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Comment by ravar | Hacker News Reader

Throwing in my two cents. I used to suffer from seasonal mood swings, since taking a daily multivitamin this has been the best winter of my life.

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I've been tracking my depression for a few years now, and I'm amazed at the number of things that can trigger a depressive episode. I used to think I had a disease called depression, but it now appears that I had arrived at a collection of various life circumstances that made experiencing depression on any given day more likely for me.

Some of the main triggers have been:

- Attempting to proceed without a plan

- Pushing for more productivity when less is called for (New year's resolutions were a great example personally)

- Bad sleep (I now use the calculator at sleepyti.me and have had great results)

- Too much exercise without rest days

- Too much exposure to social experience

- Too few dopamine-injecting experiences (e.g. not enough achievement, not nibbling away at my problems and watching leverage build up)

Strikingly to me, some of these seem tied to my psychology and I would hesitate to tell others "hey not having a plan is bad for you" when I know some people for whom planning is a mental health liability. Personalized medicine can't get good enough, fast enough.

This is interesting and resonates with me. While I agree with your conclusion about giving advice, could you perhaps share your methodology for discovering your triggers?

Every negative episode I deal with gets tracked and logged. I have a notebook just for this purpose, I time stamp my results, and I try to develop my own theories of what might be going on, and what might have happened, while remaining open to trying others' ideas (that's how I found out about sleep cycles, dopamine, etc.). My purpose is to develop a framework which gives me greater leverage against the suffering.

When I feel low, I immediately put myself in a resting state (usually laying down) and start logging and taking notes.

Incidentally my lowest periods of depression produce about 2 to 3 negative thoughts per minute for up to 30 to 45 minutes at a time, whereupon my body naturally seems to cycle out of that a bit before returning. So I'm noticing that even really depressed days have lots of little less-depressed leverage points where I can trust my judgments and rally myself to make smart decisions.

This tracking and logging and modeling stuff was not something with which I was familiar before I started studying a bit of personality psychology. I basically looked for tools that would help someone like me, but that I hadn't yet tried.

Your tracking reminds me of the book Eloquent Javascript. A chapter walks through a story where a guy would turn into a squirrel every night and he doesn't know why. He tracks everything and run correlations on it to find a cause. http://eloquentjavascript.net/04_data.html

Thanks for sharing your methods... very proactive and persistent.

> some of these seem tied to my psychology

Indeed, I personally do see similar triggers, but for me too little exerting exercise and I'm starting to mentally fall apart. This means daily exerting myself. I can skip a few days here and there but then I have to play catch up to "fill back the tank". The trickiest thing for me to notice that was that there's definitely some buildup phenomenon (the "tank" thing), when it's going down I think I'm fine but by the time I start to feel bad it's already too late and filling it back up takes as much time as I skipped exercising, which is even harder since I'm mentally down, driving a nasty feedback loop. As the best exercise for me is outdoors (skateboarding and calisthenics) this puts me in a delicate situation where I'm constantly on the edge during winter time.

As for social experience is a tight rope for me: too much and I'm burning out, too little and I'm crashing hard.

> Bad sleep (I now use the calculator at sleepyti.me and have had great results)

Interesting site, didn't knew about it!

I've checked it out, and as I wake everyday at 7am, it suggests me four different hours: 10pm, 11:30pm, 1am and 2:30am. What I find interesting is that none of it matches exactly the 8h average sleep value. As you say that you have had great results, could you comment a little bit on that?

Thanks!

I often push it too far and stay up till 3AM and wake up around 7:45 and then I can just proceed normally that day. I'm a bit melancholic on those days, but that's it :D

I was a bit surprised that this site suggested the 3AM as an option to fall asleep.

The point of the calculator is to time your sleep so that you wake up between REM sleep cycle (rather than being awoken by your alarm in the middle of a REM cycle, which usually puts you in groggy zombie mode). The calculator works off the assumption that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes (1.5 hours), so it calculates times that would allow you to wake up between sleep cycles (9 hours, 7.5 hours, 6 hours, and 4.5 hours all being multiples of 1.5 hours).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_cycle

It's offering sleep patterns that match multiples of 90 minutes. I think this is on average one 'sleep cycle'.

Waking is easier between cycles and you wake feeling more refreshed (I think).

8 hours is typically time from bedtime to wake time. It allows for some time spent falling asleep, and maybe one wake-up to visit the bathroom.

You'll notice that your suggested wake times are an hour and a half apart. Natural sleep cycles tend to run about 90 minutes (on average). So 7.5 hours would be 5 cycles. 8 hours is 5 cycles plus that buffer time.

I haven't used the app you mention, but I have begun a habit of getting out of bed between cycles instead of whenever in the cycle my alarm goes off. It definitely increases morning alertness and willingness to get up. Not sure it affects restedness much.

And I've been measuring my sleep in cycles (or at least in 90 min increments) instead of in hours - which gives me a much clearer perspective on how much I've had and need.

> Too few dopamine-injecting experiences

That is an awesome way to phrase that.

I took a 3 week vacation for the first time since I started working 8 or 9 years ago.

Did wonders for me. Should've made the time for a long long vacation a while ago.

Real vacations also help to put work stress into a proper perspective. In day-to-day worklife it's sometimes too easy to forget that work is there to support the other aspects of life, and not vice versa.

magnesium deficiencies have been known to cause depression and anxiety as well, so make sure to eat plenty of leafy green vegetables and pumpkin seeds.

Same here, D3 with Magnesium and Calcium since they are co-factors. Should take K2, too.

You probably won‘t believe it when I say that my immune system and energy levels are better than any winter before, but thats how it is.

I wonder if light therapy is actually just indirect vitamin D therapy.

I take D3, Mg and Ca regularly and I noticed better sleep, reduced anxiety and increased libido. All in all, it makes me feel 10 years younger.

Call me skeptical, but I severely doubt multivitamins can help with depression of any kind. Maybe placebo. TFA is about mortality.

>>severely doubt multivitamins can help with depression

If the multivitamin has sufficient Vitamin D, it definitely can. There are plenty of research papers indicating at least some sort of link, and Soviet Sports scientists have known about the performance benefits for a long time, well prior to oral supplementation (they irradiated athletes).

Here's one of many metasources available.

https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/depression...

As I mentioned in another comment, the evidence of a link between mood and Vitamin D is poor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15870969

I have very severe anxiety attacks which I finally have under control partly through vitamin B and fish oil supplements.

Consider replacing the fish oil with algae-derived omega 3. It has all the benefits with none of the downsides (toxic metals, fishy burps, environmental cost). Fish get their omega 3 from algae anyway so why not go straight to the source?

https://www.amazon.com/Ovega-3-Vegetarian-Omega-3-Dietary-Su...

You should try cod liver oil ("tran" for Norwegians). It has been the traditional food to combat SAD in their long winters.

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