The One You Feed - Brent Williams on Recovering from Depression

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

Brent Williams suffered for a long time from depression and anxiety and during that time he kept a journal about his thoughts, feelings, and experiences. That journal has now been turned in to a beautiful graphic novel called, Out Of The Woods: A Journey Through Depression and Anxiety. In this episode, Brent and Eric use his story as a jumping-off point to discuss how depression can show up in your life and how you can realistically, practically, and effectively find your way out of it.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Brent Williams and I Discuss…His book, Out Of The Woods: A Journey Through Depression and AnxietyHow subtle depression can be in your life – permeating everything All the things he went to as a diagnosis before he admitted it was depression he was suffering fromHis resistance to taking depression medicationHow he watched his father take medication for anxiety and how it changed himHis resistance to taking help from othersHis experience in therapyThe metaphor of depression medication being a life preserver but you still have to swim back to shoreThe components of self-care: eat well, exercise, be with people, be outside, get support, stop ruminating, proper sleepHow fundamental good nutrition is when it comes to mental well beingDoing small and manageable things when you’re depressedHow the reward mechanism in your brain isn’t working properly when you’re depressedHow it took him a while to find the right therapist The potential danger of meditating when depressedThat mindfulness meditation was the form of meditating that helped him mostThe impact of keeping a mood chart – seeing a pattern that you can’t see at the timeThat sometimes you just have to push yourself over the hurdle of doing things that are good for you when you don’t feel like doing themLooking at your activities to assess your mental wellbeingDepression showing up as irritability in menBrent Williams Links:outofthewoods.co.nz **Special Offer** for The One You Feed listeners! Buy 1 Book, Get 1 Free to give to a friend, family member or a community center!FacebookTwitterPhlur – Eric created his own sampler set that you can try! Get this curated sampler set or create your own. Get 20% off your first 3 Phlur samples at Phlur.com/wolfFabFitFun – A women’s lifestyle subscription box filled with full-size premium items that you will love. Eric’s girlfriend is honestly obsessed because the items in this box are just so good. Give yourself this gift – use the promo code FEED for $10 off your first box at fabfitfun.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's episode is brought to you by our newest Patreon members, Mick, Patricia, Christine, and Connor, and all the rest of our members who support the show. If you'd like to become a member of our Patreon community and enjoy the many benefits of membership, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Whose life are you living? Is it the one that's right for you, or is it what your parents want?

You're stuck in some place which is really destructive. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Brent Williams. As someone who had long suffered from depression and anxiety, Brent kept a journal throughout his experience, which has now been turned into a beautiful graphic novel called Out of the Woods, A Journey Through Depression and

Anxiety. Hi, Brent. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Nice to be here. It's a pleasure to have you on. Your book is called Out of the Woods, A Journey Through Depression and Anxiety. And it is a graphic novel about, as it says, your journey through depression and anxiety. And we'll get to that in a second. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I think it was really apt. It's a really apt parable for me. And in my book, I actually created a character that was sort of the best way I could see depression and anxiety in the form of dogs or wolves in my book. So I think when you're depressed, you don't see what is going on. You don't really see depression. It's sort of such a subtle influence in your life, even though it's very significant.

And by seeing it, you actually can start to see how it's affecting your life and you can decide whether you feed it or not. It's a complicated process, and I'm sure we'll talk about that. But at one level, the parable is a really effective way that you can actually confront your depression, see how it's influencing your life and make that decision about whether you really want to continue down the depression path or whether you want to get well. I agree 100% and I think that that parable speaks to me and my depression to some extent. I know that there are things that I do that are helpful for my depression. And I know there are things I do that are not helpful for it. So, you know,

one of the things that struck me in the book was all the things that you tried before you would admit it was depression. You were willing to think it was lots of other things before you actually said, oh, I have depression. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tried everything over a long period of time. And because depression comes out in a whole lot of symptoms, depression reveals itself or manifests itself with a whole lot of physical symptoms.

So it's very easy to say, oh, it's my neck, it's my stomach pain, it's my back pain, it's my neck pain, it's my insomnia, it's all these things. And if you go to a doctor, as I did, I went to many, they'll treat the symptom that you appear with. It was remarkable how none of the people that I went to said, let's look at the sum total of your life. Let's look at the sum total of your symptoms. And very quickly, somebody would have said, hey, you're depressed. You need to do something about

the depression, not just the symptoms. Yeah. I mean, you said you thought you were willing to admit it could be adrenal fatigue, burnout, vitamin deficiency, chronic fatigue, all these different things, instead of admitting it was depression. So what was it about depression that you were so reticent to think that this could be? Well, at the time, I wasn't aware that I didn't want to face depression. There wasn't even enough awareness to get to that point. But when I started to, you know, people started to tell me I was depressed when I went to my general practitioner and people started to tell me I was depressed when I went to my general practitioner and said, you've got depression, then it was more obvious that I

was running from that diagnosis, that I did not want to be depressed. I did not want to be the depressed person. I'd spent my life being the strong person, helping others, raising kids, you know, doing good things in the community. You know, I wasn't the one that was going to get depressed. I was strong. I would not succumb to something like depression. I would just get myself through it, push on, overcome it. All those things were in my psyche making me believe I couldn't be depressed or if I did something else,

surely it's not that, it's something else. I can solve it through some other action. It took many years of running, and of course, you know, that made things worse. I was just getting more depressed and running out of options, really. It is that internal belief that is still so prevalent today in people, even though there's more awareness and, you know, some of the stigma has been exposed and is perhaps reducing,

but I still come across people who won't face the fact that they are suffering from depression. acknowledge that it's depression, and we go on trying all these other things. Or we are very quickly diagnosed as having depression, we are given a medicine. And then that's kind of the end of the story. And I found both those things in my own life to be lacking, right? Like I needed to know what I was dealing with, I needed to know I had depression, right? And medicine was a big part of my recovery, but it wasn't sufficient. It wasn't enough. And so, you know, I also found that while there's been a lot of benefit to say your average general practitioner saying, hey, you might have depression. Again, I think a lot of benefits better than suffering unacknowledged. But I also find that the tendency then tends to be in a lot of cases, here's your antidepressant, go on about your life. And in your case, it really was both. It was medicine and it was all these lifestyle changes. And I thought the book did a really good job of walking through how you did so many different things. So I thought I'd start by asking you, just tell me a little bit

about your resistance to taking any medicine for depression. It was the same issue of believing that I was needed to use, not accept help. I think that was the big thing. I didn't want help from somebody else, even though I was a helper and helped others and made my living out of helping others, but yet I wasn't prepared to accept help from others, which was crazy. And in the same way, I wasn't prepared to take medication. I didn't want something artificial to try and get me over this. That was at one level. I think at a more sensible level, there was something in me which knew that my life was not right and I needed something more than just a quick fix. I look back and think if there was a quick fix, I should have and would have taken it. But I took a tougher path, which I wouldn't recommend people. But in my case, I think if I had been put back on my feet and put back into the workplace and back into my role in society, it would have just happened again.

Because in a way, that's what did happen. I got a bit better, and then I went back, and then I crashed again, and I picked myself up. And this carried on for quite a while. and I picked myself up, and this carried on for quite a while. I needed to really get to a point where I needed to change my life, change the way I was thinking and the way I was acting, and that required quite a major restructuring of myself in a way, which was through therapy, you know, a committed and long period of therapy, and that support and that process was probably the most significant thing about changing,

along with a whole lot of other things I was doing. But by this stage, I knew that I had depression and I had really embarked on a very good path of trying to get well. But that took a long time. The other thing is a very personal thing in my family. My father had severe anxiety and there's mental illness in my family and there's drug abuse in my family. And I had seen my father taking handfuls, literally handfuls of drugs and seen his personality affected by that, benzodiazepines and things like this, that he was just downing to stay awake, just to go to sleep and everything in between.

And something deep in me didn't want to go down that path. My father's a big influence in my life, and I wanted to live a different life to him. And not going down that path of the drugs, medication was part of it as well. So it's quite a complex thing for me. So I'm certainly not anti-medication. I think it works brilliantly for some people. It works horribly for others. And somewhere in the middle, there's a group that it sort of works for.

I think for any of those, all groups, though, they need to do more than just take medication. I definitely think medication is a way to get you up to a point where you can really start helping yourself when perhaps without medication, you're not capable of doing that. You use the analogy in the book, antidepressants, sort of like a life jacket. You float, but you've still got to swim to shore. You've still got to get there and find your way home. And so, you know, your book really is illustrative of something

that I often say about me and my depression is that I just kind of threw the kitchen sink at it, right? Like I threw everything that, you know, I continue to just try as many different things as I can. And the word holistic is a little bit of a cliche in some ways these days, but it really turns out in my case to be true. Like I need all of those different things. So we've mentioned, you know, antidepressants, you've mentioned therapy. Tell me about some of the other things that you had to do that you learned would be useful for you in dealing with your depression. Well, when I look at it, in dealing with your depression? Well, when I look at it,

there are all the things we need to do and to live well. And the other basic things in life, which is to eat well. Nutrition is really important. To see the sun, to get out and exercise, move our bodies, to be with people,

not to isolate yourself, which depression does so well, but to have good relationships with people. And it's a very difficult thing when you're depressed and have anxiety to have good relationships. people. It's a very difficult thing when you're depressed and have anxiety to have good relationships. It's hard enough with friends, let alone an intimate partner, to have when you've got depression and anxiety.

You're not a very pleasant person. You're actually a really annoying person for yourself and for others to be around. So you've got some basic things and they're really big things and they have to be sort of worked at. And I think they're the key things for me, getting support. And I did that in the form of therapy. That was my main support because I was very isolated at that time. Stopping your mind ruminate because that's a really big thing in depression.

And I think mindfulness is a really good tool for me. And it was getting my sleep right, moving my body at the right time and in the right way. And there's lots of little things that came sort of later. And I added a lot of them fall out of therapy, working out how you want to live your life. Whose life are you living? Is it the one you really is right for you?

Or is it what your parents want? Or is it what you've got, you know, you stuck in some place which is really quite destructive in your life? Alcohol and drugs is another big one. You know, often people with depression are abusing alcohol and drugs and that's another issue that has to be dealt with. You're not going to recover easily unless you deal with those addiction issues. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think so many of those things are so true. More and more, I am becoming aware of how important nutrition is. There are more and more studies that are really linking diet and proper nutrition to depression and overall psychological well-being. So that's certainly been one that has been a little bit of a later arrival on the scene for me.

I wouldn't say it's been like just now, but I think I continue to grow into seeing that link. Yeah, no, I think it's fundamental. And what we put in our mouths is what our brain needs to think, to grow, to function. It's what our body needs. It's just so fundamental. We think, you know, I came across a person who said they woke up, they went to their desk and they had a cup of coffee and a cigarette and then they sat at their desk, their computer,

and didn't get up until about three in the afternoon and wondered why they were feeling so depressed. It's just so, you know, sit still in a dark room in front of a computer screen and try and survive on a coffee and a cigarette. Well, it's a recipe for disaster. You're not going to recover from depression if that's your lifestyle. You do have to sort out nutrition. It's very important.

But I think it's also important not to get obsessed about it. It can easily start, especially if you've got anxiety and worry about foods and what you're eating and what you're not eating, and being a little too obsessed. I think it's really good just to eat healthily and a wide variety of food and not stress about food. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own

stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might

just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

get your podcasts. The book does a really good job of talking about breaking the downward spiral of depression by doing lots of small and manageable things. So oftentimes, if we are in the midst of depression, and we hear a conversation like this one, and we think, oh my goodness, well, I've got to overhaul my diet, and I need to start, you know, doing a ton of exercise, got to overhaul my diet and I need to start, you know, doing a ton of exercise and I need to be going to therapy and I should be, and you know, there's all this stuff that we take. And in the book, you really do a good job of sort of breaking down how for you, it was lots of small, but manageable things. Like take the nutrition one early in the book. What's the first thing I ate? I opened the cupboard because I wasn't eating. i lost 10 kilos when i was depressed and i thought i was eating i wasn't aware that i was actually just missing meals and not eating much and it's just things that um you know you're not even aware

of at the time i open the cupboard and pull out a tin of baked beans and sit there and eat them out of the can well done you've actually eaten some food. Okay, it's not brilliant food, but it's fine. It's something in your stomach. And well done. And now, you know, now I can sort of build from there. When you're depressed, you haven't got the energy or the motivation where you can't see the benefits. There's no sort of reward mechanism happening in your brain, which says, I need to go and shop, I need to buy good food, I need to cook a meal. It's just like, where do you begin? Oh, too hard, just sit down, give up, don't eat.

So starting small for me is like just have something in the cupboards that is really simple and you can just grab and open and eat without even heating it. So have some fruit, you know, have an avocado, have some crackers, have, you know, just simple, simple food that you don't have to have to prepare because you've got no energy when you're really depressed and you just basically sit around and the world just passes you by. In the book throughout, there is a character who is sort of guiding you through how to get better. Who is this character? What does that represent to you?

Was it an actual person? The character came about because when I was writing the book, by this stage, I had made a lot of progress. I was recovering and I accepted my depression and I was in quite a different mode. I was investigating, I was researching, I was looking at a lot of stuff, I was doing everything I have in my book, I was sort of road testing and assessing and making diary notes and keeping a mood chart, what was working, what wasn't.

And the person that was doing that was a lot wiser than the person that was depressed. And so the helper is the wisdom that was in me that came later, looking back on my life and saying, okay, well, what did I do? What worked? What didn't? And it became quite a really helpful character in the book

that could easily have been my therapist or a good supportive friend. And I liked the fact that it was left open so people could bring their own help into their story, into their own story. One of the things that's interesting is you now talk about therapy as being such an important part of your recovery, but your initial attempts at therapy did not go real well. No, no they didn't. I mean, first I didn't want to, I vowed not to go to a therapist. I thought, I vowed not to go to a therapist. I

thought I'm never going to go to a therapist. I'm not going to sit in front of somebody else, even though I probably sent many other clients off to therapists. So again, it was that shame, the denial. It took me a while before I found a therapist that was right for me. And yeah, many were going down paths, which really was not helpful. So you're not necessarily going to strike the right person immediately. And the other thing I learned was that it's not necessarily – who's right for you is not necessarily the one that is the easiest road either. In some ways, your therapist is not there to be your friend.

They're there to be your therapist. They're there to believe in your, as mine did, believe in my ability to get well. That was the thing that she never lost sight of. So sometimes it's going to be a bit tough, it's going to uncover stuff, but it was always, even though it was tough, it always felt that I was making progress and I wanted to go back and I formed a very good relationship

and it was yeah I think for me it was I would not be in the position I am today unless I had really done that and committed to it and I'm very lucky I eventually found somebody so if it's really not working you've got to ask yourself am I just running away from therapy or is this not right for me and it could be it could be both. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that you, it sounds like a couple of therapists legitimately weren't a good fit, but that you didn't give up on going.

You tried someone else and then you tried someone else. There were periods where I gave up. But then, you know, I'd see myself just slowly sliding back, sliding back and think, no, I need to give it another go. And I'm so pleased I did. And eventually I did find somebody who was very good. One of the things that we hear a lot about, and this show talks about it a fair amount, is meditation. And it was interesting to me that early on, meditation wasn't necessarily that helpful for you. It sounds't, it sounds like later,

mindfulness became a bigger part of what you were doing, but it sounds like very early on, that was a tool that you were going to that wasn't very helpful. No, it wasn't. And there's some research out there that supports that. It's not just my personal view. I think people have got to be very careful

because meditation is so easily thrown out there as a thing you've got to do. Do yoga, meditate, and you'll get out of depression. I think it's simplistic and it's, in fact, a little bit dangerous because if you think what is meditation, it's mostly sitting quietly on your own with your eyes closed, doing something quite concentrated, depending on your technique. And if you're in the middle of depression and your mind is ruminating badly,

which it does, it's going over and over and over again, the last thing I needed to do was to go into a place where I was isolated and just sitting with my mind. I actually needed something which took me out of myself, out of my situation to engage with other people. And that's where mindfulness was a very different style of meditation and drew me out to connecting with people in the world and my senses. And that was a far more productive form of meditation.

So, yeah, I think meditation can mean many things, many practices, senses and that was a very that was a far more productive form of meditation so yeah i think meditation can mean many things many practices and not all necessarily going to work for you and it depends too on which stage you know maybe suggestion is now that meditation is actually better to stop people relapsing back into depression but it's questionable whether it's good to get out of you when when you're in the pits of depression. And so you found mindfulness to be more helpful. And by mindfulness, you mean being more present to what was happening to you as you were out in the world. It was both that and also being mindful as to what was happening to my body, what was working,

what was happening to my mind, being more aware of myself generally and aware of what was working and what wasn't working in terms of my recovery. But one of the things that did work was to use mindfulness to actually engage with the world, particularly nature, to get out. And you can go for a walk in the woods, which I did a lot of, and you can go through the woods and you can just get through a long period of time where you don't actually see anything. You're just stuck in your mind and your mind is going over a whole lot of really negative, unproductive or crazy nonsense thoughts. And you get to the end of your walk and you think, what did I see?

What did I feel? What did I notice? And pretty much you notice nothing. You're just consumed by your thoughts. So a practice of mindfulness actually means you actually see what's going on. You engage with the colors, the shapes, the wind, the sun, the light, what your feet are doing on the ground, what you're hearing, the wind, people, children playing, dogs. And it's a totally different experience. And it's a very healthy experience. You give your mind a break. You actually focus on what's real rather than this pantomime that's going on in your head,

which just keeps you depressed. It just churns and churns and churns and just, you know, just keeps you trapped in depression and anxiety. I think that's a really useful idea. This one of like, okay, I go for a walk in the woods, but the entire time all I'm doing is being in my brain and mindfulness being paying attention to what's real, what's actually real here instead of what is potentially not real, which is all these thoughts about what may or may not happen.

They're real in that they're happening, but they're not real as in they don't exist outside your mind. And I would do things which really, really prompted me to pull me out of my mind quite strongly. Like I would go to the botanical gardens and I would go into the fragrant garden and smell all the different smells or the herb garden, smell the herbs. You know, I'd rub some herbs on my fingers and smell them. And if you rub a nice lemony thyme on your fingers and smell them, you can't ruminate at the same time as you're doing that.

It's almost impossible. So you come out of your ruminating mind and you smell this beautiful smell it's a different experience you give your brain a holiday you give other parts of your brain which are healthy a chance to sort of come alive and that's so important and you need to read you need to build that and by building that you actually strengthen the healthy parts of your brain that have all this ability to see beauty and to engage, to be mindful. And inevitably, other things start building on that, the ability to find self, to find compassion and kindness towards yourself. Because if you're ruminating about a whole lot of negative things, things that you've done, your regrets in life, that's inevitably you're beating yourself up.

And it's really just making you feel bad, making you more depressed, keeping you trapped. Whereas you use your senses through mindfulness to see, to smell, to feel, you're having quite a different experience. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallyn no, really.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things about depression is that we tend to think of healing, and I guess from

depression or any number of things, we tend to think of it as sort of a linear thing. We just sort of get better, get better, get better, right? And in your case, that was not the way it worked. There was up, there was down, there was up, there was down. The overall trend line over a long period of time might have appeared to be upwards, but in the midst of it there was lots of up and down. Yeah, it was a real rollercoaster. And that's why it was really helpful for me to keep a mood chart. It's just, no one told me to, I just had this idea that

I wanted to know what was going on, what was behind these, what was I doing when I felt a bit better and what was I doing when I didn't. So I'd plot a little mood chart of how I felt during the day and then I would write notes. And it was really interesting to go back and see those. You see a pattern that you can't see at the time and you think, oh, it's a consistent thing when I'm with good people, good friends that actually make me, support me, listen to me or just do something

I don't know, watch a fun movie with me or go on a walk with me I'm feeling better and when I'm on my own, when I'm isolated or when I'm saying no to people because I'm feeling too anxious or too lethargic and depressed, I'm feeling worse so you suddenly get the pattern, okay, it's really important to get out and be with people. So you see that reflected back to you, and then you can build on that and build that into your life, make that more of your routine.

So it's a very good way of monitoring, working out what's working, what's not, and strengthening those good things. And it's a process. And the more you do them, the more your brain adapts to them in good ways. And the more you find your behavior's changing, and it's the upward spiral out of depression. Just little things like that make the difference. And so for you, what's it like now? You know, would you consider yourself as somebody who has recovered from depression? Is it still something that makes periodic appearances in your life? Like, what's your relationship to it now?

I definitely feel I've recovered from depression. I would never say that I won't get depressed again. I think that would be foolish. It doesn't worry me. It doesn't keep me up at night. But it's there. I mean, it was such a shake-up in my life. It's, you know, I won't forget it.

And it sits there as a reminder whenever I just start to forget. You know, if I go through a period of forgetting to look after myself in little ways or something, I just say, okay, get back on track. Anxiety is different. Anxiety still is more present for me and can rear itself more quickly. And because the two are so connected, I focus more on looking after myself

in the anxiety area, arena, if you like, because I know that if that gets out of hand, then the depression is perhaps more likely to come back into my life. So the same things, what got me out of depression are the very same things that helped me live life without anxiety,

or that anxiety that's intolerable. I'm always trying to figure out like, what's my relationship to depression now? I don't have it like I used to have it by any stretch. I am not incapacitated by it. However, I still have what I would consider, you know, sometimes I just think of it more as like low mood. And I never know, like, is that just sort of kind of my sort of where my happiness level happens to be or is it just sort of my temperament right people used to talk about like a melancholic temperament and so I I am I find it a very interesting relationship looking at my own life like kind of what what's happening here is it you know is depression still come to visit

or do I just sometimes have low mood because that's sort of my temperament. But I know it's not what it once was. And I also know that for me, that the things that I have learned to do to help me with depression are things that I continue to do today. I have found that it is a program of my recovery is contingent upon my continuing to take good care of myself. Yes. And I think the question to ask yourself is, are you, because sometimes, you know, it can creep in and you can start to change your life without knowing really how, whether depression is creeping back in. Are you saying no to people? Are you turning down requests to be with people?

Are you saying, oh, I prefer not to exercise? Are you tending to withdraw more? Just be aware of those things. And if you are, then you might say, okay, this isn't so good. I need to do something about it. I need to get some help. I need to just turn those little things around. And I think that's an important way to see it because depression can easily just slip back into people's lives without, before they know it, they are back in that place. So that's perhaps how I would see it. I mean, I can have periods where I feel really lethargic and I prefer not to get out and do things, but I push myself. And whenever I do, I say, okay, how does it feel now? Way better. I'm so pleased I got out.

I got some exercise and that was a really good thing to do. And it proves to me that sometimes you do have to just push yourself a little bit. I find I have to push myself over the hurdle often. push yourself a little bit. I find I have to push myself over the hurdle often. I guess when I say push, it's there's you can, you know, there's there's an unhealthy pushing. And then there's just sort of what I would consider a sort of a healthy, like, okay, come on, get out there. But I like that idea of looking at it less from only a mood perspective, but looking at it from a activity and life perspective. What does my life look like? What are the activities that I'm doing? Do I appear to still be engaged and right in the

heart of my life, or am I slowly withdrawing? I think that's an interesting way to look at it. Relationships are often, as I said, they're challenging. How are you responding in relationships? Are you being open, a mindful relationship where you're listening and giving and taking and, as it were, balanced? Or are you finding that no one's right? The people around you, whether it's work relationships or personal relationships, there's always a problem with somebody you're with. I mean, that type of thing can be a good reality check to say, okay, well, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm behaving in ways that this is not right because depression comes out in so many ways. It doesn't

just, you know, it's not just the archetypal, you're sitting there, you're head down, you're slumped, you've got no energy. It can come out and people can be an agitated form of depression. They can be very grumpy, aggressive. Yeah. It can show up as irritability for sure. That is a common manifestation, particularly among men. Yeah, short temper, exploding quickly. Yeah, all those things. So it's such a complex illness. I mean, it's got so many, and sometimes they're polar opposites, aren't they? Yeah, it's quite a fascinating thing.

And that's why we go to a doctor who has got, I don't know, in New Zealand, 15-minute slots, and the doctor's going to diagnose you and prescribe you in a 15-minute slot. It's just absurd. I mean, you need 15 minutes just to talk about sleep. How's your sleep going and how to sort the sleep out because sleep is such an important thing with depression. If're constantly tired and not sleeping i mean i could speak to somebody for half an hour about um good sleep methods and how they can slowly change those and

improve them and and um it's a complex thing and then there's nutrition and there's exercise and all those things and then there's the medication thing mean, more and more we find out that the medication is not a one-size-fits-all. People respond differently to different medications. And, yeah, that's becoming a very interesting science now, how the diagnostic tools have become so much more complex and are going to make, I think in the future, they'll make medication far more useful.

It won't just be a trial and error. Well, let's just try this one and let's try this one. They'll be far more accurate and they'll be far more effective. So that will be a good thing. As long as we don't get stuck on that thinking that one day there's going to be a silver bullet for depression, I don't believe there will be. It's a lifestyle issue.

It's how you live your life. And it's way more complex than to be solved at the bottom of the cliff with any form of medication. The term illness almost makes it sound like it is a thing that you can put your finger on, like, oh, this cell is growing out of control, like you can find in cancer, or there's this virus, right? It's really more, in my mind, it's more of a syndrome, right? Because there are so many contributing factors and they layer on and interweave with each other in incredibly complex ways.

That said, there does appear to be some protocols that make sense, right? I think the vast majority of them are lifestyle-based. Well, Brent, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, for sharing your experience, for writing the book. You're going to give an offer to our listeners for your book that I wanted to give you a chance to mention because you told me about it before the show. Yeah. Thanks, Eric. I have a website for the book. It's available through the usual channels, but I also sell it directly through my website outofthewoods.co.nz.

And what I'd like to do for your listeners is offer them a deal where if they buy one book at the normal price, they get an additional book for free, which they can give away to friends or family members or to a local community center or whatever they feel is appropriate. And so you'll just go to that website. Will there be a code they use or how will that work? Yes. So if they use the code WOLF, they can access that and it will be sent to them through my distributor in the US.

All right. And I will put a link in the show notes to that. So thank you so much, Brent, for taking the time to come on. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. It's been lovely to talk to you. Take care. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you,

please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.