Mental Health Tips

How to Beat Morning Depression With 6 Simple Tricks

Trick number 4: Eat heavy breakfast in the morning.

A depressed person sitting by the bed. Photo by on .

Do you experience feelings of extreme sadness, hopelessness or fatigue the first thing you wake up in the morning? The moment you open your eyes — be it in the morning or after a nap in the afternoon — you lie half asleep in the bed wondering about your life and how happiness and excitement are nowhere in the vicinity. Your mind starts wandering from one thought to another and that feeling of sadness and hopelessness intensifies with each passing second. Going back to sleep or crying worsens the hopelessness.

Perhaps these feelings fade away as the day progresses. You feel as if you’ve conquered the sadness and climbed your way up from the abyss of hopelessness, however everything is back the very next morning.

Experts say you could be experiencing what is known as diurnal variation of mood, commonly referred to as morning depression.

Here are a few tricks I use to beat that hopelessness after waking up:

1. The specific cause of morning depression has not been clearly identified yet: Since the reason behind the sadness and hopelessness you feel after waking up has not been identified so far, there is no need to assign one on your own.
   Usually, in life, there are one or more negative things happening to everyone at any given period of time. Someone might be experiencing a downfall in their career. Someone of you must be going through a relationship problem. Others might be experiencing health-related issues or some other problem that might appear to you as an appropriate cause of morning depression.
   For some people, those negative events really are the reason behind morning depression. But most of the time, they are not and if they are not, as I have experienced in my case, assigning an event as a cause to this problem makes it legit for our mind. The mind then amplifies it. This is sometimes referred to as a positive feedback loop. The mind then plays thoughts of that particular problem repeatedly. The hopelessness intensifies with each iteration and it becomes hard for us to come out of it after waking up, partly because our conscious and reasonable mind is not that active right after waking up. And so we are unable to see the big picture and we keep dwelling on that small heavy moment.
   Takeaway: Do not assign any reason to that hopelessness. Do not overthink a thought that is already troubling you. I know it is easier said than done but if you wake up with a thought — which you most probably will — try to tell yourself loud and clear that this particular problem is not the reason for the sadness I am feeling. Mere acknowledgement of this will help you overcome that hopelessness.
2. Find an exciting activity: Find an engaging activity that you look up to every morning. Something that makes you jump out of bed. It’s not easy to find such passion in your life but once you find something like this, you could shift your focus to that activity each morning. If not that, make a list of activities that rejuvenates your mind and helps you feel centred and choose one of them the day you feel sad and hopeless.
   Takeaway: If you can’t find such an activity. Here are some that you could use. Listening to music. Set some songs that really lift your mood up. Play them first thing in the morning and get up from bed. Do not keep lying in bed. Get out of it. I repeat. Do not keep lying there. Read something. Find an interesting book of your choice and start reading it as soon as you wake up. Reading absorbs all your attention leaving no gaps for thoughts of sadness and hopelessness. It also acts as an exercise for your brain and slowly trains your brain to be strong enough to fight morning depression.
3. Include these healthy activities in your morning routine: The very first of those is reading something good, inspirational or interesting right after waking up. After that drink a lot of water as it is required by the brain to function normally. Do some exercise, do yoga, practice mindfulness or go for a run. These activities release happy hormones in your body and hence make you ready to win the world.
   Takeaway: Having a disciplined morning is very necessary so that the feeling of sadness and hopelessness doesn’t control your mind. Learn to play some instruments. Practice that in the morning. Or start writing a journal. Make a gratitude journal. Plan your day and write what positive thing you’re looking forward to that morning. If you can’t find one, write something small like talking to a friend or about eating something you like.
4. Eat heavy breakfast: Renowned psychologist Dr Jordan B. Peterson says if you eat a heavy and healthy breakfast for a week, you’ll see a change in your attitude as it leans towards optimism and positivity. Lack of good quality food in the right quantity can result in reduced blood sugar levels and worsen depressive symptoms.
   Takeaway:Eat a nutritious whole food breakfast in the morning. It is vital to bring your blood sugar level back up to a level where your brain can function more efficiently and help you pull out of your depressive state.
5. Sleep well and make way for some natural light in your room: Poor sleep is one of the biggest contributing factors to morning depression. If you can’t sleep at a specific time, at least try to wake up at a fixed time every morning. Also, try to develop a routine that you follow before going to bed every night.
   Put your phone away or at least turn the ‘Night Mode’ on one hour before sleep. Read a book before sleeping and continue that first thing in the morning. You can also hear some good uplifting music and/or practice mindfulness meditation just before going to bed.
   Takeaway: Make way for some natural light in your room. Remove curtains before sleeping. Your body will start waking up without an alarm to the rays of the morning sun. Natural light will also help your psyche to leave the sleeping state into a positive morning state. One more thing that could be added is night time journaling. Some of us have difficulty letting go of our thoughts as we sleep. As a result, they linger on in our psyche and they overpower us in the morning because our conscious mind takes time to take control. Thus they drag us into sadness and hopelessness and since our own mind doesn’t seem to help us get out of it, we accept that sadness and hopelessness as our reality.
   Try to empty your mind of any worries and concerns before going to sleep by writing them down and don’t forget to write a hopeful positive statement at the end of each worrisome thought.
6. Troubling dreams linger in the mind: Many of us are pulled into sadness because of the disturbing dreams we see and wake up with. Dreams are nothing but your brain cleaning your mind of unnecessary memories and setting it straight for use the very next morning.
   Takeaway: You know you start forgetting whatever you dreamt of as the time passes in the morning. Try not to recall your dream. You’ll forget it anyway but recalling it might make you sad or depressed because you desperately try to make sense out of those random dreams. Jump to the above-mentioned morning activities and instruct your mind to not think about it. Remember If you’ll not control your mind, it will control you.

Final Takeaway:

Most of the time, the thoughts that trouble us in the morning are related to the recent changes in our life circumstances such as a break-up, job loss or unemployment, death of a loved one, some chronic pain, anxiety about a life situation or substance abuse.

Personally, I have observed that we dwell so much on a small life situation, we overthink it so many times (because our brain is trying to prepare us for that moment of perceived threat) and it becomes so much bigger than it really is that we are dragged into a permanent state of anxiety. That life event gets sorted and we forget how we reacted to it, thus continuing the same behaviour for the next seemingly threatful life situation. This of course, continues in the morning. So, if we’re not happy with our reality because of some life situation, we get averse to waking up to it in the morning.

For example, one may be dissatisfied with his or her marriage, income or job. They then develop an inherent wish to avoid stepping into that stressful reality- a wish that can never be fulfilled. They are often in a state of denial and so they avoid facing that reality.

However, I have found that the moment we accept that reality, it ceases to trouble us. We then -at least psychologically- move past that and start looking past that. This prepares us to look beyond that seemingly threatful reality of life which is necessary to realize that life cannot be defined by and/or boiled down to one or more small or big negative events.

This makes us look forward to more opportunities and possibilities that open up because of the acceptance of that painful reality. We develop an eye for the doors of solution which were otherwise invisible. It makes us understand how life always goes on. We see and plan beyond that seemingly huge life-altering event and that event then transforms into something that lifts us up to a higher reality.