It’s Okay to Not to Be Okay! How to deal with Failure & Depression in life? (3 Mins Read)

Mental health can inflict anyone regardless of age, gender, wealth, personality, or profession. Mental health issues are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking, or behavior and are characterized by distress or problems functioning in social, work, or family activities. You may call it depression, or a feeling of self-worthlessness, low self-esteem, self-hate, guilt, anxiety, or lack of purpose in life.

If you are facing such issues that are incapacitating you in carrying on your normal social behaviour, you are not alone. As per the WHO report, one in four people in the world is affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives.

How to identify if you are under depression or facing any other mental health issues?

While it is okay to have insecurities, fear, and anxiety in life, but when it causes neurodivergence in your behavior it can become toxic.

People may undergo depression due to failures in life. The failure can be professional, or personal. While people take professional failure like business or job loss very personally, personal failure, like a failed marriage, dysfunctional family, or broken love relationship can be equally fatal.

Depression can also seep in due to grief (lots of people), or loss of material possession. Such feelings of pain and loss are not alien to us and most of us have successfully emerged out of it. But there are many who still find it difficult to return to normalcy in their social life and exhibit deviated cognizance.

It is quite possible that you want to move ahead in life, but past experiences, failures, and setbacks keep pushing you back. It is common for you to isolate yourself from the external world as you reflect back in past and find yourself in an endless loop of determining every single mistake, where you went wrong and how could you have dealt with it.

It is advisable to assess the following to identify early signs of depression due to failures:

• You find yourself struggling daily to forgive yourself
• You blame yourself or others for your current situation
• You have will issues, and suffer from lack of motivation and have lost all interest in daily chores and hobbies
• You find it difficult to get out of your rooms & face the world while Isolating yourself from everyone
• You feel more fatigued and have sleep problems
• You experience changes in appetite like not feeling hungry at all, or eating a lot leading to the drastic fluctuation in your weights
• You have frequent anxiety issues
• You often have uncontrollable emotions like frequent mood swings
• You have suicidal thoughts

If you have one or more persistent symptoms as mentioned above, you may have depression and other related mental health issues. Determining it is the first step towards healing and recovery.

Why People Ignore Mental Health Issues & don’t seek intervention?

1. Ego and Shame

It is quite normal for you to blame yourself for your failures and hate yourself for not being smarter or better in the past. Or you may attribute your failures to others (called scapegoating). It is natural to not being able to forgive yourself and the pain is real! You do not want to seek help because of ego and shame.

2. Stigma, Discrimination, and Neglect

Treatments are available, but the majority of people with a known mental disorder never seek help from a health professional. Stigma, discrimination, and neglect, preventive care, and treatment from reaching people with mental disorders. Where there is neglect, there is little or no understanding. Where there is no understanding, there is neglect.

“People do not understand the importance of mental health. Even if a person dealing with it wants to talk about it, people ignore passing off depression as a temporary emotional disturbance. It is quite clear that neglect is quite prevalent in our society”. — Dr. Roli Misra

3. Lack of Information and Awareness on Mental Health

Lack of awareness, information on mental health issues, and lack of access to mental health services comes out as a strong deterrent to seeking out timely intervention.

How to deal with failures & depression in life?

1. Time is the biggest healer

Give yourself sometime after you have gone through some life-changing failure in your life. You need to internalize and understand what went wrong while taking an inward journey. Leaving few things to time is often a better measure than fighting it daily. Accept your situation, learn from your mistakes, and move ahead.

2. Seek out help

Seek out help from your immediate family and friends. People still care is the biggest revelation regardless of your success or accomplishment. Love, kindness, patience, and compassion coming from family and partner will do wonders.

Read: 5 Tips for Choosing your Friends wisely

3. Gain perspective on gratitude

Practicing gratitude while internalizing how your hardships are objectively easier compared to countless humans out there who have faced terrible things like poverty, slavery, grief, job loss, etc. Practice gratitude towards people who extend timely help and to God for this beautiful life. Always remember privilege is an important caveat and be cognizant of your privilege.

4. Find Pleasures in small things

This goes a long way. Discover your source of pleasure in smaller things. Do not link your happiness to material things or people. Link it with smaller and more meaningful things in life.

Read: Happiness is a choice. Choose to be happy!

Read: 9 Reasons Why Gardening is Good for Your Health

5. Seek meaning in life

Finding meaning in life is of the utmost importance. No matter how harsh your circumstances are, if you have a meaning in life you will still find reasons to continue and deal with your current situation. Do not link meaning to material possessions as seeking meaning in life is the core human value.

I remember one of my batchmates from MBA, secured a job in the world’s best MNCs via campus placements. After a few years, we connected only to know how he was not happy in corporate jobs and how he finally took a career in teaching in a Government Primary School post his first corporate job to pursue his passion of helping the poor children to chase eternal peace, which to him was his meaning in life. He has finally found his meaning in life, which keeps him going.

6. Accept your imperfect self

No one is perfect and seeking perfection out of life is being too harsh on yourself. This is a gradual process and shall be learned with time. Learn to forgive yourself, move forward, and start afresh. Unburden yourself!

Read: Learn to Say ‘No’

7. The power of Meditation and Exercise

We all know how exercise is good for our bodies, but it is equally effective in dealing with depression, anxiety, and stress. As you work out there are physiological changes in your brain like the release of endorphins among others which helps fight mild to moderate depression. Likewise, meditation creates positive space in our minds and prepare the brain for stressful situations & helps us fight depression.

Read: Demystifying Health and Wellness

8. Seek therapy or professional help

Break the mental barriers of ego and shame, put behind the social stigma, and neglect by others and seek timely professional help. Take it as good as going to a doctor for physical injury or disease. And remember, the earlier you seek help, the better it is.

I would like to sum up with the saying :

We only have one life. Keep it simple. Missing somebody? Call. Wanna Meet up? Invite. Wanna be understood? Explain. Have questions? Ask. Don’t like something? Speak up. Like something? Share. Want something? Ask for it. Love someone? Tell them.

Disclaimer: The information provided herein is intended for your general knowledge only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment for specific medical conditions. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat a health problem or disease without consulting with a qualified healthcare provider. Please consult your healthcare provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding your condition.

Originally published at https://theeasywisdom.com on June 17, 2020.