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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1946 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 3, 2026

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Perhaps not a small question, but I'm curious if folks here have dealt with depression/anxiety and if so, how have they turned it around or alleviated symptoms?

Looking mostly for success stories.

I appreciate that some of the below may seem obvious to the point of coming off as condescending, but the reason obvious advice is seen as obvious is because so much of the time it really works. I will be limiting myself to lifestyle choices you can do yourself without interacting with a healthcare professional or therapist. Ranked in order from most to least importance/effectiveness/relevance:

  1. Don't self-medicate: Alcohol, weed, whatever. All of it has to go. If you're already drinking so much that going cold turkey would trigger DTs, then you'll have to wean yourself off it slowly; if not, then you must stop drinking completely, immediately. Not even a glass of wine with dinner "for the antioxidants". If you have any drink in the house, pour it down the sink today. If you have weed in the house, destroy it. Don't give it to a friend to hang on to until you think you're in a better headspace: destroy it.
  2. Intense cardio exercise: By far the single most effective antidepressant I've ever tried, and I've tried many. I only got into running during Covid, and after a few weeks I found that going for a run (>=5k, or 3 miles) several times a week did wonders for my mood and energy levels. Having struggled with depressive episodes for many years, I was kicking myself for not trying this one sooner. But if you're going to try this, take it seriously and invest in a proper pair of running shoes and synthetic socks (the latter may not seem as important: believe me, it is, perhaps even more important than running shoes if you want to avoid nasty blisters). It may be a few weeks before you start to notice any change: give it time. (The last sentence applies to everything.) Regular cardio exercise will also help you to fall asleep more easily (see point #4).
  3. Eat, but don't eat shit: Some depressives lose their appetite; others eat their feelings. (I fall into the latter camp.) If you're in the former, you must make yourself eat even if you don't want to, so set alarms on your phone reminding yourself to eat at regular intervals. If you're in the latter camp, resist the temptation to eat shitty fast food/junk food: in addition to being bad for your body, you'll experience a comedown when the sugar rush wears off which will make you feel even worse than you did before you started eating. Conveniently, the solution to both "not eating" and "eating like shit" is the same: stock your kitchen with nourishing, healthy snacks that require minimal preparation (so you won't have the excuse of "I'm too tired to cook, I'll just [order a pizza]/[eat nothing]"): as Scott notes (Ctrl-F "2.1.2"), nuts are particularly well-suited to this purpose. Go to the supermarket and buy a few different kinds of nuts and several kinds of fruit. When you feel up to cooking again, eat plenty of green vegetables. Cut out junk food entirely: no ice cream, frozen pizza, chicken nuggets, fizzy drinks (incl. energy drinks). If you must drink caffeine, tea or coffee without sugar.
  4. Stick to a regular sleep schedule: When you're depressed, all you want to do is lie in bed all day and take endless naps. Force yourself not to. Don't drink any caffeine after noon. Stay awake till nine PM, at which point you put your phone away and don't look at it until the following morning (disable Wi-Fi and mobile data so you won't receive notifications). From nine–ten PM, read a physical book, not a Kindle or e-reader. You will probably not be in the mood to read a book, and derive no enjoyment from doing so: do it anyway. At ten PM, close your book and try to sleep. Stay in bed with the lights off until your alarm goes off. If you wake in the night (or can't get to sleep in the first place), resist the temptation to look at your phone, not even for "five minutes". Ideally, use a dedicated alarm clock so that you can leave your phone in another room, or at least out of reach of your bed. Even if you have trouble falling asleep, sticking to this routine will make your body associate the period 10 PM–7 AM with darkness and restfulness, so that when the insomnia passes you'll be out like a light.
  5. Minimise your phone usage: Once a day, go for a walk for at least an hour. Don't bring your phone with you. "But I need Google Maps to find my way—" you'll find your way home. Leave your phone at home.
  6. Socialise: My mother is significantly more introverted than I am and prefers to work remotely as much as possible. Nonetheless, she compared going into the office with working out: she dreads doing it, but never regrets having done so afterwards. No matter how introverted you are, or how much you "hate people", human beings are social animals, and there's a very good reason why solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment. We are meant to socialise, not just with the handful of people we call our loved ones, but with people we don't know very well, people we hardly recognise, people we actively dislike. The modern world makes it far too easy to isolate oneself, and just about anything you want can be ordered to your home without leaving the comfort of your bed. You must fight back against the luxuries. Don't apply for fully remote jobs. If you have a hybrid job and your boss says you only have to come in one day a week, make yourself go in two days a week; if he says two, do three. You won't want to do this, and you'll feel exhausted by the end of your morning commute, and you'll be dreading going in the night before. Do it anyway. It's no accident that the worst period of most people's lives in the last few years (including mine) was Covid. People told themselves that the reason Covid sucked was because they couldn't spend time with their friends and loved ones, and they couldn't go to gigs, and they couldn't go to the cinema. All of that is true: and yet, not going into the office and spending time with your colleagues (even your annoying colleague who types too loudly and chews with his mouth open) also had a negative impact on our moods and quality of life, even if it didn't feel like that, even if we told ourselves that fully remote working was the one silver lining to this awful cloud. It's not psychologically healthy to roll out of bed at 8:59 AM; it's not psychologically healthy to have nothing preventing you taking three naps a day (or more); it's not psychologically healthy to be able to crack open a beer at 5 PM on the dot, every day. There are people for whom Covid lockdowns and attendant fully remote working had no material impact on their lifestyles and quality of life. These are not psychologically healthy people.
  7. Don't use social media: I feel like this one is self-explanatory, but it would be remiss of me not to include it. Uninstall Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. from your phone. If you have friends you keep in touch with via any of these platforms, get their phone numbers so you can keep in touch via WhatsApp or similar. If you have an Android phone, uninstalling YouTube is a bit circuitous and you have to enable developer mode: do it, it's worth it. By "social media", I'm including LinkedIn: if you're looking for a job, then depending on the industry LinkedIn may be pretty much unavoidable, but at least limit your usage of it to your computer browser, and don't install the app on your phone. ("What if I get a message from a recruiter when I'm out, and I don't see it until I get home?" – an hour's delay in responding to a message is not going to make or break you landing your dream job. You know it, I know it, let's not kid ourselves.) The Motte doesn't have many of the worst features of social media, but it has enough of them that requesting the mods to temporarily ban you for a few weeks couldn't hurt.
  8. Don't watch porn: Some depressives lose their sex drive, some don't. If you're in the latter camp, don't watch porn. It will make you feel worse in the long run.
  9. Don't read the news: I don't care if you think you need to in order to stay informed on current affairs, or if you think your depression is an entirely logical reaction to how awful and unjust the world is (admittedly, the latter rationalisation is more common among left-leaning people than the kind of user who tends to frequent this space, but it's easy to unintentionally blackpill yourself). Don't read national or international news of any kind. Local news printed in an actual newspaper is probably okay, but if you want to read something, your first port of call should be a fictional book. When you're depressed, no hypothetical situation exists in which reading the news will improve your mood.
  10. Don't overthink: There was a period during Covid in which I was routinely self-administering depression questionnaires to myself (I'm not going to tell you what they're called, because then you'll start doing the same thing). It will come as no surprise to you that constantly asking myself "Am I depressed?" inevitably made me feel more depressed and anxious than I would have otherwise. The goal is not for you to wake up one morning and think "I don't feel depressed anymore": the goal is for you to wake up one morning and think "today I need to do X before lunch and then I have Y after lunch and I mustn't forget to do Z in the evening". Your mood shouldn't be something that you're consciously aware of: constantly asking yourself if you feel good or bad is a recipe for making yourself feel bad.

I have not followed all of the above advice consistently: I still drink too much, I still eat too much fast/junk food, my sleep schedule is far from consistent, I spend far too much time looking at my phone (including social media) and so on and so forth. But even following some of the above advice some of the time, my mood, energy levels and so on are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were during Covid, which in turn were leaps and bounds ahead of my worst depressive periods in 2015-17. For large chunks of the latter period, I was drinking too much, eating mountains of shitty fast food, never exercising, staring at my phone for hours, smoking weed several times a week, watching too much porn, taking naps whenever I could and shutting myself off from the outside world – and this was while taking antidepressants (in addition to antipsychotics, some of the time). We can play the chicken-and-egg game all we like, but what would it accomplish? Even if doing these things didn't make me depressed, I have little doubt that they exacerbated my depression. I still have days where I feel down, but they're nowhere near as bad as my worst days.

[This concludes the "advice" portion of my comment.]

To get philosophical for a minute: there are many people in the West who purport not to be religious, who purport not to believe in souls or Heaven or Hell or the rest of it – and yet many of these people still reflexively, unthinkingly adopt a worldview which is implicitly dualist. This comes out in many forms (per my recurrent hobby horse, "I don't believe in souls, I just believe that everyone has an innate gender identity unrelated to their physical sex and knowable only to themselves"), but perhaps the most common is a conception of mental health as something wholly uncoupled from their bodies and what goes into (and out of) them; mental illness as a disease of the mind, not a disease of the body. But we don't have minds: we have brains, and every mental sensation we feel is ultimately a set of neurons firing inside them. It therefore follows that all of our moods (incl. mood disorders) are ultimately products of i) our underlying neural architecture; ii) the mechanical processes our bodies undergo (digestion, hydration, cardiac exercise etc.) and iii) the sensory stimuli we experience*. Small children have to consciously learn the causal relationship between eating and needing to defecate the following day; even many adults don't drink enough water and wonder why they have headaches and feel nauseated all the time. And a great many adults have this implicitly dualistic conception of moods as things that just happen, independent of ii) and iii) above. (The more scientifically literate will simply overweight the role of i) while downplaying ii) and iii) to the point of complete negligence, insisting that their propensity for negative moods is just "how they're wired" or a "chemical imbalance".)

What all of my recommendations have in common is that they are designed to force you to recognise the importance of ii) and iii) in determining your moods. Scrolling on Instagram and watching porn will make you feel worse, regardless of your underlying neural architecture; eating healthy food and exercising will make you feel better. It is incredibly easy to rationalise away your depression as solely the product of i) and deny utterly the role that ii) and iii) play in determining it. I know a girl who has been diagnosed with depression and is taking antidepressants. What kind of lifestyle does she lead?

  • She doesn't have a job (her parents pay for everything) and hence has no responsibilities to speak of
  • She's in college but could hardly be said to be actively applying herself, and routinely sleeps in late and misses her classes
  • She doesn't appear to know how to cook, and eats shitty fast food for every meal
  • She never exercises, and with her slowing metabolism the latter two points are starting to become obvious
  • She drinks too often, and too much
  • She stays up late every night and sleeps in the next morning
  • She never reads books, and spends hours watching Netflix or scrolling on her phone
  • She doesn't have a boyfriend, but will often go to the pub, get drunk and let some man take her home and have his way with her, never to hear from him again

Is she "here for a good time, not for a long time"? No – every time I see her she moans about how depressed she is. Gee, I wonder why?

Sometimes this failure to draw reasonable causal inferences is the result of denial or motivated reasoning (e.g. the alcoholic who pretends not to know why he always feels depressed the morning after going on the piss) – but in other cases, people appear to have so totally internalised the idea of "mental health" as something distinct from "physical health" that they simply don't recognise a connection between the things they do and how they feel: bad moods just happen to them, for no reason. This was made most apparent to me in Theodore Darlymple's magisterial piece "The Rush from Judgement", which ought to be required reading for every would-be doctor, therapist or social welfare: so many of Darlymple's patients appeared to believe that they felt depressed because they suffered from a medical disorder, and simply failed to join the dots with the fact that their lives were depressing (as @self_made_human calls it, Shit Life Syndrome): if you don't have a job, are dependent on the state for everything, have no interests beyond watching TV or going to the pub, are in a relationship with a man who doesn't respect you and who hits you – is it any wonder you feel miserable all the time? Moreover, Darlymple prescribing these women antidepressants would not come close to addressing the root cause of said misery. If they wanted to not feel like shit all the time, they had to change their lifestyles – they had to change ii) and iii).

Darlymple's patients are extreme cases, but that failure-to-join-the-dots, that conception of bad moods and negative thoughts as things that just come upon you for no reason in particular (as opposed to the inevitable outcome of the mechanical processes your body undergoes, the sensory stimuli you take in and your underlying neural architecture) is something that afflicts even the educated and gainfully employed. I very much doubt Phoebe O'Brien attributes any of her negative emotions to the fact that she spends hours every day staring at her phone – it must be the "rise of the far-right" that's got her feeling down. Yeah, sure.

To clarify: am I saying that everyone who eats right, gets enough exercise, sticks to a proper sleep schedule and uninstalls Instagram will feel pretty much okay most of the time? No – I'm not denying that one's underlying neural architecture plays a role in one's mood, merely arguing that people overweight it relative to the other factors. And I'm sure someone will have a counter-example of a high-earning CEO who ran five miles every day, stuck to his macros, was 100% teetotal and still killed himself. But these counter-examples inevitably remind me of the obese people who talk about how Dr. So-and-So completely overlooked that Patient Such-and-Such had a tumour because they were convinced that Such-and-Such's health problems were caused solely by his weight. Mistakes can happen, on the margin, but the existence of people who eat right, get enough exercise, don't use social media and still feel depressed should not blind us to the fact that the average person doesn't eat right, doesn't get enough exercise and uses social media too much, and that most people would feel happier if they improved their diet, exercised more and used social media less.

*Really a subset of ii), but it's such an abstract framing that it's easier to understand if you uncouple them. "I saw a photo of an OnlyFans model on Instagram, which caused neurons to fire in my brain and in turn triggered a surge of blood into my penis resulting in an erection" is hardly an intuitive way to frame that sequence of events, even if it's literally true. It's mechanical processes all the way down.

It's kind of sad that the socialization part is both maybe the most important of these and the one least solvable just by you acting in a disciplined and regimented way yourself. If the people around you aren't your people and they don't care about things that you care about and you don't care about things they care about and every time socialization happens it's around things they care about and you don't, at some point you just become too tired and stop going.

Good post, even if I studiously ignore most of the lifestyle advice for myself. For what it's worth, the antidepressant effects of exercise are significant (g of - 0.63 when walking briskly, which compares favorably to both CBT and most antidepressant drugs). Even better, you can capture the majority of the benefit with about 2.5 hours of brisk walking a week. I knew that living so far from the bus stop was doing something for me, that isn't just wearing out my shoes.*

*I don't think it did anything for me, but defer to RCTs over the anecdotes of a very lazy man

I don't think it did anything for me, but defer to RCTs over the anecdotes of a very lazy man

To be fair, it could both do nothing for you and also be very effective for the average person. Now you can claim hipster points for not being like the great unwashed masses.

To be fair, it could both do nothing for you and also be very effective for the average person.

And that is precisely what I said, so I'm not sure what your point is. I'd rather have had bog-standard uncool depression instead.

I was trying to make a joke, since you said you defer to the RCTs as correct over your own experience. But whatevs, joke didn't land I guess.

Sorry dude, I'm the one who is very sleep deprived. Not your fault, and looking at it with a coffee in me, I understand the riff.

Don't self-medicate: Alcohol, weed, whatever. All of it has to go. If you're already drinking so much that going cold turkey would trigger DTs, then you'll have to wean yourself off it slowly; if not, then you must stop drinking completely, immediately. Not even a glass of wine with dinner "for the antioxidants". If you have any drink in the house, pour it down the sink today. If you have weed in the house, destroy it. Don't give it to a friend to hang on to until you think you're in a better headspace: destroy it.

Interesting! I have had substance issues in the past but feel I'm in a decent spot now... albeit I do drink a tad more than I'd like. Why so teetotaling here?

Luckily am already doing a good bit of these... the biggest ones I struggle with are diet, and overthinking. Good advice overall. I appreciate the detailed overview, definitely highlights some areas where I could be doing more.

I tend to think that it ties in with the Socialization point. Drinking at home alone is generally pretty bad for your mental state in my opinion, and ditto any other drugs. I would even agree with pouring out any alcohol you have at home. Drinking with a bunch of friends or at a bar is mostly pretty good, presuming you are capable of not overdoing it. Even going to a decent bar by yourself, where you are getting out of the house, and maybe have the opportunity to chat a little bit with a bartender or some other customers, or maybe possibly even make a friend or two, overrides the negative effect of the drinks and even of some not super great food.

I'm not sure where it belongs on an ordered list, but I think there should also be a point for taking care of yourself and your spaces. I mean like, take a shower every day, shave, trim nails, get regular haircuts, any other standard grooming tasks that apply, put on fresh clean clothes every day, that are in good condition, no holes or stains or whatever. Do it every day, no matter what, whether or not you're feeling great or planning on going anywhere. If you don't have any decent clothes, go buy some. Do laundry and wash the dishes regularly too. Whatever space you live in, vacuum, mop, dust, scrub, and otherwise tidy up regularly. Not necessarily every day or perfectly, but don't let anything get too dirty. Make your bed every day, put away dirty laundry, clean up half-finished projects, etc. Fix any broken stuff around the house too. Generally take care of everything along those lines. This creates a reasonably nice and clean space you can take a little pride in all the time. It helps you see and feel that you're not completely falling apart. It's nice, positive work to do that keeps your mind off of all of the negative influences listed above. And if you get a unexpected urge or invitation to go out and do something, or have friends or family over, you don't have the automatic excuse of looking like a slob or your place being a disaster area, you can just do it.

Drinking with a bunch of friends or at a bar is mostly pretty good, presuming you are capable of not overdoing it. Even going to a decent bar by yourself, where you are getting out of the house, and maybe have the opportunity to chat a little bit with a bartender or some other customers, or maybe possibly even make a friend or two, overrides the negative effect of the drinks and even of some not super great food.

Better still would be to go to the bar but stick to non-alcoholic beers, but I agree that the benefits of socialising with your friends would probably outweight the costs of drinking a few alcoholic beverages.

Your latter paragraph is so important and I'm kicking myself for not including it in my original comment. Forcing yourself to take a shower, comb your hair and brush your teeth is absolutely vital for pulling yourself out of a slump, as is keeping your living space clean and tidy.

Why so teetotaling here?

"Not drinking" makes for a good Schelling point. Notorious alcoholic and drug addict Matthew Perry (RIP) claimed that he can choose whether or not to have the first drink, but having had the first drink, every subsequent drink is entirely out of his hands. I don't believe this and agree with his interlocutor that he does have a choice about whether to drink the subsequent drinks: as Bryan Caplan would say, if Perry had one beer, and somebody put a gun to his head and told him they'd shoot him if he had another one, I'm sure he could summon the willpower to stop there. But that preamble aside, for most people, if you have one drink, the temptation to have another will be much greater compared to if you didn't have any. And two drinks turns into three, three turns into four, and before you know it it's the following morning and you're feeling like shit, much worse than you felt before you started drinking. Hence, the most effective way to prevent yourself from drinking to excess is simply not to start drinking in the first place, and not trusting yourself to have the self-control to only drink in moderation.

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