Should I hit bottom on purpose just to bounce back?

Points of no return are sometimes just that, points of no return.
Why risk it?

Dropping out leaves you without ammunition to rebuild yourself and the new life you get may not be what you want. I have been there and the comeback is hard and usually less than expected because you’ve got to work with whatever is available, not necessarily what you want.

A new life comes from extreme positive effort, not letting go of the one you have.

With the circumstances that you have outlined now, I would not hit bottom just to bounce back. You have made some progress so just keep plugging away at the changes that you want to make.

You outlined an impressive list of accomplishments:

1. You’re employed.
2. You’re getting regular exercise.
3. You’re happy about half the time.

Why would you want to throw all of that away?

What can you do instead?

Consider seeing a therapist to help you make the changes that you want to make to achieve your goals.

Write your goals down. Studies show that actually writing our goals down helps us achieve them a significantly greater part of the time.

Good luck. Let us know how you progress.

You are comfortably numb and you know it. You need to cut the cord and make that change you feel the need to. Big first step there if you got the guts to do it! Life is too short not to or you may look back with enormous regrets….just do it!

If you go all the way to the bottom, you might not bounce. You might end up down and out and you know it.

Over the last few days, I’ve been fighting a depression, too. It’s really hard at this time of year, when it’s so dark outside and we get such little sunshine. It’s really bad for depression. I know this, and I’ve been using some of my normal tricks to try to stay up—unhealthy ones as well as healthy ones.

My depression started situationally, and I knew it could start getting bad, but I think I have stopped it because I’ve been motivated in a number of ways. One was that I know I have no more latitude at home. If I get depressed again, it will be more than my wife can take. Another is that I made a move to try to fix the situation that started the depression. I took a risk. I didn’t wait there passively to see if it would fix itself. I realized what I wanted, and I went for it.

Even just going for it made me feel better. Getting some of what I wanted was even better.

My psychiatrist said that with depression, each time you go down, it gets worse and you stay down there longer. You know what that does.

DO NOT LET THAT HAPPEN!!!!!

It hurts. Believe me, I know. And it’s hard to imagine affecting it. But you don’t really want to die. You just want the pain to stop. Maybe you need new meds. See the shrink. But also don’t let it happen. You don’t bounce. The floor here is like one of the glue traps for mice.

“Bottom” is the lowest point you get to before you do turn your life around. If you go looking for it, then you won’t find it… there’s always a lower “bottom” than where you are at any ‘now’ in your life.

And you don’t always ‘bounce’. As @anartist aptly points out, you may not make the great comeback; you could keep on going down.

To a person who looks back on his life and reflects, “bottom” is an identifiable point in his or her life. To the person who hasn’t yet made the comeback, you don’t even know if there will be a ‘bottom’ that you’ll be able to look back on. Not everyone survives the trip down.

I feel the same way sometimes but also thinks it’s silly. What I’ve ben thinking of doing is cutting toxic connections and commitments. Things that I do because they happened to be around me. I think that given enough balls I will just have to stop associating myself with things/people that are draining my energy and ambitions. It’s a tough decision, and I hope you can figure that out for yourself.

Another vote for no—just like others have said. Who knows how much bounce you’ll get?

I think of life as a pool of water a lot of the time. Where in life, we’re treading on the surface if everything’s going accordingly. Sometimes we start to sink, and feel like we’re drowning. In life’s pool, we can hold our breaths for a very long time, but we know eventually we’re going to need some air.

—What you’re talking about is what I’d do all the time when I was in a swimming pool when I was little. If I was close enough to the bottom, and was really starting to feel the lack of oxygen, I’d push myself down just a little bit farther to reach the floor, and I’d shoot myself back up to the surface.—

I think life’s pool, though, is deceivingly deep. Just when we think we can’t go lower… we do. At least, that’s been my experience. It can get into a pretty nasty cycle: if I just go a little lower, then I’ll reach the floor and be able to push off. So we keep going down, trying to find it. We think we see it, reach it, and find out we’ve got farther down still to swim.
Meanwhile the water gets darker, darker, it gets harder to see what might be the bottom, the surface gets farther and farther away, your lungs start to scream for air more and more.

Maybe, maybe, you really are as close to the bottom as you think you are. And maybe you’d be able to get a good push off the floor to get yourself going. But since it’s darker and harder to see, personally I’m not as certain.
If I were you I’d face up toward where the surface is, and start swimming. Angle your path so that you’re going the direction you want, for sure.
It’s harder, you’re starting without any momentum, trying to go up instead of follow the (tempting) current down. I just think a definite steady rise is safer than gambling a plunge-to-pushoff.

Why would you purposely hit rock bottom? My advice for you is to try to keep your spirit high and never let yourself drop. If you put this in physical terms you wouldn’t let yourself hit the ground you would take hold of whatever you can to ensure you don’t hit the jagged rocks below.

sounds like what you have isnt that bad…maybe what you have is actually boredom. Familiarity breeds contempt and admitedly there is always the temptation to crash and burn as at least that would be exciting and you have the “challange” of trying to fix things…but the kind of excitement you might percieve in deliberate self destruction probably isnt what you will get. If you dont like where you are in life then hell yeh change it even if it means a big risk to get what you want but dont deliberatly sabotage yourself…that would just be stupid.

Call where you are right now the bottom and get busy on your journey to better things.

It doesn’t work that way.

If you really feel like moving on to the bottom from where you are, you should at least talk to someone in person before making that selection.

And you sound like you have drive, goals, and are organized because you have a job and do the exercise thing. And, it sounds like you are happy about half the time. Perhaps you just need to put yourself in a different place or just do something different, like take a class, learn the guitar, go on a blind date (if you are single), take a vacation and go somewhere warm, or something you just think you’d like to try or do.

Like @yarnlady above said, consider this is where the bottom is, then make some adjustments or changes you know that are attainable, and go from there, don’t look back or dwell on the past. The past will take care of itself. :)

This too shall pass. Patience, my firend. All things will come to you if you but persevere. : )

What’s interesting to me is how many of us use the water metaphor. I remember that when I was at my darkest, I looked up, and I couldn’t see any light at all. My first med brought me up to where I could see dim light above. The second one brought me up to around ten or fifteen feet below the surface, and the final med brought me up to where I could breathe.

It’s weird because start going down and then you bounce around a bit and you aren’t aware of the danger you are in. Then, the world changes while you were looking to the side, and you are so far down, and heading so fast, you can’t imagine it is possible to do anything except hasten the inevitable.

It’s amazing to me how many of us have contemplated or tried to commit suicide. A week or so ago, I was at that point for a few moments. Fortunately I managed to pull myself up (no bouncing), and I’ve changed some bad practices (mainly going to be earlier, but also spending more time away from fluther) and I’ve turned around.