The best thing to do when you’re depressed is to live as though you’re not depressed. (That advice applies to fear and other suffering as well.) If you have decided not to go the psychotropic drug route, I find this is the most helpful course.

“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts, but you have to stop sooner or later. And then you still have to decide what to do” (The Silver Chair). A mark of adulthood is that you remember more quickly the part about “still having to decide what to do,” and so you deliberately cut down on the crying, until it is almost eliminated.

I write this for people who may have been bequeathed an inordinately melancholy temperament, or have some undiagnosed condition of the humors that they don’t have time to pursue to the last penny.

If you focus on your depression then it grows to 10 feet tall. And then you generally end up with two problems—the presenting problem of the depression, plus the mess you have made of your life by coddling the depression and losing time that should be spend on more important endeavors.

These days if I notice I am in the Slough of Despond, I say to myself, “That’s interesting, I’m depressed.” And then I pray God’s promises over it—“I will never leave you or forsake you”; “My power is made perfect in weakness”; that sort of thing. It helps, also, to make a list of what you need to do that day, and just start doing it. Press into life and live it. Oh, and it’s better not to let on to many people if you’re depressed; the payoff from that gambit is very meager.