Prevent Depression: 5 Helpful Tips
Depression is a complex process associated with both psychological aspects and brain chemistry, among other factors. It’s certainly important to pay attention to this illness and seek help when we see the first symptoms arise. Below we give five tips to prevent depression.
Five Tips to Prevent Depression
1. Believing in Ourselves
An especially important tip is to always trust ourselves and our abilities. We should both value ourselves for our skills and draw conclusions from past experiences. This way, we’ll be aware of who we are and the chances that we can take.
Although being confident about ourselves can be difficult because it requires dedication and attention, there are strategies for gaining confidence that we can use. Some of them include the following:
- Considering mistakes to be normal.
- Being aware of what the best ways to learn are.
- Celebrating our successes in proportion with how hard they were for us to achieve.
2. Surrounding Ourselves with Good People
In order to prevent depression, it’s certainly important to surround ourselves with people that make us feel good about ourselves. In other words, we should be around people who value and respect us. They help us recognize our skills. They also make us realize our imperfections, but always in a constructive way.
We need to spend some time identifying the people who support us and are emotionally good for us. They’re the people who should be a part of our lives.
Discover: The Best Tips to Help You Lift Your Mood
3. Keeping Bad Thoughts Away
In order to prevent a possible depression spell, it’s also important to keep away from bad thoughts or rid our minds of them. In this case, it’s advisable to turn negative thoughts into positive ones that are related to things that we’d like to achieve.
As a result, we’ll have more energy and ability to concentrate on positive things that’ll help improve our mood.
Read: Bad Luck? Turn Negative Thoughts into Positive Ones
4. Trying to Solve All of Our Problems
Avoiding problems doesn’t improve our self-esteem or prevent depression. On the contrary, putting them off until later can lead to additional emotional difficulties, raise our stress levels, as well as make it easier to feel depressed. It’s definitely better to solve the problems we have in the best way possible.
5. Seeking Professional Help Before It’s Too Late to Prevent Depression
When noticing the first signs of depression, which can vary from person to person, we should see a professional so that we can get a diagnosis and receive proper treatment. As we said in the beginning, we’re talking about a serious illness that should thus be diagnosed and treated by a professional.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- American Psychiatric Association. Depressive disorders. In: American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing. 2013:155-188.
- Cruwys, T., Dingle, G. A., Haslam, C., Haslam, S. A., Jetten, J., & Morton, T. A. (2013). Social group memberships protect against future depression, alleviate depression symptoms and prevent depression relapse. Social Science and Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.09.013
- Flannery-Schroeder, E. C. (2006). Reducing Anxiety to Prevent Depression. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2006.07.006
