What would you recommend for someone going through a deep depression? Because one of the things about depression is it can be hard to take a shower, to do that 30 days of the thing. So do you have like breakouts or things you'd recommend to interrupt that cycle? Depression is a multifaceted beast. And for people who don't have the context, for my entire adult life, certainly.
Although the frequency and severity has changed substantially in the last 10 years, had extended, experienced extensive, extended and extensive depressive episodes. Almost killed myself in college. I've written about that at some length. So if you just search Tim Ferriss suicide, that post will pop up. It's one of the more important posts I've ever written.
It'd be certainly top three or so of the blog posts I've written. very proud of that post. I mean, if you look at the comments, you'll see why.
Thousands of comments at this point. But how I relate to suicidal ideation, I think, can be found in that post. But number one, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. But I do have a lot of personal experience with depression, and I've been approached by a lot of people with depression, including close friends.
And I would say that, as you mentioned, it can be seemingly impossible to summon the will to do anything when you're severely depressed. I mean, there are... People who get almost into catatonia, right?
I actually, so this year, I experienced it for the first time. No kidding. A very close loved one was going through chemotherapy.
And it was interesting. It hit me quite hard, which felt dumb as well, because I'm not going through it myself. But what really woke me up is, usually, you hear me talk about WordPress and automatic.
I'm so excited about it. There was a day I just looked at my computer. I was like, wow, I don't care about this. That never happened before. Yeah.
That was the wake up. I was like, oh, man, like everything seems kind of grayscale. I feel this apathy.
And it really gave me a lot of empathy for things you've described before that I hadn't experienced personally. What helped you? I don't know if my example is good because I do want to know your answer.
I will give you my answer. For me, some of the external conditions changing. So the chemo getting better and better and ending was part of it.
That's not a great answer. Sometimes your external conditions still suck. Yeah.
Or bad things happen. You can lose loved ones. I got really strict about like exercise.
I cut out all alcohol. Like, like, okay, I just need to like detox, clean up. I'd be like kind of monk mode.
Yeah. And I think that's all I know how to do. Sleep, you know, try to like, I probably uninstalled Twitter at that point. Yeah.
Like, it was just really like, it's kind of things that are on my list anyway, but you know, day to day, I would say. i try to hit a lot of these things and i'm casual about something yeah so i'll make a couple of recommendations i i'm very cautious about making broad prescriptions because there's so many different varieties right there is everything ranging from i'm having a couple of tough weeks and i'm not sure why but i can still function really well i'm high functioning all the way to i'm i want to hang myself tomorrow yeah and those are those are entirely different species closer to that first one from the experience yeah a couple of resources i want to recommend first of all if if you're suicidal certainly please call a hotline. And I've been through this.
You're not alone. A lot of people face this. And even though it feels like it's permanent, it's personal, there's nothing you can do to change it. There are tools and I'm living proof of that. So I mean, I am incredibly happy and fulfilled right now.
And I've found tools that help to stabilize and facilitate that. Not 100% of the time, because I'm still part of the human experience. So I would just say you're not alone. And if it's an acute experience, please call Suicide Hotline, and I'll put that in the show notes. But if you search my name, Tim Ferriss, Suicide, that post has helped a lot of people.
There's also a post I wrote called something along the lines of productivity hacks for the manic depressive neurotic and something rather like me, which has been helpful for a lot of folks. And that also, I think, just allows people to remove some of the judgment, the self-judgment from the experience. Because there's the experience that is difficult, and then there's the harsh self-judgment that sometimes accompanies it.
That was tough for me. Right? Where you might be in a really challenging state, you're suffering, and then you have this voice that says, who the fuck are you kidding? Are you joking right now? Like, your life is great.
There's so many people who have so many more challenges than you. You don't even have the right to feel this way. Suck it up, buttercup.
Get it together and variations of that and it makes it a lot worse. So that post I just mentioned, which I'll link to in the show notes, has helped some people with that. You know, lastly, I would say if it's really acute, there are a few tools that I'm hesitant to recommend because there are, especially in the first, some risks associated. I did a podcast with Dr. John Crystal, who's the chair of psychiatry at Yale, which was effectively in everything you.
would ever want to know about ketamine episode and i think for acute suicidal ideation and risk of self-harm intravenous or im ketamine is very interesting as a pattern interrupt that episode is available for folks there are risks associated with ketamine there is an addiction potential uh it is it is something to keep an eye on but again risky compared to what if someone's at risk of cute self-harm then it's generally well tolerated, meaning it doesn't suppress respiration. It is very well researched. And that is one tool.
Another that is a newer tool that I've been exploring myself also, which we might talk about at dinner because we haven't talked about it, is something called accelerated TMS. And this is transcranial magnetic stimulation, various types of brain stimulation for addressing treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. There are some newer protocols, like the SAINT protocol, which was developed at Stanford, that are incredibly interesting. It's way faster, too, because the old treatments would take like 30 days, an hour a day or something like that. The new ones are way faster.
Way faster. So you're taking treatments that would otherwise take a month or two and compressing it into five days. Wow.
And fascinating, fascinating, cutting-edge stuff that I'm paying a lot of attention to because some of the results are equal to or even greater than with durability so if as fast acting and as durable or to a greater extent fast acting and durable than some of the psychedelic assist therapies and i'm reading about it as well because yeah we have friends that won't ever take a psychedelic yeah or some of these things or this actually this whole religions as mormons of this lds etc so some of this stuff i think is like really cool accessibility kind of like the same way breathwork can be Absolutely. And for people who might be older, a little frail, or with different conditions, higher blood pressure, etc., a lot of these folks should not touch psychedelics. They just should not. The risk profile doesn't make sense. And that would also be true for certain types of disorders.
I mean, later research may overturn this, but for the time being, say schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, a lot of folks who maybe lean more towards the, this is not a medical term, but like chaotic. are like entropic disorders versus hyper rigidity disorders like OCD. I would consider chronic anxiety and depression to be also rigidity issues on some level because they are often thought loops, things that repeat, right? There is a stuckness.
Whereas something like schizophrenia, which I have seen up close and personal, has a different feeling to it. It's an opposite end of the spectrum in some respects. So I'm very interested in those conditions. I'll check out those posts.
Yeah. For someone who's having a hard couple of weeks, you mentioned Tony Robbins earlier, I will mention something that I learned from him. I don't know if he's the original source of this, but I used to put this at the top of my journals.
I would write it out at the top of my journal so that I would see it every morning. And it was basically, let's call it a flow chart. That's an overstatement. And it said, STATE, in all caps, with an arrow that went to story, and then that went to strategy. So state, story, strategy.
And what that's meant to say is what happens to many people who are depressed or anxious or whatever is they sit down and they try to figure out how to fix the thing. They go straight to strategy. Like, what should I do? The challenge there is that if you're looking at the world through gray glasses. The story that you're going to come up with is going to be most likely a disabling story.
And then you're going to come up with strategies that are, by and large, pretty ineffective. If, on the other hand, you start with state. So if you're in a low-energy state, you hop in a cold shower for five minutes, or you do 50 jumping jacks, or you do 20 push-ups, anything to change your state from a low-energy state to a higher-energy state.
And that's... governed by all sorts of things. Well, let's keep it simple.
So low to higher energy state. Then you sit down and you're able to, because of changes in neurotransmitters or... any number of things, you have a more enabling story, right? And so you've turned the gray, maybe a tint or two brighter than the strategies you come up with are going to be more effective. So just reminding myself constantly before you jump to the strategy, like the what to do, the how to fix, have you addressed the state?
Because this thing in between the story really matters. Because if your narrative is like, oh, I'm always pessimistic. I've never been able to fix this.
you're starting at a deficit, right? You have a severe handicap in coming up with approaches that are going to help you. So that might be helpful to people as well. Like state, story, strategy, that is the order.