What is the cause of depression?
What exactly is depression? You can read my previous post for the symptoms of depression. But what is the cause of depression?
Let’s remember one thing! You were not born depressed. Therefore, your depression is not permanent.
Please keep in mind that I’m not talking about some disability though, which is different all together. I am talking about people who’re born healthy otherwise but fall into depression due to the circumstances in their lives.
Also, there are a lot of people who’ve cured their depression without medication so we know it is possible. This is a very good start.
You have a bad experience in your life. Now every time you think about it, it causes you to feel some kind of negative emotion. Not only that, but negative feelings get associated to anything that reminds you of that experience, or even anything that’s a little similar in nature.
What if you have many different negative events in your life? For example, what if you grew up in extreme poverty, experienced racism, had poor health, and grew up without real friends and so on?
Now, almost everything you look at might put you in a negative state.
You’re feeling sad all the time. More you feel sad, more you reinforce your current state and harder it gets to get out of sadness.
In a law of attraction term, you are always in a vibration of sadness. And since you attract in your life what you’re vibrating, you keep attracting other people, circumstances, and things that keep you in your current vibration, which is sadness. You’re stuck in a vicious cycle.
You stop to think about why you’re feeling sad but there is no answer since it’s been going on for quite some time now. It might have been a simple new gadget that someone bought that you didn’t have. Even though you might be able to afford it now but subconsciously it took you to a time when you were unable to afford anything. Or it might just be the way someone looked at you on the road, or way someone was dressed, or certain smell, or certain tone of voice, or people of certain religion/culture and so on.
It can be anything at all. It all depends what was around you when you had your negative experience(s) in your life. If in your negative state you focused in on a certain person then everytime that person’s around you, you might feel the same negative emotion. Actually, this is called a negative anchor in NLP. That same negative feeling gets anchored to that person.
So, how do you deal with it now? What do you do when you can’t even pin point the cause of your depression, of your sadness?
Take your attention away
One way is to take your attention away from sadness and by deliberately placing it on something that you like, something that makes you feel good.
If even for one moment you change your focus to something positive, at least for that moment your depression is no longer there. For that one moment you are feeling good.
You could try focusing on your breath. Focus on one complete breath, inhaling and exhaling. For that one breath your attention was taken away from depression to peace and tranquility. For that one breath you were at peace.
When I experimented like this, that’s when I realized that I did not need medication but needed to deliberately focus on things that brought joy to my life, things that made me feel good.
So, even if I couldn’t pin point the root cause of my depression but if I could feel good for just one moment then there there is hope that I could feel good for a whole day. It is just a matter of being in that state for longer periods of time daily.
This again is encouraging!
Related posts:
- It’s tough to write while depressed
- Self conversation: Talk to your best friend
- Therapies for depression
- Why do I feel tired all the time?
- Changing my emotional state
- Using affirmations
- Debt: How do you feel about debt?
- Negative Feelings associated with debt
- Challenges with affirmations
- Subliminal tapes and audio affirmations
August 7th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I think you must have found the answers here. I think I must suffer from depression at times although I have never really labelled it so.
I would go down the route of the pressure from the world around to be perfect and you feeling you are not measuring up. I have been involved in discussions elsewhere on the subject of eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia, for example) and these are also prompted by the need to be perfect.
Maybe, somehow, we need to accept who we are and what we have achieved and are capable of. Easy to say but not always easy to do.
August 7th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
[...] Excerpt from: What is the cause of depression? [...]
August 7th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Louise Hay who’s helped millions of people said that the cause of many problems was people thinking “I’m not good enough!” And not good enough by whose standard?
Need to measure up, need to be perfect has caused a lot of heartache.
What I’m learning is that true happiness lies in simple things. Materialistic things can bring joy for a few moments but long lasting happiness comes from with in. Once we learn to love ourselves, we learn to learn and appreciate others as well.
Like you said, it’s easier said than done so that’s what we need to figure out now. How exactly to do it?
August 8th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Consumer society teaches us not to be happy with ourselves, therefore you will find that depression has become more prevalent and severe. It is important as individuals for us to love ourselves and be happy with who we are. We have to learn to get out of that negative state because it is very easy to go there.
August 8th, 2009 at 10:31 am
So true. That’s why it’s important to surround yourself with people who’re encouraging and will help you.