Turn Depression Around in Five Steps

It was 5:41 a.m. when the alarm went off, and before my feet hit the floor, the noise had already started.

The business isn’t moving fast enough. You haven’t done that thing for the kids yet. You’re failing them. You’re failing at this. You’re not getting it done. You need to fix this. You’re not enough.

One thought stacked on the next, faster than I could field them, until the weight of them sat on my chest like something physical. It was heavy. It was loud. And it was the kind of heavy that, a few years ago, would have kept me in bed.

But I have grown. So I got up. I prayed. I did what the morning required of me. And in the middle of it all, I cried out to God:

“Lord, I cannot live like this. I cannot live with this much noise in my head.”

If you read my life on paper, it reads like a masterpiece. A husband who loves me. Four amazing children. Multiple businesses. A ministry that is touching lives every single day. From the outside, everything is working. But every so often, I would have a morning like this one — a morning where the inside of my mind did not match the outside of my life.

That morning, I asked God for help. And later that same day, He gave me a process that has changed my life forever.

I want to give it to you today.

What You Focus On Determines the Direction of Your Life

Before I walk you through the steps, you have to understand why this matters. Because if you don’t understand the why, you’ll do the how once and never come back to it.

Proverbs 4:23 (NLT) says it like this:

“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.”

Read that again. It determines the course of your life.

Not your circumstances. Not your bank account. Not the people around you. Your heart — what you let in, what you focus on, what you allow to sit and take up residence — that is what determines where your life goes.

So if you’re sitting in stress, anxiety, frustration, depression, despair — whatever flavor it shows up in for you — the first thing to do is not to panic. The first thing to do is to look at what your mind has been focused on. Because I can tell you with almost 100% certainty: it is not the will of God.

The strategy of God for your peace is for your mind to be fixed on Him. Isaiah 26:3 says, “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are stayed on You.”

Stayed. Fixed. Anchored. Not wandering, not drifting, not entertaining every thought that knocks on the door.

So the question becomes practical: how do you take a wandering mind that is entertaining all kinds of crazy thoughts and bring it back to where it is anchored on Him? How do you move from anxiety to peace, from despair to hope, from depression to joy — in real time, on the actual morning when you need it?

That’s what God showed me. He gave me five things to ponder on. And when I finished writing them, I was a different person walking into the rest of that day.

Here they are.