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Healthy lifestyle habits can help prevent depression, or lessen the chances of it happening again. These habits include eating properly, sleeping adequately, exercising regularly, learning to relax, and not drinking alcohol or using drugs.Counseling may help you through times of grief, stress, or low mood. Family therapy may be particularly important for teens who feel blue.If you feel socially isolated or lonely, try volunteering or getting involved in group activities.

There’s no sure way to prevent depression. However, taking steps to control stress, to increase your resilience and to boost low self-esteem may help. Friendship and social support, especially in times of crisis, can help you weather rough spells. In addition, treatment at the earliest sign of a problem can help prevent depression from worsening. Long-term maintenance treatment also may help prevent a relapse of depression symptoms.

Exercise Regularly:Regular exercise is an important part of depression prevention. Any form of exercise, be it dance, yoga, or other physical activity, will help relax and de-stress a person by increasing the amount of mood-elevating chemical transmitters in the human brain.Exercise helps release endorphins which relax muscles, reduce stress, and induce good sleep. Therefore, by exercising regularly, one is reducing the risk of depression and its symptoms manifesting.

Healthy Diet:Nutrition is another critical component but often overlooked component of depression prevention. Health is wealth – simple but extremely true!Overeating, starving, eating irregularly – all these habits influence and affect the body in more ways than one can ever imagine. In our effort to keep up with a million tasks and items on our to-do lists, we fail to take good care of ourselves.

Drinking enough water everyday and eating at least two helpings of fresh vegetables helps regulate and keep the physical body nourished with adequate minerals and vitamins.

The amount of toxin build up in the body increases with lack of exercise, lack of sleep, and bad eating habits. Therefore, it is extremely important to detoxify and flush toxins out from the human body from time to time. By investing a little into good exercising, eating, and sleeping habits, one can certainly help considerably reduce the risk of depression setting in. These habits indeed go a long way toward depression prevention.

Speak out and Share your feelings:More often than not, human beings share their joys but not their sorrows. Most of us do not like being sympathized, empathized, and take a lot of pride in putting up a strong front; we often refuse to show our vulnerable sides to the rest of the world.

While all this is very well, what we inevitably end up doing is repressing and suppressing our sorrows and bitterness. Most of these repressed feelings end up occupying a huge chunk of space in the subconscious, and this is highly unhealthy.

Just like how toxins build up in the physical body and it becomes important to flush them out, it is equally important to flush out mental and emotional toxins, too. These mental and emotional toxins are in fact far more dangerous than physical toxins, and getting rid of them is an essential part of depression prevention.

At the subconscious level, these feelings fester and manifest in the form of bad dreams, nightmares, and fear, which in turn become one of the main reasons for lack of sleep, worry, tension, and anxiety. Therefore, it is always better to express one’s feelings to another person as far as possible. Get them out of your chest, be done with saying it – you will actually experience relief and feel much lighter. This too, is important for depression prevention.

Keep yourself occupied:Keeping oneself occupied is another important part of depression prevention.An idle man’s mind is a devil’s workshop! The human brain, with its extraordinary network of neurons and neurotransmitters, can race at the speed of light or even faster. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure that this clever mind is occupied and always entertains only creative, productive, and positive thoughts as far as possible.

Irrespective of what one is going through in life; for example, all of us experience failure, illness, death of a loved one, fights and arguments, separation, abandonment, disrespect, etc, at some point in time, one must not let it affect oneself beyond a certain point. Most of these experiences are extremely sorrowful, humiliating, and sad, but one must learn to cultivate the habit of moving on.

Although depression is a highly treatable condition, some forms of depression may not be preventable. That’s because depression may be triggered by a chemical malfunctioning in the brain. However, the latest medical studies confirm that depression may often be alleviated or sometimes prevented with good health habits.

Proper diet, exercise, taking time out for fun and relaxation, not overworking, and saving time to do things you enjoy may work together to prevent a depressed mood.

Depression Prevention Tips:

1.Teach the patient about depression . Emphasize that effective methods are available to relieve her symptoms. Help her to recognize distorted perceptions that may contribute to her depression . Once the patient learns to recognize depressive thought patterns, she can consciously begin to substitute self-affirming thoughts.

2. Sunlight and exercise can help the brain to function at a higher level. Be sure to catch some rays in the morning and try to stay active in the daylight when possible.

3.Don’t endanger your health by pushing yourself beyond your limits. Keep stress in check and try to avoid stressors if you can. If you cannot, then try to deal with the stressors in a manner that mitigates the damage they may cause.

4.Inform the patient that certain antidepressants may take several weeks to produce an effect.

5.While tending to the patient’s psychological needs, don’t forget her physical needs. If she’s too depressed to take care of herself, help her with personal hygiene. Encourage her to eat. If she’s constipated, add high-fiber foods to her diet; offer small, frequent meals; and encourage physical activity and fluid intake.

6.Inform the patient that she can help ease depression by expressing her feelings, participating in pleasurable activities, and improving grooming and hygiene.

There is always something to do like taking up a book, mowing the lawn or any other domestic chore. By directing all the attention to it one can turn it into an interesting task. The main point here is ‘focusing the attention until there is no room left in the mind for worry’.

Another thing one can engage in is intellectual workout that can be done alone. For example, anticipating a future situation and devising ways to approach it; reflecting on the previous actions – without accommodating any negative feeling but focusing on improvement – and making amendments to them where necessary, in case the situation repeats itself later in the future one can use the new approach to get a better result.

Mathematical, scientific and philosophical thinking and observation, arts and poetry fall in this category. For both the hobbyists and the professionals in this fields almost everything around can be an object of observation and contemplation or a source of inspiration – one could imagine how remarkable and fascinating it was falling of a fruit in the contemplative mind of Isaac Newton.

The methods above can be used to stem the effect of loneliness, and prevent it from slipping into depression. It is also a nice way to turn the period of solitude into a moment of happiness and satisfaction.