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Comment by jamesgreenleaf | Hacker News Reader

You can certainly try this method, especially when you're younger, and you'll probably feel exhilarated and your mood will improve... until you finally go to sleep again. The effects don't last very long, and losing sleep continually is very bad for your health.

I would recommend to anyone with depression that you first change your diet. Stop eating refined carbs & processed foods of any kind. Stick to basic fruits & vegetables with some whole grains, and beans for protein. Adapt this as your personal needs vary, and as you see fit. I think you'd probably be amazed how much eating well affects your mood, especially if you've never done it before for any long period of time.

Here's some more info on a good, simple, science-backed diet to follow: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...

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I think everything involved with trying to change your diet is a pretty difficult hill to climb for most depressed people.

"I'm just not going to eat" is usually where that ends up for me. Simple solutions for complex problems.

I find that any change I would like, I think about the change and how it fits into my values structure over a few days and change my mindset on the matter. Then I slowly shift in little steps towards that goal. When I experience barriers, I take those seriously and incorporate the insights into my mindset and maybe adjust my it accordingly. In a sense the initial mindset work is asking myself to be serious about what I really want and how it fits holistically into my ways of being. Then I am more motivated because it's not just -I have this idea that it's what I want" it is "I want that" so I trust I'll get there and allow myself to work through the full complexity of the change.

In particular, this gets rid of the "I must exert energy to do this" dynamic that can be an unbreakable barrier in a depressive state.

I started suffering from depression at 18 and it got progressively worse, with periodic bouts putting me in bed for days. True misery. I switched to a very disciplined lifestyle of exercise and a diet as suggested above and it helped a lot, but it did not cure me. I just suffered less.

What cured me was SSRI medication (Lexapro). I still try to maintain healthy diet and exercise but the SSRI was night and day. I had minimal side effects and it completely changed my life. My 2 cents.

For me, an SSRI worked wonders, but was just a short term band aid. I had to adjust my dose or switch medications pretty early on. I also felt like I lost something ephemeral while medicated.

Diet and exercise also helped tremendously and had lasting effects. I not only felt better, but it was earned. It took a lot of discipline to make this happen while depressed.

Therapy is what worked. Everything else was great at relieving symptoms, which gave me the capacity to work through therapy. But, for me, they didn’t act as a cure any more than cough syrup and chicken soup cure a cold.

I tried years of therapy but honestly never found a therapist that clicked. I am a very corporate, achievement, “work 80 hours a week” type person and therapists didn’t understand and constantly identified my lifestyle as a source or symptom of my depression which is 100% not true.

The human brain is enormously complex. You can be depressed by patterns of thought, past trauma / historical issues, or simply a chemical imbalance. I firmly believe I had a chemical imbalance and the SSRI fixed it. It was seriously a night and day difference in my life.

I think there are many varied causes of depression and this is why the same techniques don’t work for everyone. But for my situation the drugs worked.

I get depressed from 36 hour weeks. Maybe the therapists arent wrong thinking that 80 hour weeks aint healthy, even if you love your job lessure is super relevant too

> your mood

Depression is not about "your mood". Depression is not the same as feeling slightly unhappy. By all means, everyone should eat healthy foods. But if you have a medical condition (depression), get medical help.

Seriously even before food, drink more water. Seriously.

Agreed but drinking the recommended amount of water is harder than I thought it would be! For one, it’s a lot of water. More than I would have thought. And second, if I’m ever going to be out and about or not able to use the restroom frequently I find it impossible.

I highly recommend more people hydrate properly but I don’t blame people who have a hard time, especially if they don’t work tech jobs where bathroom breaks are plentiful. Some of my teacher friends have it rough.

I drink more than the recommended amount of water every day and yet I'm still depressed. It is almost like water can't cure depression. Seriously.

Thank you.

"oh, have you tried more sunshine?", "try taking vitamin D, it's probably just a seasonal affective disorder", "just sleep well, eat well, drink well, don't do anything else and you're good to go"

How about just go see some damn doctors first, and who knows if they'll find something off with your thyroid, if they can't do anything but diagnose a severe depression, if your super-healthy-diet-2.0 is lacking in something and it's in your blind spot, etc.

This trend of lifestyle coaches telling obvious things is getting on my nerves quite frankly. I've drank your 3 liters of water per day, I've taken your vitamin D supplements in the winter, I've done the five kinds of fruit and veggies per day, I've done the low to no carb diets, I've done full years of thorough tracking on myfitnesspal, I've done the running frequently and lifting often. I've followed proper sleep habits that didn't budge even on weekends in order to retain a rhythm. I've gone on walks. And so on.

What I haven't done is get proper help with people who knew what the hell they were talking about, because everybody else was trying to be a damn doctor and telling me that the lemon in their hot water in the morning is probably the difference between my messed up self and their stable life. Proper treatments made the difference between life and death. Thanks everybody else..

SEE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT THEY STUDIED.

Doctors are too expensive and there are too many gaps in social safety nets that allow some people to access medical care who otherwise couldn't. Sometimes people who can access medical care have had bad experiences with doctors. I think most people who go to woo, life coach hell, and different medical traditions were driven there by terrible doctors or desperation.

And I was too. But I wasn't taken out of that hell by the lifestyle coaches, I was taken out of that hell when "good" (knowledgeable and empathetic and available) doctors, who do exist, brought their actual knowledge and experience to my problem. After about 20 excruciating years.

The point is, you don't know if you have a small cut or a fracture. While the bandaid can help the lesser problem, you're going to have a very bad time if you let people advise you to just put bandaids on your fracture.

I'm not saying people shouldn't apply at all general tips, but people need to realize that it should mandatorily come with "and go seek professional help if your suffering is increasing or if it is hard to bear, no matter how long it takes". It should be encouraged, because people who are suffering from various kinds of issues like depression or bpd are likely already not wanting to go due to both psychological factors (anhedonia, anxiety disorders about what they'll find or how their finances affect them, self-abandonment) AND the state of their lives.

High-functioning depression? well there can be a degree of delusion to operate well enough ("It's not that bad" until you flip out). Or not functioning at all? then your income is likely lower than if you were feeling well, thus the financial stress and lack of access to convenient solutions for medical support. And then you just read people saying how they went from couch to being a CEO because they wake up at 5 every day and drink lots of water.. well cool for you, but if you were lucky that it wasn't a fracture that doesn't change the lack of diagnosis of MY thing!

Me too, but when I forget to drink water, I feel awful and my mental/physical wellbeing tend to spiral. An easy thing to forget when I'm depressed and focusing on anything but my own existence.

Compared to "depressed? Just make nutrition an even taller barrier with an extra heap of guilt if you soft-fail!", it's at least benign, and beneficial for me

That's not true. Diet had much much greater impact on your brains.

Depends, try not drinking for 4 days and see how you feel, now try without eating.

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