(By
SnakeDance on Tumblr.)
Like many people with #Aspergers, I’m no stranger to #depression. Depression saps energy and motivation and makes it hard to get anything done. One of the ways I navigate this is with my kanban board, HabitRPG, and the philosophy of babysteps. Babysteps are small but they still carry you forward.
HabitRPG is an online habit tracker that turns your tasks into a role-playing game. When I’m battling depression, its most important feature is that it rewards you with game coins and experience points, levelling up, and buying equipment. Every time you complete a habit or finish a task, you get an instant reward. And that results in a small release of the “happy hormones,” endorphins and dopamine. Both of these are implicated in depression (reuptake times and available receptors have been implicated) so these releases are needed.
When you’re living with depression, just getting up in the morning can seem like a major accomplishment — so why not treat it like one? Put it on your task list and check it off - one thing done! Put it on your HabitRPG, check it off, collect coins! Paying bills can trigger a major anxiety attack for me, so I mark it as a Hard task on my HabitRPG. This is equivalent to a boss battle, so the shower of coins, experience points and levelling up really helps.
(Your inner self-hater will pipe up at this point and say something like “this is stupid, who needs to be rewarded just for getting up in the morning?” People for whom this takes a lot of effort, that’s who. This is a motivation strategy, we’re not striving for cool points here, we’re trying to stay afloat! When you’re living with depression, if you find something that works, that’s what you do. This works for me, so I’m sharing it in the hopes that it will work for someone else.)
Do this for all of your daily tasks. Get out of bed, get dressed, eat a good breakfast. Put them on your list and check them off as you do them. When creating your list, it’s tempting to put your whole day’s worth of tasks and meals on there, but if you do that, you risk becoming overwhelmed by looking at this long long list of tasks and you risk struggling to do any of them. Instead, I put only three tasks at a time onto my list then I tick them off right away as I do them. Then add three more tasks as you do them and tick them off. Just keep doing three tasks at a time.
When it comes to chores and major tasks, I need to be careful because depression really saps my energy. Mostly, I stick to the upkeep basics and I limit myself to three chores per day: Swish’n’swipe (ie: swishing out the toilets and swiping down the bathroom), dishwasher, and one other chore (either a Fly Mission or clearing a Hot Spot.) If I have more energy, I’ll add another chore. I need to pace myself but I also need to keep moving forward.
Students face the additional issues of study time and projects, like essays or reports. Depression affects the ability to focus so the Pomodoro technique and reward management systems can work well here. Put each 25 minute study period in your HabitRPG and get a little reward for each one, and/or make each one into a kanban ticket and get a sense of accomplishment as you move each one over to Done.
Writing essays, reports and theses are some of the toughest things to do when you’ve got a depression because depression also saps creativity. The Snowflake Method was developed for writing novels but many people have been applying it for writing essays and theses too. It works by taking the core of your idea and expanding it until you have a summary, then a skeleton, then building on the skeleton until you have your document. Put each step onto your HabitRPG and/or onto your kanban tickets and tick them off as you complete them. With each step and each 25-minute focus period, you’re making progress.
I keep saying “and/or” because when I’m deeply depressed, I need both kanban and HabitRPG to keep me going. I get the little bursts from the HabitRPG rewards, but I get a huge sense of accomplishment when I look at all those completed kanban tickets sitting on the Done side. My little self-hater voice likes to point out that it’s full of things like “eat lunch” and “unload dishwasher”, but I can point to my kanban and tell it “Yes and they’re all things that I got done today.” It has no real answer for that, because small accomplishments are still accomplishments.
Did you come through a suicide attack or avert self-harm? Put it on your HabitRPG as three Hard tasks. No, five Hard tasks Ten Hard tasks! No, I’m serious, these are really difficult things to manage when a person is battling depression. Managing them is a major accomplishment and deserves to be rewarded as such. These are NOT small things! These are major battles that deserve to be recognised for the end boss battles that they are.
Speaking of which, if you’re taking medication, you know the social stigma that can be attached to it. But in video games, we take various kinds of health potions all the time. That’s what your medication is, a health potion. So take your potions, Warrior! Put on your kanban armour and pick up your snowflake sword and your RPG shield! The battle music is playing and you can totally do this!
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Topic: Habit RPG (Read 38951 times)