From the Archives asked

answered Apr 4, 2024

Hi Philip - thank you so much for your posts about your experiences at Amazon as a worker and your thoughts on depression and mental health. It seems like you’ve been able to bounce back and find meaning in your work and profession again? I’ve recently been suffering from severe anxiety due to a series of very difficult experiences over the last year. Can you share with me what caused your turnaround? I’m experiencing new lows and am looking for answers that can help me find the way upward and onward. Any insights you could share would be very welcome. 😊

Philip's answer

So sorry to hear about the hardships over the past year.

TBH, I haven't truly bounced back... for instance, I took a day off work yesterday because I was feeling so low. Therapy has been hard (but helpful); not sure if you're seeing a therapist at the moment, but that has been by far the most helpful thing for me. The second most helpful was medication, which I resisted for many years but now wish I had started years earlier.

After my Amazon experience, I began to understand that, at least for me, having a regular thing to work on, with outside-enforced schedules/deadlines, was most helpful. Amazon was a great example of this. But I eventually rented myself a WeWork, and set myself to launching an iOS app within a year. With that goal, I started going in to the WeWork 5 days a week, at least 40 hours per week, which helped stabilize my life a bit.

At the moment, do you have steady employment? For me, at least, the current job has provided a set of near term goals/deadlines that are helpful to me; if I didn't have this job at the moment, I think it'd be harder to get up every day at a reasonable time, since I'm still sleeping badly.

The classic advice is always eat well, sleep well, and exercise. People say it's hard to go too low if you do those consistently. I find what's hard is actually getting on top of those things before you sink so low that even the activation energy to do those things feels impossible.

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