What to Do If You Are Depressed: Be Aware of the Paradoxes

Welcome to Part Three of “What to Do If You Are Depressed” blog series. The “take-home” message of Part Two involved acceptance. We invited you to stop playing tug of war with the beast of depression. Instead, we asked that you “drop the rope” and look it over with the theme being one of acceptance rather than conflict and resistance. Today’s theme is more about awareness, through understanding the “nature of the beast” that is depression, which was introduced in Part One.

Step 3: Recognize that Depression Is a State of Behavioral Shutdown

Although depression is a common health condition, there is much confusion about what the term means. The goal today is to help you become clearer about what depression is. First, depression is different from “normal” grief or sadness. As this blog notes, when my dog died I was sad, but I was not depressed. Many people who are depressed don’t feel sad but may feel numb or angry or anxious and agitated.

Another area of confusion that people often get hung up on is whether depression:

• Is a normal reaction to difficulty and loss
• Arises because someone is being weak or having other limitations of “character”
• Is a disease of the brain (i.e., a “chemical imbalance”) that has little or nothing to do with psychology.

Although these issues are important (and we address them in various ways in this series), they are not the best place to start when trying to understand what depression is.

Rather we need to start with a description of its most basic features. Descriptively, depression is a state of behavioral shutdown. Put in a common language, it means you feel like sh*t and don’t feel like doing sh*t. Why is this the case?

When someone is in a depressed state, there is a significant shift in the flow of mental energy away from the “positive emotional investment system” and into the “negative emotional investment system.” The positive emotional system is about being energized and open to new experiences, having a lot of curiosity and desires, and seeking and approaching “the good” (e.g., things that are emotionally nourishing like high-quality relationships, exploring interesting topics, and engaging in rewarding activities).

In contrast, the negative emotion system is about signaling danger and loss and avoiding and withdrawing into a defensive posture. Depression is a shift that pulls the positive emotion system down and jacks the negative emotion system up. That is people who are depressed experience increases in negative feelings like sadness, discouragement, despair, anxiety, irritability, anger, shame, and guilt. In addition, they experience less energy for engagement, exploration, pleasure, happiness, and interest. Technically, this is called “anhedonia.”

Depressed individuals also often experience fatigue, a focus on past losses, a discounting of future gains, difficulty concentrating, difficulty starting new activities, and problems with sleeping and eating. The pain is sometimes so great and the feeling of being trapped too intense that the person comes to believe that the only solution for escape is suicide. (See here for a blog on why people consider or attempt suicide. And, for a more detailed description of depression as a state of behavioral shutdown, see here. For a video description, see here.)

Step 3a: Be Aware of the Two “Paradoxes” of Depression

How might this understanding help you? First, it helps you label what is going on. For purposes of awareness, we want you to be able to make meaning out of your feelings and drives (or lack thereof). With the behavioral shutdown model, you can interpret your state of mind as a shift in your drive and psychic energy from the positive to the negative emotion system.

Second, it can help you become aware of what I call the “twin paradoxes” of depressive conditions. The first is the paradox of shutdown. This paradox refers to the fact that when you are depressed, your emotional instincts are telling you to withdraw, avoid, and retreat into a cave. But if you retreat into the cave, where does that leave you? It leaves you alone, feeling like crap, with no place to go.

Depression Essential Reads

When the Brain Has Difficulty Listening to the Heart

Understanding Depression and Managing It Effectively

This means something very important: Your instincts to escape and withdraw “paradoxically” feed the beast that is depression. This idea is key to this series. It is also key to understanding the neighborhood of depression and how you have found yourself in it and how you might learn how to move out of it.

Third, this cycle of shutdown highlights that folks need to act and react differently than their depressive instincts tell them to act and react. But, unfortunately, as we consider this fact, we encounter another paradox of depression. As you likely know, depressive moods suck available energy from you. The last thing a depressed person has is energy to invest in some long, drawn-out process. We can label this the paradox of effort. To turn the cycles around, you need energy and work effort—but depressive shutdowns suck all the energy out of you. Thus, it is very hard to do what is needed.

Let me summarize this entry as follows:

Depression is, first and foremost, a state of behavioral shutdown. This means that your energy shifts from the positive to the negative, and makes you feel like doing nothing. This results in two painful paradoxes of depression. The first is the paradox of shutdown. Your depressive instincts tell you to avoid and withdraw, but that only drives you into a cave, feeding the beast more and more.

The second is the paradox of effort, that significant effort and energy is required to not be driven into a cave, but depression saps all your energy from you. These two paradoxes help explain why so many people fall into depressive caves. The solution to these paradoxes involves working to develop the right mindset, which in part involves pacing one’s self and being patient and focusing on moving ahead slowly and purposefully toward more valued states of being.

To help with this movement, I would like to introduce a new “attitude”. In Part I, we introduced the attitude of loving compassion for self and others. The attitude I would like to introduce here is the attitude of curiosity. Curiosity is an attitude of wonder, of learning, and of openness to ideas and to feelings. A curious person tries to explore. She asks questions about what, why, how. Today’s entry was about answering some basic questions about what depression is, and how to understand some of its key “paradoxes”.

Thus, we can think of your willingness to read and understand this post to be in part driven by some inner curiosity. Although I know it is difficult when you are depressed, perhaps you can open yourself up to being a bit more curious about yourself, your depression, and related feelings, to others and what they are feeling, and your world across time (the past, present, and future).

We end today with a quote on the concept of curiosity from Albert Einstein:

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

In the next installment, we turn our attention to things that drive folks into shutdown mode. For Part IV, see here.