How to Motivate Yourself When You’re Depressed

Depression is a dulling enemy that sucks your soul of energy and drains motivation from your veins. Depression constantly lies to you. It tells you that you are of no value, what you contribute does more harm than good, and that you’re a burden to others. Depression tries to convince you that if you are mad at yourself or harm yourself, you are demonstrating to others that you know just how much of a burden you are. It convinces you that you deserve to succumb to its abyss, others know that you deserve to succumb to the darkness, and allowing yourself to fall is the only way to not hurt yourself or others further.

The way to overcome depression is to do the opposite of what it tells you to do. To overcome depression, a person needs to put themselves out in the open, try to help others, move forward with dreams, exercise, eat healthy, talk to friends, be with family, complete daily chores, and overcome challenges. All of the things that need to be done requires energy and depression sucks energy out of the soul.

Overcoming or succumbing to depression is the result of increasing or decreasing energy. Everything that a person needs to do in order to overcome depression are activities that generate energy once they have been completed. An increase in depression often results from the absence of energy generating activities plus the addition of energy draining activities. These energy draining activities can include, being overwhelmed with stressors, unhealthy eating, poor sleep habits, and constant negative rumination.

When the body is full of energy, everything in life looks easy and doable. Large tasks suddenly appear conquerable. When the body is depleted of energy, everything looks impossible. Small tasks suddenly look very difficult. An increase in energy results in people feeling more motivated to do tasks. A decrease in energy results in people feeling very unmotivated to do tasks.

When people are depressed, their energy is already depleted. They feel unmotivated. A feeling of motivation will not come until after energy has been increased. The problem is that energy generating tasks require a person to invest a large amount of energy into the onset of the task.  The payout of increased energy does not often generate until after the task has been completed.

The key to becoming motivated to do the energy generating tasks is to do them. A person has to first, do the tasks consistently without the motivation or the energy to do them. The person does not have to do the tasks for very long, just consistently. The consistent, short term effort, will result in consistent increases in energy. This consistent increase in energy will result in a feeling of motivation to do more of the things that are healthy and energy generating. In essence, in order to get motivation, a person has to first do the positive tasks. The motivation and energy to do them more will occur as the result of the fruit of the tasks.