Understanding and Managing Depression

First off, I’m not a medical or mental health professional.  But over the years, from personal experience, I feel I’ve learned a few things about depression that I’ve found to be helpful, and I wanted to share those here in case they might benefit anyone else.

What is it?

One of the difficulties in talking about depression is that different people mean different things when they use the word.  For example, someone might say they’re depressed about a particular fact or circumstance, meaning that they feel discouraged and unhappy about that situation.  Another person might use the word to describe feeling bored, unhappy and generally dissatisfied.  Wikipedia calls depression a “state of low mood and aversion to activity”, while the Mayo Clinic and the National Institute of Health define depression as a “mood disorder”.

The kind of depression I want to talk about goes beyond feelings of discouragement and discontentment.  It’s not simply a matter of “having the blues”, and it’s definitely not something you can just dismiss by “choosing to be happy”.  It might be described as a sense of heaviness that makes otherwise ordinary tasks seem extraordinarily daunting or burdensome.

In this case, I don’t find the term “mood disorder” to be very helpful or insightful.  What I have found helpful both in understanding and managing depression is viewing it in terms of resources and demands.

Consider this analogy:  have you ever been sick with a cold or fever, such that you don’t feel too bad so long as you rest quietly, but if you try to get up and be active, you quickly feel miserable?  What’s going on here is that your body has a limited amount of resources available, and it’s using those resources to fight off the infection.  If you rest quietly, all is well, but if you increase the demands on your system, pretty soon you’ve depleted your resources and you feel awful.  This is the same reason that stress often leads to illness — if you over-tax your body, your immune system may suffer.

I believe that mental and emotional resources are no different.  There are many things which, like an infection, can deplete our reserves even to the point that we have difficulty handling everyday tasks.  To me, depression is not simply a “low mood”.  While it may be accompanied by sorrow or discouragement, it should not be mistaken for either.  It is a state of mental-emotional depletion.  It is the weakness that results from exhausted resources.  It’s overloaded circuitry.  Given this perspective, I see depression always as a symptom, and never as the root issue.

That said, I’d like to take a look at some of the things that contribute to depression, and then talk about how to manage and possibly even avoid or prevent it.

Contributing Factors

Many times depression is brought on not just by one factor, but by several things working together.  Each of the items I discuss below, in one way or another, places demands on our limited resources, sometimes operating unnoticeably as hidden background processes, which together can hinder our ability to function normally.  Becoming aware of what these processes are and how they affect us is the first step in successfully managing depression.

Grief

By far, one of the most difficult and painful things a person can deal with is the loss of a loved one.  We grieve in proportion to the depth with which we loved, and to the importance which what we have lost occupied in our lives.  The more deeply we loved, the more painful the loss.  The more importance a thing had in our lives, the more keenly we feel its absence.  Grief is a response to loss, and it doesn’t just apply to death.  It can be the loss of anything that had value in our lives, such as a job or a home, a friendship, or our health, even the loss of hopes and dreams.  The pain of grief is not something that can simply be dismissed at will.  Grief involves both a painful wound which takes time to heal, as well as a process, sometimes a lengthy one, of learning to reconstruct our lives to no longer be dependent on what we have lost.

Broken Relationships

Relationships are difficult.  All relationships have their challenges, and sometimes those challenges can be very painful and protracted.  When this happens, it inevitably produces emotional strain.  Once again, complex situations like these are seldom easily resolved, and aspirin doesn’t work on heartache.

Negative Thoughts and Misbeliefs

This topic is huge.  While I think it’s important to understand that depression involves a broader picture than just our thought processes, it is also undeniable that our thought processes play a significant role in contributing to or helping to avoid depression.  What I think is important to understand here is that emotional wounds place a strain on our resources, and we can actually injure ourselves with our own thoughts.  Anyone who has heard the childhood retort, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” knows just how untrue that statement is.  Proverbs 18:21 says that “the power of life and death are in the tongue.”  Our words can hurt others, and in the same way, our thoughts can hurt ourselves.

What I mean is this:  suppose you make a mistake.  It’s natural enough to feel disappointed or frustrated by that mistake.  But if you respond to that situation by telling yourself, “I’m so stupid, I never do anything right,” you’re actually doing yourself an injury.  Or take the example of someone who is grieving the loss of a job that meant a lot to him.  That loss is bad enough by itself.  But by dwelling on thoughts of worthlessness, he only makes the problem worse and the wound more painful.

This brings me to the subject of misbeliefs.  Misbeliefs are anything you tell yourself that simply isn’t true.  Whatever you tell yourself, you will believe, and according to your belief, you will act.  So a person who repeats negative self-talk such as, “I’m worthless, I don’t matter, I have no value,” is going to believe those things and find him or herself mired in depression.  I think the reason depression is so often mistaken for feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness is that it is very often brought on by those very emotions.

Regret, anger, unforgiveness, bitterness, and being critical of oneself and others are all negative thoughts that only tax our resources and create or perpetuate our own emotional wounds.  The good news here is that this is the area over which we have the most control, which I will discuss in more detail in the next section.

Fatigue

In general, not getting enough rest makes it more difficult to concentrate, to solve problems, and to handle stress.  Rather than being an emotional demand in itself, fatigue is like starting your day with fewer resources at the outset.  Thus I find that I am much more suceptible to depression when I am fatigued than when I am well-rested.

Illness and Pain

Like fatigue, illness and pain, especially if prolonged, can leave a person feeling depleted and less able to cope with emotional stress.

Hormones

There have been times when, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, I’ve been slammed with a heavy weight of depression seemingly out of nowhere.  A look at the calendar makes the cause evident.  Physiologically, I don’t understand exactly why changes in hormones can bring on depression, but it’s pretty clear that they can and do.

Management Strategies

Some of the factors that contribute to depression are things that we can control, while others we may not have any direct control over.  But even in those areas, we can take steps to avoid emotional overload.

Patience

I think the first step in managing depression is to be patient with yourself and with your situation.  Understand that some things are going to take time to process.  Give yourself permission to rest.  No one likes pain.  We’re so used to taking medication to deal with physical pain, it can be frustrating that we can’t just make the emotional pain go away.  In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” (Romans 12:12)  At times I may have felt that “joyful” was entirely beyond me, but I can understand “patient in affliction”.  One of the fruits of the Holy Spirit is patient endurance, sometimes translated as “longsuffering” (Galatians 5:22), and it is even an attribute of God Himself (Exodus 34:6).  God desires us to be conformed to His perfect image (Romans 8:29), and patient endurance is part of that.

God loves us, so He makes us the gift of suffering.  Through suffering, we release our hold on the toys of this world, and know our true good lies in another world.  We’re like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.  The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what makes us perfect.  The suffering in this world is not the failure of God’s love for us; it is that love in action.  For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial is no more than the shadowlands.  Real life has not begun yet.

— C.S. Lewis

Pace Yourself

Experienced cyclists practice something they call “resting in the saddle”.  When winded after climbing a hill, for example, rather than stopping to rest, they simply decrease their level of intensity to the point where they can recover, catch their breath, and then resume a normal, sustainable pace.  Emotional wounds can put a strain on us akin to climbing a steep hill.  It’s important to recognize this and adjust our expectations accordingly.  Give yourself permission to rest.  If you have the flexibility to let some responsibilities slide, let them slide.  If you can delegate other responsibilities, do so.  By all means, be willing to relinquish control!  For responsibilities that can’t slide, pace yourself and take things slowly.

I recall a time when I was at work, and shortly after lunch I got hit with a heavy bout of depression.  I suddenly felt that I couldn’t concentrate or wrap my head around complex problems.  If I’d been at home, I would have just left my desk and laid down on the bed, but being at work, that wasn’t an option for me.  How would I make it through the rest of the day?  Well, first of all, I recognized and accepted that my performance was going to be impaired, and that it was going to take me longer than usual to do my work.  I resolved to pace myself, take things slowly so that I wouldn’t get overwhelmed, try to break down my tasks into very small pieces, and solve only one thing at a time.  Every moment felt like pushing a car uphill, where I was the car I was trying to push!  But I made it to the end of the day, and managed to stay productive without collapsing.  And that in itself was a victory.

Refuse to Think Negatively

As mentioned earlier, our thought life is the one area where we have the most control.  With all the other difficulties you may be facing, don't make it worse by engaging in negative self-talk or entertaining negative thoughts.  Resolve to be diligent in this!  According to folklore, vampires cannot enter your home unless you invite them in.  Negative thoughts are like vampires that will suck the life out of you.  If you catch yourself thinking negative thoughts, stop immediately!  It’s better to quiet your mind and just be still.  Relinquish judgmental attitudes toward yourself and others.  Abandon anger.  Choose to forgive; forgiveness is letting go.  And when you’re ready, begin to substitute those negative thoughts with hope and truth.

Hold on to Hope and Truth

We can repeat negative and hopeless statements to ourselves without even realizing it.  Some of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in today’s modernist worldview, which states that you are nothing but molecules and engery arranged by pure chance, without value, meaning or purpose.  You don’t have to accept that lie.  As I mentioned earlier, whatever you tell yourself, you will believe, and according to your belief, you will act.  So train yourself to replace false, negative thoughts with positive, true statements.  Author William Backus discusses this in detail in his book, Telling Yourself the Truth:  Find Your Way Out of Depression, Anxiety, Fear, Anger, and Other Common Problems by Applying the Principles of Misbelief Therapy.

For example, instead of saying to yourself, “I feel worthless; I have no value,” choose to embrace the truth found in the Bible: “God made me intentionally and purposefully.” (Psalm 139:13-16)  “God loves me and values me.” (John 3:16; Matthew 10:29-31)  “God desires to have fellowship with me for all eternity.” (John 14:1-3)  Spend time meditating on Psalm 139, a portion of which is quoted here:

Likewise, if you find yourself staring at a bleak and hopeless future, you can remind yourself of Jeremiah 29:11:  “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”  Even if you can’t see that hope, you can hold on to the faith that God has a future for you and He is faithful.

If you’re feeling that your life is empty and has no purpose, know that you were created to be holy and sanctified (John 17:19), to be thankful (1 Thessalonians 5:18), to do the good works that God prepared for you (Ephesians 2:10), and to demonstrate the love of Jesus to those around you (John 15:12).  Reminding yourself often of God’s word can go a long way to countering unproductive patterns of thought.

Find Support

When possible, don’t neglect to reach out and talk with the people in your life who care for you.  It’s a sad and peculiar thing that we often tend to isolate ourselves when we’re hurting, when the love of a friend or family member can do much to lift us up.

Replenish

If this is an issue of demands vs. resources, then one of the keys to successfully managing depression is to find ways to replenish your resources.  Identify things that you can do that bring healing, that refresh and restore you, and make time to do those things.  For example, make sure that you are getting enough sleep.  Exercise and eat healthy.  Go for a walk; spend time in a beautiful place; take a relaxing bath; hang out with your pet.  Above all, spend time in prayer and worship.  The Scripture says, “Cast your cares on Him, because He cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:7)  Worship is a time when we can give ourselves over completely to God, letting go of all our pain and problems in an act of beautiful surrender, simply trusting in God’s perfect love and goodness and care for us.  In doing so, His Spirit fills us and works healing in the hidden places of the heart.

Conclusion

If depression is the sense of heaviness that comes upon us when we’ve exhausted our mental and emotional resources, then it can be mitigated or avoided by carefully managing the stresses in our life and our response to those stresses.

The area of our lives over which we have most control is our thoughts, and we can do a great deal to avoid depression by being diligent to discipline our minds in rejecting negativity and embracing the truth of God’s word.

Ultimately, God is our healer.  If you haven’t yet put your hope and trust in Jesus, I invite you to call out to Him, to lay your burdens at His feet, to allow Him to take up your pain and pour His love into your life.  For He says,

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Matthew 11:28-30

There are no simple and easy answers.  But in Jesus we have God’s promise that this life is but a shadow, and our true home awaits us in perfection and glory, through the grace and mercy of our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus.

Leave a comment