Loving Yourself To Fight Depression

Depression, is a word that is often heard lately. Some people feel normal, however, others view depression as a present fact in their lives. When you hear stories from people who are struggling with depression, they always describe it as a dark period filled with feelings of pessimism, guilt, sadness, emptiness, and self-loathing.

Depression starts with a bad life event, such as a traumatic experience, failure, violence, the loss of a loved one, or poor health. However, not everyone who has had a bad experience is depressed. Some of them managed to counteract these bad experiences and lead to success.

Thoughts play a major role in human emotions. According to Aaron Beck, depressed people have irrational thoughts and beliefs that come from negative schemes. This is formed through bad experiences as a child and triggers a bias in thinking. Bias in question is a person's tendency to process anything that happens negatively, whether that happens inside or outside oneself.

People with depression believe that they are useless, so they are often blamed, hated, judged and hurt. People with depression also think that their lives are full of suffering. If negative thinking is maintained, it will lead to rumination. Rumination is a person's tendency to keep thinking about bad, painful experiences in the past. When a person gets caught up in rumination, he always blames himself for an experience that has already happened, which causes strong negative emotions to appear in him.

Fulfilling Your Own 

LoveLoving yourself is known as self compassion, a positive and healthy way to relate to yourself when facing moments of suffering in life. Self compassion can be a strength to treat yourself from depression and restore depression. There are three things in self compassion, namely mindfulness, common humanity, and self kindness.

Mindfulness helps us to be in the present moment, and to realize and accept the realities of life without judgment. Mindfulness trains to accept every painful thought and feeling with full awareness, without neglecting or exaggerating. That way, mindfulness can prevent rumination and strengthen one's ability to deal with all the negative thoughts that suddenly appear.

Common humanity helps face a negative outlook on life. Through common humanity, it can be realized that failure or natural suffering is experienced by every human being. Through this, it is necessary to see the experience from a broader and positive perspective. Recognizing that everyone lives an imperfect life so there is no need to feel like the one who is suffering the most.

Self kindness is a kindness given to oneself through warmth and unconditional acceptance. Through self kindness, you can protect yourself from the growing roots of depression such as blaming or hating yourself. Instead of blaming or hating yourself, it is necessary to practice giving understanding and compassion for yourself.

Recovering from depression is not easy. Protecting yourself to be free from depression is not instantaneous, because in fact, everyone cannot escape the negativity in life. Starting from loving yourself and getting used to being present in the present moment and not letting yourself get lost in painful thoughts and feelings.