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Reply to "Managing depression/anxiety without meds - what helped you? "
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[quote=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.[/quote]
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