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Measuring Anxiety and Depression Through Color and Stages

As I work to keep my mind and body in check during the pandemic, two older tools have proven useful: the Anxiety Rainbow and the Five Stages of Depression. The idea is that by measuring what you’re going through, you can take steps to manage those feelings and stay in the game.*

This isn’t a scientific breakdown, of course. It’s simply how I’ve learned to process what I feel.

Mood Music:

The Five Colors of the Anxiety Rainbow

To get a better handle on anxiety, I try to label the different kinds of anxiousness based on the first five colors of Newton’s primary color system:

  • Red. This is the worst of the worst, the type of anxiety that makes you feel like you’re at death’s door. I used to suffer from this one all the time: a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead, my heart pounding so violently that I thought it would break bones, my feet tingling and a constant feeling of having to throw up. Fear is the trigger for this one, the kind of fear that made me not want to go places, take risks or live life in general.
    Remedies: For me, Prozac has been a very effective weapon against red anxiety, as has my faith and, more recently, meditation.
  • Orange. Fear plays a big role in this anxiety as well, but unlike red, orange is usually rooted in something stressful that is really happening in your life. You could be fighting a serious medical issue and worrying about losing the fight. You could be having financial trouble that results in routine stress but the anxiety magnifies it to monstrous proportions.
    Remedies: Medication has helped here, too, as has reconstituting my exercise regimen.
  • Yellow. This anxiety is usually triggered by a lot of sustained stress at work or home. Maybe your marriage has hit a rough patch or your job is riding on the success or failure of a huge project. To get through it, your body pumps more adrenaline than you need, and you get the overwhelmed feeling that keeps you from seeing the order of work items and their level of completion. The news business is a perfect place to experience this because you face daily deadlines and a tongue lashing from your bosses if a competitor gets a big story instead of you. I don’t experience that today, but when I worked for newspapers, yellow anxiety was always with me.
    Remedies: Therapy, medicine, a heart-to-heart talk with the boss and, if necessary, a job or even a career change have all helped me. I made the career change in 2004. The medicine and therapy followed.
  • Green. This anxiety appears when the less-frequent stresses spark up. I recall one day six years ago when I was already ramped up after spending an evening at the hospital holding vigil while my father faced emergency surgery that ultimately didn’t happen. The plumber was coming to install a new dishwasher and to pound my mind into submission, I went on a chore spree. Then my cell phone died for good, and I had to spend the afternoon replacing it. The latter two events are problems we’re lucky to have, since the alternative is being too broke to afford these things. But it sent the day on a trajectory I hadn’t anticipated.
    Remedies: The only cure for this one is to reach the end of the day and go to bed.
  • Blue. This is a small, sustained level of anxiety so slight that you usually don’t see it for what it is. It’s generally a byproduct of depression. In my case, blue anxiety shows itself in the winter, when a lack of daylight sends me into blue moods.
    Remedies: Activity helps me the most with blue anxiety. Writing helps a lot, as does work.

5 Stages of Depression: Like Grief, But Different

There are plenty of articles out there about the so-called five stages of grief. Based on my experiences in that department, I find the writings mostly accurate and valuable.

I also found that these stages convert nicely to describe the course of my depressions.

  1. Denial and isolation. Things start to go wrong, but you’re not immediately aware of them. Your short-term memory starts to slip, you become disorganized, and you protest when those who love and know you best suggest you may be heading for an episode. You respond by clamming up and ignoring friends when they ask you to have coffee. You spend a lot more time on the couch.
  2. Anger. After too many days in denial, you start to realize you’re slipping into depression. This makes you angry, and you start taking it out on those around you. Your self-worth begins to sink, and you start to feel like you can’t do anything right. This leads to more anger, self-loathing, and self-pity.
  3. Bargaining. During grief, this is the stage where a person repeatedly goes over the what-ifs: what if the loved one had gotten medical attention sooner, what if you’d recognized the problem for what is was, and so on. With depression, the bargaining works a bit differently: You play the blame game with the world around you. You’re depressed because of work. You’re depressed because of a disagreeable family member. If the depression is really bad, you blame anyone and anything but the disease within your own brain.
  4. Melancholy. With grief, the fourth stage is depression. Within depression itself, the fourth stage is melancholy, at least in my experience. A deep sadness and hopelessness take hold in your gut after too many successive days of feeling like shit. It becomes hard to do most basic daily tasks.
  5. Acceptance. After a while, you realize you have a few choices. The most extreme choice is suicide. I’ve never seriously considered it, but I know people who have and, sadly, gone through with it. Another choice is to start doing things to emerge from the depression. For me, that involves talking to people and writing to get the feelings off my chest. The other step is to re-embrace coping tools. It’s not like flipping a switch; it’s more like rebooting a computer. It takes time to start using your coping tools effectively again and more time for them to make a difference. But acceptance is a start.

With COVID-19, I’m at acceptance now and I’m grateful for it.

* While I’ve written about these tools before, they’re often used together so I’ve aggregated them into one post.

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Channeling Freddie Mercury’s Work Ethic

I liked the 2018 Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but one thing about it bothered me: It left out the part of Freddie Mercury’s life that inspires me as much as the music itself — his descent into illness and how, the weaker he got, the harder he worked.

In interviews, the surviving members of Queen recount how Freddie, barely able to stand up, continued to slave away on new music and videos. Guitarist Brian May tells of how he worried Freddie wouldn’t be able to handle the vocals for “The Show Must Go On” off the “Innuendo” album. Freddie, he explained, said “fuck it,” downed a vodka and nailed it:

The last video he did for that album was for “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” and you can see how frail and in pain he was:

The last song he ever recorded was “Mother Love.” The band has noted that in that period, Freddie was close to the end. During the recording he had to stop because he couldn’t do anymore. He planned to finish it but never did. That’s why May sang the final verses.

There have been times in my life where things have felt too hard, when staying in bed seemed the better option. Depression and anxiety makes you feel like that a lot.

But then I’d think of Freddie toiling away, getting out of bed and working. And I would get up and go to work.

We all experience diversity. We all have our deeply ingrained pain — scars of the past and present.

Many of us have grown fresh scars while dealing with life in a pandemic with a gut-wrenching dose of street violence thrown in.

I have plenty of role models who inspire my “stay the course” attitude: Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and FDR come to mind.

But lately, with a global health crisis fueling the things that make life toughest right now, it’s Freddie who is cheering me forward.

Two images of Queen front man Freddie Mercury: one with his cat and one of him in a blue suit
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Should You Worry About Another Great Depression?

Early in this crisis, a friend made pronouncements some of us called out as fearmongering. One thing he kept saying was that the virus would cause an economic depression.

My friend has been proven right about a lot of things concerning COVID-19 these last few months. Could he be right about this, too?

The word “recession” is uncomfortable. The word “depression” can be downright terrifying, especially when “great” appears before it.

Mood Music:

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the periods of economic distress I’ve lived through, particularly those of my adult working years.

There was the early 1990s recession that led to Bill Clinton’s election as president. I was in college, so it didn’t affect me as much. The recession that followed the dot-com bust and 9-11 terrorist attacks in the early 2000s was the first where I worried about layoffs. Then came 2008 and the Great Recession. I worried about my job then, as well. I was lucky and stayed employed through both downturns.

Am I worried about job security this time around? I’ll put it this way: I never take job security as a guarantee — in good economic times or bad.

I am confident that my industry is in a good position to weather the storm. With the pandemic sending so many people into work-from-home situations and state-sponsored hackers out to exploit the chaos, information security is more important than ever. Still, it would be foolish for any industry to consider itself immune.

Indeed, some of my industry peers are worried, particularly younger folks who were still in school during the last recession. This is the first time they’re worried about being laid off. And this may turn out to be the worst downturn America has seen since the 1930s.

With these worries, I’m hearing from friends experiencing anxiety and depression. Despite my own optimism about getting through this downturn, I’m feeling it, too.

This downturn started through an unprecedented sequence of events. But the underlying economy was strong, unlike past downturns where underlying economic fissures expanded and ruptured.

Also unlike previous downturns, though, society abruptly applied the breaks, deeming social distancing necessary to manage COVID-19. Was that the right course? Time will tell.

A rapid post-pandemic recovery is wishful thinking for several reasons. Yet we won’t necessarily experience the protracted economic paralysis of the Great Depression. We’re in a different time and place. That’s cold comfort to the millions who have already lost their jobs, however.

Though I’ve been lucky at avoiding layoffs up to this point, more than a few colleagues and friends did lose their jobs in the most recent recessions. All went on to new opportunities and have achieved new levels of success. They networked, expanded their skill sets and persisted as new opportunities arose.

It’s an unsettled time. While we have past crises to guide us through, we can’t know exactly how things will go. They’ll probably get worse before they get better, because that’s how life generally goes.

But things will get better. Life generally goes like that, as well.

Keep the faith, and take things one day at a time, work your asses off and always — always — develop backup plans.

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The Military Has Given Me a New Coping Tool

Through my work in the information security industry, I’ve come to appreciate a decision-making cycle created by military strategist and U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd called the OODA Loop (observe–orient–decide–act).

Mood Music:

It was designed as a combat operations process but has become more widely applied to commercial operations and learning processes. The basic idea is to use agility to overcome the raw power of opponents.

I’ve been fortunate in getting to know some super-smart people who use it for cyber security and, in the current environment, operations in a pandemic. The OODA Loop site, operated by OODA LLC founders Matt Devost and Bob Gourley, has become daily reading for me.

Lately, I’ve been taking this to the meta-personal level, trying to apply it to how I conduct myself daily and keep steady as a guy living in uncertain times with a mind sometimes hobbled by OCD, anxiety and depression.

I’m not sure if this is even a logical path. I’m hoping my friends in the OODA Loop realm will have comments about it after reading.

I’m using it against the raw power of the depressive and anxious effects of the current lockdown, which has fueled the potentially destructive side of my OCD and threatened to cripple me within the mental battlefield.

Observe: Since early January, I’ve kept a daily eye on the infection, recovery and death rates, as well as geographic spread. I’ve opted for emotionless data points from the likes of Worldometers. As the data has painted a picture of trajectory, my feelings have ranged from disbelief and denial to fear and uncertainty. Along with the useful data points are myriad articles that make predictions based on information that varies widely in levels of emotion and accuracy. This makes useful observation tricky.

Orient: By late February, as the data points showed a clearer picture of what by then was, to me, an inevitable pandemic, I started to work on adapting my brain to the idea that this would be a daily reality and that I’d have to keep being my best self as the world spiraled out of control. I doubled down on my exercise and food regimen, went from an originally planned 60-pound weight loss to 75 pounds (just about there now), and started to shift my daily research efforts to anything that would help clients stay running amid lockdowns and mass working from home (WFH).

Decide: About two days before my company moved to full WFH mode, I decided to quarantine from the office, at least. I had been to the RSA Conference in San Francisco a couple weeks before and news had just arrived that a couple attendees had contracted the virus, one of whom was gravely ill (he has since recovered, thank God). I was just shy of the two-week mark of returning home but didn’t want to chance becoming a risk to co-workers. In doing so, I was making a choice to hunker down for the long haul.

Act: Since then, I’ve done my damndest to stay healthy physically and mentally. I walk each morning and take afternoon drives. I’ve strived to do my job in the best ways possible, focusing on clear, step-by-step guidance to help clients protect the platforms and tools they currently rely on as everyone works from home — VPNs, videoconferencing, messaging — and I’ve used this blog to help keep the public discourse rational and hopeful while making note of coping mechanisms for those predisposed to mental disorders. I’ve stayed connected to friends through Zoom “happy hours.” I wear a mask and gloves when I have to go out.

When the constraints of being homebound make my temper boil over (I’m ashamed to admit I yelled and angrily slammed my iPhone down one night because a restaurant left something out of our takeout order — not my finest hour when dealing with a trivial, first-world problem) I’ve sought ways to release the pressure.

I’ve always favored hard rock music but in recent weeks my choices have veered to the heaviest end of the spectrum — including battle music from different TV shows and films. Today’s mood music is one example.

And I’ve found a simple, fun way to grind out feelings of angst. Erin got me a manual coffee bean grinder for Easter and I’ve found it’s good, aggressive fun to pace around the house while grinding beans.

I guess we’re never too old to learn new coping mechanisms, especially when sanity depends upon it.

Though I’m not at all certain I’m using the OODA Loop as intended, it has at least given me another way to keep fighting. I’m grateful.

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A Useful Bout of Depression

This weekend the depression finally arrived. Given the scale of the crisis we’re all traveling through, I’m surprised it took this long. But it may have been exactly what I needed.

Mood Music:

Depression is often thought of as varying levels of sadness and feelings of emptiness. Those are certainly real and I’ve experienced it all. But what I went through this weekend wasn’t in that range. This was the tired variety of depression.

I’ve described this before as “happy depression” — your sense of purpose is intact and you remain fully aware of the good things around you. But you’re exhausted from the fight and a cloud descends over the mind.

In a weird way, I’ve come to see this type of depression as a defense mechanism, forcing me into low-power mode to recharge for the longer fight ahead.

That defense mechanism kicked in yesterday. I dozed a lot and watched a lot of TV. I allowed myself a few extra calories but remained within my Noom calorie budget. Overnight I slept harder than usual.

Now it’s Monday and I’m expecting another intense work week. The sky is overcast, which always dampens my spirits. Using the 5-stage depression scale I devised a few years ago by ripping off the 5 Stages of Grief, I figure I’m at 5 (acceptance), though I don’t know if I really experienced 1–4. It’s possible I have and it was mild enough in intensity that I didn’t notice.

I’m grateful that this is only a happy depression and not the crippling, empty variety of depression. I’m going to use my tools and try hard to keep it that way.

One impossible day at a time.

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Depression and Anxiety in the Age of Trump

This post isn’t to endorse or condemn either of this year’s presidential candidates. It IS acknowledgement that people are shaken by the election of Donald Trump as president. For many, the uncertainty and fear translates into depression and anxiety.

If Hillary Clinton had won, there’d be a lot of Trump supporters suffering in similar fashion. So I would have been writing this post anyway.

The big question is how to move forward if the election has left you in a state of darkness. What follows are my suggestions. They are not scientific and I’m certainly no doctor. It is simply based on what I’ve learned in my own journey through the darkness and light.

Mood music:

For me, the fate of the world used to seem to hang on the next election.

In 1994, I was a lot more liberal than I am today. (I’ve gone from slightly left of center to dead center politically over time.) That year, the GOP swept both chambers of Congress and I was devastated. Two years before that, when Bill Clinton was elected president, I thought all would be right with the world. A lot of people had the same emotional jolt eight years ago when Obama was elected, while folks on the other side of the spectrum were as depressed in 2008 as those now dismayed by Trump’s rise.

As I got older and did a lot of work to manage my demons, I found that my personal happiness wasn’t tied to which way the political winds blow. What says it all are the lyrics from the Avett Brothers song I started this post with:

When nothing is owed, deserved or expected
And you’re life doesn’t change by the man that’s elected
If your loved by someone you’re never rejected.
Decide what to be and go be it.

My life has taken turns for the better and worse regardless of who is in office. Government can’t change me. Only I can.

But that’s where my journey has taken me. It would be unfair and unrealistic to ask people in the throes of election-induced depression to simply flip a switch and approach it like me. So I’m going to point out a few things that might make you feel better in the short term. Some of it is serious, and some of it not so much.

  1. His time is limited. People looking at the next four years with a sense of doom should remember that there’s a mid-term congressional election in two years. Given how divided the electorate is, it wouldn’t take much for a wave of voter discontent to change the balance of power in Congress. That happened to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama early in their presidencies, and it happened to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan halfway through their second terms. The voters have a habit of balancing the scales when Washington goes too far in the wrong direction.
  2. A burning forest gives way to new life. It’s been said that a lot of people were willing to vote for Trump despite his racist, sexist comments because they saw him as a Molotov cocktail they could throw at a capitol rife with corruption. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have failed the American people badly these last 15-plus years. Trump doesn’t have many friends among them and that could have a burning effect on the establishment that forces both parties to change their ways.
  3. He may not be so bad. If you look at his history, Trump has put women in high positions. He relies heavily on the counsel of a son-in-law who is devout in his Jewish faith, and he has said that same-sex marriage rights are settled law. He’s also backtracked on his talk about killing Obamacare, instead talking more about reforming it than replacing it. The healthcare law is certainly in need of fixing. Maybe he’ll turn out to be pretty middle-of-the-road, and the worst-case scenarios won’t materialize. All that could be wishful thinking on my part, but one never knows.
  4. New Star Wars films are coming. No matter how bad things may get, Disney has ensured that we’ll have a new Star Wars movie for each of the next four years. Star Wars always makes things better.

Whatever happens, we need to take care of ourselves. If you are prone to depression and anxiety, seek out your friends and family. Talk to someone. I’m always happy to lend an ear. If you have a therapist, keep your appointments. If you think you might need medication, talk to your doctors.

All this may seem like the obvious, but we need constant reminders — especially when we’re down.

As long as we work to be the best individuals we can be, and as long as we keep the things beyond our control in perspective, we will survive and even prosper.

donald trump by gage skidmore 12

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The Dark Side of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been important for my OCD and anxiety management. When used in the right amounts, the tools are immensely helpful. But mindfulness has a dark side, too.

Mood music:

Dawn Foster points out the dangers in a post she wrote for The Guardian that asks “is mindfulness making us ill?”

In the article, we hear from a 37-year-old woman named Claire, who started suffering from panic attacks and depression when she started taking a mindfulness course. The mindfulness training dregded up childhood traumas, which in turn sparked panic attacks and depression.

I didn’t start taking a mindfulness class until eight years after I began to tackle my demons. Had I taken the class at the beginning of the journey, I think I would have had the same reaction as Claire. Luckily, I had peeled back the onion layers of my past long beforehand, which saved me from a fresh deluge of bad memories.

As it was, the mindfulness class I took in 2012 was overwhelming in some spots and boring in others. The yoga and the role-playing games for conflict resolution bored me. I found that trying to spend blocks of time on mindful exercises each day was unworkable. If I was having a busy, stressful day, blocking off the 30-40 minutes for yoga and breathing exercises simply stressed me out more. The reason, I realized, was that the only remedy for the stress was to tackle the root challenges head on.

All in all, mindfulness training was good for me. I just had to find a way to integrate the techniques into my life. I learned to break things into smaller pieces. Instead of doing multiple exercises in large time blocks, I found that spending two minutes here and five minutes there worked better. Ten minutes of guitar playing helps to keep me in the moment. Breathing exercises in the car help me deal with the stress of traffic jams. These things have made a positive difference.

Some exercises I dispensed with entirely. The whole business about chewing your food slowly and silently, pondering the taste and texture with each chew? That did nothing for me.

When we’re desperate to fix ourselves, we look for a silver bullet. Maybe it’s a new workout craze or a mindfulness training course. In my experience, however, the bite-sized techniques always work better. When broken into pieces, the effect is less overwhelming. But I’ve also learned that there is no silver bullet.

If someone pitches mindfulness classes as a useful tool in a bigger toolbox, great.

But if they tell you they’re THE SOLUTION, walk away.

Savage Namaste by Eddie Mize, 2009
Savage Namaste
by Eddie Mize, 2009

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When Your Kid Asks About Anti-Depressants

My 12-year-old has a few things in common with his dad. Both of us have mental disorders (his is ADHD, mine is OCD with wintertime undercurrents of ADHD). Both of us take medication to help manage our ills. But until last weekend, he had never asked the big question:

“What do these pills do, anyway?”

Mood music:

To answer the question, I dusted off an analogy I had used some years ago to explain it to others. Essentially, I told him, the brain is an engine. When one part gets worn out, the whole the engine can fail. An engine needs the right amount of oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, and so forth to function properly.

If the oil runs out, for example, the engine seizes up. If the brake fluid runs dry, the breaks fail. Too much of these fluids can harm the engine, as well.

Car owners and auto mechanics use many different techniques to keep engines healthy or fix them when they break. It could be something simple, like topping off the oil, to something more complex, like realigning or replacing faulty parts.

The brain works much the same way.

Heat map of brain activity, normal state versus depressed state

Think of a psychotherapist as the auto mechanic who is well versed in how to regulate the different engine fluids and pinpoint specific fixes for specific problems.

The different drugs are tools the mechanic uses to deal with specific problems in the engine. In the brain, when certain fluids are running low, the result is depression and a host of other mental disorders.

Antidepressants

In my case, Prozac addresses the very specific fluid deficiencies that spark OCD behavior. Since OCD is essentially the brain pumping and spinning out of control, I like to think of my specific problem as a lack of brake fluid.

When I explained it this way, I think he got it.

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The Sea Will Save You

During vacation last week, Erin and I visited Arrowhead, the home of author Herman Melville. I bought an illustrated copy of his most famous work, Moby-Dick and got a whole new appreciation for the opening paragraphs, which I hadn’t read since college. It’s where the character Ishmael says:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

I relate, because when I’m depressed, the sea helps me. Always.

Mood music:

During moments of unhappiness in my younger years, the ocean was an escape route within feet of my front steps in Revere. I would sit on the rocks and think things through. I would walk from the Point of Pines all the way to the other end of the beach and back.

The process would usually take about 90 minutes — enough time to process what I was feeling. It didn’t necessarily make me happier, and much of the time thoughts just swirled around uselessly in my head. But I always came back from the beach a little calmer, a little stronger and ready to deal with whatever I had to face.

You could say the ocean would speak to me, talking me off the ledge.

I live away from the coast now, in a city sliced in half by the Merrimack River. The river has an equally calming effect on me, and I walk along it every chance I get. But every once in a while I go back to Revere or a closer place like Newburyport or Salisbury to get my pep talk from the sea.

To be fair, Ishmael’s adventure in Moby-Dick turned out to be anything but pleasant, and growing up by the beach wasn’t always sublime. The Blizzard of 1978 and the Perfect Storm of 1991 were destructive, and seeing the ocean rage as it did scared the hell out of me.

But those experiences are far outweighed by the many gifts the sea has given me.

Revere Beach Gazebo at Sunrise

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My Kill Switch

For someone accustomed to rising at 4 a.m. on a typical day, getting up at 7 a.m. is a lot like sleeping in. Lately, though, I’ve outdone myself in spades. Some days, I can’t seem to get out of bed before 9 or 10.  I’ve been napping a lot, too. Not just cat naps, but three-hour stretches of being out cold.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/s3TRns_zssM

This is what I call my kill switch. During tough times, my body and brain simply check out.

Lately, it’s because of the chaos that comes from losing an aunt and a father eight days apart.

In the past, the kill switch activated during periods of high tension and drama. One time a hurricane was headed for Massachusetts and, living on Revere Beach, I was terrified of storm surge. During the wait, I curled up on the floor and proceeded to sleep through most of the storm.

Another time I got into a bad fight with a family member that sent me over the edge. I fell onto the couch and slept an afternoon away.

I think it’s a survival tool, albeit an inconvenient one that can kick in at inconvenient times. I also don’t like to sleep through life. But it’s all but impossible for me to control.

When I stop sleeping late and taking so many naps, it’ll be a sign that I’m through this latest rough patch in my life.

Man Lying Down