Mental Health

What If Depressive Thoughts and Anxious Feelings Keep Coming and Never Leaving?

I propose a 10-step holistic health approach covering psychological and biological well-being based on experience.

This story is about altering depressive thoughts and anxious feelings into joyful ones with healthy lifestyle habits. Our lives are precious and need monitoring to prevent destructive thoughts and feelings that might cause unnecessary suffering.

Let’s remember that nothing remains the same as everything constantly changes. We need to create many aha moments intentionally. Therefore, I’d like to serve as a catalyst and give you helpful perspectives and practical tips when you are overwhelmed by unpleasant thoughts and emotions.

I offer holistic health principles, covering psychosomatic (body and mind). Even though I only touch on healthy lifestyle factors, some people might need medical intervention and professional support for their cases.

While depressive thoughts and anxious feelings are considered mental issues, they might also originate from physical and spiritual health issues, not meeting fundamentals like sleep, nutrition, exercise, rest, relationships, social connections, and fun.

I structured the critical points under ten headings to make this story helpful and practical. The first five are about psychological aspects covering the mind, and the second five are about biological factors covering the body. The mind and body are tightly connected.

I acknowledge that everyone’s condition is unique and different. Thus, something working for one might not work for another. Therefore, I highlight principles with examples rather than descriptive details.

First, I’d like to briefly emphasize the impact of depressive thoughts and anxious feelings on our lives.

Impact of Depressive Thoughts and Anxious Feelings

We all experience depressive thoughts and anxious feelings. Depression and anxiety are two widespread mental health conditions affecting millions of people.

When reviewing the literature, the common causes were living in a hostile or discriminatory environment, having underlying psychiatric disorders such as depression, bipolar, post-traumatic stress disorder, feeling pessimistic, hopeless, frustrated, socially isolated, lonely, worthless, substance abuse, and lacking fundamental health requirements.

According to World Health Organization (WHO), “Since 2005, depression has significantly risen globally. “Approximately 280 million people in the world have depression,”

According to American Psychiatric Association, “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorders and affect nearly 30% of adults at some point in their lives. But anxiety disorders are treatable, and some effective treatments are available.”

Unfortunately, depression and anxiety lead to suicidal attempts. This paper states, “Suicide is a growing public health problem, with the national rate in the United States increasing by 30% from 2000 to 2016.”

And WHO informs that “700,000+ people die due to suicide yearly, mainly caused by depression. Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death in 15–29-year-olds.”

In addition, depression and anxiety can lead to anhedonia which turns to numbness of feelings and makes life miserable and meaningless. It is disheartening because even feeling the pain becomes meaningless during that time. I tasted anhedonia when feeling lonely and experiencing nightmares due to my mental mistakes.

10 Steps to Lower Depressive Thoughts and Anxious Feelings and Replace Them with Joyful Ones

In this section, I provide ten steps to empower the mind and body with healthy lifestyle habits to lower depressive thoughts and anxious feelings.

1 — Develop an optimistic and realistic mindset and keep a neutral perspective by observing your thoughts and feelings.

“Life is Life! The Rest is the Meaning We Add to It” has been my motto for decades. Life itself has no inherent meaning. We must give it meaning through our beliefs, values, actions, and habits.

This statement is essential for our success and happiness because it emphasizes the role of our mindset and perspectives in shaping our experiences and creating our behaviors.

An optimistic and realistic mindset can lead to success because it encourages us to focus on what we can control, not what we cannot control. Instead of feeling helpless or victimized by circumstances, we need empowerment to take action and create the life we desire.

Creating a neutral view of life can empower us to think beyond the box. Everything in life has its polarity, including positive and negative ends. It is possible to find true love on the neutral side.

Our thoughts, emotions, moods, and behavior give meaning to our lives. Optimism with a growth mindset can create the foundational framework.

Rather than taking blessings in life for granted, we need to embrace gratitude, kindness, empathy, and compassion. Feeding our karma account can give us a sense of purpose and enhance our resilience.

2 — Improve your focus, attention, and memory and gain cognitive flexibility

Our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, decisions, actions, and habits can directly or indirectly impact the circumstances and events in our lives.

The cognitive and emotional constructs create our reality. Understanding the importance of daily thoughts and feelings in determining our behavior and habits is vital. Managing them can make us unflappable amid challenging situations.

An important mental aspect of cognitive abilities is using intention. Focus and attention are managed by intention and can be developed and improved with intentional practice.

Intention refers to a mental state of being purposeful and deliberate in our decisions and actions. It involves consciously focusing our attention and energy on a particular goal.

Focus is concentrating on a specific task or object while filtering out environmental distractions. Attention involves selectively focusing on a specific aspect of the environment while suppressing other sensory inputs.

If we intentionally focus on our natural abilities and keep our attention on what matters to us, we can take calculated risks, persist in challenges, and succeed. If we hold limiting beliefs, cognitive distortions, or negative self-talk, we may give up or self-sabotage our efforts.

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adjust our thinking when facing multiple variables in an event or situation. Creating mental flexibility allows us to observe, understand, and assess our thoughts before they turn into emotions.

Setbacks, especially in the form of rejections, never leave us alone. All of us, small or big, face setbacks daily. Setbacks are inevitable in our lives.

We need to neutralize and turn setbacks and rejections into opportunities by gaining cognitive flexibility and regulating our emotions intentionally.

3 — Regulate your emotions, understand your sense and sensations, get therapy, and use your instincts and intuition.

Emotional regulation is consciously observing, understanding, assessing, and managing our triggered or aggravated emotions timely.

The opposite state of emotional regulation is emotional dysregulation. It is a condition in which people cannot describe, understand, or manage emotions effectively. People with suicidal thoughts experience emotional dysregulation.

We can gain emotional maturity with cognitive flexibility and constantly regulating emotions. I provided three tips to regulate emotions.

Behavior therapy, like CBT and DBT, seems effective in dealing with suicidal thoughts. For example, a systematic review published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found these therapies beneficial.

In addition to our intellect and emotions, our senses, sensations, instincts, and intuition are valuable resources for recovering from depressive thoughts and anxious feelings.

Senses and sensations are the results of signals that pass through neurons. Our subjective experiences arise from activating the corresponding sensory organs and receptors. Neurotransmitters, hormones, and other biochemicals facilitate communication in organs and receptors.

According to the inventor Tesla “Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.”

And according to Einstein, “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Enormous proof of consciousness and the intuitive power of humans experientially is undeniable. This ability lies within us. However, we must find ways to tune into and benefit from it.

Dictionaries define intuition as perceiving or understanding something with feelings and sensations without conscious reasoning.

However, dictionaries don’t mention its involvement with using the subconscious mind, reticular activating system, peripheral vision, and its unique cognitive aspects related to procedural memory, focus, attention, task switching, and reasoning.

4 — Lower oxidative stress and chronic inflammation.

Oxidative stress occurs when the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) exceeds the body’s antioxidant capacity to neutralize them.

ROS are reactive molecules produced by cells during metabolic processes. They are essential in cell signaling and immune response.

However, when ROS production becomes excessive, it can damage proteins, lipids, and DNA, leading to cellular dysfunction and inflammation.

Reducing elevated cortisol levels with healthy lifestyle habits can lower oxidative stress. Stress affects us at a genetic level. Accumulated stress is the root cause of mental and physical ailments.

In addition, lowering stress can diminish inflammation. Chronic inflammation can lead to autoimmune disorders, brain fog, leaky gut, and leaky brain, further increasing stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders.

Understanding the impact and implications of chronic inflammation on physical and mental health and learning practical ways to manage it with simple lifestyle changes can be a game-changer for everyone.

The most critical tool to lower inflammation is fasting which creates alternative energy through ketosis. There is significant evidence of ketone bodies such as β-Hydroxybutyrate serving as a signaling molecule to decrease inflammatory responses.

Ketosis can lower chronic inflammation and improve metabolic and mental health in 6 ways.

5 — Create pleasant hobbies, develop social connections, improve relationships, and have fun.

The brain function better when it detects joy in our actions. Fun activities can silence the concerns of the primitive brain giving a chance to the thinking brain to take over and make better decisions.

The brain works with patterns. Thus, habits determine our success or failure. Re-wiring our minds for joy, we convert hobbies into lifestyle habits reaping multiple benefits.

An innovative way to incorporate hobbies into lifestyle habits is diligently scheduling fun activities and making commitments. Unless there is an emergency, I stick to my schedule. Scheduling fun can erase our depressive thoughts and anxious feelings.

Social intelligence is coded in our genes. We evolved as social beings throughout history. Our brain is wired in a way, craving for tribal connections. Our limbic system (the emotional part) is designed to cater to our social needs.

We can tame our limbic system by improving our relationships and enhancing our social connections with meaningful engagements. When this part of the brain is tamed, our depressive thoughts and anxious feelings can diminish. We experience fewer amygdala hijacks.

6— Review and fix your diet and eating regimen.

After these psychological aspects, a critical contributor to defeating depressive thoughts and feelings can be fixing nutritional issues to balance and optimize our hormones and neurotransmitters.

Restrictive diets can limit our nutritional needs and tax our energy causing metabolic and mental health issues. For example, low-fat diets, cutting bioavailable proteins, and only depending on plants were severe issues for me.

The key point is consuming our nutrients and calories from whole foods and refraining from junk foods. One of the contributors for me was to see diet as a health matter rather than an ethical one.

Highly processed foods with unnatural additives adversely affect the nervous system. Unfortunately, these foods have become the norm, and even inflammatory foods are sold and touted as healthy in many countries.

Caloric imbalance, such as overconsumption of calories or excessive caloric deficit, can break the balance of the body, affecting mental and physical health.

Customizing our diet with support from qualified healthcare professionals such as certified dieticians, naturopaths, and integrative medicine doctors can fix nutritional problems sustainably.

In addition to a customized diet, for some moving from frequent meals to time-restricted eating might be helpful. The key mechanism is the power of ketosis and increased BDNF. Short and long-term fasting can change brain chemistry.

7 — Use exercise as a natural medicine for the body and mind.

I see personalized exercise as a natural medicine for the body and mind due to its effects on hormones and neurotransmitters.

Many people are active, but some people do the wrong exercises putting their bodies in a vulnerable state coupled with restricted diets to lose weight. Bodily stress can also create excessive mental stress, weaken the immune system, and cause visceral fat gain and muscle loss.

A viable solution is customizing workouts to meet our needs, body types, age, sex, health conditions, and goals. For example, moving from excessive cardio to resistance and high-intensity training worked well for me. I moved from long-distance running to HIIT and made calisthenics a lifestyle choice.

Including joyful exercises like trampoline, yoga, and pilates nurtured my mind. While intensifying ketosis and increasing growth factors like BDNF, these workouts also removed the toxins from the body by activating the lymphatic system.

8 — Fix your sleep issues and get restorative sleep nightly.

Restorative sleep is crucial for mental and physical health, improving our cognitive and emotional well-being.

Sleep deprivation is a critical issue for mental health. The brain relies on restorative sleep to remove metabolic toxins and build memories daily.

Due to ambition, lack of knowledge, and wrong assumptions about sleep, some people neglect sleep and suffer unnecessarily. I was one of them, and my cortisol levels elevated and caused severe physical and mental issues.

When I fixed my sleep issues using various methods such as a mindful approach, regular meditation, working in a flow state, and adequate sun exposure (increasing vitamin D), my cortisol levels were optimized, and depressive thoughts and anxious feelings were replaced with joyful ones.

9 — Avoid excessive toxins and pathogens from the body and fix addictive behaviors.

When harmful microorganisms and toxins enter the body, they can activate the immune system to defend the body. However, if the immune system is overwhelmed or if the exposure is prolonged, the response can become dysregulated, leading to inflammation and tissue damage in the brain.

Pathogens can also evade the immune system by mutating, adapting, or hiding in cells. Some toxins and pollutants can disrupt hormonal balance and cause oxidative stress, leading to chronic inflammation, cellular damage, and impaired cognition.

We must avoid toxins and pathogens by keeping the body and environment clean. We also need to move the body joyfully and regularly. Exercise maintains blood flow, oxygenates the cells, strengthens the muscles, burns excess calories, mobilizes fat, and eliminates toxins from the body.

Addictions leading to major depression are one of the root causes of self-sabotaging and suicidal thoughts, as I explained in an article titled Here’s Why Depression Has More to Do with Addictions and Less with Economic Conditions.

I also explained why understanding the concept of ΔFosB in an article titled What DeltaFosB Is and Why It Matters in Solving Addiction Problems. I also documented a case study titled Here’s How Georgia Defeated Clinical Depression in 10 Steps.

10 — Activate the self-healing capability of the body and mind naturally and sustainably.

The previous items in this post contribute to activating our self-healing systems and improving cellular health.

We can use a methodical approach to initiate the body’s and mind’s self-healing capabilities. I summarize them, focusing on the key points.

First, we need to accept the conditions and take personal responsibility. Then we need to focus on fundamentals such as personalized diet and workout, focusing on restorative sleep, rest, fun, and social connections.

After that, we need to focus on our emotions by regulating them. Some of us might need psychotherapy to address childhood traumas and other psychological issues to heal them sustainably. So obtaining timely help and professional support is necessary.

To sustainably activate the self-healing of the body and mind, we need first to detoxify our cells naturally. The two concepts are autophagy and mitophagy, as I explained in the linked articles. We may also consider leveraging the power of thermogenesis (cold and heat therapy).

Once we create such a methodical system, we must measure the progress with health tests, get regular checkups, and make necessary adjustments.

Consider These 7 Life Principles to Keep Your Sanity in Challenging Times.

Conclusions and Takeaways

There is no shame in having depressive thoughts and anxious feelings. Everyone might have them caused by various factors. But if they keep coming and never leaving, we might have mental health conditions.

Following the fundamental needs of the body and mind, observing our thoughts and expressing our emotions is essential to prevent them from destroying our lives.

Being transparent to our loved ones and seeking timely support from qualified healthcare professionals are necessary. In addition to our family doctors, getting a referral to a psychologist or psychiatrist can be invaluable.

The key takeaway point of this story is to take personal responsibility and stay optimistic and bold to continue our lives when unpleasant thoughts and emotions make us feel miserable, like giving up and dying.

Learning from the experiences of others can be invaluable. Here’s a story about how stopping rumination made Olivia a triple champion. And a story of how Jennifer took personal responsibility and healed her brain fog. You might find many more inspiring stories in a collection reflecting my valuable life lessons.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

Disclaimer: My posts do not include professional or health advice. I only document my reviews, observations, experiences, and perspectives to provide information and create awareness.

I publish my lifestyle, health, and well-being stories on EUPHORIA. My focus is on cellular, mitochondrial, metabolic, and mental health.

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