Managing depression/anxiety without meds - what helped you?

[Anonymous]

ESMR therapy.

Revamping my diet - avoiding foods that trigger panic and anxiety and mood changes. Sought out help from a osteopath.

Taking magnesium. Approved via dr.

Exercising - specifically running! Also regularly practice yoga to keep my mind calm and my muscles loose. Tremendous help. I strive for 3 times a week yoga and almost daily cardio.


This is weird but I’ll pass it along anyway; I truly have migraines (rarely now since changing my diet) but I have found that if I’m having a rough time and highly anxious, I will openly tell people that I’m dealing with a migraine. This is a half truth because often I will get a panic attack pre or post migraine so I have to switch gears and take care of myself.
Just verbalizing that I’m struggling is a release valve of sorts and gives me not an excuse but frees me up from trying to “hold on” and pretend to be fine. In an emergency, I tell myself that if I have to leave suddenly, I’ll tell my boss it’s a migraine. Having this white lie at the ready makes me feel more in control and is soothing.

Also: I have a rx for Xanax to take in emergencies only. Just having this on me (and I keep exactly one in the rx bottle) and having this always with me helps psychologically. I tell myself that it’s there and relief will be there if I’m unable to circumvent a P-A otherwise.

[Anonymous]

And another thing: distraction!

I play scrabble, do crossword puzzles on my phone or even make elaborate written lists if I’m in an anxiety provoking situation like being on a plane or at a doctors office waiting room.

I’m at my best when I can actively engage myself or even be helpful to someone else, especially when I’m nervous. So, keep chatting. Get out of your head.

An as cold as you can stand it shower will stop a panic attack! Or even splashing cold water on your face. Unable to do this? Ice pack on the back of your neck for a few minutes will help. For me, getting as cold as possible (even shivering) brings relief.

Peppermint also helps. And ginger. I keep peppermint and ginger candies with me. Good to just raise your blood sugar.

I like to fall asleep to the drone of podcasts or talk radio. Again stops the spiral of intrusive thoughts.

[Anonymous]

I completely cut out alcohol. That was the single biggest factor.

[Anonymous]

I second the suggestion to cut back or eliminate alcohol. I used to drink almost every night. Now I have maybe half a beer or wine once a week or less. Alcohol or other mood-altering substances can really make it hard to modulate your mood. If you are prone to depression or anxiety and can't take an SSRI, being able to track and modulate your mood is really helpful. An SSRI can flatten or eliminate mood swings, which is part of why they are effective. But if you can find ways to do this on your own, you can often find a higher baseline than you would on an SSRI.

For reference, when I was on an SSRI, my anxiety disappeared and I stopped having deep depressive episodes. However, I still had my flat affect from my depression because I also just felt dulled in general. Even on a very low dose, the SSRIs would deaden my emotional response to things. So even though I was not depressed, it was hard to feel happy.

But by almost entirely eliminating alcohol and being very aware of sleep and exercise cycles, I have become pretty effective at modulating my own mood, but without that flattening effect of the SSRI. So for me, even though it is hard and entails sacrifice, treating my depression/anxiety without medication is really worth it. There is more joy in my life and once I figured out how to avoid the very low lows, the rest of it was manageable.

Though I should note I don't have any mania at all. I think this is much harder to do if you have bipolar depression. My mom is BPD and she has to be medicated because her highs are almost as bad as her lows in terms of emotional hangover and risk of negative behavior. But in her case, even on medication she struggles to regulate mood, whereas for me the medication made this really easy. So it can be very person dependent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My dh really seems to improve with regular salmon. I know that sounds weird but after I noticed it I googled it and there appears to be a correlation for depression at least.

Is it from omega-3??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I completely cut out alcohol. That was the single biggest factor.

Was just coming to say the same thing. Exercising definitely helps me too but this is the biggest.

[Anonymous]

DP. Can anyone else weigh in on diet and supplements? Personally don't drink and have increased exercise. Prob need to work on reducing caffeine and sleeping more. However, coffee is actually a bright spot in my day that I enjoy. I just wonder if it negatively affects mood regulation in the long run, somewhat similar to alcohol.

[Anonymous]

Buddhist-inspired philosophy. (I call it that because I don’t know enough about the religion itself to know whether it’s “really” Buddhism...) Try something by Pema Chodron and see if it speaks to you. Any local public library should have at least one of her books.

Everyone thinks of mindfulness with those books, and that’s definitely a big part of the philosophy, but personally it’s not the aspect that most speaks to me. What has been life-changing for me is a concept of flaws and difficulty being an inherent part of everything in life. Life became much easier to take once I started viewing the life challenges and difficult phases as natural and changeable rather than something I was responsible for fixing. There’s also a similar concept of just noticing and accepting unpleasant emotions and, essentially, lovingly waiting them out without letting them get to us so much.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DP. Can anyone else weigh in on diet and supplements? Personally don't drink and have increased exercise. Prob need to work on reducing caffeine and sleeping more. However, coffee is actually a bright spot in my day that I enjoy. I just wonder if it negatively affects mood regulation in the long run, somewhat similar to alcohol.

I think the caffeine question depends a LOT on the person -- people's reactions to caffeine vary widely, and there's a genetic componant to it. If it's working for you, I wouldn't change it. But regular sleep is really important for everyone.

There are studies indicating that omega-3s help with mood regulation, so it was something that our psychiatrist, who is usually not a big fan of the alternative medicines, did recommend. There's also some good evidence that the special lights help a lot of people, particularly in the winter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DP. Can anyone else weigh in on diet and supplements? Personally don't drink and have increased exercise. Prob need to work on reducing caffeine and sleeping more. However, coffee is actually a bright spot in my day that I enjoy. I just wonder if it negatively affects mood regulation in the long run, somewhat similar to alcohol.

PP. I've tried cutting out caffeine at various times in life and it had absolutely no effect on anxiety/mood ( or my BP, or anything at all that caffeine supposedly causes).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also had some very difficult experiences with side affects and just never found a medication combination that successfully addressed my depression/anxiety without seriously impacting my personality or ability to work and maintain relationships. Also had to taper off meds before trying to get pregnant and have never gone back on.

None of this is a perfect solution, and I do sometimes contemplating going back on medication. But I would say this manages my mental health about 85-90% of the time:

- Routines (making my bed everyday, meal planning, having a planner and sticking to it)
- Therapy and journaling. I don't go to therapy all the time, but will do a 12-week stint with my therapist when I feel a depressive episode coming on. I also journal a lot to practice what I work on in therapy, and find the practice of observing my depression and anxiety and recording it helps to mitigate it's effects. This is probably the single biggest "breakthrough" I've had in treatment -- that it is possible to detach from my depressive and anxious thought patterns by simply observing them.
- Caffeine, but controlled intake. I don't do highly caffeinated sources, but one caffeinated tea in the morning and a Coke in the afternoon, pretty much every day, helps modulate my moods which makes it much easier for me to tell the difference between my depression/anxiety symptoms and ordinary mood fluctuation.
- Online message boards like this one. You have to find the right ones and be careful about how you use them, but I have found them particularly helpful for talking through CBT or DBT methods that can help, or just talking through a particularly intense anxiety attack or depressive episode (i.e. if I wake up at 2am with intense anxiety, it can help to put a post on a message board for people who struggle with anxiety, just describing what's happening and asking for support). It genuinely helps me to feel less alone and has also helped me identify therapeutic methods that have helped me.

I do still have that 10-15% of the time where it does not feel well controlled. My therapist and I have been talking recently about how to create a kind of "emergency kit" for those times so that I know what to do. The good news is that it's mostly just anxiety, because they generally don't last long enough to qualify for a true depression event. I find anxiety more frightening but also more responsive to stuff like mindfulness training and meditation. And if I can control and mitigate the anxiety, the depression is less likely to set in.

I hope this is helpful.

This is really interesting to me, van you expand on what you mean by “it is possible to detach ... by observing them”. I’ve been really trying to be mindful of my typical anxious thinking and I think what you describe could be helpful to me. Thank you so much for sharing

PP here. It means getting to the point where, when I fall into a depressive or anxious though pattern, I have this other, concurrent though process that goes, “Oh, I see here that I am catastrophizing this situation with my family. It’s not surprising because my mom’s judgment is always pretty triggering of anxiety for me. It’s understandable that I’m upset, but I know from experience that blowing this into a big conflict in my mind will only make this worse. I think I’ll go write in my journal for 10 minutes to explain this to myself, and then go for a run to shake it off.”

It took a lot of time to get to that point (like years of both therapy and doing a lot of reading on my own about depressive and anxious though patterns, doing CBT on my own, learning meditation, etc.), but I basically built a little friend who lives in my head and has the distance to view the situation in a level headed way but also with the compassion and understanding you don’t always get from a friend/therapist/family member.

This voice in my head is how I assume non-depressed, non-anxious people think all the time. I’m not one of those people, so I jerry-rigged an imaginary one to my brain.

Not OP, but thank you for taking the time to explain. This is very helpful.

[Anonymous]

A daily, morning shower gets every day off to a great start.

Keeping the house clean, the laundry done & not having too much clutter.

Staying far away from toxic individuals and counting my blessings daily.

Keeping a gratitude journal also helps if you love to write.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My dh really seems to improve with regular salmon. I know that sounds weird but after I noticed it I googled it and there appears to be a correlation for depression at least.

Is it from omega-3??

I take daily omega supplements and eat salmon at least once a week. I do think it helps.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I also had some very difficult experiences with side affects and just never found a medication combination that successfully addressed my depression/anxiety without seriously impacting my personality or ability to work and maintain relationships. Also had to taper off meds before trying to get pregnant and have never gone back on.

None of this is a perfect solution, and I do sometimes contemplating going back on medication. But I would say this manages my mental health about 85-90% of the time:

- Routines (making my bed everyday, meal planning, having a planner and sticking to it)
- Therapy and journaling. I don't go to therapy all the time, but will do a 12-week stint with my therapist when I feel a depressive episode coming on. I also journal a lot to practice what I work on in therapy, and find the practice of observing my depression and anxiety and recording it helps to mitigate it's effects. This is probably the single biggest "breakthrough" I've had in treatment -- that it is possible to detach from my depressive and anxious thought patterns by simply observing them.
- Caffeine, but controlled intake. I don't do highly caffeinated sources, but one caffeinated tea in the morning and a Coke in the afternoon, pretty much every day, helps modulate my moods which makes it much easier for me to tell the difference between my depression/anxiety symptoms and ordinary mood fluctuation.
- Online message boards like this one. You have to find the right ones and be careful about how you use them, but I have found them particularly helpful for talking through CBT or DBT methods that can help, or just talking through a particularly intense anxiety attack or depressive episode (i.e. if I wake up at 2am with intense anxiety, it can help to put a post on a message board for people who struggle with anxiety, just describing what's happening and asking for support). It genuinely helps me to feel less alone and has also helped me identify therapeutic methods that have helped me.

I do still have that 10-15% of the time where it does not feel well controlled. My therapist and I have been talking recently about how to create a kind of "emergency kit" for those times so that I know what to do. The good news is that it's mostly just anxiety, because they generally don't last long enough to qualify for a true depression event. I find anxiety more frightening but also more responsive to stuff like mindfulness training and meditation. And if I can control and mitigate the anxiety, the depression is less likely to set in.

I hope this is helpful.

This is really interesting to me, van you expand on what you mean by “it is possible to detach ... by observing them”. I’ve been really trying to be mindful of my typical anxious thinking and I think what you describe could be helpful to me. Thank you so much for sharing

PP here. It means getting to the point where, when I fall into a depressive or anxious though pattern, I have this other, concurrent though process that goes, “Oh, I see here that I am catastrophizing this situation with my family. It’s not surprising because my mom’s judgment is always pretty triggering of anxiety for me. It’s understandable that I’m upset, but I know from experience that blowing this into a big conflict in my mind will only make this worse. I think I’ll go write in my journal for 10 minutes to explain this to myself, and then go for a run to shake it off.”

It took a lot of time to get to that point (like years of both therapy and doing a lot of reading on my own about depressive and anxious though patterns, doing CBT on my own, learning meditation, etc.), but I basically built a little friend who lives in my head and has the distance to view the situation in a level headed way but also with the compassion and understanding you don’t always get from a friend/therapist/family member.

This voice in my head is how I assume non-depressed, non-anxious people think all the time. I’m not one of those people, so I jerry-rigged an imaginary one to my brain.

Not OP, but thank you for taking the time to explain. This is very helpful.

+1 DP and agree this is very helpful. I have just started trying to journal my thoughts as my tendency is to always have something in my life which I am currently catastrophizing...

[Anonymous]

Lot of good things here.

I got an Oura ring to help track my HRV (heart rate variability) and sleeping. I made some changes from that.

I stopped drinking when I could see what it did to my sleep and HRV.

I use box breathing if I find my self having bouts of anxiety, to help with the distancing aspect and bring my body back to normal.

We eat fish at least once weekly.

I no longer guilt myself for watching shows, it is a distraction.

I set time on the weekends to tidy- I use Alexa to help, I feel better when my visual space is less cluttered.

I limit to one cup of coffee in the morning and have a cup of non-caffeinated tea after lunch.

I try to have some kind of exercise daily. This has been really hard since it’s been so cold, so I do more housework, cleaning, cooking. I bought a kick bike that I loved using in the fall, and am excited to get back outside when I feel warm enough.

Definitely vitamin D, and I also have some magnesium with it (natural calm). I also try to incorporate way more vegetables in our days than I used to, beyond peas and corn.