening feeling of competition that led to the depression or a rather unhealthy attitude to life.

I had to take a break, briefly saw a psychiatrist but I did not take the medicine and get back to life with a renewed attitude. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the celebrity demise of people like Robin Williams, not everybody is able to cope with it. In addition, perhaps with age, the ability to cope with it diminishes. I am not sure-perhaps.

Back home in India, the suicide of Jiah Khan shocked everyone. The declaration by Deepika Padukone surprised people.

Depression, they say is a reality in today’s life. There is no reason why it should be a reality of our lives. Psychiatrists will put you on sedatives and you will be sleeping wondering what has gone wrong with you. It is an escapist form of curing a problem, which needs a lifestyle cure.

There is something wrong that we must be doing to cause it. There is no one thing. It is a multitude of negative factors, which lead to an avalanche of negative thinking which makes people feel depressed and in the need of medical advice.

What should we do to fight depression and clinical depression?

There are fundamental issues of existence at sake. We cannot be living a life, which feels empty on the inside. We cannot be competing or comparing our lives and our worth from what others think of us and we must build health relationships out of love.

I am no authority on a happy life, yet. However, I would like to put down a few things we could perhaps do, in order to make our lives a happy one and not have the need to visit a psychiatrist-ever.

Have a purpose

Most of us live reproductive lives and that is the only purpose of their lives. They want to find a job-any job and then find a partner-any partner and then raise kids with that partner.

Now, there are many things fundamentally wrong with this kind of existence. Your life is only limited to your family. This means that you have no objective but to see your kids growing up and then seeing their kids growing up. This puts a lot of pressure on the lives of your kids, since you are drawing your happiness from what they do, not what you do.

Find a purpose beyond raising a family.

Find your passion

There has to be something that fires you up to get up in the middle of the night and get working. Can you not just brood over your school and college life and think of things you would just do free?

All of us must find a passion, which defines who we are. I am passionate about writing and stage. I quit my job recently to try to create a life out of my passion. You have to find a passion and find work, which connects you with your passion. No, I have not succeeded yet but I am much happier doing the work that I have done this year but that is a subject for another post.

Find your passion. Work that we do not find rewarding drains the life out of us, every single day.

Let love drive your relationships

I am not married and do not know when I will tie the proverbial knot. However, I have been in relationships. Having said that, our personal life is an extremely important part of our lives and forms the backbone of our lives.

Love makes us strong and strong relationships give us the power to face the challenges of life. A lot of us are in relationships, which suck. Arranged marriage is a terrible institution and neither the name nor the form this institution exist should exist in a healthy human society. If you find love in an arranged marriage, good for you. When love knocks the door, open it.

Walk out of unhappy relationships. It is not good for your kids to see their parents after each other’s neck. May be, you will find a happy relationship, may be, you will not. However, it will be better than being in a painful relationship.

Stay physically active to fight clinical depression

One of the reasons I think I got depressed is because I stopped exercising and taking care of myself.

Our minds and body are interdependent and the soul, if you must call it, is the entire being. If the body suffers, the mind suffers and the other way round. Work hard on keeping fit. Fitness is a state of physical and mental well being.

Work hard and find time to reward yourself

You like going to spas. I do. Work hard on your passion and as I said above, only do the work that excites you. Excel sheets should be left for accountants and quantitative experts who get orgasmic at pivot tables and macro charts.

There should be multiple sources of orgasms and your work should be one of your sources. Work hard and enjoy hard. I do not want to get into hardness any further.

Be grateful

Do not compare your life to that of others. If nature wanted us to live similar lives, then why would we be different people? You get the point. Be grateful for your life. The fact that you can read this means you have the benefit of a good education, access to a computer, have a roof on your head and umpteen things to be grateful about.

Be grateful for this life and accept that it gives you with humility, always with humility.

I think I am at the end of my list and this piece has turned out to be much longer than I had anticipated.

I want people to be happy and I want to be happy. There is no reason why you need to feel sad when there is so much to feel grateful and happy about.

Carpe Diem.

You should see a psychiatrist when all of this fails and you find yourself in a hole that you can’t get out of. If nothing works, and you still find yourself in a hole, you may need medical help.

I wish you well-hope that you recover and find your happiness again.

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani