Depression blocks the conscious expression of our energies.
This causes us to believe that we don’t have any energy. We complain of lack of motivation and drive and end up leading very low effort lives.
But the energy is there. We eat food, the food has calories, our bodies have lots of calories to burn and produce energy to be used for whatever we like.
Depression merely hides that energy from us. It convinces us to stay in a false austerity mindset where we think and act as though we are in a constant state of energy starvation and that we must therefore somehow hoard our energy and spend only the absolute minimum effort on only our most trusted high reward activities.
Be those what they may.,
But you can’t hoard energy. Whatever you don’t spend is lost forever. You can’t accumulate it like it’s spare change in a jar.
Or rather, you can, but the form it takes is fat and that is its own curse.
Otherwise, no, you can’t save it for later like it’s leftovers. And the longer you go without spending it, the rustier the systems for using and expression your energies get and the more they resist letting you get things flowing again.
But those energies are still in there, trying to express themselves but are blocked by your depression’s bullshit.
This has the same effect as blocking the sluice gate on a dam. The energies get backed up as they continue to be produced without being used, and that pressure can only go one place and that’s the system itself.
Like, imagine if you turned on a faucet but then plugged it up. The water pressure would build up until it busted a pipe or a joint somewhere and got released that way, right?
That is what is going on in the mind and body of a person with depression. The blockage expresses its at its most basic level as psychological pain but it is most commonly felt as depression and/or anxiety.
That’s where the black moods and panic attacks and radical irritability come from. These are the equivalent of those pipes that burst under pressure from the blocked tap. The conscious expression of our energies is blocked by depression’s lies, and so it come out in these very destructive and maladaptive unconscious ways.
And all because depression has conned you into thinking you have no energy when the truth is that you have tons of it and depression just won’t let you spend it.
Depression is such a miser.
I propose a radical rethinking of the whole thing. Instead of going along with your depression’s wrongheaded fascist ideology, go in the opposite direction.
Treat the day’s energy not as something to hoard (which is impossible) but as a curse, something you have to get rid of every day in order to feel OK.
Trust me, if you can uncramp yourself enough to get that energy out – and it doesn’t matter how or whether it’s “productive” or not – you will feel so much happier, stronger, and calmer because your pipes are not all backed up any more.
The happiest i have been in the last 20 years was during 2011, when I was trying to write a million words in a year.,
Also good : the times when I was producing 30 or 60 secs of video every day.
If I do more, I will be happier. Dammit.
I just have a certain energy hoarding dragon to slay first.
More after the break.
The heart of the disease
What it really boils down to is the lies depression feeds you when you are contemplating actually taking action.
That’s when the big guns come out. Depression forces you to focus on the grinding, shrieking, metal on metal pain that comes when you are trying to get a rusty old engine like the one in you going and convinces you that taking things any further than that will only make that horrible pain even worse, so you had better give up NOW, or else.
The one thing it does not want you to think about is the truth that the pain will go away once the pump is primed and everything starts moving again and the motion of the engine grinds the rest of that nasty old rust away.
Depression cannot afford to let you think about that. Ergo, it uses its evil power to control the focus of your mind via pain and emotion and makes you concentrate only on the immediate psychological pain, which it convinces you is building to a crisis point so you had better escape now or you will be utterly destroyed.
Depression/anxiety does this all the time. It takes some small fragment of genuine emotion then amplifies it till it gets what it wants, which is for you to give up and press the emergency abort button then wallow in the feeling of relief and escape that is your reward for being depression’s good little bitch.
That’s why simply staying with an unpleasant memory or emotion or realization without acting on or judging it is so damned powerful. By sitting with the emotion, you let yourself get used to it and make it harder and harder for your depression to panic you into knuckling under to it.
And the longer you just sit there with the emotion, watching it without feeling the need to act on it or react to it or otherwise try to control it, the smaller and more harmless it will become, until it is finally small and safe enough for you to deal with.
Be warned, though, that once you let all the panicky emotion drain away from it, what is left might strike you as laughably simple and easy, and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about it.
And that is a good and healthy place to be. But beware that depression is still lurking and will try to make you feel bad for getting so upset about something you “should” have known was no big deal.
Nonsense! Don’t “should” yourself, kid. Yeah it may turn out to be a little nothing that got caught in your mind and turned into a big something in much the same way a tiny bit of grit or sand can be turned into a great big pearl by an oyster.
But that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. In fact, by sticking with the feeling until the false emotion melted away, you did something far more right than most people wll ever do in their life.
So go ahead. Pull up that big bad feeling and then sit down and watch it. See what it does. Gage how it reacts to various stimuli. And watch the badness melt away.
Maybe one day, I’ll join you there.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.