Bright wanted a discussion about mental health and these struggles so I am posting everything that worked for my negative moods, many of them caused by bipolar disorder. I listed what worked in my experience but different things work for different people. Journaling and behavioral activation which I am going to write about came from education outside of GYE.
The negative emotions for which I am going to write solutions that worked for me are depression, anxiety, anger, stress, fatigue, and boredom.
1. For stress, exercise and socialization helped. A third thing that helped me a lot was behavioral activation. I made a list of all the possible things I can do in my free time. I made the list as long as possible, and I write everything I can think about regardless of whether it is something that I will really do in the end and regardless of whether I think they can be effective. Afterwards I choose 2-3 things from the list that I love to do the most. I keep a journal of my mood for every hour of the day which includes my specific mood from the emotion-wheel on the Flight to Freedom program and its intensity from 1-10.
I investigate by doing these activities while writing down my mood also in the hours before and after doing these activities. I do these activities a few times regardless of whether they made me feel better or not. After doing them a few times I check whether my mood became better after doing them. In the beginning it can sometimes only be a subtle difference. If they made my mood better, I continue doing them and if not, I replace them for other activities on my list. It is important to be an investigator because when someone has clinical depression it makes him feel that there is no way out of it and his efforts are futile. Therefore, simply investigating as opposed to testing and proving is the way to go.
Eventually you will find a number of activities that you enjoy. Keep doing them and eventually you won’t be depressed. I used this technique for clinical depression and it worked. The way it works is because people who are depressed generally withdraw from society and regular functioning which feeds the depression which causes more withdrawal and they are in a depression loop. Behavioral activation gives a person a positive feeling which triggers more behavioral activation which triggers more positive feelings.
Very often at the beginning you have to force yourself to do these activities and it may even feel like they will make your mood worse. The real measure is how you feel after doing these activities a few times and not how you feel before doing them or after doing them once.
It is important not to do these activities instead of your regular daily functioning like work, learning and davening but rather do them in your free time. I am writing this because these activities made me feel so good that I lost some of my interest in working.
2. For anxiety, exercise and Urge Surfing help. A third thing that helps is journaling. There are two types of journaling that I do. One is when I have severe anxiety sometimes to the point that I am about to have a panic attack. I don’t have the composure to process anything. I write down what happened and all of my raw emotions exactly as they are with all their severity without leaving out any details. This can lower my anxiety from level 9 which is just below a panic attack to level 2-3.
There is another type of journaling which I do when I have mild to moderate anxiety where it isn’t as severe and I am able to process my emotions. I journal what happened including my emotions and then I use CBT to look at what happened objectively from the outside how it would look to someone else who doesn’t have the negios that I have and how other people involved experienced what happened including their personality and psyche and how they deal with what happened. For those who aren’t familiar with CBT, you can learn about it on the Flight to Freedom program. Essentially what I do with CBT is equivalent to what my therapist would have done in a therapy session.
3. For anger, exercise, Urge Surfing and journaling helped. My anxiety and anger were often intertwined because when I had anxiety it would usually trigger people around me which led to anger.
4. For stress, exercise, discussing it with someone and Urge Surfing helped. I have had to use Urge Surfing a few times a week for this.
5. For boredom, escape, and distract helped. Sometimes all I need was to leave the house and I would figure out what I was going to do once I was in the street. I usually either went to shul or to visit a relative. At other times finding something that I enjoyed doing helped a lot.
6. For fatigue, Stop, Distract and SOBER worked. SOBER is good for fatigue because it is short.
Nowadays, I don't usually have negative moods anymore but this only happened after going through an intermediate period since joining GYE of doing these exercises faithfully. I haven't had clinical depression since joining GYE and the things I wrote for depression were done before this period.
.