Frustration, sadness, and despair. Feeling like you’re trapped in a cycle. Everyday tasks seeming like insurmountable obstacles. While anyone who’s struggled with their mental health is probably all too familiar with these experiences, they also happen to be common characteristics of depression.
As important as it is to recognize this impact, it’s equally important to recognize that there is hope. Understanding depression paves the way for you to more effectively manage it. Here’s what you need to know about depression, 5 steps you can take to manage its symptoms, and its surprising connection to other conditions including OCD:
What are the symptoms of depression?
While symptoms of depression will vary for each person, depression often presents as:
- A persistent low mood or sadness
- A loss of interest or pleasure
- Decreased energy
- Incessant negative thoughts, including suicidal ideation
However, symptoms aren’t limited to this list. Depression can manifest in many different ways—difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbances, and changes in appetite are a few of its many other possible symptoms.
Feeling depressed can cause people to withdraw from activities that used to bring them joy or fulfillment, which, unfortunately, tends to perpetuate the low mood they’re experiencing.
5 steps you can take to manage depression
The good news about depression is that taking steps to manage it will often positively impact other mental health conditions you’re experiencing. Incorporating techniques based on improving your well-being into your daily life can help you learn to manage the intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and low moods that may also be related to a condition like OCD.
1. Seek professional help
This might seem obvious, but it’s important enough to bear repeating. In the same way that you would see a medical doctor for an injury or physical ailment, seeking the help of a specialist is highly recommended if you’re struggling with depression.
2. Make self-care a priority
This doesn’t mean the warm bubble baths, facial treatments, and spa days that we often see portrayed as self-care. There’s a time and a place for those activities, but the self-care we’re talking about here is something much deeper and more profound. It’s a kind of self-care that, with patience and effort, delivers lasting results.
The self-care you’ll benefit the most from prioritizing is self-compassion: the practice of being kind to yourself, prioritizing your mental health-related needs, and taking good care of yourself in a way that fills your bucket, so to speak.
In order to practice this kind of self-care, it can help to begin with reflection. What keeps you moving towards your values and goals in life? What steps are you taking to live the life that you truly want to be living?
3. Practice mindfulness and staying present
When we’re living in the past or trying to control the future, we’re missing the here and now. Struggling with depression can feel like playing tug-of-war with your mind, constantly trying to pull your attention away, only to have it get caught up in your thoughts once again. Learning ways to practice mindfulness and bring ourselves back to the present moment can help us change this pattern.
Staying present starts with focusing on the moment in front of you and engaging your senses. Observe where you are. Take a deep breath. Look around you—what do you see? Listen closely—what do you hear? Engage your taste—it can help to have a piece of candy or gum on hand for this very purpose. Use your senses to become more aware of the moment you’re in, however it presents itself to you. Grounding techniques like these can help alleviate the emotions caused by depression, providing you with some separation from intense feelings without avoiding them.
When treating depression, it may be helpful to also address negative experiences or thought processes that feed the depression.
4. Be conscious of how physical and mental health are connected
We might all know this to be true on some level, but knowing and doing are completely different things. When we take care of our mental health, we are taking care of our physical health—and vice versa. What you eat, what you drink, what you put in your body, it all matters.
Exercise can have a huge impact on one’s mood and overall sense of well-being in any situation, but especially when you’re dealing with depression. The catch here is that when you’re feeling depressed, even getting out of bed can seem like an enormous ordeal, let alone going out and exercising.
This is where Behavioral Activation (BA), the primary treatment for depression, can play an important role. In its basic form, BA is about making a choice to act in a specific way, even when—especially when—you don’t feel like it. Depression can make people withdraw from the activities they enjoy, which often exacerbates their symptoms. The more someone is able to choose to participate in these activities—to get out of bed, get dressed, and go for a walk, as challenging as it may seem in the moment—the better they will feel.
5. Learn when to challenge a negative thought and when to not engage
It can also be helpful to practice accepting your thoughts as just being thoughts and not judging them, attaching meaning to them, or assuming they indicate any truth or danger.
Some common thoughts that people experiencing depression may struggle with include thoughts of being worthless, or excessive guilt over things they may have said or done in the past. However, unwanted, persistent negative thoughts aren’t unique to depression. They can also be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
If your depressive intrusive thoughts are a result of depression, they may benefit from therapy that can help you challenge their validity. If you have OCD on the other hand, whether on its own or alongside depression, these thoughts will need to be treated with more specialized care. Traditional talk therapy is unlikely to be effective for OCD, and may even be harmful.
Like any element of treating depression and other mental health conditions, this is best navigated with the help of a professional, who will have the expertise to teach you where a thought is stemming from, which can be especially important if you’re dealing with depression alongside OCD.
The often-overlooked relationship between depression and OCD
Along with identifying symptoms of depression, becoming aware of the often-overlooked link between depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an important part of growing your knowledge.
What you may not know is that depression and OCD can—and frequently do—co-occur. Because OCD is frequently misdiagnosed, it’s important to identify when its symptoms are occurring alongside symptoms of depression, as the two conditions can exacerbate each other if left untreated.
The two main symptoms of OCD are obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are repetitive and intrusive thoughts, images, urges, or feelings that often cause intense anxiety, distress, and discomfort to the person experiencing them. Compulsions are mental or physical actions that are often performed in an attempt to alleviate distress.
While both disorders are distinct and complex, they seem to interplay with one another—which makes sense, given that if you’re anxious or having intrusive thoughts, you may start to feel hopeless, extremely tired, or overwhelmed. Additionally, if you’re feeling down and depressed, you may start to have more negative thoughts.
If you’re noticing intrusive thoughts or compulsive behaviors in addition to symptoms of depression, it could be a sign of OCD. The next step would be to find an OCD specialist, as they’ll be able to help you determine if that’s the case. Professionals who do not specialize in OCD may not fully understand it, which can limit their ability to properly diagnose and treat it.
A specialist will also be able to determine which disorder needs to be focused on more heavily in the beginning of treatment. Sometimes, if the depression is more prominent, it will need to be more controlled before your treatment plan moves to treating the OCD. If the OCD is more dominant, on the other hand, then this can be addressed earlier on, which will likely impact the depression symptoms positively.
Thankfully, many professionals have training and practice in treating depression, so looking for an OCD specialist first can help guide your search to find a provider with knowledge of both conditions.
Get your life back from OCD
Seeking treatment for OCD and depression
For anyone feeling weighed down by untreated OCD and depression, it’s vital to know that you don’t have to struggle forever. Both OCD and depression are treatable, and the most effective treatments for both conditions can work incredibly well together.
The key often lies in determining which condition is causing the most difficulty with functioning and treating it first. There are many situations when depression and OCD can be treated simultaneously, but there are also instances when depression is primary and may need to be successfully addressed before exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the gold-standard treatment for OCD, can be successful.
In cases where depression interferes with a person’s ability to participate in exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy for OCD, BA, can help them overcome this obstacle. Once symptoms of depression are better controlled, an individual is more likely to participate effectively in ERP, allowing them to experience its life-changing benefits.
Because ERP and BA are so similar (both treatments help people better understand their current behaviors and teach them how to practice more rewarding ones, helping them feel better over time), pairing them is an effective hybrid approach to tackling both depression and OCD.
About NOCD
NOCD provides effective, affordable, and convenient therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Our licensed therapists specialize in exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, the most effective treatment for OCD, and we provide support between sessions, when it’s needed most.
Because we’re committed to providing the OCD community with highly personalized care, NOCD Therapists can also treat members of the OCD community who are experiencing other mental health conditions alongside OCD, including depression and anxiety disorders.
If you’re struggling with symptoms of OCD and depression, we can help. You can book a free 15-minute call with our team to learn more about starting treatment for OCD and co-occurring conditions with NOCD. On your call, we can answer any questions you might have and help you get matched with a NOCD Therapist who’s trained to provide the treatment you need.