How to deal with depression?
(This article is adapted from an article written by Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.
The Behavioral Shutdown Model (BSM) explored here suggests an alternative interpretation of MDD and depression in general. Rather than viewing MDD as the consequence of a neurophysiological dysfunction, the BSM suggests that depression is actually an evolved defensive strategy.
Depression is a state of behavioral shutdown that can happen for a host of reasons. The key thing to understand is that, as a state of behavioral shutdown, depression traps people into vicious cycles of avoidance and withdrawal. This means that you need to:
- Learn about the cycles of behavioral shutdown. With the behavioral shutdown model, you can interpret your state of mind as a shift in your drive and psychic energy from the positive to the negative emotion system.
- Understand how they trap you, given who you are and the kinds of things that are driving your depression.
- Learn how to engage the world in a different way (i.e., doing, thinking, feeling, and relating).
Understanding what is going on and making these changes are hard to do. However, if you are patient and persevere, and are able to find a path of positive investment that nourishes your soul, then shutdown will reverse itself.
How does one find a path to positive investment? To guide the process we will be using the three “A’s”
- Awareness: increasing your understanding about what it going on, especially in terms of your feelings, thoughts, actions, and relationships
- Acceptance: being able to hold and tolerate negative feelings and distressing situations in a measured and mindful way
- Active change: it means trying new things, even when it is hard. (e.g. try new treatment like Nuowave Digital Therapeutics
As such, this journey invites you to adopt the attitude that you are attempting to:
- Increase your awareness of who you are and of what depression is, where it comes from, and what might be done
- Work toward increasing your capacity for acceptance of what is, including painful feelings and past losses
- Increase your engagement with things, even if your first instinct is to avoid and withdraw
Descriptively, depression is a state of behavioral shutdown. Put in a common language, it means you feel like sh*t and don’t feel like doing sh*t. Why is this the case?
When someone is in a depressed state, there is a significant shift in the flow of mental energy away from the “positive emotional investment system” and into the “negative emotional investment system.”The positive emotional system is about being energized and open to new experiences, having a lot of curiosity and desires, and seeking and approaching “the good” (e.g., things that are emotionally nourishing like high-quality relationships, exploring interesting topics, and engaging in rewarding activities).
In contrast, the negative emotion system is about signaling danger and loss and avoiding and withdrawing into a defensive posture. Depression is a shift that pulls the positive emotion system down and jacks the negative emotion system up. That is people who are depressed experience increases in negative feelings like sadness, discouragement, despair, anxiety, irritability, anger, shame, and guilt. In addition, they experience less energy for engagement, exploration, pleasure, happiness, and interest. Technically, this is called “anhedonia.”
Depressed individuals also often experience fatigue, a focus on past losses, a discounting of future gains, difficulty concentrating, difficulty starting new activities, and problems with sleeping and eating. The pain is sometimes so great and the feeling of being trapped too intense that the person comes to believe that the only solution for escape is suicide.