When you live with mental illness life is often very closed off. We isolate for various reasons. Sometimes it is because we do not feel up to engaging in activities. Sometimes people are so used to us canceling plans that they stop inviting us. Often, we mentally and physically cannot do things. Despite this we cannot give up. We need to engage.
In my last post How to Find Joy in the Little Things When You Live with Depression: Simple ways to notice hope, comfort, and small moments of happiness during difficult days I discussed finding joy in moments. Today, I would like to talk about the looking forward. There is a little mental health pick me up trick that can help improve our mood. Simply put, this pick me up is having something to look forward to. Sounds simple, right?. It probably is simpler than we think, but maybe we need a little help figuring out how we can focus on having something to look forward to each day.
One of the reasons we need things to look forward to is that our minds need to know that there is more to life than being in survival mode. There is more to life than the darkness that depression throws on us. Having something to look forward to can break the grip depression or other mental illnesses have on us. Having something to look forward to tells us “Hey, you have this positive coming up!”
Before I jump into ways to set up things to look forward to/things to anticipate, I would like to say that I think it is important to balance what we look forward to with noticing what we have already experienced. Those little joys that I discussed in my last post are equally as important as having something to anticipate. Living with mental illness is hard. Balancing these two is not easy. I recommend the balance because if we are caught up in only thinking about what has happened, we can miss what can happen. By the same token if we are always anticipating and not doing, we have no memories to make. Life, in general, requires balance. So, I just encourage all of us to balance what we anticipate with the joys we notice.
How do we gather things to anticipate?
Here are a few ideas that can help us start anticipating things that will bring us joy even as we battle depression:
Create Little Things: When we are looking at the future it is often easier to keep things small. We can get lost in the big goals. So, let’s start by creating a “Little Things” List. This can include things like:
o Going for a walk tomorrow morning
o Meeting a friend for lunch
o Watching the season finale of a favorite television show
o Picking up our favorite coffee on our way to work
o Carving out time for reading a book by a favorite author or in a favorite genre
Be Intentional in Our Anticipation: We can allow anticipation to be part of our experience. We might
o Read reviews of a movie we plan to see
o Check out the menu of a restaurant we plan to eat at
o Watch a YouTube video about a place we plan to visit
o Talk to a friend about something we plan to do together.
Decrease the Effort Needed to Say Yes to Something: Enjoyable activities often require a bit of effort. I am talking about the little things that people who do not live with depression might not think about. Here are some examples:
o Lay our clothes out the night before we plan to do something. This can take the planning and decision making out of preparation.
o Keep the book we want to read next to our reading spot.
o Have the friend or family member we are doing something with pick us up.
o Create a hobby space. This will make it easier to engage in a hobby.
Create a Future Interest List: Sometimes we do not do things or anticipate something because we do not know what we want to do. Maybe our mind gets overwhelmed when we try to think about what we want to do. Having a list of activities we are interested in doing, allows us to “pick one off the list” and plan it. These lists help up find things to do without being overwhelmed trying to think of something from scratch. We might have a set of lists. Including:
o Movies we want to watch
o Restaurants we want to eat at
o Areas we want to walk in
o Books we want to read
o Places we want to visit
o Hobbies we would like to try
Set Up Recurring Events: Sometimes it helps if we have a few things that we do every week or at set times. Recurring events take the process of thinking of new things out of process. The predictability also makes things easier when we live with depression. Our mind does not have the added pressure of deciding what to do. Examples of recurring ideas include:
o A set time to talk to a friend
o A daily walk with our pet time
o A set night to go to a restaurant or pick up food
o A monthly movie day
o A regular day or two to get coffee from our favorite coffee shop
All of the above show how important structure can be for us. When we can plan things in advance, we are more likely to engage. Notice that most of these things are smaller things. It is important to have these small things to look forward to. It is easier to follow through on small things. When we plan something that we know we are likely to follow through on, our brains are more likely to help us follow through. This develops hope because our brains start to learn that we follow through on doing the small, planned things. Doing these activities allows us to feel joy.
Going back to my previous post (mentioned above), we can “keep evidence” of what we have done, especially if we enjoyed it. Maybe we do this by keeping a list on our phone of the things we have done. We might write about what we have done in a journal. We can keep evidence without words by taking pictures. We might set up a folder on our phone to keep pictures of the things we have engaged in. Whatever way we keep evidence, the important thing is that we have a way to remember that we can engage, and we have engaged. We can look back on this evidence when we are struggling. Seeing our evidence can provide the little push we need to re-engage.
Living with depression often leads us to isolate. This isolation is not healthy mentally or physically. We need to find ways to engage in life. If you do not have anyone to engage in activities with or you just need a little help, I would suggest finding a NAMI Connections support group. Click on the link to find a group near you. Once we start engaging, we will find ourselves doing more. We just need to take one step at a time. We just need one thing to look forward to.
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