Despair can be a killer. As an example, drug overdose deaths in the United States
increased by 25 percent from May 2020 through April 2021, sending more than 100,000 Americans to the grave. Whatever sparked this rise in casualties, we can rest assured that most of those who died were living without confidence or faith in the future.
On a much broader scale, despair and its first cousin, depression, can also gun down the human spirit. A job lost, a marriage broken, a loved one’s death—these and other tragedies can cause us to lose heart, become despondent, and surrender all hope. Those buried in that darkness often want to sleep 24/7. Some give up on personal hygiene. Others turn off their phones and feel so isolated and lost that even a trip to the grocery store or the library becomes a near-insurmountable Everest of effort.
In such severe cases, those afflicted frequently turn to professionals for counseling or for therapeutic drugs to rescue them from these black storms. The training and strategies employed by these men and women can often throw these despondent souls a rope and haul them out of the abyss.
Yet if these clients wish to walk in the sunshine again, they must possess the will and the desire to seize that rope.
In less severe circumstances, when melancholy is a visitor rather than a permanent houseguest, those of us bitten by what Winston Churchill called his “black dog” may concoct our own therapeutics. Here are five of them—and you can dig up plenty more online—that have helped me over the years.
Step away from the self. When I used to teach, my students demanded my full attention. My forlorn mood might linger in the back of my mind, but those hours in the classroom gave me a much-needed respite from sadness. I became an actor, erecting a façade that provided a few hours of relief from the pain.
Adopt a positive maxim. Six years ago, when failure pummeled me like some heavyweight in a ring from which there was no escape, I grabbed an erasable marker and wrote “Invictus,” Latin for “Unconquered,” on the glass door of my apartment. That word stayed put for months. Sometimes I sneered at it, sometimes I could hardly stand to look at it, but in the end “Invictus” helped carry me across that desert that had become my life.
‘This too shall pass.’ Time is one of the most powerful, yet most overlooked, of the world’s cure-alls. We Americans tend to be an impatient people, as can be seen at any Department of Motor Vehicles, and we want results yesterday. But as a friend tells me about his own scuff-ups with the blues, recognizing that his condition was a mood—and therefore temporary—kept him moving forward. The same holds true for us.
Move the body, and you move the mood. When that same friend was younger and down in the dumps, he would walk the city streets, sometimes for hours, to revive his spirits. In my case, a burst of housekeeping—dusting shelves, wiping up stains from the wooden floors, washing down countertops—is just as effective. Performing these chores at a fast clip makes me feel better and brings the added satisfaction of a sparkling kitchen or orderly bookshelves.
Turn away from negative influences. Sometimes, for example, the national news takes me down. Turning off my laptop and choosing instead to pick up a book or call a friend often delivers some necessary R&R from my blue funk.
Do these tactics always work? Of course not. But that brings us to the final therapeutic: Don’t give up. Remember: that bout with the doldrums will pass, and we can help push it out the door.
Invictus.
