How to Get Things Done When You're Depressed

“I can’t. I don’t want to. What’s the point? I suck at everything. I’m not in the mood.”

These are the lies depression tells us when we’re in its grasp. Depression is not just a mood or a feeling; it’s a brain disease that changes our bodies, our thoughts, and our actions. The self-defeating thoughts it creates are especially strong, and they feel so real that sometimes, we willingly follow them to bed, curl up, and resign to feeling miserable.

Depression is not just a mood or a feeling; it’s a brain disease that changes our bodies, our thoughts, and our actions.

But the magical thing about the brain is that you can actually change its state through your actions.

This is something author Julie Fast has been learning for decades. She is an award winning mental health writer, researcher and educator. She has over 40 years of personal experience with depression and 20 years of working directly with those affected by it. Her latest book is Getting It Done When You’re Depressed, Second Edition (Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston, Psy.D., ABPP). The book offers 50 strategies to break the cycle of inactivity, anxiety and lack of focus that so often accompanies depression.

Today, she talked to me about busting depression myths, using concrete strategies to break through depression, how COVID-19 has affected people with depression, and why you have to create your own hope when you’re depressed. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Dr. Jade Wu:

I just wanted to start by asking you to clarify about depression a little bit, because I think often people think of depression as feeling sad or being pessimistic. And while depression can certainly include those elements, there's a lot more to it than that. Could you speak to how depression affects us in our day-to-day life?

Julie Fast:

Well, I break depression into three main categories. The one you described—weepy, hopeless, sad depression— that's what people think about when they think of depression. But then we have irritated, agitated, depression, where we have more energy, but we feel mean or we are snappy with the people around us. We kick things. We don't like our lives and we're upset. And then we have what is by far the worst of all, and that's catatonic depression, where you can't move, you can't think, or you think you can't. Within all of those depressions, you have hopelessness and pessimism, but how they present is either weepy/sad, irritated/angry, or immovable catatonia. You can be suicidal in all of those as well, and you can be psychotic and...

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