Do meaningful shit. Join a meaningful movement to make a better world that’s willing to train you to be a leader, that in combination with therapy and medication has done wonders for me

I hear you, I’ve been in deep bouts of depression since my early teens.

In my case, I started to consistently feel better when I became a part of a community that was doing something. Organising, taking some form of action, and connecting with people who had shared goals and who’ve been through similar struggles as myself.

Over the years I’ve worked on my depression by myself a lot, engaging in hobbies, working out, etc. but the improvements were always temporary. It wasn’t until I started fighting for something with others that I stopped sliding down into the abyss, even through bad days.

It’s just my experience, I hope you can make it out as well.

I’m going to be trying esketamine treatment soon. I’ll tell you if it’s helpful. As with other commenters in this thread, I’ve had incredible periods of relief after psilocybin shrooms. Just 4 trips, but that was followed by months of improved mood and functioning overall. I’m hoping esketamine is similarly effective for me. It’s legal and FDA approved now by the way, so perhaps look into a psychiatry practice near you that provides the service.

Can’t say this is a “solution”, but negative thinking is habitual. Our brains are hardwired to reward repetitive thinking by strengthening the connections we use the most. This is the same mechanism that allows us to get better at tasks through practice.

Unfortunately, our brains don’t differentiate between positive or negative thought patterns. It doesn’t reward us when we think good things, while punishing us for thinking bad things. it just makes it easier for us to think about things, that we think about often.

This means that negative thinking reinforces negative thinking…making it easier and easier to have negative thoughts. It becomes an automatic function that our brains execute like muscle memory.

The only way to stop this from happening, is to force your brain to think about something else…and repeat it often enough, that the new pattern takes priority over the old one. Eventually the new pattern will become as automatic as the old one, and will no longer require effort to execute.

I think I accidentally stumbled into the perfect (for me) solution when I became the ‘mushroom guy’ in college at the same time that I learned about/became obsessed with meditation. i tripped every two weeks for a stretch of ~6 months while developing a meditation habit and consuming every Alan Watts lecture on youtube.

not saying at all that this like fixed me, it still hits from time to time. we’re not broken, just fucked up by our environment, parents, culture, poverty, biology, etc. me cramming shrooms and meditation simultaneously for a year just gave my brain a major reset and helped me develop mindfulness tools for keeping my nervous system on an even keel.

there is some scientific backing to this approach, I’ve learned about later on. psychedelics can help bump you off mental patterns, and mindfulness can help you create new patterns intentionally.
the key though is in the combo.

By having a less miserable life.

It’s not all in your head, despite what the CBT nutters say. Nor is your brain chemistry corrupted like a faulty hard-drive. All of this shit was made-up by bourgies so people won’t blame the societal structures they live under.

Unfortunately a lot of things that keep us miserable are out of our control, or take an extreme amount of work to try and change your circumstances to something better.