Carla Bezanson’s Guide to Feeling Better When You Barely Have the Energy to Try

Here’s the trap nobody warns you about. Everything that would make you feel better requires you to already feel well enough to do it… so you don’t do it. Then you call yourself lazy for not doing it, and the not-doing plus the name-calling lands you somewhere worse than where you started. 

Carla Bezanson has been stuck in that loop for years. But on a recent episode of Don’t Think, the host says that’s finally changed. “I’m not waking up and just suddenly singing and dancing and painting a picture of a rainbow,” she admits. “It’s not that, but it’s definitely I don’t think I’m depressed anymore, which I haven’t been able to say in a long time.”

She puts it at about 30 percent better. Here’s how she got out.

Carla Bezanson Shares the Mental Health Changes That Helped Her Feel Better

Start with enough light to move around

For Bezanson, medication came first—and it took years of striking out to get there. “I would get mad at myself, and I would blame myself, and I would think I’m lazy or I’m not capable or why can’t I grow up,” she says. “Because I was depressed. And it’s really hard to do anything when you’re literally just fighting to keep the lights on.”

The right prescription didn’t make her “the happiest person in the world,” she says. But it did give her “enough light in the room” to move around and start taking care of things. If that sounds familiar, Bezanson suggests talking to a doctor. Not because meds are everyone’s answer, but because they don’t need to be treated like some dramatic last resort either. 

Change the room you fell apart In 

Once Bezanson had enough light to move around, she noticed walking into her own apartment gave her immediate anxiety, like a dark cloud settling over her head. But “the apartment itself wasn’t the problem,” she says. “The problem was that I had spent so much time there in mental hell.” She had cried on that couch and slept on it because the bed felt scarier, and she’d stayed up all night with the TV going more times than she could count. So she moved into a different unit in the same building, and she’s felt lighter ever since. 

A new lease isn’t required, though. “Sometimes even like moving the furniture in your room, getting a new plant, whatever, something just to change it up a little and almost mark in your brain like the start of the next chapter, you’re turning the page.” 

Make your world bigger than your own head

Of course, a new plant can only do so much when depression has already shrunk your whole world down to the size of your own brain. 

“You stop doing things that are outside of your comfort zone, and pretty much everything feels outside your comfort zone when you’re depressed,” Bezanson says. “Suddenly, like, you’re thinking about yourself all day, right? How do I feel? Why am I anxious? What’s wrong with me?”

When she asked the internet how to make her life more enjoyable, the video pulled millions of views, and one suggestion kept coming back: do something selfless. Hers turned out to be fostering a rescue named Daisy. “Fostering her forced me to think about something else and somebody else’s well-being,” she says. “Not as avoidance from my problems, but as a purpose. And it just made my world bigger.”

Bezanson isn’t saying everyone needs to foster a dog. For some people, she admits, it would probably make things harder. The bigger idea is finding one thing that pulls your attention outside your own head. “Maybe it’s volunteering at a soup kitchen,” she says. “Maybe it’s hanging out with your grandmother in the nursing home more.”

Anything where the assignment is somebody else. “It’s something selfless that you don’t necessarily need to do for you, but actually, ironically, it in turn does help you.”

Want the rest? Listen to the full episode on Don’t Think, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Read Next:

• If Dating Feels Like a ‘New Mental Illness,’ It’s Probably Not the Right Person
• The ‘What Have You Done for Me Lately?’ Mentality Is Slowly Destroying Your Self-Worth
• The Mental Health Questions Everyone’s Googling—Answered Honestly By A Therapist
• What to Do When Your Life Is Falling Apart, According to Zach Braff