How to lift yourself up when you are feeling down

I’ve always believed that the best information about depression comes from someone who has actually gone through the experience. I have lived with and beaten severe depression, and I’ve been writing about my experience for almost twenty years. On this page I am going to show you how to lift yourself up when you are feeling down before this feeling develops into something worse.

How can I uplift my mood quickly? If you are feeling down and fear depression, the best choice is to fight positively! The poor choice is to give up and allow depression to take control. You always have a choice: listen to positive words or music or sit in the dark and listen to your own negative voice, get up and move or lie down and feel sorry for yourself.

I’ve written this page for when you feel down, (and I know what that’s like). I will show you two ways how you can lift yourself up when you are feeling down instantly. The trick is to stay that way. I’ll then reveal how to stop feeling sorry for yourself and to understand the difference between feeling down and depression. Finally, I’ll offer my personal recommendation how to get out of the trap of feeling down.

I felt down and did nothing about it, it’ll pass I thought. However, before I knew it, I was feeling empty inside, cold, miserable, alone and hopeless. This feeling went rapidly from just feeling sad to full on depression. What follows is from my experience of suffering from depression and years of helping others beat it.

Two Ways to Lift your Mood Immediately

The great news is, there are things you can do to lift your mood immediately and if you repeat these they can help to stop you from feeling down longer term. How do I know this works? Because I used these strategies to help me escape from severe depression over many years. Please note that I also got help from a doctor and psychiatrist who provided the guidance I needed to help myself solve the problem. The doctor also suggested medication, which I was reluctant to take but agreed and it helped enormously by taking away the stress and anxiety, enabling me to work on myself and change my thinking.

Method 1: Stop feeling like a victim

How to lift yourself up when you are feeling down – this is the first way.

Especially for those who are feeling depressed or very down, you need to stop feeling like you are victim. Do you feel like that?

Now, you can feel like a victim of somebody’s actions, or a victim of bad luck, or of life in general. Feeling like a victim lowers your self esteem, makes you feel sorry for yourself (see the next section), and makes you feel down. So how do you stop this?

I wrote a very helpful post some years ago on my website More Self Esteem and this deals with exactly this question. Go check this post out and learn why you may be feeling this way and what to do about feeling like a victim . It will certainly help you.

Feeling like a victim converts all your pain and sorrow into negativity and can cause serious long term issues such as depression.

Help is available

If you feel this way it is very helpful, and recommended to see a therapist or psychiatrist to get rid of such feelings. For some, feeling like a victim could be a life long struggle and may even have roots in very negative experiences such as abuse, physical or mental. Please, if you have such issues do not try to solve them alone and seek help.

Steps how to lift yourself up when you are feeling down might involve removing toxic people from your life. By toxic I mean those who make you feel worthless or who are constantly negative towards you. Maybe they are a big part of the reasons why you are feeling down.

Talk therapy can be very helpful for dealing with negative emotions and can really help you here. Either in a group setting or one to one with a therapist, resolve these issues or at least learn to cope with them so they don’t affect your happiness.

Method 2: Music Therapy

Find out all about music therapy and what it is. Basically, it is using music to heal yourself. In the case of how to lift yourself when you are feeling down, music can have an immediate positive effect. It sure helped me!

Relaxing music reduces anxiety and stress and repeatedly listening to music has long terms benefits (source: Knight and Rickard 2001, Journal of Music therapy). I found that regularly listening to “New Age” music helped me to instantly relax, stop worrying and doing this repeatedly made me feel not only calmer, but also much more positive. I think it was one of the top strategies I tried that really helped me out of depression.

There is so much evidence, (including this article), that using relaxing music to change your mood works, that I advise you to try it and use this as one of your main goto strategies to stop feeling down.

How Can You Stop Feeling Sorry for Yourself?

We have already talked about one way to do this, dealing with your feelings of being a victim. Now let’s consider a second way which is totally in your control. In fact, it is up to you to decide to do this.

What you need to decide right now is that you want to stop feeling down and that you want to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I hear you saying “of course I do, that’s why I’m here”. But, beware! I know from my own experience with feeling sad and depressed that after a while you can get used to the negative feelings eating away at you. You may even, as I did, accept them as a normal part of your life.

But this is something you need to stop if this is you. You need to decide 100% that now you want to be happy. To stop feeling sorry for yourself you need to choose to act, to take positive steps. That might be getting help from a professional or seeing a doctor. It might be talking to a good friend or taking up exercise. It could mean forming goals and starting to work to achieve them.

There are only two choices

To stop feeling sorry for yourself you have to move and get busy on positive steps that will move you forward in the direction you want to go.

The other choice is to expect that you can lie down, close your eyes and give in to the feelings hoping that things will get better with time. This is not the best choice, you are allowing your feelings to control you and your actions. Overthinking can turn to worry and anxiety to depression if you don’t reverse this by making the decision to get up, take the first step, get help if you need it, and stop feeling sorry for yourself because nobody else will feel that way.

Are you feeling sad or are you depressed?

Feeling down and sad is one of the symptoms of depression, but it is not the same even if it is very bad. In fact, these emotions are normal as we encounter the problems and low points in life. We all have those.

The happiest people are those who are able to cope with the problems that hit us unexpectedly, and react in a more positive way. Everybody feels sad, but you should never allow it to take you over. Depression is when sadness controls you and you feel hopeless and unable or unwilling to change it.

So how is depression different from just feeling sad? According to Medical News Today, it is when you feel down for at least two weeks and have the several of the symptoms such as lack of motivation, insomnia, weight gain and lack of energy. But, in order to be sure you have depression, you should see a doctor who will look at your symptoms and make a medical diagnosis.

Sadness makes you feel unhappy but depression actually affects your daily routine and may make it hard for you to manage your life, work and make decisions.

Ask yourself if you feel really depressed today do you believe that you are feeling down or do you truly think that your situation is hopeless, that you are stuck and can’t escape? Have you been feeling this way for more than 14 days? If so, go see a doctor and get help. Depression can be a dangerous beast and you cannot overcome it alone.

Recommendation

If you really do feel depressed I recommend that you get this depression program as it is VERY successful. It really works, I know because I followed it a few years ago and it really helped me. Many visitors to this website have also emailed me and told me how much they enjoyed and benefited from this depression program so be sure that is well worth getting. It gets five stars from me!! *****

Two more ways to help you feel more positive

• Use the incredible power of self hypnosis – download this helpful program to feel happier
• One of the best ways to change the way you feel instantly and to help you if you are feeling bad is to use gratitude. I recently uploaded a video about how to use a gratitude journal, go check it out below.