Depression is a very misunderstood experience. From the outside it is often perceived as laziness, which can be a catastrophic assumption. Doctors take it more seriously but have traditionally treated it as a “chemical imbalance” – an idea now widely challenged by modern research. Depression is a real, physiological experience, often severely debilitating, and often requires far more than just platitudes and positive thinking. Depression is serious, and requires a thoughtful approach that treats you as a unique individual with unique experiences. Pills are not always enough. So what would that look like?
What does depression actually feel like?
The characteristic feeling of depression is “No“. It’s your nervous system flooding you with deactivating energy, trying to keep you still, quiet, or hidden. It can be persistent sadness, extreme fatigue, limbs that feel heavy and full of lead, brain fog, no sense of joy or hope or excitement. It isn’t just navigating difficult terrain in life, it’s more like having driven into a swamp. Every step forward takes huge effort that leaves you exhausted and often doesn’t seem worth the effort, or not possible at all.
It can be a feeling of flatness – that life is just one grey day after another, with no feeling either positive or negative at all. No motivation to do anything, to engage in the world, nothing worth fighting for and no energy for the fight anyway. As if all emotional vibrancy has been switched off, nothing matters, if there’s any emotion at all it’s something like despair.
Sometimes depression coexists with anxiety – one pushing you to act, the other pushing you to stay still. This can feel exhausting, like pushing the accelerator and the brake pedal at the same time – there’s no movement possible, and the engine is burning out.
Depression can be a very tough hole to climb out of.
Why do I feel like this?
There are conflicting opinions on why someone might experience depression. The idea that there is something wrong with your brain chemicals is an attractive answer, as it points to an easy fix with medication, but there’s very little evidence that this is the case, and despite the prevalence of antidepressants (around one in seven UK adults are now prescribed them, a rate that has doubled in the last decade) few people would agree that mental health in the general population is improving. Things seem to be getting worse, and antidepressants have not proved to be the magic bullet they promised to be.
So if not a chemical imbalance, then what? Research increasingly points to three main culprits – trauma, lifestyle, and lack of meaning or direction. Depression is often a complex mix of these three contributing factors.
Trauma
Trauma used to be understood as a single incident that involved threat to life or physical integrity. It was a label applied only to people who had experienced extreme levels of threat, injury, fear, or violation. Depression can certainly be a response to these types of experience – one of the ways our nervous system tries to keep us safe in a dangerous world, but it can also apply to a pattern of less obvious incidents, experienced over time, that add up to the same conclusion – that being seen is dangerous. Often this means childhood needs that went unmet – love, safety, attention, respect – but it can be any chronic situation such as an abusive relationship, workplace stress, or social isolation. Depression can be seen as the ‘play dead’ response often seen in animals – when a threat is too overwhelming, when anxiety ‘fight or flight’ energy will not help, the body goes into shutdown, hoping that the threat will ignore us, and pass on by. In this sense, it can be seen as having a biological origin.
Lifestyle
There’s good news and bad news here – Sleep, Diet, Exercise (the Three Pillars of wellbeing) are major contributing factors to depression. The good news is this means you can do something to help yourself feel better right now. Eat clean, exercise vigorously, get quality rest – research shows these are at least as effective as antidepressant medications, and have a ton of beneficial side effects (unlike the very unwelcome side effects that antidepressants can bring).
The bad news is that sleeping well, eating well, and exercising at all are some of the hardest things to do when you’re depressed. If depression is your nervous system flooding your body with deactivating energy, the very last thing you’ll feel able to do is lift weights or go for a run. In therapy however, we understand that transformation is built on tiny changes. Each single shuffle forward makes the next step more likely to happen, and 1% changes stack on top of each other. It’s a cliché, but oceans truly are made of rain drops, and in a years time you truly will be grateful that you started today.
Loss of Meaning and Purpose
In the last few decades, the world has changed more drastically than perhaps at any time in our history. The Digital Age has transformed us from beings that had to go out into the world and meet it there, into beings that can stay home and get it delivered to us next day. The structures that used to unite us and give us a sense of community are all in decline, quickly being replaced with online communities of people we will never meet. We’ve never been richer, but for many people the foundational life-goals of buying a home, having a meaningful career, raising a family, have never seemed further out of reach.
Humans need a quest, a Holy Grail to seek, a dragon to slay or an adventure to have. We have to feel that our lives are aimed at something bigger than ourselves, that there is meaning to life, and instead we have Instagram.
If any of this feels familiar – the flatness, the swamp, the loss of passion and meaning – then therapy might be worth exploring.
How can therapy help?
Therapy has come a long way recently. It’s not just talking about feelings any more. A modern approach to depression therapy understands that it is likely a threat response, and so requires more active interventions – what is the threat? Is it real or imagined? Is it in the present, the future, or the past? Can it be resolved? If so, what steps must we take? If not, how do we acknowledge, accept, and prepare for that? This may involve getting the body moving, or it may involve getting the body resting! It may involve exploring childhood experiences and understanding what strategies for safety your nervous system learned then, and reassuring it that now you’re an adult you have more power, more resources, more options, and the shutdown is not keeping you safe anymore.
My approach to depression therapy
I work face to face with clients in Bournemouth, and online across the UK. I draw heavily on modern methods such as Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), Polyvagal theory, as well as more established ideas such as Jungian therapy that deals with unconscious processes and how they can interfere with conscious living. Together, these help me offer a comprehensive approach that explores what happened to you in the past, what’s happening right now, and what practical steps you can take to reassure and reset your nervous system so it takes the brake off and allows you to live with meaning and passion once again.
Ready to take the first step?
If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. I offer a free 30-minute consultation — no obligation to continue, just a chance to talk about what’s going on, ask me any questions you have, and see if working together might help.