letterhead

Zen-ish Thoughts About Depression

Reminder: I am not a licensed mental health professional. Everything that follows is meant conversationally and descriptively, not as diagnosis or treatment.

Part One: Depression, Conversationally (not clinically) Defined

Depression takes many forms, and occurs in a wide range of severities. Contact a licensed mental health professional –

Whatever professional help you need, learning to take a more Zen-ish approach to life's challenges can also help. I've made up four illustrations of things people in casual conversations might lump together under the heading of depression.

Being cranky

This might look like irritability, fatigue, lack of focus or interest, "clever" but inconsiderate sarcasm, or it can take several other forms as well. Simply being a bit worn down by fatigue or frustration may be enough to produce this. It may be annoying to others, which matters, and it may be counter-productive for yourself, which matters, but ultimately what I mean to describe here is uncharacteristic of your behavior, brief, and its impact is usually small. It's just a form of temporary crankiness, and there are worse forms.

It's best to control this rather than let it run free, and deal with the true irritant, but in the end, we all lose it sometimes and should be compassionate with others when they are losing it. (This does not mean you can't point out that a cranky person is losing it, ask them if they are okay, and request that they tone it down.)

What I Wish For You: Eat, drink some water, take a nap, go for a run, reevaluate what things you let get to you, be more mindful of your impact on others, and on yourself. Apologize and get back to competently handling your obligations and enjoying your pleasures. Do better next time. Zen-ish Coaching can help build resilience.

Being Depressive

If you are typically or frequently fatigued, sad, cranky, angry, hostile, sarcastic, biting, hard to motivate, or if you have trouble with following through, there is something going on that you should want to change, and can. You might think it's just your nature, or you are just being honest about various real problems in the real world, but being in a state of relative unhappiness, complaint, and under-functioning more or less all of the time is not only a drain on those around you, it's very, very bad for you. And despite its persistence in your life to date, it is not necessarily central to who you are or the kind of experiences you are capable of having.

Just by being a living human, you can be and are entitled to be happy more often than not. This is true even in, and especially in a problematic world. You can learn to make happiness, contentment, kindness, and generosity the dominant characteristic of your life, without denying or ignoring the real issues you are naturally called upon to notice and address.

What I Wish For You: Greater Zenfulness can work wonders, but for something so deeply ingrained into your expectations, default state of mind, and behavior, I also hope you will find a great psychotherapist. Talk with your therapist about whether medication might also be helpful. Although life presents many very real problems, if they dominate your experience, you can learn to navigate better, and you have a moral imperative to do that, to take better care of yourself. Zen-ish Coaching can help with major mindset shifts.

Reactive Depression

This arises in response to circumstances, and usually fades "on its own" when circumstances change, or when our response to circumstances changes. Even so, it might last for weeks, months, or even years. One might be reacting to a significant financial, vocational, or more personal loss, or to social, political, or ecological conditions, or any other significant stressor, even if that stressor is a misperception.

Even though this might eventually resolve without special attention, this response can be long-lived enough and difficulty enough that therapy and possibly medication may be indicated, to help you function while it persists. Therapy and a Zen-ish approach can each help you extract different gold nuggets from the hole you are in, learning more about yourself, about how to function more effectively in demanding circumstances, and about reducing the chances of being in similar circumstances in the future.

What I Wish For You: I hope you will be in therapy, and on medication too if that is needed. Definitely take the opportunity to learn how to handle life's most challenging stresses with greater Zenfulness. Recover, but be gracious with yourself about the time it takes. Zen-ish Coaching can help you be compassionate with yourself for where you are now, while you are on the path to recovery, and how much you bring to the rest of your life by the time you come to the end of that path.

Non-reactive Depression

This is a more continuous or recurring or intense depressed state that is not strongly tied to circumstances, and frequently keeps you from functioning well on one or more of life's normal tasks. This may result from unfortunate brain chemistry, or exceptional and/or repeated trauma, or all of the above.

Because a brain chemistry imbalance is a likely cause and/or a likely consequence of ongoing depression, medication is strongly indicated. If one has a physiological problem such as Type I Diabetes, one takes medicine for it, and does not misattribute the metabolic need to some imagined and blameful lack of character. Likewise, problematic brain chemistry is a physiological problem, a metabolic need that calls for medication.

Even if brain chemistry is the primary cause, both because having lived with depression is itself damaging, and because psychopharmacology is imperfect, therapy is also indicated. It can help by addressing the non-biochemical contributions to the difficulty you are having, including learning how to better cope with the bits that either will not change or will take a long time to change.

What I Wish For You: See a professional mental health provider as soon as you can arrange it. Zen-ish Coaching can also help you to create changes and to better handle what doesn't change.

Part Two: A Zen-ish Response In Brief

Below is a generic synopsis of a Zen-ish response to depression. For something customized to your personal situation, consider live consultation.

As always, we begin with doing our best to note what is so.

Another part of what is so, even in pervasive depression, is that we are not only depressed.

  • At various moments we are also hungry, or bored, or find something funny, or get lost in a good book or movie, or are called upon in our role as a spouse or parent or child or student or employee or friend or … what are some things that you are at the same time that you are depressed? Which ones combine with the depression in a negative way, which provide some temporary distraction or even lessening, and which are neutral?

Now, what if I did something different?

  • "What would happen if I had a different response?"
  • "Who would I be if I had a different daily experience of life?"

A common feature of depression is rumination (obsessive, unproductive thinking).

  • Acknowledging one's depressive feelings, symptoms, and consequences – what is so – can play a role in reducing their intensity and tenacity. Interrupting rumination with mindfulness of other things that are also so – one's breathing, the weather, taking a walk and noticing the sights and feelings that attend it, and so on are no cure, but may be tactically helpful for producing a break. When you get good at producing breaks, you spontaneously spend more time in break mode and less in rumination and worry mode.

Accept that depression is a natural emotion rather than fighting it, and that it naturally rises and recedes. It will reduce more quickly after you acknowledge it rather than fight it, and let the latest peak pass.

  • Even 30 seconds of slow, unforced, calming breathing can make a huge difference. More will do even more.
  • Humming stimulates 15 times as much nitric oxide production as normal breathing. (See Humming Greatly Increases Nasal Nitric Oxide.) Among other things, nitric oxide participates in the processing of norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate, neurotransmitters involved in the neurobiology of clinical depression. (See Nitric oxide and major depression.)

Suffering about suffering.

  • Depression is sometimes accompanied by self-loathing, self-condemnation, a sense of inescapable bad fate, or other such intensely negative views of oneself. Feelings are notoriously unreliable narrators of fact. Part of what is so is that you have those feelings. Another part of what is so is that they do not accurately reflect your true worth or "fate".

Whatever you are suffering about – injury, illness, relationship troubles, financial troubles, personal violence, war, some difficulties that a loved one is facing, or …

  • It is part of the human experience, and you are not uniquely immune to it being part of your experience.
  • While it feels excruciatingly unique and personal, in the 106 billion human lives that have existed, even if your circumstances put you in the rarest 1% of human experiences, nominally about 1 billion 60 million other people have experienced something comparable. Even if suffering is much worse now than in pre-historic times, (which seems likely), and that shifts the distribution substantially toward modern times, your suffering still puts you in the company of many millions of other people. That doesn't mean it isn't suffering, but it isn't yours alone. You just can't see your companions, but they are there. It is literally true that whatever you are going through, it is just part of the human experience, and you are not alone in experiencing it.
  • Our circumstances can often change even when it seems they cannot. Not having a solution in mind, even after extensive attempts to find one, does not mean none will ever come to pass. You may one day find a way out, or circumstances themselves may change in some unexpected way.
  • Everything ebbs and flows in its hold on us, even the loss of a loved one. Almost everything is impermanent. When something is truly unchanging, or at any rate when it outlasts us, we eventually change how we relate to it. Be it joy or sorrow, it will not have the impact on us in the future that it has on us today.

In a Zen-ish perspective, we are each profoundly responsible for ourselves.

  • This includes taking good care of oneself. That includes ensuring that you regularly spend time doing things that nurture you, make you feel better, even if only a little and only for a while. That is much better than not at all and never. What are some things you do that actually help, at least a little, at least for a little while? How often are you doing them? How will you take increasing responsibility to ensure you take better care of yourself just later today?

Part Three: A Chapter in Claire's Life

Note: There are many kinds of depression. This just illustrates one type.

Claire had always been an ambitious person. Her life was a constant sprint from one goal to the next – school, work, relationships – all in pursuit of a sense of satisfaction and happiness. But satisfaction and happiness refused to stick around, despite her many accomplishments. As the years passed, she began to feel a sense of exhaustion that her weekend getaways could no longer shake. This ache gradually grew into an overwhelming sense of pointlessness and despair – something she thought was only felt by other people. She found herself unable to enjoy the things she once loved, and sometimes even getting out of bed felt insurmountable.

With her high-functioning depression, although her husband knew something was wrong, even he was unaware of the extent of her struggle. She barely acknowledged it herself. No one thought of her as a person who struggles, and certainly he didn't, and she didn't. We often just don't see what we don't expect to see.

Claire began to read books and listen to talks about Zen principles, and was drawn to the idea of mindfulness. Unlike self-help guidance she had seen elsewhere, Zen teachings did not promise either a quick fix, or a psychological transformation. In fact, they didn't promise anything so specific. Instead, Zen teachings encouraged her to sit with her feelings of pointlessness and despair, to observe them without judgment, and to recognize her feelings as part of the human experience in general, not just her personal experience. Then, what comes of it is what comes of it.

That was the whole promise, other than the general claim that seeing things as they really are is always better, even if, and especially when things are not so great. Acknowledging and frankly responding to the pain beats any degree of denying it, and in less time.

The idea of "beginner's mind" resonated within Claire. It suggested approaching life with curiosity and openness, with a minimum of preconceived notions or expectations, so one can see things just as they are – not enlarged, not hidden away yet waiting to pounce, and not aggrandized when things happen to be favorable – to truly see things just as they are, no more, no less.

Claire realized that much of her depression stemmed from her relentless self-criticism and the stories she told herself about who she was and who she should be. These were not based on seeing herself as she actually was, but on seeing herself as "had" to be in some ever-receding future. She previously thought that these ideas were how she motivated herself, how she became so successful at work, how she got such a great husband, and had such a great life. They were all of that, but they also played a huge role in her dissatisfaction with life, in the fulfillment she did not obtain from her many accomplishments, in her wondering why she bothered at all, in her increasingly painful and unexplained sadness.

Claire decided to begin a meditation practice, which seemed not-very-Claire-like. But she understood that this was a way to practice having a beginner's mind. It was incredibly difficult at first. Sitting quietly for even five minutes felt unbearable. Her mind raced with thoughts: regrets about the past, anxieties about the future, and a gnawing, desperate sense of worthlessness, accompanied by eagerness to stop "wasting time" and get back to work. Increasingly, instead of fighting these thoughts, Claire remembered the Zen meditation teaching of just sitting, just observing. She stopped trying to suppress her feelings, or chase her thoughts, or solve her problems in the moment. She simply sat with them, observing their coming and going.

Claire came to see her thoughts as just that – thoughts. They weren't facts, and whatever they were, they were far too fleeting to be permanent. She began to notice how her mind would latch onto certain topics and replay them endlessly. By bringing gentle awareness to this latching on, she started to loosen its grip on her. She noted that thoughts vary in their accuracy, that thoughts come, and thoughts go.

Not having taken casual, exploratory walks in nature since she was a girl, Claire started walking in a nearby wooded park several times a week. She made this into a walking meditation by turning her very presence in the park into a trigger for being in a restful, restorative state of mind. In years past, Claire would have made these walks into power-walks, to ensure she wasn't wasting time. But she instead made them into dependably recurring episodes of quiet, relaxed, and undirected reflection on her feelings and thoughts, without any more objective than to notice them. With a beginner's open and curious mind, she more often found a thought or feeling interesting – "Don't I have an interesting combination of thoughts and feelings" – rather than each thought and feeling implying that she must immediately do something. She sought to know them better, to understand their origins and impact rather than being led around by them.

Months had gone by when Claire also noticed that she was beginning to bring this calm, non-judging, relaxed attention to tasks at work, and sometimes even had it in the midst of talking to customers. A co-worker told her that she seemed different, less stressed, happier, and was more amazing than ever at internal meetings and on calls with customers. Her husband noticed this too and was relieved for her, although he still didn't know what was really going on for her. They needed to talk more.

In a conventional sense, nothing in her life had changed. She still had the same job. She was still in the same marriage. She still lived in the same house, and drove the same car. Her work responsibilities, schedule, and accomplishments had not materially changed. Only she had changed. Her former sense of constantly rushing, never being able to do enough, never being enough, had sharply faded. She didn't feel bad so much of the time any more, although she wasn't sure why, because so little had objectively changed.

Claire's circumstantial depression had improved, not because her circumstances had changed, but because her reaction to her circumstances had changed. And, to be clear, even this was very indirect. She was not approaching life with an entirely new perspective, or a profound psychological insight. She was just integrating enough mentally healthy time into her life to do a better job of coping with it.

This is good, but far from complete. If you were Claire's best friend, what would you want her to do next? She has created a period of relief from her depression, and she is living a happier life again, but how long will it be before she notices that she is still short on actual fulfillment? What about her marriage or her vocation or her avocational activities is likely to call out next, and perhaps require a more substantial change? What about her knowledge of herself needs exploration? Knowing Claire as you do as her best friend, what sort of thing do you think would make her not just feel better, but truly fulfilled? If this story were about you, what would you do next?

About a year after the events above, Claire's depression returned. She became aware of the fact that she had only managed to feel better, to cope better, and not to find the sort of purpose in life that once again felt deeply missing. With depression recurring, Claire determined that she needed to see a therapist.

Had she gone into therapy earlier, she would not have been as well-prepared as she was now. She had learned that her depression was circumstantial (not primarily biochemical), but that just a modest change in her relationship with her circumstances brought only temporary relief. She needed to get a fuller understanding of what was missing, and what she might do about it. A Zen-ish perspective helped her get to this point, and would help her in her next steps too, but she also needed some professional assistance.

With a combination of therapy, deepening her understanding of Zen-ish principles, and increasingly applying them, Claire has a good chance of learning much more about herself, and of making her life much more fulfilling. Having made a good start, she needed to do more to get more.