How Can I Stop Feeling DEPRESSED?

Depression can affect your life, but it doesn't have to define it. With understanding, and the right strategies, it is possible to find joy and fulfilment again.

In today's episode:

• The top 3 causes of depression
• Can being rejected make you depressed?
• What happens in the body and brain in depression
• How to pull yourself out of depression

Citations
Some ideas here were inspired by a Nicabm training on working with shame. You can buy your full training programme here.
From Gen Alpha to boomers, we asked 6 therapists what each generation is talking about in therapy

Here's another podcast for you: How do you Heal SHAME?

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Transcript

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How Can I Stop Feeling Depressed?

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 daily.

Depression is tough to find your way out of alone, but it’s also something that most of us will experience. 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! Although my podcasts are quite short, they can be densely packed with information and inspire thoughtfulness. So don’t be surprised if some of this takes a while to process!

Am I depressed or just sad?

I think of depression as something that occurs when we feel like things are not getting better over a long period. Maybe we’ve carried the same burden for a while…

What are the top 3 causes of depression?

I’m going to start here by giving you a list of some of the main things that can cause this type of depression.

1. 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.
2. Loss of control, purpose, or identity. With the economy as it’s been, I know many people must be experiencing this.
3. Having different values from the people around you.  Do you have the experience of feeling like nobody around you gets you? Perhaps you feel out of place? This might be that the other people around you are not thinking the same way as you are. This can cause you to feel isolated and lonely…
4. Loneliness or grief can cause depression.
5. Hormonal changes or physical illness.
6. Early loss or trauma can contribute to depression on an ongoing basis.
7. Trying to avoid painful emotions. This is where it’s preferable to feel depressed, to collapse, rather than feel emotional pain.

Is it normal to get depressed as you age?

We also have different things to deal with depending on our age. Social hierarchies and dynamics become important for Generation Z (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, (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,  (around 44 to 59 ), often have a lot of responsibilities. They may be at the top of their career while at the same time bringing up children, and looking after ageing 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, (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!

Can being rejected make you depressed?

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 rejection experience over and over again, the sense of shame from it might lead to depression. In this case, you might even be looking for that rejection. Anxiety of any kind can be a form of information gathering and trying to find evidence to support what you end up feeling depressed about.

Usually underneath depression is some kind of self-deprecation.

I’ve always seen depression a:

• a depression of feelings,
• a form of overwhelm,
• and not knowing how to cope with something difficult that happens on repeat.

What happens to the brain in depression?

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. Here the experience of threat tricks your mind into this collapse, this shutdown, as protection.

It’s like a feigned death! As with prey caught by a predator, feigned death might help you to escape harm.

To illustrate this, I told a story on social media. Here’s the story:

 


 A post shared by Shelley Treacher (@shelleytreacher)

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 life.

How to pull yourself out of depression

In talking about how to recover from depression., for the sake of simplicity, I’ve divided this up into three categories:

1. Understanding what’s behind the depression
2. Problem solving
3. Deeper Healing

What is the basic understanding of depression?

The first thing to acknowledge about depression is to normalise 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 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.

Break down critical thought patterns like

Nobody likes me or cares about me

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. She encourages us to tolerate it with somebody else, with a therapist, if none of your friends are appropriate to do this with.

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 recognises that being blamed for being the problem, or blaming yourself for being the problem, doesn’t help you.

What is problem-solving in mental health?

1. Linehan 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. Recognising what you wanted in that moment when you got depressed that you couldn’t have. Validating that, radically accepting that you wanted it, and then learning to be okay with not getting it.

2. 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. This can be 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, or 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 about you?

3. Kelly McGonigal, another one of the people that I just love, 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. Depression is surrendering, collapsing into the present, which is absolutely the opposite of anxiety, which is worry about the future or the past.

4. 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 the 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. 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 doing the little tasks, it definitely cheers me up and I’m always happy by the end of Tuesday and 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.

5. 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, and 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 when therapy clients come into my office who can be so depressed, so traumatised and so full of panic and yet still they’re motivated enough to come to my office. I think this is a great testament to the fact that we have resources hidden deep inside us.  They just need to be paid attention to.

6. 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, and walking, start to wake you up and get 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.

 


 A post shared by Shelley Treacher (@shelleytreacher)

7. 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.

8. 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!

9. 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.

For example, thinking 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. In my experience in my work, it’s unlikely that they’re thinking, “I really don’t like you”.

What triggers depression?

Moving on a little from understanding and problem-solving, going a little deeper,  Pat Ogden, another woman who I so admire, works with posture. The posture of depression can give you 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. This happens when you’ve unconsciously learned to trigger that particular response, when something feels threatening.

Healing is in being curious about the protective mechanism of depression, the shutdown, and the low motivation. It’s going to help you to step back and be curious about what that’s doing for you, and how.

Here the pain, the hurt and the shame can be locked up in 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  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. 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.

Final thoughts on how to beat depression

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.

Today I’ve talked about depression.

1. I described what depression is and some of the things that might trigger depression.
2. I then explained how depression works in the nervous system and the brain.
3. 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.
4. I gave you several techniques to try, from coping with disappointment,  to making small steps to shift your state.
5. Going deeper, I started to explain how you can shift the trauma response of depression in your body.

Perhaps a good question to end with 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?

Can you lead a normal life with depression?

Depression may feel like a permanent dark cloud. Some people even ask whether it’s possible to lead a normal life with depression.

But it doesn’t have to define your existence.

Life has challenges, and that’s just part of being alive. By being kind to ourselves, and taking care of ourselves, we can still find happiness and a sense of purpose even when times are tough.

I help people find their way out of depression and anxiety daily.  So if you need a bit more help get in touch with me by clicking the link today.  

Thank you for listening. This has been Shelley Treacher from the Stress and Anxiety Recovery Podcast.