I started making my bed every day when I was 19 years old. It became a daily practice for me at a time in my life when I was in a deep depression, and constantly felt guilty for lacking the energy to do anything. Even if I do nothing else with my day, at least I’ve accomplished one thing: I’ve made my bed. Let me explain.

Depression is complex and multi-faceted. It’s not just feeling sad – it’s these seemingly endless cycles of barely having enough energy to exist followed by feeling overwhelmed with guilt that you’ve accomplished nothing with your day. It’s feeling ashamed when everyone around you is seemingly productive, while it takes you hours to convince yourself to even get out of bed and live the day. And these cycles reinforce themselves. The less energy you have, the less you accomplish, and the guiltier you feel. The more you feel consumed by guilt, the less energy you have and the less motivation you have to do something about it.

I still remember sitting in group therapy with a room full of people struggling in ways similar to me, and being handed a piece of paper with a long list of ideas of things we could do to care for ourselves. There were over 200 items on this list: things like ‘take a walk,’ ‘talk to a loved one’, ‘brush your hair’, and ‘make your bed’. It was an exercise in something everyone in that room was very unfamiliar with – being kind to oneself – and a challenge to find one item on the list that we could do for ourselves before the next session. Even if we could not bear to exist, could we just do one thing on the list? Doing one simple task counted as an accomplishment, counted as being productive and working on ourselves.

That idea was a seed, planted in my brain, that has grown magnificently over the years. The nature of my reality as a depressive is that it can be hard for me to exist. It can take a lot of my energy just to live in this world. But if I lack the ability to do anything else with my day, I can at least make my bed. I can accomplish at least one thing and that helps me break the cycle of guilt and shame. Instead of drowning in the guilt that I’ve lost another day completely to the depression, I can say to myself “No, I did something today – I made my bed.” While that may seem small to the average person, it is so incredibly powerful to me.

To this day, I make my bed every day. And when things are difficult for me in the winter, I’ve still done at least one thing with my day. That one thing is so powerful because it is a wedge that I use to break the cycle and stop the depression spiral before it overwhelms me.