Editor's Notes

1. Let me start with a few words about the content in this talk
2. There’s something nice about depression, though. Technically, depression is an important mechanism in the human consciousness - it’s the signal for us to change something around us or about us.The pill.
3. There’s something nice about depression, though. Technically, depression is an important mechanism in the human consciousness - it’s the signal for us to change something around us or about us.The pill.
4. There’s something nice about depression, though. Technically, depression is an important mechanism in the human consciousness - it’s the signal for us to change something around us or about us.The pill.
5. How many of you have ever practiced breathing exercises? Great! I won’t talk about how to use breathing exercises to relax, even though you should make some research on that.   “The Graveyards Are Full of Indispensable Men”. Maybe you’ve heard that before. We all like the idea of being important, of being irreplaceable. And we’re, to a certain point. But we often tend to forget that we have limits set by our bodies. We are fragile. And nobody can or should be responsible for every single thing on the planet. Slowing down is a must. My recipe for this is to start your very own rituals and put a special meaning in them. The long morning coffee, the Saturday lunch with a friends, the Sunday wine tasting, the visits to the gym. Never sacrifice those rituals. Call them your daily dose of happiness. Try to find more of them.
6. Make lists (and think of them as emergency plans) When the grey veil of depression comes, your rituals and habits may not be enough to restore the colors of life. They might lose their special meaning, so here’s a second recipe. Make lists of things that make you happy or excite you. Include all the movies never have the time to watch, all that places you wanted to visit, the foods you wanted to try. It might on paper or it might be a secret online list somewhere. Just start it today and update it occasionally. Refer to that list whenever you’re sad or hopeless. Pick a random thing and just do it. It will certainly require some effort at the beginning, but believe me, it will help at some point. I’ve been having a such a list for a long time now. There’s a trip to a distant Canadian island in it, together with eating more avocados, preparing and drinking Chai Latte and a famous Bulgarian dish - the tripe soup you maybe heard of already. 
7. Or - find distributed sources of happiness. Have you read the article called “Love is not enough” that became kind of viral recently? It’s about love, happiness and choices. We all love the idea that there’s a supreme power to suddenly make our lives perfect - being it love, that great job over there, having children. Sadly, no salvation comes like this. It’s easier if you divide things into smaller parts, just like unit testing. The feedback loop is smaller and usually we need to see the very results of things in order to be happy.
8. All those small hacks from the previous recipes look pretty easy to follow, right? Just imagine how empowering it might be for yourself to discover even more of them. This requires patience and dedication. It takes time spent in reading, sometimes time spent in writing. It takes time for debugging your mind. It takes time for refactoring our brain. And none of the above is a single action. You should do this continuously. For some years now I’ve been having that idea that people should come in our lives with user manuals they made themselves. During the years we all gathered some data on how we’re reacting to different situations, how our bodies react. Start writing your user manual today!
9. Listening to people can sometimes save them but it is mostly empowering. And listening is not easy. Start practising, you’ll learn a lot during the process of learning.
10. Finding ourselves and repairing our damaged mechanisms is a long journey