How Self-Discipline Can Help Heal Depression

Of all the things to have by your side in life and to continually hone your proficiency in, consistency is one of the best. This isn’t a new idea by any means. Most of us are so used to it we barely register this statement as anything more than a trite mantra of the 21st century. And yet, as valuable as consistency is the everyday human, it is doubly important to the depressed individual.

Consistency and depression — simplistically speaking, a dichotomy of positive and negative — share some striking parallels. By any technical measure, depression itself is habitual and consistent. It gruelingly persists with unrelenting regularity. It is usually categorized by sameness, flatness. Consequently, an interesting strategy, indeed, is to fight the very nature of depression with something that bears the same underlying pattern.

Depression drags down and is predictable. Consistency (that is, of predetermined good habits) lifts up and is, by definition, predictable.

The difference between the two, of course, is that depression feels natural and consistency feels artificial. Depressed people commonly lament a lack of naturally-occurring motivation and feel helpless in escaping their predicament because they are too focused on trying to produce this naturally-occurring motivation (which reveals itself to be maddeningly elusive). In actuality, this is a tall order to ask of anyone depressed and not a very realistic expectation. Motivation does not bloom out of nothing, after all.

And so, it is this artificiality that makes those with depression squirm, and understandably so. They’re all too familiar with feeling faded, fake, a shell of themselves. Trying to install “positive habits” can feel wearying and slightly revolting because of its implicit artificiality. But it is precisely this artificiality which singularly is poised to combat the individual’s depression.

What does this look like? This means forcing yourself to sit down and write down a positive thought about the future, even if the thought is slow and laborious in coming, and your face is tightly arranged in a grim expression. This means slinging your feet over the side of the bed every day the moment your alarm rings, even if endless sleep and its tempting anesthesia beckons. This means urging your fingers to participate in an favored pastime of yours — to play an instrument, to make something — even if you are unspeakably tired and you desperately don’t want to try.

Over time, your willingness to engage in a constructive habit regardless of the presence of positive motivation cannot help but make you stronger and more resilient. Over time, living itself becomes less conditional on having all the stars aligned. Perhaps you realized that you were capable of moving ahead even when that desire didn’t originally exist inside of you. The desire wasn’t organic, you might have learned, but instead was something cultivated through action.

Consistency, stripped down to its essence, is defined by good habits chosen irrespective of feelings, emotion, and motivation. It is a disciplinary framework that operates regardless of your shifting emotional sands. This “disregard for feelings” can be hard to swallow for some people. Forcing oneself into an uncomfortably rigid set of demands might read as self-punishment or, conversely, inauthenticity.

Because as much as most people want to avoid being too draconian with themselves, they can’t stand “faking it” even more. This makes sense — for “faking it” feels like a crime against our identities. After all, a common problem people encounter when it comes to attempting self-discipline is feeling as if their identities can weather the storm. They might back out of good habits because they feel unmotivated and the idea of bringing themselves to participate in ‘x’ good habit feels false and forced.

Absent of any practice with consistency-regardless-of-feelings, people will usually run for shelter — they’ll rush to submit to that feeling of withering motivation, say. They’ll skip their planned exercise because they’re “not feeling it”. They’ll sleep in every day because they feel too sad to get up. They’ll stop partaking in their hobbies because they’re feeling listless and unenthusiastic. And on some level, they’ll be convinced that such capitulation is correct — that in doing so, they’re “staying true to themselves”. (In some cases, depression is arrived at from precisely this slippery-slope of choices.)

And so, it is not hard to see how a dominant policy of “listening to one’s feelings” can quickly take a bad turn. Generally speaking, feelings are ephemeral but the behavior that we chose to produce in reaction to them is what ends up setting the tone of our daily lives. Granted, there is plenty of merit to the general concept of “listening to one’s feelings”. It is listening, however, that is a bit of a passive exercise. Following your feelings, however, is an active endeavor. And you don’t always have to follow your feelings! You’re not obligated to!

This is, in part, why depression can be so difficult to disentangle from. It can be jarring and disorienting to hold two selves at once — one that is depressed, and another that refuses to fall in step with this depression, and instead, is striving towards positive, consistent habits. Depression is frequently limned as a negative spiral due to the powerful feedback loop that persists between feelings and behavior.

All this said, “listening to your feelings” should not vindicate everything that you do. Why? Because you actually have very little evidence that you are always working in your best interest. Is “listening” to that mood swing that you had five minutes ago really the most appropriate course of action? We tend to believe that our feelings possess some secret, intrinsic knowledge about our beings that ought to be relied upon more than the positive intervention of self-discipline. And this isn’t always the case.

Do keep the channels open to emotional awareness; but crucially, don’t allow your emotions to dictate the whole of your everyday decisions — least of all because you don’t actually want them to.

Consistency is cool and detached, comfortingly level-headed. Consistency is to order as feelings are to chaos, symbolically speaking. We have as much a need for self-imposed structure as we do for a self-attentive ear.

Consistency also has a taming effect, helping to ritualize our daily experience in a positive way. Again, many of us might initially glower at the idea of it because it feels punishing and claustrophobic and we want only to “listen to our heart” and to do what we feel in the moment. But the truth is, you will likely grow to resent granting yourself “absolute freedom” because ironically, your feelings will quickly overtake this vacuum and will come to hold you hostage. As a consequence, you will probably have trouble respecting yourself, too. You require the balancing effect of discipline and structure and you crave its implicit stability.

Consistency and self-discipline can serve as the anchor in the middle of stormy seas. For those with depression, such habits can put a floor on how far one can fall. They tend to fortify a person with knowledge of their own resilience and over time, help to cultivate a healthy, forward-thinking mentality.

There is something both stabilizing and liberating about consistency. As previously mentioned, it shares the same fundamental rhythm as depression — predictable, somewhat plodding. It is just that the notion of consistency has positive intentions and depression has negative ones.

It takes some real grit to subvert the lull of depression with the initially numbing feel of self-discipline. But the results are worth it. As it is, consistency itself offers its own unique breed of freedom. This is because it rescues you from having to cajole yourself into a task. It eliminates you from having to partake in an endless, tiresome string of complicated justifications for wanting to wriggle out of this or that.

Basically, it offers you the ease of removing emotion from the equation. Crucially, not because it’s categorically irrelevant but because you’ve dictated that it simply needn’t be applied in this situation. You have that choice, you know. And it’s a wonderfully freeing and self-affirming decision to make.

By adhering to a policy of consistency in certain habits, you’re actually escaping the possible tyranny of your emotions. Taking a break from them is good because they do not constitute the unequivocal, sound decision-making basis for everything in your life, after all. In addition, you’re also making room for a rather enjoyable simplicity to emerge.

And when you’re consistent with your habits, you needn’t think about results or become too bogged down in self-assessment. In fact, it’s this very lack of self-assessment that is so crucial. The most important thing is that you engage in ritual confrontation of whatever is the task at hand. It’s just an action — and that’s all you can be evaluated on. Thus, plain action is a manageable goal and a very straightforward one at that.

There’s a soothing quality of predicability to self-discipline because it assures you that your only responsibility is to show up and engage in the practical completion of a task. It doesn’t matter how you feel before you are about to do it — this is of no consequence. This is why depression can be very well suited to this kind of “medicine” — self-discipline/consistency doesn’t requires that you have anything in the way of positive feelings in order to engage with it. It asks only for some dedication, and you’d be surprised by how organically you can grow this dedication out of only a small speck.

As daunting as it seems to think self-discipline can save you from your depression (and keep in mind, it is but a possible strategy, not a cure) remember that you are not obligated to sink into depressive feelings. You can give them a little nod of recognition but you do not have to follow those emotions. We all have that choice a thousand times in the course of our daily lives.

Ultimately, self-discipline doesn’t bat an eye at a lack of motivation. It makes you do the thing anyways. And you know what? Afterward, you’re glad for it. Depression’s power is weakened whenever we use our never-fully-crippled powers of self-discipline for good.

The consistency of good habits marches to the same tempo as the dreary, unflagging trudge of depression. The former, however, can reign triumphant over the latter if only we trusted that our emotions don’t always need to be leaned into.

Over time, consistency builds not only a reassuring calm into one’s life, fixing a steady rhythm that promises immunity from being unhinged by emotional vagaries, but it also gives us the gift of self-respect.

You want to be relied on, after all. And there’s nothing like watching yourself show up and accomplish your objectives with businesslike precision, knowing that you are strong enough to do something that you are desperately not feeling in the moment. You can be trusted to follow through! (And that’s a victorious realization to come to.)