Self-confidence. Something you’re supposed to work on building as a “strategy” to help fend off depression. But how the heck do you do that?
I mean, logically, I can see how, if you have more self-confidence, then perhaps you’d feel better about yourself, or maybe you’d beat yourself up less, or spend less time revisiting and reliving and rehashing every conversation/event in your head (which of course leads to more and more negative self-talk). Logically, it makes sense.
For me, battling depression, it seems unattainable and yet another reason to beat myself up. So how to break the cycle?
Brushing my teeth.
Ok, crazy, I know. But bear with me. Any dental health professional is going to tell you that you should brush at least twice per day, especially after meals.
Uh, hello, I usually eat 3 times per day.
It’s impossible. And don’t even get me started on flossing. And frankly, there are some days when I can barely drag my butt out of bed and force myself to get through the bare minimum of existence (like going to the bathroom), let alone brushing my teeth. Seriously. TMI? Maybe. But I’ll just pull back the curtain and let you see my faults in all their glory. I don’t always brush my teeth twice a day. I don’t always brush my teeth once per day. There are days that I struggle to remember at all. There are days that I remember, but I’m already on my way to work and it’s too late. Or I’ll remember, but the state of my depression is requiring such monumental effort to just get dressed and remain vertical…to add on “brush your teeth” is just one more burden, and too much to bear, so I’ll shrug it off.
So, despite the logical, rational side of me being fully informed that benefits of oral health go far beyond pearly whites, there were plenty of days that I just didn’t brush. Not like, “OH! I think I forgot to brush yesterday!” More like, “ummmm I can’t even remember when was the last time I brushed.”
And that was just one more way to beat myself up. Folks talk about “self-care” as being an important key to handling stress and just about anything you can think of, and then they give tips for self-care, like getting a massage or going for a walk or listening to your favorite music. BAH. I couldn’t even handle regularly brushing my teeth. So, it became a regular point of self-flagellation. Perhaps deservedly so, you might think, since brushing your teeth IS important. But it became more of a beast than it needed to be.
Every time I’d see the toothpaste on the counter, I’d be reminded of my failings.
I’d blame it on the toothbrush I had and I’d seek out a new one, which I avoided just as successfully. I bought an electric toothbrush thinking that having a device that would do all the hard work of brushing and timing the recommended 2-minute brush time would help, but it just sat there on its charging station, mocking me. My husband’s matching toothbrush head would have to be replaced, and replaced again, and my toothbrush head would just sit there, stubbornly refusing to fade halfway down to indicate the need to replace.
At some point, I realized that the whole tooth brushing thing was indicative of so much deeper stuff. My depression was preventing me from one of the most basic self-care rituals, and also one of the most beneficial. I needed to prioritize it, put it on the daily “to do” list. I figured if I could just get to a point where I could brush daily no matter what, then I could check that off, and therefore have a “win” for the day, even if I didn’t manage to do anything else. Even if depression had dragged me down to a depth that I couldn’t get anything else done, at least I’d brushed my teeth.
So, I tried. I struggled. I continued to hate my toothbrush—not because it wasn’t comfortable or functional, but because it sat there on the counter mocking me. Standing proud and tall in the recharge station, a testament to my failure to accomplish this most simple act.
I’m persistent, though. And on the days when I felt better, maybe not quite so bogged down with life, the universe, and everything in it, I would try to figure out what was the problem? What’s holding me back? What was stopping me from this one simple act of self-care?
Two minutes.
Two minutes. That was the problem. My head was saying, “it’s only two minutes” but my depression just couldn’t muster the energy to devote two whole minutes to anything other than feeling overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed by two minutes. Depression is like that, isn’t it? It just sucks the life out of you.
So, I got this crazy idea that I would cut it down to the smallest possible fraction of time, and landed on 30 seconds. My electric toothbrush buzzes at 30-second intervals to facilitate thorough brushing of all four quadrants of the mouth (resulting in two minutes of brushing), but screw that. I’m just going to brush my whole damn mouth in 30 seconds. On the days that I couldn’t bear to deal with the buzzing, I would just use my regular toothbrush and mentally count to 30. I figured I’d give THAT a try and see what happened. Sure, 30 seconds isn’t the recommended 2 minutes at least twice per day. I decided that just 30 seconds once per day would be such a vast improvement over “I can’t remember when the last time I brushed was” that those recommended daily guidelines were irrelevant. Anything is an improvement over “sometime last week, maybe?”
I decided I’d wedge it into the morning routine. That’s what all the habit-forming experts tell you, right? They tell you to add it to the things you already do. I figured that I could wedge in 30 seconds of brushing right in between “Bathroom, wash hands” and “Brush hair” that would occur right before I walked out the door in the mornings.
The first day, I washed my hands, saw that blasted toothbrush sitting there glaring at me, and felt a sinking feeling. Ugh. Was it going to beat me again? No, just 30 seconds, that’s all I promised. Thirty seconds later, I spit and rinsed and wiped my face with the towel…and rejoiced! Victory! I win! Take THAT, you mother effing toothbrush! Try mock me AGAIN, you sanctimonious twit! HA! I win!!!!!
So, as a side note, to anyone who thinks I’m completely insane for vilifying my toothbrush for being a bully….yes, that’s right. I’m crazy. But ultimately, who cares? If displaying a wee bit of wackiness facilitates a small but significant measure of self-care, then so be it. I’ll own that.
In the book How to Keep House While Drowning, author KC Davis admits that she struggled to even get the toothpaste on the toothbrush, so she ended up buying pre-pasted toothbrushes that she could keep in handy locations (like the bathroom, obviously, but also the kitchen and her purse, so she’d always be prepared for the moment when she did remember to brush).
How Can You Build Confidence in 30 Seconds?
Which brings me back around to the self-confidence issue. I didn’t realize how I’d allowed a stupid, inanimate object like a toothbrush to berate me, mock me, bully me, or rather, how I’d allowed my own negative self-talk to wield such a small and simple tool as if it were a mighty weapon. And after about a week of brushing for 30 seconds nearly every single day, I started to see a small, incremental improvement in my self-esteem. “I can do this” I cheered myself on one day. Thirty seconds to victory.
I’d wager that out of all of the “ways to beat depression” articles out there, none will recommend brushing your teeth for 30 seconds a day. I won’t either. It’s just something that makes an incremental difference FOR ME. And if you already brush regularly, shoots! Victory! Give yourself some credit, pat yourself on the back, high-five yourself in the mirror. Maybe there’s some other small self-care habit that the rest of the population takes for granted that you can work on. Anything that you make yourself feel bad about is a good place to start. Maybe you already brush but you don’t floss. So try just flossing a couple different teeth—30 seconds!—per day, and boom, by the end of the month, you’ve flossed every tooth a couple of times. Whatever it is, find one thing that you beat yourself up about, break it down into a ridiculously small fraction, and just do that. That small increment, even though it’s really small, feels like a giant victory. And when you’re battling depression, you need all the small victories you can get.
What small daily victories do you have that you can build on? Let us know in the comments below so we can cheer you on!
