Your Best Friend - The Brain: Depression And Sadness

Last evening, I began to write the post which I've been wanting to post in a long time, but I realized that talking about everything in a single post would make it too long and too complicated. So that is why I'm going to cut everything into pieces and try to make it as short and as easy as possible to explain.

And I'll start off with depression, what exactly is depression and what is the difference between feeling down, feeling sad and having depression.

I think we all at one point in our lives have had a moment where we've felt really down and we weren't exactly sure what was happening with us. For most of us, these moments can last a few days, a week or perhaps a month, but in the end they go away and we usually don't experience them again for a long time. However, that's not the case with everyone.

For me personally, I've had this feeling of "emptyness" within me for almost 10 years. Now, I cannot say whether that is depression or not, since I've never went to a professional and I've never been diagnosed with anything. But what I can do is describe to you how I felt.

Imagine waking up every day and not feeling joy or pleasure from the things that you once used to enjoy so much. Imagine having your motivation go up and down all the time, feeling physically tired most of the time, not being able to relax while working, studying or doing your hobbies. Not being able to enjoy music. Not being able to enjoy watching a movie. Not being able to completely enjoy the time you spent with your family and friends.

Now, don't get me wrong! It doesn't mean that you've put a sad face on and you look sad and unhappy all the time. Not at all! You can still make jokes, you can still smile, you can still socialize, you can still find joy from doing things from time to time, but at the end of the day, no matter how much you try you just can't get rid of this "emptyness" within you. Something is draining you out. It's leaving you lifeless... And your friends and family, unless you actually share to them and talk about it, might have a hard time noticing it. Or in most cases would assume that you are just sad.

So...where do I begin? Should I just copy-paste a definition of depression from some online website and share it with you all? That never worked out. At least for me it never did, because it created more questions than answers...

And surely if you are reading this, whether you've experienced something similar or not, I'd like to present this information in the best way possible, so why not actually describe it the way that people who've dealt and fought with depression, have felt it...

Difference between Depression and Sadness

To start this off, I'll be quoting someone who's went through it all - suicidal depression with depersonalization and anxiety. And that someone is Noah Thomas aka BIGNOKNOW, who I discovered on YouTube recently and he has some amazing videos about depression, anxiety, overthinking, intrusive thinking and a lot of other topics related to mental health. He's went through a massive change in his life, both mentally and physically in the past couple of years and I think that he's a great example to everyone who is struggling with mental problems that you should never give up and stop believing that one day you'll be better.

Characteristics of Healthy Sadness

First major difference between depression and sadness would be that you feel sad, but you don't have a loss of self-esteem or perhaps it's temporary. Self-esteem would be confidence, trust in your own abilities and your self-respect. You feel down, but you still have a good amount of self-love and self-trust.
Your negative feelings are simply a reaction to an inappropriately sad or disheartening event - something which triggered these negative feelings like: loss of job, relationship break up, a major change in your life such as moving to live in a new place. These are just things which create a bit of a turmoil and inner inflammation.
A big sign that you're just feeling down is when your feelings just last a couple of weeks and they go away in an appropriate amount of time. Of course that would be different for each of us, but what is important is that with time, you are feeling better and better.
Another sign is that you're feeling sad and you recognize that, but you do not feel hopelessness and despair about the future. Or even if you do have such feelings for a moment, you snap out of that mindset very quickly. You don't go that far forward, you remain right in the present where you are and you just experience your sadness.
You're able to stay productive in your daily life. You're able to rise to life's demands whether it would be as a parent, as an employee, as a partner, as a friend - you're still showing up with relative ease.
Your negative thoughts are realistic negative thoughts. You're down, because something tangible is going on that you can identify. You're not just feeling overwhelmed, hopeless and despairing for absolutely no apparent reason for a longer period of time.

Characteristics of what may be Depression

Loss of self-esteem is one of the first signs, along with talking, thinking and behaving very negatively towards yourself. I have to add though, I believe that this can also be part of healthy sadness, I think what makes it worse is if this kind of thinking and behavior continues for a long time and even turns into a habit. But more on that in another post!
A big sign is that the way that you're behaving, the way that you're feeling and thinking are objectively out of proportion with the reality or actuality of your event. You get this huge dark emotion from relatively small triggers or none at all...Remember that feeling of "emptyness" that I wrote about earlier? This is when you have no reason to feel down, but somehow you just do.
These feelings of apathy, these feelings of sadness, this hopeless, this down-dark cloud over you last longer than you "feel it should". It's just lingering, it just stays there and despite your best efforts or none, it's not going away.
Another sign is that you yourself feel that things are not going to get better. You start to attach your current mood with your future mood. I think this is a very big sign. Again, when we simply feel down, we might also experience this. But it usually doesn't last very long.
Your thinking becomes catastrophic. You start not to see past the hopelessness and the depressed feeling and you start to create a new reality for yourself in the long term. This is when waking up, you cannot see past your pain - it is a product of you struggling with depression or at least very intense, negative and painful feelings.
Something which I wrote about earlier was that you start to lose interest in the things in life which once brought you joy. Work starts to lose it's meaning. Friendships begin to lose their warmness and you feel less and less connected. You begin to isolate yourself. Basically, all of the things that listed happiness, start to disappear and you start to feel apathy towards a lot of things. It's essencially a withdrawal from your normal day to day life experience(s) that once came very natural to you.
Your negative thoughts start to get exaggerated and distorted, even though to you they seem perfectly reasonable. This one is very easy to figure out, especially if you have someone who can sit down with you and who has your best interest in mind and can tell you "Look, you're not behaving like your normal self. You're not thinking clearly". This could be a close friend, or a family member. Noah mentions in his video that a therapist is a really good outside, third-party person who can look at you with no emotional attachment and kind of help you understand whether your thinking has gone wayward and why your thinking has gone wayward. I think this is something that only you can find out for yourself. Personally for me, educating myself, reading a lot and talking a lot about my feelings with my friends and to some extend my family, has helped me a lot. Mind you again, I do not know if I have ever had depression, I just felt the need to talk about how I feel and I felt down for a long period of time. I would suggest to you to just trust your close friends and share, share as much as you can. In another post about compulsions, intrusive thoughts and obessions, I'll try to explain the reason(s) why sharing and talking can be very helpful, depending on how we train our brain to do it. And more on that in the other future post!

Conclusions

Whether you think you've just experienced a lot of sadness or perhaps something more severe, I think that it is always important that we educate ourselves about how we feel and why we feel the way that we do. Our mental health along with our physical health are always connected. And if we want to live a happy life, regardless of what kind of situations we find ourselves in, then we have to open up our hearts and be honest with ourselves in order to make some changes into our lives.

For me personally, I'm still very young and I am confident that I have a lot to look forward to, but I cannot see myself living the way that I used to live before for the rest of my life. And I know that there's many people, especially young people who have it much worse and are much more confused about themselves and about what exactly they're going through.

You have absolutely no idea how much miscommunication and misunderstandings is caused between our own selves and the people which we love and have great importance in our lives.

After all of these years of reading, learning and getting to know myself better, I'm finally starting to realize so many things which I am confident are really helpful for my current self and will be even more helpful for my future self. Because I want to be a great friend to all of my friends out there, I want to be a great son to my family that's always supported me and loved me so much and one day I want to be a great partner that can go out of their way to understand the other person and be in their shoes (position).

And I am sure that all of us have similar thoughts and dreams. I'm sure that all of us, deep down, underneath all doubts and fears, we all just want to live a happy life.

And I'm confident that we all can! And trust me, learning to be honest with yourself is a progress that will change your life forever and it all starts from you. You are the source of it all! So don't waste your potential and try to live the life that you've always wanted to live!

One day, although I do not have any plans to deal with psychology and mental health as a professial, I still plan to translate all of these thoughts and ideas from people like Noah, into Japanese, Chinese and pretty much any language that I can, so that everyone has access to them and we all stop living inside our heads and start living the lives of our dreams.

Lastly, I woud like to add that most of the information I wrote down in this post comes from one of Noah's videos which you can watch here.

And also a link to his YouTube channel can be found here:

Thank you so much for taking your time and reading! I really hope this was helpful to all of you! Next time, I plan to write about anxiety and depression and how these two are connected.