When your phone prompts you to switch to low battery mode it’s similar to how your body is feeling when it is depressed. This isn’t something we think about much because we’re more familiar with symptoms, not causes. We do our best to medicate the mood without thinking much about why we’re feeling this mood in the first place.
Depression is an evolutionary mechanism. It’s just as vital to our body as is something like inflammation. While these are both unpleasant states, they play an important role in our healing. However, if we treated someone with a fever in the way we treat someone who’s depressed we’d be throwing them out in the cold to lower their temperature.
Understanding Our Body’s Signals
Feeling depressed is nothing more than a sign that we need to conserve energy. Some of the most common reasons for this include:
- Too much anxiety can cause us to feel depressed. This is because our cortex is working overtime to try to find a solution to something too complex for logic to solve alone. Unfortunately, anxiety never concludes so your body will enter into a long-term depression so you can conserve energy while diverting all of your resources into solving the problem that your mind is fixated upon.
- When you don’t get enough sleep you deplete your body’s resources. This also happens when you consume too much sugar, caffeine, or alcohol.
- Depression occurs when you don’t get enough sleep. This is because your body must work to find a way to conserve energy. Some studies show getting too much sleep can also make a person depressed. You can think of this as an issue with your body’s feedback loop because when you’re getting a lot of sleep your body will think that it needs all this sleep. This will lead your body to feel depressed so that it can conserve more energy. Some people also think that the research here itself is faulty.
- Emotional exhaustion is just as hard on your body as is emotional exhaustion. This is because your body feels deprived when a lot is going on and it doesn’t have much time to process it.
- It’s also possible to feel depressed when you fight with someone, break up with someone, or someone dies. This is because your body needs extra energy to re-establish these important social structures in your life.
It’s also important to note that humans aren’t the only ones who suffer from depression. This is a state that other animals also undergo. For instance, it’s seen in pack animals such as chimpanzees and wolves. When one of their pack members dies the other members of the pack are oftentimes observed feeling depressed for weeks at a time.
What all This Means
Hopefully, you’ve been able to change your thoughts about depression now that you have more of an understanding of it. So, the next time you’re feeling this way you should stop and think about what’s causing you to feel this way. It may be that something significant has happened in your life or that you’re burning the candle at both ends. In either case, you should address the root cause of your problems and in doing so you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised by what happens to your depressed feelings.
If this doesn’t work and you’re still suffering from depression in St. Petersburg and Clearwater, FL, you should know that you have a trusted ally on your side. TMS Advantage has successfully helped many people. You should contact them today to get the help that you need.
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