Fed-Up of Being Fed-Up? Making Sense of Depression

Are you concerned you might be experiencing depression? Here I outline common signs, explore emotional roots, and suggest ways forward. A persistent sense of dejection and despondency is not meaningless. When we listen to it, along with other emotions we experience, it can guide us toward change, connection, and renewed vitality.

Quick Read Summary
Depression affects both body and mind, showing up as low energy, appetite and sleep changes, self-criticism, and loss of meaning. It can stem from unmet needs, anger turned inward, difficult life circumstances, or even existential challenges.
Ways forward include listening to feelings of dejection and despondency with curiosity, noticing the inner critic, and taking small, practical actions like connecting socially, and caring for your body. Depression is painful, but not meaningless - it can point us toward change, connection, and renewed vitality.

 

Characteristics of Depression

Depression can be described as persistent dejection and despondency. It can affect body and mind.

Physical symptoms may include low energy and fatigue, appetite changes (eating too much or too little), sleep problems (oversleeping or insomnia), reduced sexual desire, and weakened immune system

Emotional symptoms may include lack of motivation, loss of meaning, and a pervasive sense of stuckness. Depression is not the opposite of happiness, but rather a deadening or numbing of experience. There may be a tendency to persistently not feel present, and to be not in the driving seat of your life:

I can’t stand to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises) .

Depression can also evoke self-blame, guilt, hopelessness, and helplessness:

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth (Margret Atwood, Cat’s Eye).

At its most painful, depression can bring thoughts of not wanting to live - from wishing to go to sleep and never wake up, to more explicit suicidal feelings.

Possible Emotional Roots of Depression

Depression is rarely caused by one thing. It often arises from a combination of personal, relational, and cultural influences. It can be useful to see depression as a ‘creative adjustment’. This refers to a way of adapting to our surroundings in order to survive and better prosper within it. It may be something in the way we experience our current surroundings – whether that be our relationships or work – that makes dampening our energy seem wise. It may be something in our past environment, and our response has become fixed.

Four Things that May Be at the Root of Depression

1. Cut off from own needs and wishes: When we suppress or neglect our own needs, a gap opens between who we are and who we want to be. Living predominantly according to “shoulds” and “oughts” instead of authentic wishes can generate sadness and feelings of emptiness. We may do this in order to avoid an anticipated or perceived dispproval of others.

2. Anger turned inward: Sometimes anger toward others is redirected against ourselves. This can happen in grief, after the loss of a loved one through death, the loss of a relationship through chosen separation, or the loss of a job: any loss that may lead to a loss of a particular vision of the future. Anger towards the outside world may be turned inwards in the form of self-blame, feelings of worthlessness and self-criticism. This will be particularly so if it feels too risky to express it to the person you’re really angry with. See also my post on working with your anger.

3. Difficult circumstances: Relationship breakdown, bereavement, financial stress, job loss, caring responsibilities, or social isolation can all trigger depression. It is not just inside the individual. It may reflect family patterns, cultural pressures, inequality, or lack of community and social connection.

4. Existential limitations: Even when life is going well, we still face limits: time is short, every path chosen means letting go of another path, and loss is unavoidable. Existential philosophers suggest that humans suffer from a “fundamental lack” - we can never be completely fulfilled. This lack fuels desire, and creative striving to fill the lack, but can also feel overwhelming. Depression may sometimes be a collapse of desire in the face of these truths.

Do you have a tendency to measure yourself against the possible, or against the impossible? Recognising the difference can ease self-blame.

Ways to Help

The ideas below are drawn from approaches I often use in therapy. You may find one or two resonate for self-reflection. You don’t need to do all of them. Even a small shift in perspective or action can make a difference.

Insight-led approaches

Emotions don’t always behave as we’d like. Try listening to your dejection and despondency, or any other emotions around your depression:

• What is my depression trying to tell me?
• What about my life would I like to change?
• When did my depression begin? What was happening then?
• What beliefs about myself do these emotions go hand in hand with?

Notice if you have what therapists sometimes refer to as an inner critic or critical voice. What kind of things do you say to yourself when things go wrong? What sort of tone does this inner critic have? Rather than going along with it entirely, or completely ignoring it, be curious about it: is it worried about you in some way? Does it sound like anyone you know?

Other practices include:

• Challenging distortions: reality-testing your assumptions, such as recognising achievements as well as shortcomings. Be attentive to any differences in the rules you apply to yourself and those of others. Do you give yourself harder time than you do other people?
• Checking expectations: are your standards impossibly high?

Action and Experiment-led approaches

Practical steps can help shift both body and mind:

• Try adjusting your posture as if you feel how you would like to feel. This might mean putting your shoulders back, or standing up more straight. What does the shift in your posture feel like?
• Use gentle self-affirmations.
• Try “social prescriptions”: meet friends, join a social group, take up a new hobby.
• Take care of yourself physically: adopt a routine that supports good sleep, eat a balanced diet, and take regular exercise.

See also my post on techniques to tackle the problem of procrastination.

These things are often easier said than done. And I know from my own past experience that it can be infuriating and disheartening when depressed to hear others imply that resolving depression is as easy as all that! But action and experiment-led approaches can at times evoke movement in feelings, which can then be available for reflection and possible new insights. They can also evoke physiological changes in the body that may support the easing of depression and provide ground upon which to build a recovery.

Acknowledging existential limitations

We are always unfinished, always in process. Depression can sometimes reflect resistance to life’s givens: imperfection, finitude, loss. Facing these limits honestly can open space for growth We can't become complete or find a place beyond all struggle. But we can, as the playwright Beckett put it: Fail, fail again, fail better. And it's possible to enjoy and find much fulfillment in that process. 

Cultural perspectives

In highly individualist environments, depression can reflect isolation and pressure to achieve. Perhaps ask yourself:

• How connected am I to something larger than myself?
• Where can I find solidarity and community?

Connection can be one of the most powerful antidotes to despair.

Conversely, in highly collectivist environments, depression can be rooted in excess conformity to group norms and the neglect of individual needs and wishes. It may be helpful to ask yourself:

• How can I establish or assert personal boundaries to better meet my own needs?

I believe there is an ineradicable tension between our need for a sense of group belonging, and our need for free individual expression. Any period of depression we experience may relate to the way we negotiate this tension. As may our recovery. 

Final Thoughts

Depression is painful, but it is not meaningless. Sometimes it is a call to reflect on our assumptions, values, and priorities. By listening to its message(s), while also taking small, practical steps, we can begin to reconnect with needs, face life’s limitations with openness, and potentially move towards strengthening our vitality.  

If aspects of this blog resonate with you, and you would like help to explore your experience of depression further within therapy, please feel free to contact me. I offer a free 20 minute video consultation.

Please note that I do not offer emergency support. If you need an immediate mental health response please contact a crisis support service: Mental health helplines