Depression

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          Exercise for Deep Abdominal Breathing – While lying down, place one hand on your abdomen, the other on your chest. While relaxing your abdominal muscles, breathe in deeply and slowly through your nose, so that the hand on your abdomen moves up more than the one on your chest. (Once you have mastered that, you can further deepen your breathing by expanding your chest also right after you have first expanded your abdomen). Then exhale slowly and completely through rounded lips so that it takes twice as long to breathe out as it takes to breathe in. Do this exercise for 10-15 times two to three times a day. Further, after a few days, try to make abdominal breathing, without extending exhalation, a regular habit.

Get Good Quality Sleep

          Sleep is prescribed by Nature, good quality sleep improves your defence mechanism and plays a vital part in preventing and curing depression. Maintain regular sleeping and waking habits and make sure that adults get 7-8 hours good quality sleep every night in a totally dark room without any light contamination. Children need much more sleep and older people less. Avoid sleeping during the day except for 15-20 minutes: that too if your body needs it for relaxation. Sleep deprivation increases the risk of unhealthy eating, leading to weight gain and other complications including depression.

Practice Meditation

          The term meditation describes a variety of techniques that involve quieting the mind and relaxing the body by focusing all the mental faculties, without cessation, on an object, word or sensation and ignoring interrupting thoughts. All types of meditation involve regular sessions – ideally for 20 minutes or more each day – in which you spend uninterrupted time calmly becoming aware of your thoughts and distancing yourself from those thoughts. You may notice the voice in your head, but you work to detach from it and not react to it, focusing instead on your breathing, a scenery or a word (Om or Waheguru) on brief prayer or your physical sensations. The process has been aptly described as “thinking about not-thinking”. Regularity of time, place and practice are very important in meditation. The regularity conditions the mind to slowing down its activities with a minimum delay. The most effective times are early dawn and dusk, when the atmosphere is serene and peaceful.