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Out of everything, meditating is likely going to be the key to unlocking the capability to accomplish your other goals.

The reason I suggest this is because it is a good intro habit to help you establish other habits, its free, and it is an innate human capability you can learn to tap into at any time. The other thing is it will help curb your anxiety, and thinking processes to help calm you down so you don't get stuck in circular thinking and enable you to be able to focus on tasks that you desire to accomplish.

Much like you, I had a hard time getting out of bed and doing things when I first wake up. Then by the time I did get out of bed, I was so anxious and miserable from all my circular thinking just laying there, sometimes for hours, that all my energy was zapped and I had no desire to do anything really. So that's why I started meditating every morning, there are hundreds of free meditations on Youtube, and free apps, although I used Headspace which is a paid app (although the initial program is free).

What this does is it prevents you from getting stuck in that cycle, and gives your brain and body a chance to relax before you confront the day. The key to meditation is you're actually teaching yourself to relax, its like creating a muscle memory for relaxation but you have to practice daily or it isn't as effective.

What I recommend is starting with 10 minutes every morning when you first wake up. Try guided, or whatever works for you. The goal here isn't to stop thinking, no one can stop thinking. If someone had figured out a way to stop thinking then we'd all be doing it all the time, so instead what you need to do is learn is how to let go of your thoughts, and change your relationship with them.

Accept that you're going to think, and not allow every thought to pass through your brain to have meaning or purpose, because most of them don't. I can't tell you have many silly, depressive, or pointless thoughts I've had in my life, and for years I paid attention to all of them as if they were the absolutely truth, but the reality was none of them had any meaning. I simply had a poor relationship with them and gave them attention they didn't deserve. Now when I start thinking circularly I just recognize that is what I'm doing (its taken years of training and I still do it sometimes), focus on my breathing, and move on with my day and get back to my goals.

See if you can go 7 days in a row, and then try another 7, and maybe try bumping to 15 minutes, and eventually 20 over time.

There's a good book on this subject, honestly its a bit dry but the lessons in it are good. The author has also done a TedTalk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4w3W94ygA

https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Way-Through-Depression-Unhappiness/dp/1593851286?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Start with meditation, improve your diet, and perhaps start a mood journal or use a mood tracking app so you can see the impact meditation and eating better has on your life. There's nothing more convincing then data from yourself to continue to motivate yourself to keep doing something.

P.S. For healthy food - I use a farm to delivery service. I never go to the grocery store, I just have my groceries delivered 1-2 times a week so I always have fresh food. Its actually cheaper then going to the store, and I just order the same thing every week.

You might like to take a look at Stoicism Joanna. Not the tough action hero stoic who endures what ever is thrown at him to get things done but the Greco-Roman Stoic philosophy for life that is the foundation of modern *BT therapies.

Two books that you might like to take a look at are Happy by Derren Brown and Stocisim and the Art of Happiness by Donald Robertson Its probably better to start with secondary sources than the original greek or roman texts. You can get Meditations by Marcus Aurelius for the Enchiridion of Epictetus for free on line when you want to delve deeper.

> Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

Marcus Aurelius

> The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

Marcus Aurelius

> Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Epictetus

This book with the cringey title Born to Win is the best DIY therapy I've found--it is a participatory self-help journey. You can't just read it, you must do the questions at the end of each chapter.

http://amzn.com/0201590441

They force you to open up the childhood vaults, face things you don't want to face, but always with a feeling like you're making progress on each issue as an adult. All the uncomfortable feelings seem like they're adding up to something.

It combines Transactional Analysis theory but doesn't fall into the intellectual rabbit holes that other famous books do. It's the second part that makes it work, applying the learning with Gestalt exercises (lots of imagining stuff and talking in your head to versions of yourself)

Somehow it feels like no matter how fucked up you are or why it happened, you can start the healing process of becoming the adult you want to be, that those decisions and capabilities are inside you.

It's very sobering, and feels self-help in the 'it's your responsibility to heal yourself' without fake promises of happiness or anything else. It'll help you see at your talents and limitations and the world as it is, and the tendency to want to despair and hide from it.

It is also one of the books that reddit people might get defensive about since fundamentally it believes depression, anxiety, and lots of mental suffering are a shutting down or broken coping mechanism of childhood patterns that backfire on us as adults. Therefore the people who hold on to the 'my brain chemistry dopamine system is fucked and always will be' might get defensive. The book has a very calm and reasonable tone about the depression life-script we cling to, no different than seeing yourself as an alcoholic or constant victim or whatever. It's one way to live, and it may be possible to slowly choose other ways.

My personal plan of attack? Get the book and do a chapter a week, get outside and exercise each week, and if you can afford it get a therapist to practice and reinforce emotional changes once a week.


---Watch this series of 3 pretty neat intro videos to get the conceptual part of the theory down.

part 1 is here https://youtu.be/nKNyFSLJy6o

Like most psychology trends, it's just one version of understanding parts of the subconscious--don't question it too much. Lots of frameworks use different words for the same stuff. This is supposed to be emotional work, not science.

---If what you saw seems promising or interesting to you, get the book. DO NOT order the other more famous books on transactional analysis or other frameworks-- The point is not to become some expert on yet another mumbo-jumbo theory. You don't need it, and you'll overload / sabotage yourself--Theory is simply a TOOL.

--get a plain notebook and a pen. You will be writing out the answers to the many many questions in the book. It needs to be private as hell and a scribble fest. The questions are the the most important part. If you are willing to pay a professional $50 bucks an hour to talk to, you owe it to yourself to spend an hour (or five or however many it takes) by yourself to do the prep work. Almost all modern schools of therapy work in the 'here and now' and the content of what you talk about on the couch is increasingly irrelevant to how therapy actually helps people (fixing your ability to form attachments and feel your own emotions instead of using bad habits to run from them). It's your goddamn life, if your therapist is working harder than you are at your healing, you're going to have a bad time....

--Additional mental exercise that's been super helpful: Find one or two childhood photos of yourself, hard copy if possible. You should be carrying this around secretly all the time. You need to imagine your kid self as not a vague 'inner child' idea but as a very specific ghost-child only you can see and must comfort and protect and 're-parent'. Every time you are despairing and suffering in your day or can't get yourself out of bed or whatever, you must actively imagine the innocent-kid-you snuggling up or reaching for hugs, scared and seeking comfort. Wherever you are at, just imagine little-you right there, pulling at your shirt or blanket for cuddles. You are a broken adult because different parts of the world neglected, ignored, and/or hurt this kid in ways that may or may not be clear, but you are not going to let that happen again. All the kid needs is comfort and love and soothing hugs, so you imagine giving that and saying what the kid needs to hear. Somehow this mental exercise gives me the strength to activate my own best self, like 'this kid needs me' in a way that doesn't work when I'm trying to motivate myself for my own good. (the ghost-kid must be little innocent 5 year old toddler you, no matter what mixed self-loathing feelings you have about yourself. Wont work if you imagine a vague child-as-idea or your actual children. That's why you need the photo to remind you)

Thanks for the read. I have been feeling especially overwhelmed lately at work. I snapped at two coworkers yesterday in separate incidents. I owe an apology to one of them today. The other, I do not.

I think that setting up small goals is really the best way to live. I was reading in a book about writing recently called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It said something along the lines of "the best instructions for writing, and living life, are to do both like you are driving at night. You don't need to see more than a few feet ahead of you to make the whole journey."

Yes, as a matter of fact. I've read Molecules of Emotion twice. It's fascinating stuff.

I LOVE these wireless Bluetooth boys — they stay put in my ears, there are buttons to play/pause, skip, adjust volume, answer calls, etc., and they are somewhat noise cancelling PLUS they’re under $40! Oh and they’re not AirPods :)

(No I don’t work for this company I just stumbled on these browsing amazon high one day and they’re amazinggg)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L2NJKMK?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

> You can't cure it, only do things to ease it until it passes on its own

Good point. Sad feelings and thoughts are pretty normal human reactions to things you've gone through. Let yourself feel them without judgment and they'll lessen over time.

This isn't just my opinion, it's shared in this book. Don't be put off from the "mindfulness". The first half of the book is an expansion upon the point i made above, the second half is basic meditation practice (which I don't really do but still founds this book really interesting for the first half). There is no mystical-ness to this, one of the authors is a physician, another a psychologist.

Athlete's Way by Christopher Bergland is a good read.

They're called cognitive distortions (I see at least 3 of them in your post: jumping to conclusions, all-or-nothing thinking, and should statements) and a book called Feeling Good will teach you to overcome them.

Before Happiness by Shawn Achor

"The body keeps the score" by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466011790&sr=8-1&keywords=trauma

It's an interesting read about trauma (mostly in PTSD vets and victims of child abuse) but it still reflects a LOT on depression and the state of a depressive mind and ways to heal.
It's helped me, but i've also been traumatized.