How Depression Really Feels

My intention at the end of January was to share some of the indispensable mind tools picked up during a recent stay at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in France. Instead, I stumbled into the pit of despair. Again. For something like the millionth time since this infernal depression took hold several year years ago. 

Life Above the Surface

After discovering a different style of meditation—and related mind tools—last year, these visits to the pit have been broken up by occasional moments of reprieve. In fact, during the summer of 2022, I managed to stay aboveground for four blessed weeks in a row. The longest symptom-free stretch since falling ill.  

During that window, simple pleasures emerged from the darkness: delectable globes of lemon and raspberry gelato, fluffy pink sunset skies, frolicking flocks of sparrows out for their morning flight. Suddenly, I could taste and smell and see and hear and feel the world again. Life coursed through my veins. I believed the worst was over.  

Then, just as suddenly, a few weeks later, I could no longer sense these marvels. The demons were back with a vengeance, come to drag me to that all-too familiar place. From there I could observe the very same gelato, and sky, and birds, with nothing but cool detachment and a creeping hollowness in my bones. On the outside, I didn’t look any different. While on the inside, my perception of summer’s feast of colours had transformed into a muted palette of grey. Taste buds dulled. Limbs dragged under the weight of an additional, invisible 50 pounds.  

How Depression Really Feels

Unlike what many people believe, depression is not sadness. It’s not the fleeting disappointment of losing a tennis match, or a spark of anger over getting cut off in traffic. Depression is a thief of Self that strikes in broad daylight, stealing your capacity to feel anything at all, and usually leaving no trace of its work. More than sadness, Anhedonia and Apathy are the hallmarks of this illness.  

Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure in normally pleasurable activities, such as eating a delicious meal or going for a walk in nature. Even when you push yourself to engage, your mind and body are elsewhere. Anhedonia goes something like this: you make plans to meet up with a close friend for coffee and cake. Usually, you look forward to this activity, which involves three of your favourite things—heart-warming conversation, a sharp shot of espresso and the sweet delight of a chocolate pastry.  

At the café you look around and observe the familiar setting. You mime the motions of sitting, sipping, chatting, chewing, maybe even smiling. All the while you feel nothing. The cake has no taste. The coffee has no aroma. The loving embrace of your friend stirs no warmth in your heart. You observe her face through a fuzzy veil. Her voice, your voice and the background din of the café are muffled, as though submerged underwater.  

Once all pleasure is sufficiently removed from the picture, Apathy joins in on the fun. Your friend asks you what you’ve got planned for the weekend? How’s it going at work? When is your daughter’s ballet recital? Somewhere deep inside, you care about the answers to these questions. You know you do. Only, you can’t quite break past the fog to muster a heartfelt response. You’ve been held hostage for too long.  

Coping with a Diseased Brain

The other day one of my friends astutely observed the biggest challenge with depression: the organ you need to fight the illness is the very one diseased. I’m painfully aware of this paradox. My brain—and the thoughts, feelings and sensations it produces through various electrical signals—is the source of the problem. It’s also the solution. Learning how to harness this powerful machine, and send out signals that help rather than hinder, is the name of the game. However, that’s a lot easier said than done.  

Rewiring thought patterns takes regular practice, much like training your biceps at the gym. To grow muscle, you perform a targeted set of movements, consistently over time. But how can you do this if your brain is already broken by the time any symptoms appear? With a broken arm, the healing process is straightforward. First, you protect the bone with a cast, allowing your body time and space to heal. Later, once the cast comes off, you slowly build up strength and mobility with physio exercises. When you’re fully healed, you resume normal training.  

For depression, the standard treatments offered by modern psychiatry are medication and therapy. At best, these tools serve as a cast, creating some space to heal the underlying issues that contribute to the depression. Unfortunately, this cast only works for roughly half of all people seeking treatment. The rest of us are stuck with the jagged edges of exposed bone. To make matters worse, beyond the therapy room, there’s little guidance for how to manage the remaining 167 hours of the week. You’re on your own, without a compass. Any failure to improve gets blamed on you, rather than a faulty cast and lack of helpful resources to rehabilitate your brain. 

In my case, round after round of medication and therapy delivered no tangible improvement to the depression. After a while, I grew so demoralised that my brain invented a clever, albeit destructive, means of coping with pain: suicidal ideation—and, over time, suicidal gestures. As the months, and then years, passed I got stuck in a well-worn groove of negative thinking. I talked and talked and talked, in therapy session after therapy session, while nothing concretely improved—neither in my brain, nor in my life.  

Arm Yourself for the Battle of Your Life

What I’ve learned the hard way throughout this saga is that no one solution can solve a mind problem of such enormous magnitude. When you’re at war with an artful opponent—your own cleverly disguised ego—you must be readily equipped with a selection of weapons. Through my research, and personal experience, I’ve learned there are times to sit with your pain, and other times when useful distraction is a better option. It’s equally important to look closely at your automatic thoughts for insights, and to decommission the particularly destructive programs in your head. The key is knowing when to use which tool. 

For me, the most valuable weapon has been learning to be with discomfort. Emotions come and go, like clouds in the sky, as the saying goes. The issue comes from attaching thoughts—or the stories we tell ourselves—to these emotions. I can often stop an emotional tsunami in its tracks by letting the storm carry me: simply feeling the feelings, rather than assigning any particular value, or meaning, to the experience. Granted, the journey isn’t pleasant. More often than not, I want to run as far away as possible from the overwhelming grief flooding my system.  

Other times, when a full-on suicide spiral is already looming, I choose a different line of defense. Moments of crisis aren’t the best time to sit down and reflect on all the conditions for happiness in your life. This meditative contemplation—which I learned at Plum Village and practice regularly—is a wonderful antidote in times of routine sadness or frustration. I employ it whenever my mind is itching to throw a pity party. Unfortunately, the same tool is futile when the emergency lights are already blinking.  

In the face of a metaphorical tiger, your body’s physiology changes into fight or flight mode. It’s time to shift into another gear, not close your eyes and chant. Your psyche—and body—needs immediate cover. In depression, this opponent can manifest as rumination: My life is ruined. There’s no way out of this mess. Why bother trying when nothing works? Nobody loves me anyway. Nothing I do matters. These dismal thoughts pelt down like a battery of aerial bombs. Worse yet, you can’t stop them, even though they’re coming from your own mind.  

The Right Tool for the Job

Here’s where I turn to a different weapon: a strong dose of knock-you-out medicine, prescribed by my doctor, and safe shelter under the bedcovers until the worst has passed. Sometimes this may take a few hours. Other times the attacks last for days, or even weeks. Later, once the coast is clear, I get straight back to the mind gym and review the events leading up to the attack. Was there a specific trigger? Maybe I felt misunderstood or neglected by someone close to me. Or perhaps I was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt over letting down a loved one. I could have been overtired, or hungry, or thrumming with tension after a particularly busy day.  

Often the trigger is disproportionately small compared to the scale of attack. When this is the case, it’s useful to examine what caused the attack to build momentum. How did my perceptions of the triggering event fuel the fire? Here’s the place to get honest with yourself. Our brain naturally seeks out evidence to support our beliefs—and protect our precarious conception of self: I’m right. You’re wrong. Here are all of the reasons why. Instead, it’s much more helpful to question the origin of these beliefs, and the accompanying emotions. In some backward way your brain is trying to help you. If you can figure out what lies beneath the destructive thoughts and behaviours, you’re already taking a step in the right direction. 

Nowadays, when I notice a recurring negative thought pop up, I confront it directly. Nothing I do matters. Is this statement true? I mean, really true? Probably not. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that the statement is true: Nothing I do matters. I can still choose to live joyfully in the present moment. Because if nothing I do matters, then it’s equally true for all of us, and existence is one big experiment. Getting dragged down by existential paralysis is nothing more than an excuse to hide behind the fear and do nothing to change my circumstances.  

Your Brain Is Only Trying to Help

Once we start to peel away the layers of ruminative thoughts, an underlying emotion is revealed—be it fear or shame or anger, or some combination of them all. Most of the time, we go to great lengths to numb such feelings. Only in confronting them can we free ourselves from their tyranny. All of this takes time and effort. Many of the habitual thought processes that influence our current actions were programmed early on, before conscious memories could even be formed. And by the time we’re attuned to them, we’ve had many decades of practice reinforcing these superhighways of neuronal connectivity in the brain.  

Four years ago, I was blissfully unaware of such mechanisms. I was so attached to the carefully constructed view of myself, and the world, that I believed everything my brain told me. Life was a lot simpler back then. Nothing was my fault. I didn’t need to be aware of my reactions to external events because, in my mind, they were justified. Life was happening to me, and I didn’t even know it. I also didn’t know the cost of maintaining this illusion: the constant vigilance required to uphold my identity, both inside and out. Not to mention the precarious nature of entrusting my identity to others’ opinion of me. Frankly, this is an exhausting way to live your life. Not to mention, a direct path to suffering.  

Until I understood my brain’s contributing role in this depression, I remained stuck in a chronic cycle of dis-ease. Today, I know better than to be fooled by my thoughts. This doesn’t mean the depression is gone. I still get frequently dragged into the pit. Depression interrupts the healthy functioning of your nervous system and brain and body in wily ways. It’s messy. It’s disabling. It destroys lives. In the worst instances, it kills. At the same time, depression sufferers need not remain helpless victims in the grip of the beast, or an inadequate health care system.  

Managing depression is both an art and a science. There is no magic bullet. Each person is different. Each depression is different. The good news is, there are many tools out there to help with the fight. In time, with consistent mind training—and a heaping dose of courage—I’ve been able to spend more and more time aboveground. There’s still got a long way to go. Some days, the beast will simply not be tamed. What’s changed, however, is my belief: I can, and will, conquer this depression. From the darkness of the pit, this pinprick of light is enough to keep me fighting for a place back in the world of technicolor.  

Note: I’m not a mental health professional. I’m not a therapist. I have no formal training in the treatment of mental illness. What I am is a depression survivor. My mission is to uncover every possible means of freeing myself from the tyranny of depression, and to create a space where fellow warriors can connect and thrive.