A couple of days ago, someone sent me a bumper sticker which read “whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again”. That’s struck me as kind of funny - the more I thought about it, though, I realized that there is some truth to it:

We have all felt a bit blue before: Perhaps things aren’t going too well in our marriage, at work there has been nothing but stress lately and no relief is in sight. And maybe the holidays didn’t turn out the way we were hoping and the cold weather just won’t end. Perhaps we’re not even quite sure what happened. Sounds familiar, right? Most of the time, things get better after a while – perhaps we have our next island-vacation to look forward to or spring comes along, after all, and there is new life coming up all around us.

Sometimes, though, things don’t seem to get better and we find ourselves sliding into what I call the Spiral of Depression. It goes something like this: We feel down, therefore we don’t have any energy…. we don’t have any energy, therefore we don’t do the things that we need to get done…. we don’t get things done, therefore we get farther behind…. I get farther behind, therefore I feel out of control…. We feel out of control, therefore we get more depressed…. We get more depressed, therefore we have even less energy…. we have even less energy, therefore we get even less done…. Round and round the spiral goes, farther and farther down.

What happens eventually is that we “hit bottom”, meaning we are so sick and tired of being sick and tired that we are willing to do just about anything just to feel better again. This point is really our chance to take a good look at ourselves and the changes we might need to make – as they say: “never change a winning team”; well, the team is not winning now, so we might as well change something: perhaps we need to face some issues head-on, maybe we need to change careers or resolve some issues in an important relationship. Perhaps it’s even OK to ask for help in starting a new spiral, a spiral which takes us back up, round and round, farther and farther up.

The main problem at this juncture is finding a starting-point. After all, we don’t have any energy and we are so far behind that it is all so overwhelming. What we need now, are little successes, such as cleaning up one room of the house, making one phone call to a long-lost friend, paying some of those overdue bills. Tackling the whole house, all the friends, or all the bills would be so overwhelming that we would likely fail and failure is the last thing we need now. We need small successes which help us to get caught up a bit, which will help us fell more in control, which will help us be less depressed, which will give us more energy to tackle more things that need to get done. As we gain momentum, we can take on the larger projects and make some real changes so we can come out way ahead in the end.

So, back to the bumper sticker: When we get blue, we need to become active, take control, start breathing again, a few cautious gasps at first, and eventually let the air flow freely.