How to cope with depression, in 3 key ideas
In this article we will see a short and simple explanation about what depression is and what you can do to cope with it.
- Related article: "Types of depression: their symptoms and characteristics"
Distinguishing between depression and sadness
The first thing is to review the differences between depression and sadness.
Sadness is one of the basic emotions and it helps us to adapt to the environment, it is natural to the human and healthy being in a situation in which we have lost something or someone.
When sadness lasts over time and progressively increases in intensity, it is pathological, and it is no longer adaptive, natural and healthy, we would already be talking about depression.
But there is good news: depression is a problem that is largely based on learned behaviors. Only rarely can it be caused by a biological problem, by an imbalance of neurotransmitters, and being a learning, we can modify it.
Symptoms
Depressive symptoms are behaviors that appear in all areas of the human environment
. Thus, they will be present in the family, work and social areas. It is very common for these symptoms to be valued as if they were part of other diseases. The person who has depression may have pain, fatigue, lack of energy, problems in eating food, sleeping, digesting food ...There are three types of symptoms or signs:
- Of what we think (cognitions),
- Of what we feel (emotions).
- Of what we do (behavior).
In psychology we know that when we suffer from depression we have what we call the depressive triad. This appears when there are thoughts and a negative vision of oneself, of one's surroundings and of what is to come.
- You may be interested: ""Why do I feel sad?" The question that changes everything"
How to cope with depression?
Let's now look at the causes and how to deal with depression.
1. Lack of desire
One cause is not having incentives, you don't feel like doing anything and apathy appears. What can be done then is don't wait until you feel like doing something. The motivation, in short, is to have reasons; not win. Therefore, we must try to do what we want, even if we don't feel like it. In this case, if there are reasons to move, everything else does not matter; the desire to do so will come later, when we have become accustomed to that level of energy and activity. Something that I think is very important is to remember this simple principle: before depression, action.
The pessimistic bias
Another cause is negative thoughts. These types of thoughts are inherent to human beings, we all have them; the problem is when we give them a lot of importance. In this way, we can have what we call tunnel vision.
Put your hands as you see in the photograph. What do you see? You only see in one direction, and it is a negative direction. What we have to do is open that tunnel, get to have another perspective. To the extent that you have another perspective, you see other things and not only focus on the negative. So part of what it takes to cope with depression is practicing the skill of not putting too much weight on negative thoughts.
3. Avoid learned helplessness
A third cause would be what we call in psychology learned helplessness. For you to understand me simply, learned helplessness appears when we repeatedly do something, we fail, and we give up, we give up. In order not to enter the learned helplessness that is the prelude to depression, it is necessary to learn to accept the unfair part of life that has touched us. In life we are going to find things for which we are going to fight and we are not going to get. To the extent that we are able to accept that there are goals that we will not reach even if we fight for them, we will be protected against learned helplessness.