Narrowing the scope of what you need to accomplish is extremely effective. The best advice I've ever gotten for dealing with depression is to just do one thing at a time.
For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried.
If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on.
The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :)
Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.
I think this is somewhat similar to what I often do when I need to work on something and never seem to get started: Define the absolutely minimal next step very concretely.
Procrastinating on filing taxes. Next step is to log in to tax preparation app.
Procrastinating on cleaning office. Next step is to pick up a piece of paper off the desk and throw it away.
Whatever it might be, once I get to something absolutely concrete and absolutely doable... I can usually get started and make some progress.
It's much easier (for me) to procrastinate on "do your taxes" than "log in to tax prep app." Once it's that clear it's like... ok, why procrastinate on that?
This is one of the techniques I use for my depression and it does help me "deal with it".
In my case "deal with it" doesn't mean "make me not depressed": I'm still depressed but it does help me turn some some of my bad, hard-to-do-anything days into ok or even occasionally productive ones. And having something useful come out of a day I thought I would be useless is also helpful in fighting depressive thought loops about being a useless/lazy/bad person generally speaking.
Well, to start, you're literally saying "to deal with this particular symptom of depression, just don't have that symptom." That's extremely invalidating and completely denies the nature of depression as a condition. It's not something you just "get over" or "stop having." If it was that easy, a depressed person wouldn't need this advice. Getting started is very often the whole problem.
Ah, let me reframe what I'm saying. This is meant to apply to any task, including getting out of bed and going to the bathroom.
The advice is to break the goal down into the smallest possible pieces and start there. For getting out of bed, I'd probably start with rolling onto my side.
It's not a cure. It's not guaranteed to work. It's a strategy for expending as little energy as possible to get started. If you can focus on one small, actionable item, it can help reduce how overwhelming the entire task feels.
If you don't have the capacity to do something, there is no advice that will make that thing possible and no one should be expecting you to do it.
For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried.
If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on.
The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :)
Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.