This evening, I felt sleepy. My head was dizzy, my body was exhausted, and my mind went completely blank. I wanted to lie down right after dinner. But, as a family man, I couldn’t.

No, it is not because I ate too much. I am carefully controlling the amount of foods for each dinner. OK, I confess I have stuffed 80% of my stomach. But that is not the reason. I always ate that much. It was not because of foods, I was sure.

After about an hour’s doze, I figured that I was kind of in a blue mood.

Several days ago, I did a self-assessment on depression. Luckily I am not in a major depression, but unfortunately I definitely fit in a mild case. I guess I don’t need any drug treatment. Maybe a psychological consultation would be suffice. However, I don’t need to frantically Google “how to help you out of depression.” As a learned student, I should be able to come up a way to treat myself.

Anyway, I kept on nodding and contemplating treatments for another fifteen minutes or so until my wife finally got mad at me. She offered me two choices: I either did some chores to wake myself up, or slept like a pig. Well, as usual, I decided to do neither. Instead, I started to write my diary.

I made a commitment earlier this month that I would write something down every day to organize my life. I wrote something in first two days, skipped several days, and just penned down several sentences for some more days. Lack of principle is really a bad habit.

So I opened up my nice and big notebook, fished my favorite pen out of my messy bag, and jotted down a couple sentences like “today is a fine day although it rains in the evening.” Then I remembered that I was caught in the rain when I was walking back home. My son laughed at me because the rain fell just for the period when I was on the road. I was soaking wet.

That was funny and quite middle school diary story. I wrote some more.

Then I remembered I had read a very interesting paper this afternoon. I wrote a summary and made some comments about its methods and conclusion. I started feeling good.

Half an hour later, I was fully awake with two pages of diary and a joyful mood. I realized that I just overcame the sleepiness and boosted my mood.

Writing is an active process. Words and sentences are products of careful thinking. Even in a diary style, you have to organize your thoughts to form a coherent story. It is a good mental exercise.

On the other hand, reading is a passive process which may doze yourself off. It is not uncommon that people fall asleep during reading, but very few will fall asleep during writing.

More important, because I use writing as a psychological treatment, I intentionally avoid negative things (for example, I have wasted so much time surfing the internet, so sad.). Instead, I focus on what I have achieved today. For example, I have read a paper, submitted several programs, talked to a couple people, did exercise, and reduced the online time, etc.. A few small achievements are still great. Thinking and writing these positive things reinforces the bright feelings. A good feeling is the best reward I can have.

In fact, writing, reading, and thinking positively, are common ways many pioneer psychologists had used to solve their own problems. For example, Sigmund Freud, the founding father of id and ego, once suffered a major depression. However, he did not retreat from his social life. Instead, he carefully recorded what he felt during that period, read a lot of books to distract himself, and kept on writing his papers and books. After he rose up from the depression, he concluded that reading and writing helped him recover.

Certainly, everybody has his/her own way to cope with the depression. Sometimes time will cure it, but often you need to do something to distract yourself. Think positively, live actively, and hold on tight, you will survive the depression.