In my last post I told you about my father’s workshop. Decades of tools, some he had designed and built himself, gone in one night to a burglar. He knew exactly how to fix the car in front of him. He did not have what he needed to do it.
I told that story to explain what depression steals. Today I want to tell you what he did next.
He restocked. Not all at once; the insurance money did not stretch that far, and no money could replace some of those tools. He started with the basics. The things every job needs. Then, one tool at a time, as a job demanded it, he added to the collection. It took years. But the workshop filled again, and this time he knew precisely what was in it, because he had chosen every piece.
That is what I want to talk about. Not the storm. The workshop. Your mental and emotional toolbox.
You stock the box before the storm
Here is the hard truth from my last post, restated: when a depressive episode hits, the part of your mind that would normally work out what to do is the part that has stopped working. You cannot think your way out, because the thinker is what is broken.
Which leaves exactly one option. You do the thinking beforehand.
I chose, tested, and put every one of these in place when my sky was clear. That is the whole trick. There is no clever tool. There is only the unglamorous discipline of preparing while you are well for the day you will not be.
John F. Kennedy put it plainly in his 1962 State of the Union address: “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” He was talking about recessions. He could have been talking about my head.
What is in my toolbox
Forty years of living with depression has stocked my box slowly, the way my father restocked his: one tool at a time, each one earned by an actual job it had to do. Here is what is in mine.
Learning to catch unhelpful thought patterns. Therapists call this CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), but the name matters less than the skill. It is the practice of noticing the thoughts that pull you downward and asking whether they are actually true. Everyone would be better off without me. Nothing will ever change. I always fail. These thoughts feel like facts during an episode, but they are simply thoughts.
Now, you might reasonably object: didn’t I just spend an entire post arguing that you cannot think your way out of depression? I did, and I stand by it. That is precisely why this tool belongs in the fair-weather section of the box. You do not learn to catch these patterns during a storm. You learn them between storms, with deliberate repetition, until the catching becomes semi-automatic, so that when the storm arrives, some part of you can still whisper that this is the storm talking even when the rest of you believes the lie.
Catching the thought is half the skill. The other half is replacing it. The storm tells a story about you, and it is always the same story: failure, worthlessness, hopelessness. Learning to replace it with a truer one takes deliberate practice. I have survived every storm so far. This is an episode, not the rest of my life. Call it accurate thinking rather than positive thinking, practised until it becomes the voice you reach for.
Friends and family. In my case, Christina and Adam do not need me to explain the storm. They have seen it. They know when “I’m fine” means nothing of the sort. The work here happens in fair weather: letting the people closest to you learn what your storms look like, so that when one arrives, you do not have to find words you no longer have.
The longer I live, the less I value material possessions, and the more I value genuine friends. I confess I let my own connections drift when I am unwell, which is exactly backwards. When your connections fail, you leave yourself entirely vulnerable to the storm. So strengthen those connections. Whether you feel like it or not.
Counselling. Not a tool for emergencies only. A good counsellor is like the specialist tool you did not know you needed until someone put it in your hand. The relationship works best when you build it before the crisis, not during it. Walking into a first session mid-episode is possible, and far better than nothing. But walking into a familiar room, with someone who already knows your history, is a different thing entirely.
My engagement with a professional counsellor in 2015 was life-saving. Troy, a highly qualified clinical psychologist and a lovely man, met with me weekly for months. He helped calm the storm in my brain. Not only did he give me understanding about what I was going through, about how thoughts and emotions work, but he also helped me to identify and use some of these tools that I am sharing with you now.
Prayer and/or meditation. For some people this is prayer. For others it is meditation, breathing practice, or mindfulness. I practise all of these, and I am not here to tell you which tool you should use. What I will tell you is that a regular practice of stillness, built in good weather, gives your mind somewhere familiar to go when it can no longer navigate. The path has to be worn in advance. You cannot cut a new trail in a cyclone.
Medication, managed with your GP. I list this without embarrassment and without drama. For some people, medication is the difference between functioning and not. For others it is unnecessary. The tool is not the tablet — the tool is the relationship with a doctor who knows you, who prescribes properly and adjusts over time. If a tablet helped your heart, you would take it without a second thought. Your brain is an organ too.
In my personal experience, when the storm was at its worst and most deadly, a simple antidepressant (SSRI) helped clear my mind enough that I was able to take advantage of the other tools in the toolbox. It did not cure me, and never will. But it did help my brain to start working again so that I could slowly regain my sanity.
Physical exercise and movement. I wrote last time that the body still works when the mind will not. That makes movement one of the most reliable tools in the box: it asks nothing of the broken part. A walk requires no clarity, no motivation beyond putting on shoes, no belief that it will help. The evidence here is remarkable. Clinical trials that put exercise head-to-head against antidepressants have found the two roughly equally effective for mild to moderate depression — a free tool, matching a prescription one. Do not bin your tablets; the studies are clearest for milder storms, and for me the two worked together. Take walking as seriously as you take your prescription. But again: you build the habit in fair weather. A person who walks every day can keep walking through a storm on autopilot. A person who does not will not start during one.
Sleep, food, and the basics. Unfashionable, unmarketable, and more powerful than almost anything else on this list. Poor sleep does not just accompany depression; it feeds it. Skipped meals and survival eating do the same. Guarding these basics when you are well means the floor is higher when you fall.
Hobbies. This one surprised me when I finally understood it. A hobby is a pre-built reason to do something. During an episode, generating motivation from scratch is impossible. But a hobby carries its own momentum. The shed is already set up. The project is half-finished. The next step is obvious. You do not have to decide anything. You just have to show up to something you built when deciding was easy.
No single tool does every job
A few honest notes about the box itself.
No single tool fixes every problem, every time. It takes a combination, and the combination changes. What carried me through one episode has been useless in another.
Not every person needs every tool. Some people recover well without medication; others struggle to recover without it. Some find exercise essential; others cope without much of it. There is no standard-issue box. There is only yours.
And the four storm tools from my last post all live in this box too: naming the storm, refusing to out-think it, borrowing judgement from people who love you, waiting it out. They are the tools designed for use during the cyclone. Everything above is what you stock between them.
Keep using the tools when the sun comes out
One warning.
The depths are dangerous, and I do not need to tell you why. But recovery carries a danger of its own, and almost nobody warns you about it. The sun comes out, the sky clears, and the temptation is overwhelming: pack the box away. Stop the walks. Skip the counselling. Let the medication review slide. Drift from the friends who held you up.
I have made this mistake more than once. The storm does not send a warning before it returns. Sometimes all it takes is a run of bad news, a string of small failures, and I am back in the dark wondering what hit me.
Depression, for most of us, has no cure. It goes into remission. That is not pessimism; it is realism, and realism is what lets you stay ready. The tools are not for episodes. They are for life. You keep using them in fair weather precisely so they are sharp, familiar, and within reach when the weather turns.
Build yours now
Do not wait for the burglary to make the list. Sit down on a clear day and take stock of your box. What is in it? What has actually worked for you before? What is missing? Who knows what your storms look like, and who needs to?
Then add one tool. Just one. Book the GP appointment. Take the first walk. Have the honest conversation with the person closest to you. Start the practice of stillness. One tool, chosen in sunshine.
Find out what works for you. Put it in your toolbox.
And use it. Often.
If this post finds you in the middle of a storm right now, please do not read it as a list of things you should have done. You can stock the box from inside the storm too; it is just harder, which is why the first tool to reach for is another person. Tell someone. In Australia, Lifeline is available around the clock on 13 11 14, and Beyond Blue offers free, confidential support from mental health professionals on 1300 22 4636 or via online chat at beyondblue.org.au.
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