Common Sense Help with Depression
Notice that the mornings when you awaken are the worst time of day. The most important indicator of a depression is that the early mornings are the worst time of the day. The day is then likely to improve, though at a lesser degree.
And why is the awakening time so exhausting and hopeless? It is because when a depressed person wakes up, she is exhausted by the amount of dreaming that she has done that night - in a vain attempt to clear her brain of the exhausting rumination and worrying of the day before. A depressed person has to dream more than she is capable of and dreaming takes a lot of energy. And so a cycle of hopelessness begins, where problems remain unresolved or get worse, where blackness and confinement expand and far too much time is spent asking unanswerable questions like – “what is wrong with me?” Often also the lack of healthy deep wave sleep creates physical problems which add to the unproductive worrying.
For a few days, resolve to take your attention away from your problems, including how bad you feel and towards small pleasures and useful activities and notice how quickly you begin to feel a little lighter inside.
Be thrilled to discover this new explanation for why you are feeling so bad. Your depression is not a mental illness but the normal response to a difficult situation which then spirals out of control.
After all, if you sprained your ankle – well yes you would perhaps need to get it X-rayed. But you would know that you were not ill. That it was not like typhoid or diabetes or leukaemia. With a sprain you have to rest, but just for a time and know that the wrong thing to do would be long distance running.
And so it is for a depression. You don’t spend time worrying even more and so find that you do even more exhausting dreaming. No! You do whatever it takes to take your mind off your problems just as with a sprain you take the weight off your feet. And because you begin to accept the idea “that there is nothing wrong with me” the pressure comes off. And you will be amazed. Within a few days, your sleep and dreaming improve and maybe the problems that triggered the depression do not seem quite so hard to sort out.
Don’t listen to what experts tell you
Low serotonin is the result, not the cause of depression. And this is why anti-depressants are rarely the complete answer. Anti-depressants treat symptoms and not underlying causes and seem to work by suppressing REM (or dream) sleep.
Neither are depression symptoms hereditary. The fact that family members may all suffer from depression is better explained by their common environment than their common genes.
Depression is not a biological disorder – there is no chemical test available or possible or yet devised that can mark a depression.
Finally there are not many different types of depression – such as Post partum, grief, teenage etc. You might as well have a special I have been jilted by my girlfriend depression.
©Copyright 2012 by Andrew Richardson, Counselling in South Woodford All Rights Reserved.