How to Get Depressed in Five Simple Steps

(Originally published on LinkedIn on 2022-09-20.)

Have you ever wondered about clinical depression, and how one actually becomes depressed? Does it seem like your brain’s just not wired that way? Then first of all, don’t worry: Depression is hard to understand. Some of us do seem to have a natural affinity for it, but few can claim to fully understand it (I certainly know I don’t fully understand it).

For that reason, in this article I am not going to try to explain how depression works. Instead I’m going to offer some practical insights on how to achieve depression. I am not depressed at the time of writing this article, but I have been depressed at several different points in my life, and in the process I think I’ve picked up a certain feeling for how it can be accomplished.

This is not a complete manual, because just like there are many ways to be depressed, there are also many different ways to reach that elusive state. Hopefully these pointers will be of at least some help, by outlining one possible strategy for getting there.

(And do remember, that only you possess the agency to choose how you interpret this article. I can only ask of you, to please not misinterpret it!)

Step One

A good first step on the road to depression would be to get rid of your daily routines. As many as possible. Routines help us cope with everyday life, and without them, you’ll find that even ordinary tasks like doing the dishes and taking out the trash can in fact begin requiring an extraordinary effort. Regular exercise does wonders for your mental health, so that needs to go, too.

Here it’s helpful if there is some external event that can serve as an initial impetus to help you stop doing all such activities for a while; something that makes you too tired or otherwise incapable of getting them done. However you get there, you want to end up in a position where you put off doing them for a long enough time, that the accumulated work will serve to make sure the prospect of finally doing them will be sufficiently daunting.

When you’re left with no choice but to do some chores (which at this point should be enough work that you really need to prioritize doing only the most important ones), avoid the temptation to act on the conclusion that you need to start doing them regularly again. You do them, once, after which you’ll be exhausted, and things are again workable, for now. Let it go, try to relax. Play a videogame.

The thing you absolutely should avoid at this point is asking for help while you get back up on your feet. Let your sense of shame aid you in keeping your problem to yourself. The goal at this stage is to drain you of energy, lower your resilience, and introduce a latent continuous stressor into your life, that can fuel the next step of your journey.

Step Two

As the stress over your situation at home is building, the way our brains function is that you’ll naturally have less capacity to do things at work. It’s time to start neglecting some of your work commitments. I recommend you begin by not doing some minor things you’ve quietly assumed are expected of you. You’ll likely find that you’re getting away with it, which can be eye opening: Many processes in society rely on norms and expectations. A lot of times, nobody is actively following up on what you’re doing (or not doing), leaving you largely to police yourself. And your inner cop is currently too busy with the stress over how your life is deteriorating, to care! (Freedom!)

There will of course still be many things you simply can’t get away with not doing, but with those you can often at least procrastinate. Nobody will mind you being a bit late. You’re stressed. They’ll understand. Eventually, unless you’re psychopathic or have a really shitty job (in which case, you already have a good head start in achieving depression!), you’ll start feeling guilty over your declining performance.

Perhaps your manager will even bring it up, at some point. If they do, and they are appearing concerned rather than displeased, resist the impulse to tell them the truth. Instead, reinforce the feeling of guilt by saying that you’ve just had a temporary setback, but it’s a thing of the past, and that you will really start improving from now on. Hopefully they’ll let it go with that. If they later notice that you’re in fact not improving at all, and express more serious concerns over your general wellbeing, then it’s important that you double down on the deception, and maybe find easy ways to make it appear that you’re improving while you’re not.

The lie and the feeling of guilt are both useful, because your constant under-performance relative to expectations helps a lot with lowering your self esteem — and because of the inherent plasticity of our brains, after a few repeat cycles, the feelings of guilt and shame will have become ingrained in your mind, unrelated to anything you’re actually doing or not doing. They’ve become self-sustaining!

Step Three

Now that you’ve hopefully established an internal sense of inadequacy, it’s time to expand on it. Start thinking about negative social and professional experiences you’ve had in the past. If you find this challenging on a first read-through, don’t worry, it will come naturally for you as your self esteem decreases — as will seeing how you really were the one to blame in all of these situations.

This can be a very good driver for your continued journey towards depression, if done right. Take special care, however, to avoid falling into the trap of attributing your failures to something specific you said or did, and stopping there! Focus instead on the underlying reasons; how things really went wrong not because of something you did, but because of who you, deep down, are as a person. See how these failings in your person are also evident in your recent neglect of your home, your health and your job. Humans are exceptionally good at seeing patterns. Notice the pattern.

This negative feedback loop is specifically what you’re after, to be able to make progress. You really need to begin internalizing that you are a lazy, unreliable, and generally useless person. While you’re doing this, make sure not to talk about it with anyone else! They may offer an alternative viewpoint, which could risk pulling you out of the loop.

Step Four

Once you feel you’ve reached a point of equilibrium with negative introspection alone, you should start more actively looking for rejection from others. Social media can be very helpful here. Look at how your friends are excluding you from their perfect lives and fun activities, and at how they by contrast are either ignoring your posts, constantly disagreeing with you (probably because they’ve seen right through you, for who you really are), or are interacting with you just out of politeness and don’t really care about you.

Start making posts where you allude to what an inherently worthless person you are. If your friends try to convince you you’re wrong, then at this stage it should already feel natural for you to assume that they’re only doing it out of a misguided sense of pity, and maybe even just because you’ve guilt-tripped them into it. (If the latter’s the case, be sure to add guilt-tripping to your growing tally of self-identified character flaws!)

Depending on your disposition, you may at this point choose to, for example, get verbally confrontative and argue against anyone who tries to convince you you’re not a bad person. It can be really tiresome for them to constantly get shot down as they’re trying their best to help, and as they give up, it will only serve to prove that you were right all along. But it’s optional. Just remember that whatever choices you make here, in order to achieve a full-on major depression, they should always be destructive rather than constructive, and in some way contribute to your growing sense of social isolation.

Step Five

If you’ve followed all the steps diligently, then you will likely come to a point where the situation is putting enough strain on you that you cease being able to go to work. In fact, it may be that you can no longer get yourself to do pretty much anything; even getting out of bed and taking care of basic personal hygiene becomes a struggle.

You’ll be feeling how your life has really gone down the drain, and how everything that’s wrong comes together naturally at the very core of your rotten person. You’ll start truly loathing yourself, and thinking of yourself as deserving of suffering. And, as the sane remnants of your mind protest in abject evolutionary horror, you will for the first time fully experience the thought that the world would be a better place, if you were not in it.

If you do manage to reach this point, then congratulations, you are now well and thoroughly depressed!

Conclusion

I hope that this list is of some use to someone (anyone, really). I also want to reiterate: This is not a manual for depression, which remains a highly complex topic with lots of room for individual variance, as well as for severity. I do not claim to know all the possible ways to achieve depression. These are just some pointers, partially based on my own experiences, as well as on observing the trajectories of friends, who at some point of their lives have also successfully achieved depression.

And finally, if you do struggle, then I have only one request of you, in memory of those of my friends who did: Please don’t give up hope, because it’ll be the last thing you do.