When you come down with the flu, chances are you respond to the illness with a series of behaviors designed to get you well again. You most likely spend much more time in bed; you get plenty of rest; you may have your cocktail of vitamins and over-the-counter medications that help you get your health back. You push against the flu and eventually, you knock it out of your system.
Oddly enough, depression typically evokes the opposite response. There are a handful of things we can always do to improve our mood. It is now common knowledge that exercise, particularly cardio, makes us feel better. Spending time around other people also helps. In addition, staying away from mind-altering substances such as alcohol and marijuana spares us the depressive effect those substances tend to have in the long run.
For some reason – perhaps the presence of an antagonistic attitude toward the self – we tend to go in the other direction when we are depressed. Being with friends may be the best thing to reduce the dark feelings and thoughts that are holding you down, but when you’re feeling negatively about yourself and you’re short on optimism and hope, you’re just not in the mood to go out and put your social mask on. You’d rather binge watch on Netflix.
Even though getting your body moving can stimulate the release of endorphins, which improve mood naturally, when you are depressed, the likelihood of pursuing a workout – putting on your Nikes and going for a run, or perhaps paying a visit to your gym – significantly decreases. You may even realize that you would feel better after a workout but you have neither the energy nor the motivation to make it happen.
Moreover, a large number of us are more interested in the immediate escape that a few drinks, a pain pill or a joint may provide than in avoiding the longer-term reinforcement of the depressed symptoms that will come later, in the wake of a mind-altering escape. When you are not feeling strong, it’s very difficult to do things for tomorrow that require more of you tonight.
Sometimes antidepressant medication can be helpful. The more the depression seems to be coming from your brain chemistry, as opposed to real, depressing things that may be happening in your life, the more appropriate antidepressants may be for you. Unfortunately, counter to what you may think, when those drugs work, it usually feels more like the negativity gets reduced in volume and becomes more possible to move around, bringing your life back to doable again. Antidepressants are not happy pills, as any competent psychiatrist will tell you. Finally, research indicates that in cases of endogenous depressions (those caused by biochemical imbalances) a combination of medication and talk therapy leads to the most consistently positive outcome.
What the whole process of climbing out of a depression requires is a reaffirmation of your commitment to yourself, a return to self-respect and self-regard. Because you’re depressed, one of the more influential thoughts running around your brain is that you deserve this! There is a powerfully toxic connection between feeling unworthy and lacking the motivation to do helpful things to push against the unworthiness. Taken to its terrible extreme, suicidal ideation usually comes with the conviction that “The world will be better off without me anyway.”
Here’s the thing: Those negative thoughts are as inaccurate as they are painful. But if you want to fight against a depression, it is necessary to find a way of short-circuiting the depressive fallacies that are holding you down. It hinges on your ability to find a part of your mind that recognizes the dysfunctional nature of your thinking and your situation and stands willing to do things to affect change. This may seem a bit vague, but psychotherapy can be quite helpful in this process.
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