Have you been depressed? I can tell from experience that a depressed mind is quite active. In a bad way - constantly hurting itself with dark thoughts and hence reinforcing the bad stuff constantly.
You can't exercise depression away. At least for those situations I am familiar with.
Been suffering with depression for most of my life. Exercise does help (for me, it's walking or hiking). I took medication for a year and I hated it. I meditate a lot (I'm a Christian) and I spend a lot of time introspecting my issues. Much of my depression comes from having a crappy childhood so I often have to address them in creative ways.
There have been times work has made me depressed so I take some time off. I also have done a good job of not associating things with my identity, so work is work and if I lose my job, then it's my job I lost. I tend to segment things in my mind so that when I underperform at work, I feel bad but not to the point that I want to kill myself over it. Learning to value yourself can be difficult but it's not impossible.
It's impossible to "think yourself" out of depression or "do something good" out of depression, unless it's just a temporary down mood.
The way I beat depression is by doing pure mental exercises on focusing on the actual physical areas of the body where depression is felt, without trying to change/fight/eliminate the feeling itself.
I came up with this technique during lowest point of my life and was almost shocked how fast I moved from suicidal to almost fully content state.
This proved to be very powerful technique as it dissolved pain at it's roots. The speed of that approach for me was like taking antibiotics compare to taking vitamins.
I can also second advice on exercise and better eating habits.
Severe depression leads to isolating behaviors. If you're not so depressed that you are able to leave the house and go somewhere, you're ahead of the game and excercise is just icing on the cake.
When I was less wise, I remember suggesting exercise to someone suffering from depression.
Didn't go so well.
You reach an unfortunate point when depressed that makes it difficult to listen to actually useful advice. It's an unfortunate state of mind to say the least.
I've been writing an article in the past few days that explain why movement is so critical to fighting depression.
Still, this author's experience resonates with me in the sense that I get that taking drugs is a way to fix the depression problem.
When depression is that crippling and intense, it just doesn't seem like any one thing can help. Like you said, it's baby steps, and if drugs and therapy are on the menu along with exercise and nutrition, then all the better.
At some point, I'll be exploring the really hard causes of depression, those that come from society's own anguish.
In any case, being personally fit will add immeasurably to your mental fortitude, and events that would otherwise bowl you over won't.
Some advice here, such as exercising is good for the overall health of a human being, but depression isn't simple as this. Other advice is quite sad, such as "I eat a good stake" to avoid having a "dark mood". Depression is a serious mental issue that needs proper treatment, it isn't a joke.
A professional will be able to give you better guidance about this, with therapy and medicine.
Quite. The whole thing with (bad) depression is that it makes you unable to get up and do the very things that help fight it: exercise, create, see friends.
Not everyone's depression is the same. For some people depression is episodic and goes away. For others, a great many others, severe depression is a constant companion. Every minute of every day of every year of your life, and it's the episodes of not being depressed which are temporary and go away.
That said, exercise has been shown to be helpful for depression of every sort (generally at least as effective as drugs, on average).
I don't want to preach and I don't know your situation but I offer my perspective regardless. I may be talking completely past you because I'm not familiar with the term organic depression, and that's ok, maybe someone else will find this helpful.
I grant there may be some mechanism that can be fixed alleviated by chemicals acting on the body but everything is connected, body-mind-soul. As far as I can tell, depression is in essence a negative feedback loop of bad thoughts that flood your brain and body incessantly creating negativity and sluggishness that further shape your thoughts and behaviour.
A depressed person may not even realize their mind may be constantly telling them they suck or they're not worthy or whatever, but that is, as all thoughts and emotions are, illusionary in the sense that you don't have to take that as your own. You don't have to associate your being or identify as that chatter or the phenomenon passing through that body. You're purer and more beautiful and more deserving of love than that.
Thoughts can have tremendous energy especially if you get provoked by or stuck to them. What prolonged persistent meditation practice (say at least 2x30 min per day) may help one achieve is a sort of mental clarity or non separateness from/non attachment to thoughts, seeing how the mind really works.
I've been considering this. In the past I've been on the side of figuring if you can control your mind then you can control your predicament. But I'm now at a point where I'm not having such fine control over my mood. So instead I need to force myself to behave in ways which may improve my environment, which will improve my mood, which will reinforce the behavior
Of course the truth of depression is that it never goes away. But this is something to try to get through a few months
Exercise is excellent for staving off depression. One indicator that you may be depressed is you no longer have any motivation to do things like exercise. So while one can suggest it as a treatment, not many legit depressives are actually going to follow through.
1. regular exercise (find something you enjoy): it's almost impossible, biologically speaking, to feel depressed if you're active.
2. meditation (if non-religious) or prayer (if religious): to steady and tame your brain.
3. Do some research about mood enhancing diets. Many pop foods can cause mild depression in the long run.
4. Therapist and/or friend to bounce your ideas off of. You need someone to tell you that reality is not as bad a you think it is. It seems silly but it makes a tremendous difference.
Sunlight and exercise definitely help when I get the "blahs" (what I call the week-long negatively introspective period you describe). That feeling that depression is beautiful or somehow correct is very dangerous, however.
During my senior year of high school and the first two years of college I was definitely suffering from the gray/black depression mentioned above. Life was feeling pretty meaningless, and I was in a constant state of demotivation. Anything which registered positively on the emotional scale was severely blunted.
If nothing matters, does anything even exist? I'd often just sit around and wonder about if I was real, if the space between my fingers was real, or if the person sitting next to me was real. Somehow the lucidity of that thought process was exhilarating but paradoxically it also served to deepen my depression. Now when I meet people who seem preoccupied with existential thoughts I wonder how depressed they are.
During this time I was in the best shape of my life, and I frequented the beach so I got plenty of sunlight. I wouldn't describe myself as having been suicidal, but I didn't see much point to living either. That is, I had no desire to cease living, and if faced with the choice I would have definitely chosen life over not life, but I often thought deeply about what the point of living really was.
I lost close to three years to this. It's a permanent scar in the form of my undergrad GPA. I understand the feelings very, very well. However the one thing I don't understand is what brought me out of it. I didn't have anything like the experience Allie (author of the OP) had with the weird giggling fit. I just slowly became distracted from anhedonism by the meaning that life gradually seemed to have.
Around that time I sought treatment for ADHD, as I was flunking out of school. Maybe treating my ADHD caused me to find meaning in my newfound ability to direct all of my intellect toward a common goal? Maybe it was just the drugs? Maybe anhedonism was my childhood toy that slowly became less enthralling?
Conversations about depression and what depression is like are absolutely beneficial. It's powerful to be able to empathize with a person in this situation. I just wish we understood the mechanisms behind this super "stable" form of deep depression well enough to reliably pull people out of it.
I guess my main point was what you're saying: exercise will not cure depression.
I think it's a behavior of people who are struggling with depression to constantly seek out a single answer to their problems. In that sense, I believe anything, no matter how beneficial on paper, can eventually be used as a fixation which feeds the depressive cycle. This has been my experience as I've struggled with depression in my life. Exercise is no exception to this pattern.
I'm clinically depressed. I've had suicidal ideation for about twelve years (half my life.) On the rare days when sunlight peeks through and I can see the sky, yeah, working out and taking care of myself make me feel amazing. But most of the time it's just something I do. I don't feel better afterward. There may be a shadow of a thought in the back of my head like "this is making me stronger," but that's about it.
I've read an awful lot of LessWrong guides like the link about, pithily, how to extract more marginal value from your life. The problem is that before doing any of that makes sense I have to stop being so depressed, because every time I do something that's supposed to make me feel good I end up literally wanting to fucking kill myself. When I ask myself what I want out of life, the answer comes back immediately, "I want to die." Depression is this huge boulder that has been keeping me from getting on with my life for years now, and I know this but I'm not strong enough to move it myself. The best I can do is make life in the cave busy.
Before the inevitable replies pour in, I am doing every last thing I physically can about this. I run. I lift. I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet. I'm medicated. I'm in therapy. When I try meditation, it tends to bring me back to the feelings of wanting to die, and that's too much for me to sit with. I'm pursuing ketamine because I'm sick of living like this. I hope it helps me move the boulder.
You can't exercise depression away. At least for those situations I am familiar with.
reply