This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Depression, Detached from others, Feelings of alienation, Feelings of disconnect, Sadness, Social isolation, sesonal depression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One of the things that you’re going to find is that a lot of times people hit the holiday season disenfranchised from other folks. This is particularly true for people that spend a lot of their time online; gamers on interactive sites and people that interact on peer networks and do a lot of their visiting with others on-line.
What they may find over the holidays is that a lot of their peers that they interact with on-line are not available during the holiday season and off-line and they realize that they are not as connected with people as they normally think they are and loneliness and feelings of isolation can kick in. A lot of times these people can find themselves feeling depressed, anxious and a lot of times just really lonely over the holidays.
The things that I would suggest is that they do to kind of deal with that, physical activity being one, is changing up what they do in their normal daily basis, changing their routine. Put themselves in places where there are a number of people. Put themselves in places where they can have pleasant experiences.
One suggestion to counter seasonal depression is to do some community work which is always productive and highly appreciated. In addition to that what we know is that people that do volunteerism get a tremendous boost to their self-worth and self-esteem and they feel connected.
I would recommend for people that suffer from seasonal depression around the holidays is to go out and serve in a soup kitchen to help the homeless or volunteer at a local hospital, they are always clamoring for people to visit during the holidays, or volunteer at a nursing home. These kinds of things that put you out of your normal range of being self-absorbed really help people who are suffering from feelings of depression.
If you are afflicted by the symptoms of depression we encourage you to call our office or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our trauma counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of anxiety, depression and trauma. We are located in Mesa, AZ.