The first thing will be to review the differences between depression and sadness.
Sadness is one of the basic emotions and it helps us adapt to the environment, it is natural to human beings and healthy in a situation in which we have lost something or someone.
When sadness lasts over time and progressively increases in intensity, it becomes pathological, and 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 due to an imbalance of neurotransmitters, and since it is a learning process, we can modify it.
Symptoms
Depressive symptoms are behaviors that They 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 evaluated as if they were part of other diseases. The person who has depression may experience pain, fatigue, lack of energy, problems with food intake, sleep, and food digestion…
There are three types of symptoms or signs:
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, one’s own environment and what is to come.
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 Motivation, in short, is having reasons; not win. That is why we have to 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: in the face of 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 too much importance. In this way, we can have what we call tunnel vision.
Place 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 don’t just focus on the negative. Therefore, part of coping with depression is practicing the skill of not giving so much importance to negative thoughts.
3. Avoid learned helplessness
A third cause would be what we call in psychology learned helplessness So that you understand me in a simple way, learned helplessness appears when we repeatedly do something, we do not achieve it, and we give up, we give up. In order not to enter into the learned helplessness that is the prelude to depression, it is necessary to learn to accept the unfair part of life that we have been dealt. In life we are going to encounter things that we are going to fight for and we are not going to achieve. To the extent that we are able to accept that there are objectives that we will not reach even if we fight for them, we will be protected against learned helplessness.
