I was having a conversation with my sister just last night about anxiety and depression, mental illnesses we have both had to learn to cope with in the past few years. My sister, being two years younger than me, determined she was suffering from panic attacks around the same time that I realized it during my undergrad career. Being a little newer to the managing-your-mental-state-game, she asked me last night what she should do during “depression hours”. And as odd as that statement may sound, I understood exactly what she meant.

And that’s not to say that anxiety or depression are only important or prominent for a few hours a day. They are both all-encompassing, and even when a person with anxiety or depression is happy or is relaxed, that doesn’t mean their anxiety or depression has magically vanished. Anxiety and depression are more about your baseline emotions, rather than the spectrum of emotions you experience (at least, that’s the way my sister and I experience it). When I’m out and around other people and busy--I’m also very extroverted by nature--things are fine. I laugh, I’m content, and I’m completely at ease, and all of those are genuine feelings. It’s the way you feel when the fun/distractions stop, and you’re at home and you have an hour to kill and rather than calmly finding something to fill your time, you end up in this downward spiral of negative self-talk and fear. That fear can be about being alone, or work, or school, or really anything that’s going on in your subconscious that makes you uncomfortable. It’s like your brain takes advantage of the lack of distractions around you to harass you with your own thoughts… if that makes sense.

So what my sister was talking about (“depression hours”) refers to a time of day, essentially, that your anxiety or depression is the most likely to start making you feel badly about yourself and the world around you. Usually it’s unstructured time that you have to yourself, for my sister and I, it’s around 5-8pm. It’s a nebulous time that you know the day is ending but it’s over yet, and you should eat dinner sometime during that window but exactly when can vary. It’s also around when you can do your homework or relax or see your friends--like I said, it’s unstructured. And it’s that ambiguity that makes our anxiety come alive. We start searching around in our brains for things to do or ways to stay busy and, instead, we stumble across nervous energy left over from the day that just feeds on things we dislike about ourselves or the world or anything, really.

One thing the question made me realize, however, is that I think my “depression hours” have shortened. I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought until now, but I agreed when my sister said 5-8pm, when really I think that used to be my time. My anxiety still tends to peak around 5:30-6pm, but usually I’m out of it and feeling more stable by 7. This was pretty exciting to discover, especially since I had never really thought about it in that context before. It was a strange, quantitative way of figuring out that I have actually learned to manage my anxiety and depression much better than when I was my sister’s age.

So finally, we talked about things you can do during these “depression hours”. And for anyone else out there who knows what this means and feels the same way, here are some things you can do to navigate the most challenging hours of your day:

• If you start to panic: lay flat on your back (preferably on the floor somewhere) and start naming the colors of different objects in the room around you. If you have something soft or fuzzy to touch or hold, do that. Start to try to ground yourself in the physical present to get your mind to quiet down.
• If you start to cry: let yourself cry for a bit, and then call someone who will make you laugh. Everyone has that friend, or that sibling, who without a doubt will make you laugh, even if the world is falling apart. Just try calling that friend, even making a phone call and listening to the other end of the line ring can make you feel less disconnected.
• Cook something: this always helps me because if you’re following a recipe, you’re introducing structure for yourself, and that can ground you.
• Go walk around a store you like for no reason at all: this gives you the opportunity to see other people, maybe chat with a friendly employee, and at the very least you’ll probably be surrounded by interesting objects that will take your mind off of anything that’s worrying you.
• Of course, if you can find a friend to see, that’s always a good option. Probably the most fool-proof distraction, but also one of the more challenging ones (especially in the era of COVID).
• Finally, a few things I don’t recommend doing during your challenging hours: drinking, smoking, hanging our with someone you don’t enjoy just for the company, looking at old photos or memories, calling your ex (it sounds ridiculous but I’m the most serious about this one), telling yourself you need to calm down- it’ll make things worse, trying to deny or hold back the emotions you’re feeling.

Hopefully this post helps anyone out there dealing with anxiety/depression hours, and if you have more do’s/ do-not’s for coping with these types of things, I would love to hear about them in the comments!

---Serina Taluja

Serina Taluja is a Doctoral student in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences