Adapting Habitica for Anxiety and Depression

One of the hardest things about mental illness is that, no matter how talented and capable we are, depression or anxiety can make it very difficult to care for ourselves, or just to get through the basics of everyday life. You might be a literal rocket scientist and still have trouble remembering to take your medication. You might be able to juggle fifteen knives that are on fire, but feel like you can't even get out of bed. You might take care of the other people in your life, but not make time for things that make you happy. You might not be able to think of any things that make you happy!

Just like with any other task or habit, Habitica can provide extra support to help manage the things that seem unmanageable. Know that if your habits include things like "eat three meals a day," "shower like a normal person," "leave the house," or "think of something I like about myself," you're not alone. Habitica has many guilds for Habiticans to support each other, with many suggestions about how the site can be used to help you cope and improve.

On this page, you'll find many forms of help, from suggested habits to existing challenges to guilds of like-minded folks. It's important to remember that what works for one person won't necessarily work for another, and your personal level of success with these methods will vary. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of resources here, so if something isn't working for you, you can always try something different. The only thing that truly matters is that you don't give up on yourself.

Caveat
The information contained on this website and Habitica.com is not intended as, and is not, a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice.

If you are feeling suicidal or are worried you might harm yourself or someone else, you should seek immediate help by doing one or more of the following:


 * 1) Going to your nearest emergency room or
 * 2) Calling a suicide hotline.

The national hotline in the US is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). A list of state-by-state numbers can be found here, and international numbers are available here. If you don't feel able to talk aloud about this, you can chat online with trained volunteers at I'm Alive, and if you aren't in immediate danger of acting on your thoughts, The Samaritans provide support from trained volunteers over email. If you don't feel ready to talk to anyone just yet, this page explains why your suicidal feelings aren't your fault, and don't make you a bad person.

You may also find the Black Ribbon guild helpful, they are dedicated to suicide prevention though in an emergency please use the suggestions above.

  '''The page is currently undergoing major reworking from here onward, and will change often. Many sections will be incomplete or contain outlines of future content.'''

Starting Small
Mental illness can sap away all of your energy, making it difficult to accomplish anything, and leading to feelings of frustration and helplessness. While it's impossible to "just snap out of it", you have the power to improve, regardless of how severe and persistent your illness is.

The key to achieving tangible, long-term improvements is, counter-intuitively, to make many small changes instead of large, dramatic changes. Small changes are easier to wrap your head around and easier to accomplish; with each small change you successfully implement, you'll gain confidence and motivation, increasing your ability to make additional small changes. Over time, these small changes add up, slowly but surely pushing you closer to where you want to be, and further from where you currently are. Eventually, you'll look back and realize that you've made large changes to your life, but by stacking small changes, not trying to fix everything at once.

Taking Care of Yourself
The first step in this process is learning how to take care of yourself. When you are at your worst, it can be difficult to muster the energy to do even basic things, such as eating or bathing regularly. Improving your self-care is essential to being able to tackle larger problems. In other words, taking care of yourself is the foundation of your journey to self-sufficiency and happiness. But where to start? There are many examples provided below. Regardless of what change you choose to try, it's important that you do it every day, to increase the effect it has on your habits. Don't forget, focus on changing only one thing at a time, even if you would like to improve all of these areas. Once you feel you have one change under control, add another, and once you have both under control, add another, and so on.

Sleep
Not enough and/or low-quality sleep degrades your mental health, making proper sleep an essential part of your recovery. These are some small changes that can help you improve your sleeping:
 * Set a time to go to bed or wake up every morning. You don't need to set these simultaneously; it is perfectly valid to start by changing just one, and then changing the other after the first has been mastered.
 * Have a set time every night that you stop using digital screens. If you find it difficult to resist the urge, remove all screens from your room at a set time every night.

Hygiene
Keeping yourself clean keeps you healthy, which feeds back into your mental health. You can: The make it through the day challenge from the The Basics guild may be helpful here.
 * Brush/floss your teeth once a day (twice a day if you can manage)
 * Take a quick shower each day. Or if that's too difficult, wash your face and armpits with a washcloth every day.

Exercise
Don't worry, you don't need to start by running a marathon! Just getting yourself moving a little bit to begin with can make a big difference. Try to get outside at least once a day, even if it's just standing in the doorway. If you're feeling up for it, take a short walk for five minutes, or just to the end of the block. You can also: The Exercise challenge from the The Basics guild may be helpful here.
 * Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
 * Intentionally park in spots far from the entrance to a building.

Diet
Eating unhealthily (or not enough) has a negative effect on your physical health, which leads to a negative effect on your mental health The FOOD challenge may be helpful for those with eating disorders involving under eating and the Eat Right! challenge would be helpful for people trying to ensure they eat 3 meals a day.
 * If you eat too much, replace some of your unhealthy snacks with healthier ones, such as your favorite fruit or nuts.
 * If you don't eat enough, commit to eating at least one full meal each day.

Medication
If you have medication prescribed, be it on a regular dose or taken when needed (or both), taking this promptly can make a huge difference to your health. But it can be difficult with mental health conditions, especially if the medication has side effects. The Take your meds! challenge may be helpful here.
 * If you have medication taken when needed, it helps to notice sooner rather than later that this is needed. Having a Habit for this can encourage this.
 * For regular medication, you may want to have one (or more) Dailies for this to encourage you to take medication regularly.

Again, what's important is that you make one change, and commit to doing it every day. The easiest way to do that in Habitica is to create a Daily for the change you're trying to make. Additionally, you can join The Basics guild, which is full of Habiticans helping each other struggling with the same issues and helping each other. You may also find help in the Mentally Ill guild. You may find some relatively simple challenges helpful such at the Critical Goals and Healthy Mental Habits challenge from the Black Ribbon Guild.

Mental Health Habits
Another option is to tackle your problems more directly, and try to consciously change how you think. There are many methods to do this, some of which are listed below.

Gratitude
When depressed, it's easy to think that there is nothing good about your life. To combat this, at the end of each day, list three things that you are grateful for, or three good things that happened that day. This may be difficult at first, but over time, you'll improve. Taking the time for self-reflection and gratitude can improve your outlook on life, increasing your level of self-satisfaction and lowering the affects of anxiety and depression. Witnessing someone else's gratitude, such as reading this kind of list or listening to an anecdote with a grateful message, can feel encouraging and help you think of your own lists and stories. Good Things Today is a guild dedicated to this, with a monthly Challenge and supportive environment.

Another method that can be used in Habitica to increase your gratitude is the Happy List Challenge. The challenge is simple, you just make a list of ten things that make you happy - then do at least one thing on the list every day. There should be a focus on small, achievable things, but you can include some big ones as well. To make it easier to complete at least one thing every day, see if you can make at least half of them cost little to no money. If you're having trouble thinking of a good list, you can head over to the Happy List Guild to see others' lists and receive help constructing yours.

Meditation
Meditation isn't just for Buddhists; it can help calm anyone's mind and it doesn't need to be the same for different people. There are lots of resources on meditation including the Habitica The Easiest Meditation in the World challenge. Taking the time and space to meditate can help clear your mind and become more grounded in your body, either as a regular Daily or as a Habit, it can be especially helpful if you notice warning signs of an attack of anxiety or depression. Meditation can be a form of stress management.

Living with Anxiety/Depression
This section is aimed at those who have some control, but are still greatly distressed/affected by their anxiety or depression, and would like to learn methods for better managing these.

Management methods
Here are some of the ways you can use Habitica to help manage and gain control of your conditions drawing on well-studied techniques to help manage and, in time, reduce the effects of mental health conditions. It is by no means an exhaustive list so please do add ideas that you have found useful.

Daily mental health goals
Setting daily mental heath goals can be valuable, the The BACE Method for Self-Care challenge includes four self-care dailies: looking after your Body; Achieving something (remember that these don't need to be big, sometimes having a shower is an achievement!); making social Connections with others and finding something relaxing or Enjoyable (even if you can't fully enjoy it).
 * Caring for You "One of the hardest parts of mental illness can be all the self-loathing and doubt. One way to begin combating that is to show yourself a little love. It's not about ignoring your flaws and faults, but acknowledging your humanity and being alright with it. This challenge involves no "punishments", because this is purely about taking care of yourself and maybe even doing a little pampering (though you can add your own negatives if you feel it necessary). Everything is rated as "medium" on the difficulty scale because this is often an uphill battle."
 * Critical Goals and Healthy Mental Habits: "These are a few simple (but important!) goals aimed at helping you maintain a healthier state of mind, and rewarding you for positive mental health habits. Feel free to take this challenge on as a whole, or if all of it is too much for you, you can join and quit the challenge, keep the tasks and delete the individual ones you don't want."

Changing negative thought patterns
Negative thought patterns can be overwhelming and can be hard to combat, especially when you are used to them that you don't notice them starting. Habits and challenges can be valuable tools in changing negative thought patterns. You can use habits and challenges to combat negative thought patterns in noticing them sooner (gaining early warning signs and insight into what is fuelling these thoughts), combating them and replacing with affirming thoughts.

Using habits you can control the wording how best connects for you but with challenges you have the option of peer support especially as part of a guild.

Changing negative actions
The Habit Loop can lead to negative actions becoming entrenched and repetitive and challenging to combat, however by using rewards through Habitica can help use that loop to change these habits. Not doing negative actions can be positive habit which may want to be balanced with a negative habit for when you do take that action.

There are challenges linked to combating negative actions including Self-Harm Recovery and BFRB Beating for beating Body Focused Repetitive Behaviours such as hair pulling and skin picking.

Building on the basics
As you continue to live with anxiety/depression you will need to ensure you still work on the basics of sleep, hygiene, exercise, diet, and medication.

Guilds
Trying to change the habits associated with anxiety and depression can be difficult to do on your own. Fortunately, there are multiple guilds with users dedicated supporting each others' efforts to change. In addition to the Mentally Ill and The Black Ribbon guilds mentioned earlier the Anxiety Alliance is a supportive guild for people with anxiety of whatever type talk about experiences and support each other. The Therapy Homework guild helps people with mental illness, whether or not they are currently in therapy, support each other with mental health goals. More information as well as a longer list of guilds is available at the guilds guide.

The Next Level
This section is aimed at those who have improved greatly, and have relatively consistent control over their lives.

Share your experiences and help others
Intro/Info

Guilds
As your mental health improves you may be able to support those in recovery with ideas and experiences. You may also want to join guilds which are less heavily focused on mental health such as The Chronic Illness Guild for more general support for people living with any chronic illness.

Editing this page (i.e., adding your experiences)
Intro/Info

Challenges
This area is very much a work in progress, and will likely change content and organization multiple times in the near future.

When battling mental illness, it can be hard to figure out where to begin. In fact, it is often easier to adopt and/or modify others' methods than create your own from scratch. There are many challenges created by the users of Habitica for this very purpose. Below is a selection of these challenges to get you started.

Simple Challenges

 * The Happy List Challenge: "Make a list of ten things that make you happy - then do at least one thing on the list every day. There should be a focus on small, achievable things, but you can include some big ones as well. See if you can make at least half of them cost little to no money :)"
 * The Easiest Meditation in the World: "Breathe in as much air as you can using only your nostrils, it is imperative that you keep your mouth close, and hold your breath for 4 seconds (count 1 elephant, 2 elephant, 3 elephant, 4 elephant). Then exhale all the air through your nose all while keeping your mouth close, when all the air has been pushed out of your lungs, hold your breath for 4 seconds then inhale and repeat. Do this whenever you feel stressed to calm down. Give yourself a + for every set of inhale, exhale that you do."
 * The Basics (Guild): "This is a guild with challenges for people who need to get basic tasks done. Have problems with hygiene, eating right, doing homework? Executive dysfunction, depression, lack of spoons got you down? This is the guild for you!"

Methodologies

 * The BACE Method for Self-Care "The BACE (Body, Achievement, Connect, Enjoy) Method for Self-Care is designed to help reduce vulnerability to negative thoughts and feelings. By completing at least one thing from each category every day, you become better equipped to deal with your mental illness."
 * Critical Goals and Healthy Mental Habits: "These are a few simple (but important!) goals aimed at helping you maintain a healthier state of mind, and rewarding you for positive mental health habits. Feel free to take this challenge on as a whole, or if all of it is too much for you, you can join and quit the challenge, keep the tasks and delete the individual ones you don't want."

Changing Unhealthy Habits

 * Self-Harm Recovery "Trying to stop self harming can be difficult so this is a challenge to try to help make it a bit easier."
 * BFRB Beating "This challenge aims to aid those with body focused repetitive behaviours begin to overcome their BFRB. BFRBs include trichotillomania (hair pulling) and dermatillomania (also known as compulsive skin picking), as well as excessive nail and skin biting, which can include fingers, insides of cheeks, and lip chewing. These disorders are linked to OCD and can often be very isolating and distressing."

Health

 * 3 Meals a Day "Whether you're recovering from an eating disorder, dealing with the loss of appetite from a mood disorder, or have some other mental health roadblock related to your eating habits, striving towards 3 meals a day is a great start on the road to a healthier life!"

Body Care

 * Exercise
 * Eat Healthy
 * Proper Sleep (or go to bed/wake up by X o'clock)

General Habits/Advice

 * Start with small changes/habits
 * Morning routine
 * Talk to someone close to you
 * Meditation

Ideas for more habits

 * We should include advice on how to break bad habits associated with depression and anxiety.
 * Not doing negative behaviors can be a positive habit. For example, if you have trouble with alcohol, not drinking might be a real victory, and something you can reward yourself for (instead of just punishing slip-ups).

Habitica wiki links

 * Adapting Habitica for ADHD
 * Burnout
 * Antidotes: Overcoming Obstacles
 * Sites that can help
 * Category:Methodologies