I’m going through this right now. It’s like I’ve reached the point of burn out where I can’t handle one more podcast, one more video, one more article, one more opinion. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I care very deeply and lost the ability to cope with that and then hit a wall where I need absolute silence to recover.

I’m posting here weekly about my attempts to make my eating habits less dysfunctional with depression and low energy to hold myself accountable.

I spent some time planning how to make my diet as simple and healthy as possible, and how to plan ahead meals for when I am in a depressive episode and struggling to cook/eat. So here’s what it is:

1. For breakfast, I am always eating oatmeal with yogurt and walnuts. Simple, easy, and repetitive breakfast doesn’t bother me. It’s also easy to buy all these ingredients in bulk so I never have to worry.

2. For lunch, I am always eating a sandwich or a wrap, although the contents of the sandwich can vary. Deli meat and cheese is always easy to source and make sandwiches out of if I am feeling low energy. If I am feeling higher energy, I can make sandwiches/wraps out of chopped leftover vegetables and meats, such as chicken salad sandwich etc.

3. For dinner, I will be cook a proper meal with protein + carb + veg side dish. The key here is I will be cooking three servings at once and freezing the leftover two servings to eat when I feel depressed. This way, I can build up a buffer of real food in the freezer when I feel more functional and can eat it later when my energy is bad.

And with this plan, I am only really cooking 1.5 meals a day (I’m counting sandwiches as half cooking due to lower prep time). I’m hoping too eating better with improve my energy levels and make coping with the rest of my life easier.

My actual meal plan this week is then:

Sandwich: Apple chicken salad sandwich

Dinner 1: Pirogi, Polish sausage, and Brussels sprouts (trying to use up freezer leftovers)

Dinner 2: Pozole, bread, broccoli

Things are going a bit better. I got my entire house clean this morning and I feel some of the joy and color coming back into my life, as well as the motivation to set goals again.

I always sleep really strangely coming out of a depressive episode. It’s like I am dead asleep all night, need more sleep than normal, and my dreams are super intense and strange. When I wake up, it’s like pulling my consciousness out of the void. It feels like my brain is trying to heal itself.

Hoping to get caught up on chores, manage work, plan one social outing, and most importantly, play a lot of the Oblivion Remaster! I love that game so much, it’s probably had the biggest positive on my mental health in years.

I wish you the best of luck! My plan is to use these weekly threads for accountability. I think it will help me stay on track.

Really going to attempt to un-dysfunction my eating habits this weekend. Depression completely screwed up when I eat, how much I am eating, and what I eat such that I basically go days without eating anything but bread or cookies every 12 hours and then struggle with my mood and energy predictably crashing. I used to do just fine feeding myself but it’s like I somehow lost this skill.

Thank you for your kind words. I just started a new antidepressants, so I’m hopeful it’ll help.

I focus less on getting motivation and more on structuring my life so that I can work with less. I’ve accepted that I am always going to feel low energy but it’s a lot easier to manage when everything is a habit on autopilot and my life is super organized. So the more I can autopilot things I need to do due to a very structured routine, the easier it is to cope with low energy because I am making fewer decisions.

I’ve been stuck in a depressive episode ever since the election kicked my mental health into decline again. I have been trying to dig myself out of it all week. Going to spend the weekend trying to clean up the depression mess from months of rotting in my house and then try to get on top of eating enough food again. I’m trying to accept my limitations even though I often feel bad about myself for being able to do less than other people do. I’m so jealous of people who can just exist without every tiny chore and responsibility being an enormous uphill struggle.