Depression and Anxiety:  A Time Management Model

Traditional treatment models for reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety often focus on emotional regulation and control.  For example, the Cognitive Behavioral approach encourages the affected person to take control of the negative automatic thoughts. These types of thoughts inform and empower one’s emotions.  Stop telling yourself things like “I am stupid.” Instead, replace negative thoughts like that with something like, “I made the best decision I could with the information that I was given.”  

While I wholly support traditional cognitive behavioral interventions to treat depression/anxiety, the approach takes both practice and time to perfect.  Therefore, it can seem overwhelming to people who are in acute emotional discomfort.  

For this reason, I have recently begun treating the symptoms of depression/anxiety from a time management approach.  To this end, the intervention invites the inflicted to “stay in their time zone,” and focus on what is experienced in the moment. 

Depression: Time Management

Depression often focuses on the past as you re-experience a hurt, loss, or feeling of insufficiency.  Prolonged and complicated grief often results in depressive episodes where the past experience of loss prevents the person from experiencing happiness in the present.  One antidote is to live in the moment and choose to emotionally invest in the people in your life today.  Refuse to allow something negative that has happened in the past to rob you of your joy in the present.  Don’t give the past that much power over the present. 

Anxiety: Time Management

Anxiety, by contrast, is often focused on the future.  It whispers, “what if…” over and over again, filling your mind with worst possible case scenarios.  Anxiety is irrational fear of an unknown and uncontrolled future.  One antidote is to live in the moment and choose to emotionally invest in the people around you.  Refuse to allow something negative, that might happen in the future, to rob you of joy in the present.  Don’t give the future that much power over the present.  

Some quick and simple techniques to ground your emotions in the present include:  prayer and meditation, focus on what you can see, feel, hear, and touch or say the alphabet backwards.  Do whatever it takes to stay in your own time zone.