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Depression
5 Ways to Improve Life With Depression or Anxiety
Quality-of-life strategies when treatments aren't complete cures.
Posted August 3, 2023 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- People with depression and anxiety often avoid tasks that invoke negative emotions or self-criticism.
- Mental health conditions are usually covered by disabilities protections, so one can request accommodations.
- It's OK to not buy into this narrative and expectation to have a "bigger life."
Many physical health conditions, like diabetes, don't have cures. Or, for some conditions, treatments only work for some people.
Conditions that don't have cures might have disease-modifying treatments that modify the progression of the disease. Beyond this, treatment often focuses on quality-of-life improvements (think: eye drops for conditions that cause dry eye).
In the world of mental health treatments, where current treatments don't work completely for everyone, I rarely see discussions about quality-of-life improvements and other supportive strategies.
That's what we'll discuss here—how to live well with mental health challenges and ease the burden.
1. Using AI bots to reduce mental load
I wrote a whole post about the potential uses of ChatGPT for reducing mental load. Personally, I don't use it for writing, but I do for editing. For instance, one of my favorite prompts is to paste in draft text and ask it to find anywhere I could remove one to three unnecessary words from a sentence to make the article more concise. I could do this manually myself, but it makes editing less mentally taxing.
There's potential to use ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to reduce the mental load of completing repetitive tasks, planning, organizing, and decision-making.
If you're avoiding writing an email or a text, ask it to help, especially if you're trying to strike a sensitive or diplomatic tone and want to reduce the emotional labor of achieving that. It can also assist you in simplifying your message.
Most likely, chatbots will offer imperfect suggestions that you modify. When that happens, paste in your human-corrected version, so that, over time, it better learns what you want.
2. Letting support people and advocates help you
People with depression and anxiety often avoid tasks that invoke negative emotions or self-criticism. This raises a concern that using support people will lead to depressed or anxious people engaging in greater avoidance and the person not growing their own skills.
Keep that in mind, but also consider how support people or advocates could help you. If you're familiar with labor doulas, that's a useful model to consider. Part of their role is to help laboring people advocate for themselves during labor. It's a vulnerable time when someone who is normally able to process information and not get pressured often finds that more difficult.
If you have depression or an anxiety disorder, you may need someone to serve that role in other situations, like medical appointments or major financial negotiations. Sometimes it's supportive merely to have company or someone to keep track of your belongings and paperwork at important appointments.
Another idea is to accept an offer from a friend to cook meals for your freezer or to request this help.
3. Using physical supports
A particular physical support I like in summer is a cooling vest. Extreme heat can increase stress and agitation and make errands more physically taxing (which depletes your mental energy).
Compression socks are another tool for reducing fatigue, but check with your physician before using.
Another category is anything that helps you eat more nutritiously, like meal kits.
4. Changing your focus
In modern life, we're often told our goal should be to have a "bigger life"—that is, to achieve more, have more impact, have more experiences, and have more friends. We're cautioned against a small life that doesn't fulfill our potential and challenged to break free of any restrictions we face.
However, it's also OK to not buy into this narrative and expectation.
If your mental health limits you, it's up to you whether you choose to challenge those limitations. It's not a requirement. You're a worthwhile human either way. You're free to make different choices at different times; you're not locked in.
5. Using the same types of assistive technologies and accommodations that people with other conditions use
If you're depressed or anxious, sometimes it's worth imagining having fatigue or brain fog from another condition. In that scenario, what supports could you use? What would improve your quality of life and self-management while living with those challenges?
Remember that mental health conditions are usually covered by disabilities protections (legislation varies by country), so you're entitled to request and use accommodations. If you need to use a mobility scooter at a store because you're severely depressed, do it! If you need instructions in writing rather than just verbally, ask for it. If you need someone in authority to slow down or repeat information, ask.
When seeking disability protections, it's important to indicate that you're asking due to a disability. For instance, you can say, "I have a disability that [impairs me in X way], and, therefore, I need [accommodation Y]."
The wheelchair symbol for disabilities can be unhelpful because it can make people think accommodations are only for people who use wheelchairs.
Even if you don't need these strategies all the time, they may be helpful during exacerbations. If your condition is chronic and treatments have not worked for you, then you may think of these as permanent quality-of-life solutions.
Otherwise, you might think of these ideas as ways to better help you to help yourself, like if the mobility scooter helps you have the energy to shop for nutritious food that you also have to come home and cook.
As with conditions considered primarily physical, your goal is to be as functional, happy, and pain-free as possible. You also deserve this if your health challenge is mental illness.
Bonus tip: If your self-critical brain tells you that you should only use supportive strategies when you absolutely need them (that is, you couldn't do a task without them), reject that idea. You can use them when it would be helpful to you and you would like that. It doesn't have to be essential.
