hmm, I'm probably depressed.

We are in the same boat brother. Just need to find our purpose.

 

If you are just feeling down or discouraged, then there are some short term things that you can do to begin to change your mood and your perspective. Get out. Do something with people. Find a Christmas concert or service to attend. Go to a basketball game with a friend - anything to break out of the deepening rut you have found yourself in. If you are moving into depression, that's another thing altogether. Go online and look at descriptions of depression and see how you measure up. Depression can be triggered by circumstances - loss, grief, transition, aloneness, conflict, etc. But depression is actually a chemical issue in your brain and therefore a medical issue that needs to be treated. Getting counselling (to find out what factors are perhaps causing the mental short-circuit) can help. Finding the right medication may also be a necessary part of getting you back on track. I speak from experience. Ten years ago, after successive cycles of depression, I fell off a cliff, mentally. I was in denial and blamed myself for feeling badly. In reality, my wife of 30 years had become increasingly abusive, I was coming to grips with the long suppressed reality of having been sexually abused as a teenager by a male relative, and I was in total denial about how I was using porn to self-medicate. It's only when I became suicidal that I reached out for help, and I am very glad I did. I sought the care of a psychiatrist (a psychologist may be an excellent counsellor, but a psychiatrist is an MD and able to go after the medical angle of depressive illness), and she worked on finding the right medication to bring my depressive symptoms under control. It took trying two different meds, but the one I'm on now has worked brilliantly for 10 years and without the weight gain issues that some others have. I am told I will be on this medication for the rest of my life. That's ok with me, as I never want to go back to the dark hole I was in. Then over the course of some months, we began to unpack all of the issues feeding into my depression. It all came out - the abuse (and part of the abuse was exposure to gay pornography), the struggle with temptation and SSA and the occasional resort to porn when it was available, the increasing dysfunction of my marriage, the fact that my spouse took my struggles with porn and SSA from my experience of abuse to justify her terrible treatment of me and estrangement from me. All of these were hard to work through, and I am still working through some of them these many years later. And I continue to struggle with using porn to self medicate when I feel angry, lost, hurt, or sad. I have been with Sexaholics Anonymous for a number of years and used their program with profit. Being away from an SA program where I currently live and living alone gave me the opportunity to fall back into bad habits. But when I discovered NF, I was happy to give it another go. Anyway, take depression seriously. If you are depressed, don't let lack of insurance be an excuse to keep you from getting help. There are churches and non-profits that could be offering you the kind of help you need. I've gone on way too long. I hope you find the kind of help you need.

 

I suggest you take Vitamin B Complex and Vitamin D. They may help with mild depression.

Cold Showers in the morning can also help depression and they pretty much kill any PMO urges. There are some good YouTube videos that go into detail on the benefits.

 

Sounds more like apathy than depression in my opinion. Try doing something you wouldn't normally do to break the monotony.