My Top 3 Suggestions for Depression

— This is not medical advice

October 21, 2022

Who is this average looking “white guy” and what is he doing talking to me about depression? He’s unrelatable!

Cue dismay.

A few bullet points that I believe give me street cred to support my answer:

1. getting bullied in my youth and having to go back to the lion’s den everyday,

2. epigenetic trauma,

3. being raised by a medical specialist, my dad, Dr. Hal Blatman,

4. knowing only outsider status from the dominant cultural religion,

5. TBI and coma from a car accident at 18 years old, and PTSD that became complex over the 15 years it took to get a meaningful diagnosis.

6. lots of dissociative behaviors: alcohol, weed, porn, tv, etc…

Some behaviors, choices, and activities exacerbate pain, and some behaviors, choices, and activities relieve pain.

Tony Robbins talks a lot about this binary motivator for all human behavior — to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. I’m not sure it’s so simple, but it’s a great place to start.

At nearly 40 years old, and some of the street cred I listed above, I have a decent amount of observational analysis to recognize patterns in my own life experience.

My top 3 suggestions for depression are:

1. Clean up your food diet — eliminate sugar completely and drink water only (no other drinks)

Sugar makes everything worse (emotional madness, physical rehab/recovery).

Avoid inflammatory foods like the plague. Just this one systemic change may cause such a dramatic difference in your life that you get bored as your old patterns and habits fall away.

2. Clean up media diet — no toxicity

Media is designed to draw you in, capture your attention, and keep you there.

Don’t believe me?

There’s a well-known metric that all media masures — “bounce rate”. According to Wikipedia, “[this] represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.” 

Keeping your attention on the media, away from how you feel, is the #1 priority. Giving you the media that improves your quality of life is secondary, at best.

3. Journal consistently — you’ll find out what you live for

Spending time alone in your thoughts, digesting them into coherent ideas by exercising the energy through your body and out through a writing implement, helps cognitive processing and reveals you to yourself. Reading the journaling back to yourself can help you get an objective perspective on your feelings, motivations, and actions.

I know no better way to know yourself more deeply.

By knowing yourself more deeply, you can get out from under the thumb of oppressive mental models that spiral you out to others’ agendas, and more in touch with the truth of what you live for.

My life experience consolidates into the recognition that living into what you live for by learning who you are underneath enculturalization, unifying your spirit into its real purpose for embodying, is my greatest advice for anyone dealing with depression.

May these words serve your soul and heal your heart.

For more from me, Joshua Blatman, follow me on all my socials, listed here.

Joshua is an Ohioan, American, and global man; husband, father, musician, astrologer, writer, and spiritual being in earth form, spiritualizing the material a little more each day.

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