How To Create A Routine When Depressed
When you’re feeling depressed even seemingly simple tasks can feel like mountains to climb.
Depression is proven to have an impact on everything from sleeping and eating to important day-to-day activities. It’s important to build small habits to try and find ways to consistently feel better, even in small increments.
Building routines can make tasks feel more manageable and help you to take back control of your daily life.
Recognise Your Starting Point
Not being able to keep up with existing routines or feeling exhausted by them can be an early sign of a depressive episode. When you recognise this happening it may be time to make changes to help you maintain or build a more suitable routine.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” Theodore Roosevelt
It’s extremely important to start where you are. Identifying your starting point helps you to find manageable and achievable habits to work into your routines. It also helps you to be realistic in your goal-setting.
For example, if you’re finding it tough to get up in time, shower and eat breakfast, you probably don’t want to add in lots of extra unnecessary goals that will add to that pressure. You don’t need to get up at 5 am and hit the gym to be productive, productivity is subjective.
Create a routine that is practical for you.
The Benefits Of A Routine
Living with depression often involves navigating a sea of uncertainty and unpredictability. Establishing a routine can be stabilising, aid with productivity, and offer lots of other long term benefits.
Predictability
A routine helps with predictability and reestablishing a sense of control. Every day you are performing the same simple tasks, even when the things that are out of your control can be overwhelming. Many find this stabilising.
Improved Sleep
Depression often disrupts sleep patterns, contributing to an ongoing cycle of fatigue and low mood.
A consistent routine, especially in the mornings and evenings, can signal to the body that it's time to get up or wind down.
Sleeping for just 60-90 minutes more per night can make you happier and healthier long-term according to the American Psychological Association.
Consistency is key when it comes to adjusting sleep patterns. Tracking sleep-related habits is a good way of measuring progress and ensuring you’re getting enough sleep.
Sense of Achievement
We all like to feel like we’ve achieved something in the day, no matter how small those achievements are. When you have depression it can be even more important to focus on the day’s small wins.
Sticking to a routine and checking off habits can offer a small but important sense of achievement.
The act of manually checking off tasks, like to-do lists and habit trackers is also thought to release a small amount of dopamine, the “feel good” hormone, so it’s no surprise that it can be really beneficial when building a routine when depressed.
Focus and Productivity
A well-structured routine provides a framework for concentrating on essential tasks without feeling overwhelmed. This helps with productivity and can even distract from negative actions and thoughts.
Regulation and Stability
Depression can bring about intense emotional fluctuations. A routine provides a stabilising influence, helping to regulate emotions and find comfort in familiar actions.
How To Create A Routine When Depressed
Identifying Important Tasks
Routines should be helpful, not overwhelming.
It’s important that you don’t try to fit too much into your routine. Try to prioritise things that are beneficial long term.
If you aren’t sure about how to differentiate important actions, ask yourself, will this help to make today easier?
The Importance Of Habits
Habits can be a key part of building a routine when depressed. Small, achievable goals make the whole process less intimidating and help you to break down and monitor progress.
Habits are defined as something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way. Not only is this consistency reassuring for those with depression, but it can help to encourage more positive actions.
Routines are essentially built from a number of habits that are put together for a purpose. Breaking a routine down into these small individual tasks makes it manageable and provides essential structure to your day.
Recognise Wins, Not Losses
When you’re feeling low it’s important to focus on the positives. Small wins are much more important than losses.
When establishing your routine, focus on the things that you did do rather than the things you didn’t. These are small daily wins that in the past you haven’t been able to get done.
One way you can tackle this is by identifying things that you need to do and things that you’d like to do. The things that you need to do cover the absolute minimum that needs to get done for tomorrow to be less stressful.
On top of these essentials, you can overachieve by doing the things you’d like to do.
Recording Progress
Measuring your progress is a practical and motivating way to see if your routine is working. There are lots of different ways you can track your routine, some digital and some more manual.
Paper habit tracking can be much more impactful than habit tracking apps. It encourages thoughtful and proactive engagement with habits and allows the opportunity to think about how they are beneficial for mental health and general wellbeing. This manual process of marking off a habit and checking in on your planned routine can be a consistent reminder of what you need to get done in a day
For routines that focus on small habits, habit tracking calendars are a great option for monitoring smaller tasks during the day. Not only do they help to visualise progress but they can serve as a visible reminder of the tasks you need to complete to really feel that sense of achievement.
