This one gets a little serious. Not a lot, but a little.

By a wide margin, the biggest issue keeping me from being as productive as I would like is depression. When I’m depressed, I procrastinate, and when I procrastinate, I get depressed. And it doesn’t take much to make me procrastinate, either. For example, halfway through writing this paragraph, I stopped for five minutes to rearrange the icons in my menu bar.

Now I’m watching my cat.

I get the most depressed when I’m not working on something I love, hence procrastination being a cause of it. Keeping depression away, then, takes a lot of discipline, which, unfortunately, sounds too much like, “You’re not working hard enough.” If you’ve ever wrestled with depression, you know that being told you just need to try harder only makes it worse.

No, it’s more about having a system for not letting your brain throttle down. As long as your brain is running at full power, you’ll tend not to become depressed. After all, depression is basically just a symptom of diminished brain activity. Just look at how sluggish and disinterested you become when you’re feeling down.

So how do you maintain that high level of brainal output? That’s where the discipline comes in. You have to figure out a system for getting your brain moving, and then have the discipline to maintain it. In my case, the rules are so: As soon as I get up every morning, I have to play the drums for a half hour, work out for an hour, shower, get dressed, and immediately get to work on the most important task I have for the day without looking at Twitter or email.

But as soon as I miss a day, the depression comes back. Yesterday, for example, I did not start my day by working out. I did drum for about twenty minutes, but then I sat down at my computer and went through my RSS feeds. By the time I was done, I had no desire to do any work, so I wrote this post instead.

And so there is the need for discipline. I have to stick to the routine or I’ll get depressed.

Fortunately, in this particular case, writing this post was at least something important that had to get done, and the fact that it’s about depression is having a sort of Heisenberg effect, in that I can feel the depression lifting just enough for me to get my brain focussed again.

I mentioned on Monday that I burned out after the crunch experiment. I took a week off, thinking I just needed a break, but at the end of that week, I still felt like I needed more down time, so I took more. By the end of the second week, though, without noticing until it was too late, I’d fallen into a cycle of deep depression and couldn’t will myself to work.

In addition to depression, I’ve also developed an anxiety problem in the last couple of years. I finally went to my doctor about it in March, and the doctor prescribed me some Xanax. I bring this up because, when I’m depressed, I become more susceptible to anxiety, which is an even bigger problem when pills are in the equation, because anti-anxiety medications can cause depression. You can guess where this is going.

In the third week after the crunch, I became a pretty unpleasant person to be around. I started having several anxiety episodes a day. This culminated midway through the week when I had a huge anxiety attack about… something. I don’t remember exactly. It was mundane. I think it was because I’d forgotten to clean the litter box during the day and my wife noticed the smell and I panicked for fear of being seen as a slacker.

So I took a pill to settle the anxiety down, but the pill made me feel extremely depressed. I started ranting to my wife about every little thing wrong with my life, eventually bursting into tears when she expressed the barest hint of frustration at me. Next thing I knew, I was sobbing in my office, thinking about suicide. It took me an hour to remember that suicidal thoughts are another possible side effect of the pills. I threw them out immediately.

It’s perverse, the way depression can spiral sometimes.

But my point: This all happened because I took a break from the routine and didn’t replace it with something similarly stimulating. I let my brain throttle down. I should have spent those weeks off doing something worthwhile. I could have done concept sketches for Hindrances’ next game. Hell, I probably didn’t even need to do anything work related. I could have just spent some time reading or hiking. But I didn’t. I mostly just played Dragon Age and surfed the web.

As a depressed person, my greatest adversary is my own brain. I’ve come to think of it as something separate from myself. It does things, thinks about things, without my permission. It is not the self, it is the finicky engine that drives the self. It needs constant care and maintenance, and it takes a disciplined owner to consistently provide those things.