I couldn’t motivate myself to do anything important this morning, which is a rare thing for me. And I just felt bad in general. I started to doubt myself, and wonder whether anything I do is worthwhile.

I sat here in this funk and wondered how to get out of it. Should I just forget about today? Should I just give up what I do, because I’m not as good at it as I thought I was?

That was definitely what I was considering. But I knew this mild depression was temporary, and so I thought about possible solutions. And then some of them actually worked–little tricks of the mind that can have a real effect on reality.

Here’s what I did that worked, in hopes that it might help you if these feelings ever come up..

I think we all have the tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe, and see everything from the viewpoint of how it affects us. But this can have all kinds of effects, from feeling sorry for ourselves when things aren’t going exactly as we’d like, to doubting ourselves when we aren’t perfect. So instead of worrying so much about myself, I thought about other people I might help. Finding small ways to help others gets me out of my self-centered thinking, and then I’m not wallowing in self-pity anymore–I’m starting to think about what others need. I’m not doubting myself, because the question of whether I’m good enough or not is not the central question anymore. The central question is what others need. So thinking about others instead of myself helps solve self-doubt and self-pity.

We all have this picture of ourselves, this idea of what kind of person we are. When this idea gets threatened, we can react very defensively. People can question whether we did a good job, and this threatens our idea of ourselves as competent–and so we can become angry or hurt at the criticism. Someone can accuse you of lying and this threatens your idea that you’re a good person, and so you can get angry and attack the other person. My identity of myself as someone who is motivated and productive and has good ideas and so forth … this was getting in the way this morning. When I wasn’t productive, it made me despair because then I was worried I wasn’t who I thought I was. My solution was to realize that I’m not one thing. I’m not always productive–sometimes I am, but sometimes I’m lazy. I’m not always motivated–sometimes I am, but other times I don’t feel like working. I don’t always have good ideas. I can be many things, and so this identity of mine becomes less fragile, more antifragile. Then it doesn’t matter if someone thinks I didn’t do a good job–because I don’t always do a good job. I make mistakes, I am less than perfect. And that’s perfectly OK.