The Evolution of a Battle with Anxiety and Depression - Part 3
A miraculous and complete eradication of depression
I think a disclaimer, which I’ll repeat again later, would be wise to start this post. I am not giving advice. I’m not a medical professional. I am simply attempting to communicate, from my own experience, what has happened to me, and what actions that I have done, to severely alter the grip that anxiety and depression had over my life. That is all. Part 1 and Part 2 found here.
For the final part of this series (that rapidly expanded beyond its initial scope) I want to detail my progress with depression. The depressive symptoms that stemmed from my drinking and my spiritual bankruptcy were the components of life that drove me closest to the edge of ending it. I felt useless and life felt pointless. Depressive symptoms were constantly with me. In reflecting back I feel the last four years, or even more, of my drinking was spent in a constant depressive state.
Once again, my intention with this post is not to intimidate with a laundry list of “to-dos” for anyone to take up. Instead, I want to show you how I have to prioritize my life and activities as an alcoholic. It is my top priority every single morning that I wake up to maintain today in active recovery. These practices help, but are not perfect (outside of the final one, which really isn’t a practice anyhow). You need to make the decision how dealing with these issues falls out on your priority list. How willing are you?
Depression
How It Started:
I was manic. My highs would be so unbelievable high it felt wildly out of control (and it was) and then my lows would send me crashing down, barely able to move. I laid on the couch, or curled up in a ball sitting on the floor. Shades were drawn so no one could see in, often times I would venture to the basement to hide myself further. I cannot even tell you how many prescription medications I was on by May 14th, 2023.
I could sense that my neurons were not connecting and firing appropriately. My memory was terrible (even when not drinking) and I could tell that sensations took longer to travel through my system. Everything felt lethargic. Things that used to bring me joy (ie music) were being shut off. I couldn’t get the chills like I used to listening to my favorite songs. I was constantly tired, yet restful sleep at night hardly ever came. I had limited energy, focus and willingness to take on challenges. I hardly showed emotion outside of the extreme swings on my ups and downs, and I fought every sensation of emotion that did well up within me.
I felt useless, worthless and thought about my death often. I was scared of death, but it was constantly on my mind. As the battle worsened, I felt that I was running out of options to find a solution to how I was feeling, but death was always there. It frightens me, even today, how convinced I started to become that death was the only path out of this depressive hell.
Experiences would happen to me in life, and I would recognize that, “I should feel something from this”, but my emotional response was entirely deadened. I felt nothing when I should have felt joy, love or exhilaration.
Practices:
Movement
While in rehab, I decided to reframe my relationship with “workouts” and “exercise”. To start, I stopped using those two words entirely. Those words made me think of something like a chore with no end goal or purpose to them. So I began to solely think about in this manner - every day I need to move my body through three dimensional space. It may seem like an odd reframing, but it helped connect me with a higher purpose to the practice of movement. I was living life, I was human and a significant part of life as a human being was moving through three dimensional space.
I move my body for two primary purposes - to advance towards a set of life visions that I have for myself and to allow myself to lay my head on my pillow each night and sleep soundly. Sleep hygiene has become all the rage today, but I genuinely feel that I accomplish a quality night sleep by moving my body through space with purpose every day. Since May 14th, 2023 I have had only two disrupted nights of sleeps. That alone is a miracle, as sleep was a constant battle in the throughs of my addiction and depression.
I have two ways where I feel I can say I accomplished my movement practice for a day. Break a sweat, or get a substantial amount of fresh air, outside the confines of a man made space. I am a super user of the MTNTOUGH daily programming, as it allows me to accomplish my daily objectives as well as advance towards many of my longer term visions of health for my life. Plus, the company is filled with incredible individuals, many of which I know personally, who have been supportive of my family in our journey. So yeah, I love these folks for more than their stellar programs that they have available.
Antidepressants
When I went into rehab, they reset my medication protocol. I was on at least four prescription meds for depression when I went into rehab, and they rolled me back to one multi-vitamin per day as well as a low dose antidepressant. I was thrilled to be off the ridiculous regimen of medications (many of which I shouldn’t have been on, but I was lying to my prescribing therapist), but knew that one day I did want to be completely rid of prescription medication.
I took my time coming off of the antidepressants. As soon as everything started to happen with Lucy’s health concerns, I knew that I should not make changes to my medications, purely out of fear of what would happen to my emotional state and stability as we traversed such a radically difficult time as a family.
After losing Lucy, and moving back to Boise I finally started targeting getting off the antidepressant. By March of 2024, my PCP told me that at the extreme low dose that I was on that there was no tapering protocol, I could just stop taking them.
This is where I learned how terrible and horrifying becoming dependent on a prescription medication can be. Despite being on as low of a dose that was even offered on the market, I had two weeks of a reset/withdrawal period. I was finding myself slipping into the same thought patterns as I had prior to rehab. I was quick to anger. And I was damn lucky that both Alyssa and I were hyper aware of the change stemming from my removal of the antidepressant. We soldiered on through this time period for two weeks, when my systems finally came into homeostasis.
It was a real lesson to me. Any medication that has such critical interactions and impacts to you emotional state and thought patterns needs to be treated with the upmost care and caution as you plan your period of healing and then coming off of the drugs.
I’m throwing the disclaimer in here that I’m not a doctor, nor prescriber, and I’m not providing you with any advice or direction. I decided to seriously and objectively ask myself if being dependent on a prescription medication was what I wanted in life, and my answer was a resounding ‘hell no’. I had to suffer through those two weeks, though, and we were incredibly conscious and aware of what was happening in my system with the removal of the drugs. I know people who have relapsed after making a medication change. I feel lucky to have had the support I did that allowed us to be so deliberate about my change.
Set incredibly low expectations
I wrote an entire post about this previously. Rather than rehash it, I will just state that I am honest and genuine about my desire to be just 0.01% better every day. I was happy with slow progress. Progress meant not drinking, and not returning the the wretched emotional and physical state that existed for me prior to entering rehab.
Cold plunge
Here we go. Yet another article, or component of an article, hopping on the cold plunge bandwagon. I bet there are 10,000 pieces published on this topic today. Cold plunging is such a trendy topic that that whatever level of consciousness ChatGPT currently possesses, even it is getting annoyed of having to query and regurgitate facts and figures about plunging.
But hear me out - I have two very specific experiences that made me aware of the healing power of cold exposure that are separate from any C-level influencers attempt to get eyes on social media.
The first is some writing on the topic from the 1800’s mountain man journals. I went through a phase, shortly after moving to Idaho, where I was voraciously consuming books that centered around the American West between 1804 (Lewis and Clark expedition) until 1877, when the Nez Perce “surrendered” after their incredible flee from the US Army.
Directly from Lewis and Clark’s journals is this piece of writing about time spent at a hot spring and creek along the Lolo Trail:
after remaining in the hot bath as long as they could bear it ran and plunged themselves into the creek [Lolo Creek] the water of which is as cold as ice can make it; after remaining here a few minutes they return again to the warm bath, repeating the transition several times but always ending with the warm bath.
-Lewis & Clark Journals, pgs. 170–71
Further, there was a journal kept of a man who wintered up with the native tribe in central Idaho. To stay fit, the warriors would swim from one bank to the other of the Salmon River.
I know both these places in Idaho. I know how large the Salmon is, how cold these creeks and rivers get coming out of the mountains. I also read and recognize these stories knowing that our Euro-centric Western expansion destroyed millennia of generational and experiential knowledge. I wondered what healing the natives had found in the cold rivers.
The second life experience that I had that made me pay major attention to cold emersion was at our grief retreat in September. There was a couple from the Northeast there who had lost their oldest, and only, daughter at just over one year old. The loss was sudden, tragic and making it incredibly difficult for them to navigate life by the time they made it to the retreat and our path’s crossed.
We sat around the fire pit one evening, just talking. Sharing our experiences, journeys and just listening to each couple talk about their children and their own healing. The topic of discussion was how we have attempted to step away at various points throughout the year to try to check in with ourselves and our healing from loss.
The wife of this Northeastern couple was describing a long weekend they took at a cabin during the winter months. Their hosts had a sauna set by a lake that had not yet frozen over. They participated in cycling between the sauna and running to the dock to jump in the water before returning to the sauna.
I’ll never forget what she said. “The time that my entire body was under that cold water was the first time since losing our daughter that I was not thinking about the pain and suffering that I was experiencing from her loss.” Her husband sat next to her nodding along.
These bundle of experiences made me decide to approach cold exposure seriously. That has turned into is me plunging in a homemade cold plunge for three minutes each morning, generally before my movement practice. It sucks, my mind creates excuses as to why I don’t need to do it all the time, but I work through them and force myself in.
And it works. For so many ailments it works, but the greatest of all of the rush that I feel afterwards that carries on throughout the day. It’s the flood of neurotransmitters and connectivity of my system that I could feel was degraded when I was depressed. It’s a feeling of being alive that I so desperately was searching for in the years of battling alcohol.
Eat well
A quote that is often attributed to Hippocampus sets the groundwork for this practice.
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food
You know this is legit because he uses “thy” in the statement.
I take it very seriously that I eat “well” about 95% percent of my meals. My definition of well is basically limiting processed foods (especially anything with high amounts of added ultra-processed sugars). I generally will eat meat and veggies or some high quality starch or bread.
I try not to overcomplicate things anymore. I have a close friend that I have made here in Boise that runs his own nutritional coaching business (Valley to Peak Nutrition) and he has a mantra that I have grabbed hold of, “Complexity kills Compliance”. I think of this often and have worked to simplify my approach to what I eat.
As it pertains to my symptoms of depression, the biggest change for me was ditching the ultra-processed sugars. When I did that, I realized that I was usually reverting to these foods when I was in a state of emotional upheaval. The after effects of a heavy load of ultra-processed sugary foods was a number of hours in a dulled state (no where near a full blown depressive state, but still something) after my consumption.
Group therapy
Under the practice of group therapy I couple AA meetings, community groups, couples counseling as well as the group sessions I participated in as a part of my inpatient and outpatient treatment I did in 2023. I had no idea what to expect out of group therapy, I was skeptical when I entered into rehab and realized the vast majority of our time would be spent in group.
My skeptical concerns were laid to rest quickly as I realized the power in group settings. The value of group sessions is the community that it builds. It has been so powerful as a part of my recovery programming, that Community is one of my five practices of recovery. I focus on it daily as I continue to live one day at a time in recovery.
Rediscovering myself, and my role, as a part of a greater community helped eradicate many of the depressive symptoms that were associated with feelings of loneliness and uselessness. Even in my first days and weeks entering into the rooms of the AA meeting that I now call my home group, I could sense that I belonged and that I brought something to the table for others.
There is a base human need that we all have to feel that we can give back, help others and have a community that we can call on in moments of need. Group sessions have an incredible power of creating the ability to fulfill this need that (most) all of us have as human beings.
Intense moments of spiritual connection - the destruction of nihilism
I saved this one for last, both in an attempt to tie this series all back together as well as impress upon the reader the lasting and powerful impacts that my moments of spiritual transformation had on my life.
I am a hunter and outdoorsman (random topic shift, bear with me). Back in 2017, I went on my very first solo backcountry archery elk hunt. For those unfamiliar, hunting with a bow and arrow requires you to get close to an elk. So close that you can smell them. This particular hunt was a grind. Steep, choked out pitches where the forest undergrowth would take you and hurl you on your back with a misstep. I worked for days to find openings on the ridge lines that elk might be interested in hanging around.
The second to last day of that hunt I had a bull so close and so riled up that when he bugled at me I felt it rattle my bones. I walked away empty handed that season, but vowed that experience was so impactful that I could go out ten more seasons, never see an elk, and still be motivated to head out the following season.
Now take that experience and multiply it by a number that is endless… truly endless. That is how I feel having had my spiritual transformations. Those instants where God revealed Himself to me created shifts that were so profound that if I live an infinite number of years and never have God reappear in the same way as he did, I would still have faith.
I never need to experience God like that again in my life. I won’t deny the opportunity at another experience like it, but I don’t require it. Experiencing those moments put everything into place, created an understanding of perspective within me and rid me of all remaining remnants of nihilism and depression.
I don’t think these experiences are things you can create or make happen on your own. However, I genuinely believe that you can create the potential for these moments to occur. It takes honesty, open-mindness and a willingness to perceive the world in a new light. I created the potential in my life by committing to the idea that God was not anything that I needed to understand, yet I was willing to have faith. It allowed me to see the world through an entirely new lens, and it allowed me to accept his presence when he came to me in the doctor’s office on August 8th, 2023.
What’s Next?
For my situation, I desire nothing to change. Do not read that as I will not take any action. I will continue to maintain and follow these above practices that have allowed me to entirely eradicate symptoms of depression in my life.
I sat here thinking about what I hated worse - the symptoms of anxiety or depression. Then I realized, it was neither of those two things. The worst part of the entire battle with alcoholism, depression and anxiety was feeling so unbelievably alone through it all. To have resolved the feelings of loneliness, isolation and nihilism allowed everything else to fall in place.
That’s all I’ve got. Quite the expansion on a fairly simple question that was posed to me, but the battle with this disease of alcoholism has been intense.
All my love,
Kyle