Blackouts are when everything familiar and reliable seems to disappear. You know how it goes … whatever you use to keep yourself stable suddenly seems to be gone. For me, it’s a panicky feeling that usually builds after I’ve been feeling depressed for a while.

One thing that will greatly eradicate these times, and reduce their power effectively, is to simply remember that it hasn’t always been like this. You had good moods once, remember? You had hopes for the future at one time. The world wasn’t always going to hell in a handbasket.

Help yourself remember by writing things down when you’re in a good place. When the world looks great, why does it look great? What about it makes you feel optimistic? Write things down, even if they look obvious to you when you’re in a great mood, because in the middle of a blackout they won’t be obvious and you will have forgotten them.

Simply remembering this in the middle of a blackout will do you a world of good. It helps bring unity to your life, remove some of those “schizophrenia” style mood swings. Depression can be like black clouds that block out the sunlight — just remembering that there are good things in life as well as bad helps to clear those clouds a little more quickly. Or at least it makes them a bit more patchy, which is a step towards them completely clearing. Learning to accept “patchy” instead of demanding completely clear skies is a healthy step too. I’m writing a post about optimism and pessimism that looks at this in more detail, though.

The value of blackouts

Seeing blackouts like periods that you just need to escape means that we have chunks of our life that are worth nothing. It’s like having a painting with large holes in it. But actually, we shouldn’t see life as just lurching from one good moment to the next, treating “blackouts” as unnecessary and unwanted periods. Blackouts are an important part of life. Instead of damaging the good times, they actually help build them. For those that read the Bible, Paul writes in Romans 5 that suffering produces endurance, which in turn produces character, and character produces hope. “Blackouts” are a really valuable thing, you just have to flip your attitude and how you handle them.