Today, I'm talking about depression.
Hi, I'm Shelley Treacher from the Stress and Anxiety Recovery Podcast. I help people find their way out of depression and anxiety on a daily basis.
If you need a bit more help than this podcast can offer, get in touch with me by clicking the link today. Having said that, depression is tough to find your way out of alone, but it's also something that most of us will experience at one point or other. So today I'm going to talk about what leads to depression, what happens in the brain with depression, and how to start to find your way out of it.
If you're new to my podcast, welcome. You'll find that although my podcasts are quite short, they can be densely packed with information and they can also inspire you to be thoughtful. So don't be surprised if some of this takes a while to process.
So what is depression? I think of depression as something that occurs when we feel like things are just not getting better over a long period of time. And maybe we've carried the same burden for a while. I'm going to start by giving you a list of some of the main things that can cause this type of depression.
- Number one is burnout and stress from looking after or supporting everybody else. This might be where you feel an emotional responsibility for how everyone around you feels. Perhaps you neglect what you need and feel.
- The second is a loss of control, purpose, or identity. With the economy as it's been, I know a lot of people must be experiencing this.
- A third thing is having different values from the people around you. Do you have that experience of feeling like nobody around you really gets you? Perhaps you feel out of place. Really, this just might be that the other people around you are not thinking the same way as you. This can cause you to feel isolated and lonely, which is the fourth thing I have on this list.
- Loneliness or grief can cause depression.
- Number five, hormonal changes or physical illness.
- Number six, early loss or trauma can contribute to depression ongoing.
And then finally, a seventh cause of depression could be trying to avoid painful emotion. This is where it's preferable to feel depressed, to collapse,rather than feel emotional pain.
But we also have different things to deal with depending on our age. Social hierarchies and dynamics become important for Generation Z, that's between 18 and 26. Often they're starting to explore what's important for them, and whether they have values similar to or different from those of their family and the people around them.
Social media must be a nightmare for these people!
Similarly, millennials, that's late 20s to early 40s, start to process emotional issues with their parents and develop bonds and conflict in social relationships. Turning 30 seems to be the most terrifying prospect for most of my clients of that age. It brings so much pressure to have a successful career, to have a great relationship, to have yourself All sorted by the age of 30.
Generation X, that's around 44 to 59 years old, often have a lot of responsibilities. They may be at the pinnacle of their career while at the same time bringing up children. And looking after aging parents. I can testify that this age also brings the urgency of needing to look after your health. How are you supposed to do that while single handedly looking after everybody else?
The baby boomers, that's the 60s AND 70S are adjusting to a later stage in life, and may be afraid of losing control, identity, or direction.
Honestly, occasionally, at the Generation X stage, I sometimes look forward to that.
Although, I shall surely be in my 90s when I actually retire.
There are different ways that depression shows up. And as you can see, lots of different reasons for how it might start to set in.
If you've listened to my podcast about shame, you'll know that shame often comes when we feel we're doing or want to be doing something that might lead to rejection. If you were to feel this over and over again, this sense of shame might lead to depression.
And in this case, you might even be looking for that rejection.
Anxiety of any kind can be a form of information gathering and supporting evidence to what you might end up feeling depressed about. But usually underneath it somewhere is some kind of self deprecation.
I've always seen depression as a kind of depression of feelings, an overwhelm, and not knowing how to cope with something difficult that happens on repeat.
But depression, physiologically, is a shutdown. It's a nervous system trauma response, where there's an experience of some kind of threat, like feeling rejected, and so trauma tricks your mind into this collapse, this shutdown.
It's kind of a feigned death. As with prey caught by a predator, feigned death might just help you to escape.
To illustrate this, I told a story on social media. Here's the story.
Mary sits alone in her living room. Her heart feels heavy with grief as she mourns the loss of her beloved cat, who passed away earlier that day. Her sympathetic nervous system responds initially to the emotional distress, causing her heart rate to increase, her breathing to become shallow, and her muscles to tense up as she experiences the initial shock and the sadness.
However, as the depth of her grief sinks in, Mary's body begins to shut down in a hypo aroused collapse state. Her dorsal vagal nerve, part of the parasympathetic nervous system, becomes dominant as a protective mechanism to cope with the overwhelming emotional pain. Mary's heart rate slows and her breathing becomes shallow and irregular.
She feels a profound sense of numbness and emptiness as if a part of her had been lost along with her beloved pet. Her muscles may become limp and she may find it difficult to move or engage with her surroundings. Mary feels emotionally disconnected and withdrawn. Her body is conserving energy and withdrawing from the overwhelming stimuli.
Presented by the grief of losing her pet, Mary's body is attempting to cope with the profound emotional and psychological distress. It's the survival mechanism that allows her to temporarily dissociate from the intense feelings of grief in order to protect herself from further emotional harm.
Whilst that's one story of how depression can develop, it's important to know that it's normal for us to have ups and downs in everyday life. But when this turns into depression, It sucks, and we need to find a way to deal with it and build something new in your life.
In talking about how to recover from depression. For the sake of simplicity, I've divided this up into three categories. The first technique is understanding what's behind the depression. The second technique is problem solving, and then thirdly, what to do to go a bit deeper.
The first thing to acknowledge about depression is to normalize its existence. It's such a taboo subject in our culture. We don't talk about it, and we have a reluctance to show it and to admit it.
If you listen to my podcast on exercise, you'll know that I talked about understanding what's behind your lack of self control, or lack of motivation, by working out how you lost control. Similarly, the key to working out why you're depressed or how depression comes to you is working out how you lost control of your mood or your nervous system in the first place. We need to look at the things that perpetuate depression in order to get over it or through it. Low motivation is often the first thing affected and something to get through.
So tracing your steps back to work out when this began and what's happened since then to get you into the position you're in now. And just as with low motivation, or a lack of willpower, if you want to call it that, left unchallenged, left not understood, your brain will just default to the autopilot every single time the same trigger happens.
This is understanding that you are being triggered, that you have some kind of response to some kind of stress or emotional pain or difficulty. So just as with comfort eating or with any addiction or obsessive habit, study what you say to yourself just before you collapse on the sofa.
Study what criticisms you might have of yourself in particular.
Breaking down critical thought patterns like nobody likes me or cares about me, which are so common, Often, the words, I can't, are in there somewhere.
Marsha Linehan, someone I greatly admire, talks about depression as an avoidance of emotion, in particular, sadness. So she encourages us to tolerate it with somebody else, with a therapist, if none of your friends are appropriate to do this with, for a short while.
You can't get out of this on your own at times, so a therapist can help you to do that.
One of the things that she teaches is something called radical acceptance. She recognizes that being blamed for being the problem, or blaming yourself for being the problem, doesn't help you.
And she also thinks that listening alone, listening to understand what's going on for you is not enough. So she advocates problem solving and huge amounts of validation. Recognizing what you wanted in that moment when you got depressed that you couldn't have it. Validating that, radically accepting that you wanted it, and then learning to be okay with not getting it.
Another suggestion by Shelley Harrell is to make a list of a hundred things that are pleasant to you, or that you used to find pleasant, even if you don't find it pleasant now. She suggests thinking of any little thing, like a flower, a colour, or something that just makes you slightly happier.
Anything that reminds you that a shift can happen. Because in depression, we lose that sense of variability. We assume that it's all or nothing.
For me, I know that I get a tiny little lift. Every time I see some kind of animal, uh, somebody who's put together a really nice outfit, that makes me feel better somehow. I like watching films by Ang Lee where everything is beautifully shot, and the smell of an orange.
What is it for you?
Kelly McGonigal, another one of the people that I just love
and would love to meet one day, talks of depression as losing the ability to change your present. So, she suggests that you have to prove to yourself that you can change the present by doing one tiny little thing differently, even if you don't like it. Because depression is surrendering, collapsing into the present, which is absolutely the opposite to anxiety, which is worry about the future or the past.
Having established that it is a stress or a hypo arousal response to be depressed or to do nothing, a further step that you can take in this process of trying to get control of your impulses, is training your body to shift when you're in this state. Engaging in things external to you, are also quite important because depression pulls you inward to your negative story that you might be telling about yourself.
I want to tell you that I've been experiencing being very tired in the mornings lately. Some days, I think I'm going to be tired for the rest of the day, so I don't set myself up to do very much. But I noticed recently, That if I just start to do something, even if it's the smallest task, I end up doing loads of stuff.
I've also been going to a particular salsa class on a Tuesday night. I can tell you that every single time, I don't want to go. I'm tired. It's Tuesday evening. I've done a day's work. There's no way I want to go out and do more. I'm But I know that it cheers me up.
I know that I'm going to feel better every single time. So I paid in advance to go every week, and that forces me to go. Just like with doing the little task, it definitely cheers me up and I'm always happy by the end of Tuesday. I'm very grateful that I went.
I'm not depressed when I do this, but I think this is a good example of how doing something slightly different can change everything.
Another tactic is to look at what's meaningful to you. Start to train your brain to think of what's important to you and practice it. Write it down, remind yourself of it, to get you out of this low motivation.
There are reasons why you want to move forward, and they don't go away when you're depressed. Obviously they go away from the forefront of your mind, but they're still meaningful to you. It constantly amazes me therapy clients coming into my office can be so depressed and so traumatized and so full of panic and yet still they're motivated enough to come to my office.
I think it's a great testament to the fact that we have resources hidden deep inside us. They just need paying attention to.
I want to remind you here of the neuroscience of movement and how our brains trick us into not moving or conserving energy for survival or pleasure. I've also told you before about how different research shows that movement can have an antidepressant effect on us.
Activating the body is often what we need as the first step, because this is what's going to get you out of shutdown and collapse. Moving the body slightly, singing, exercise, yoga, walking, starts to wake you up and gets you into a caring relationship with your body.
I've shown you an exercise before, and this is on social media if you need to see it, of patting your body all over.
This is a lovely boundary exercise, but it also can wake your body up.
Just try it, just for 30 seconds, and see if you feel the difference.
Play can also bring back that seeking and curiosity that depression eliminates. As can the right social contact. I have done a podcast on social contact and how that makes us feel better, as well as the exercise podcast. These are going to tell you more about why these two things are important to beat your depression.
Another technique you can try is calling up an imagined support system. This could be people you know already, or it could be people from your past.
It could be celebrities, or it could even be lost relatives. I often imagine my ancestors cheering me on, this gives me great comfort
but another way of problem solving this depression is to learn to tolerate ambiguity. We make a lot of assumptions in life. Tolerating ambiguity is not jumping to a conclusion that something means the most negative thing.
Like, someone doesn't like you if they ignore you for a while. Here's another little example from my life recently. Three weekends ago, I had three great dates planned with friends. All three of them cancelled one by one on me. After the first one, I was just slightly disappointed, but decided to do something different.
After the second one, I was really quite disappointed. After the third one, I started wondering whether I was cancellable. So in tolerating ambiguity here, my job was to remain impartial about the reasons. The lesson here is that you just don't know what other people are thinking. And in my experience in my work, it's unlikely that they're thinking, I really don't like you.
Moving on a little from understanding and problem solving, in going a little deeper, Pat Ogden, another woman who I so admire, works with posture.
The posture of depression can be such valuable information.
Here you're working on the trauma triggered parts of you that invoke that shutdown response. This shows up in your body, and this happens when you've learned to trigger that particular response, when something feels threatening. It's being curious about the protective mechanism of depression, the shutdown, the low motivation, where you can step back and be curious about what that's doing for you, and how.
Here the pain and the hurt and the shame can be locked up into your body. Following Pat Ogden's work, the idea is to try and have a different response, a feeling of safety in your body. Your body is capable of all the responses, but it's just got locked into one particular one.
In therapy, we slow the memory story down to allow these other responses, catching the moment when that response occurs. Was available, as Pat Ogden says, the point is that she can fully experience a capacity to push away, fight back, or get away. It will start to shift those default patterns, those mechanisms in her body.
It's not helpful to be told what you should do. You have to find what works for you. So these are just suggestions.
Being able to talk about it to someone who won't tell you to just get over it is essential. It's real.
Today I've talked about depression. I described what depression is and some of the things that might trigger depression. I then explained how depression works in the nervous system and the brain.
Then I gave you some techniques to find your way through depression. I started with understanding what depression is for you. and how it occurs in your body. I gave you several techniques to try from coping with disappointment, to making small steps to shift your state.
Going deeper, I started to explain how you can shift the trauma response of depression in your body. Perhaps a good question to end on is a question by Marsha Linehan.
She encourages you to ask yourself, Can I change this in some way? Is there a way for me to change my response to what's happening to me? Can I develop other skills? Can I develop other things that would bring down the depression?
may cast its shadow and may feel like it's going to last forever, some people even ask whether it's possible to lead a normal life with depression, It doesn't have to define your existence.
Life is touched by adversity, so this is normal life, With compassion and understanding, and a commitment to self care, it is possible to find joy, meaning, and fulfillment amidst this darkness.
I help people find their way out of depression and anxiety on a daily basis. So if you need a bit more help get in touch with me by clicking the link today.
Next month in June, I'll be back to talk about self harm. Thank you for listening. This has been Shelley Treacher from the Stress and Anxiety Recovery Podcast.
