this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
387 points (98.7% liked)

Asklemmy

43751 readers
1230 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

So i still have depression and im constantly bored, i feel like a loser who cant do anything right. I want to let my creativeness out, make something i can share with the world or family, but im probably dreaming too big. I cant stand being depressed and bored, it stinks, everyone tells me to work out but i lack the motivation to do so.

i usually just watch youtube all day while complaining to family members that have no idea what to do about me.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Okay, fair enough. That’s a good point to bring up. I think that’s one stable path to depression and I think that if a person has never been in good shape that should be their first thing to try after they’re stabilized from any acute danger. (Meaning if the shit’s bad enough just take meds to get out of the hole and be able to operate).

Maybe their brains are atrophied, maybe those regions are losing processing power, or for some other reason signaling freeze-inducing threat.

I think the most proximal cause of my depression, at least, is a feeling of overwhelm and hopelessness, that’s so chronic it just suppressed me across the board. And for me, that overwhelm came from normal life, being fed through a hippocampus without enough processing power to plot a path through it all. I couldn’t be sure, so I slowed down across the board, ie became avoidant and unmotivated.

So what I tell myself is that the growth of the hippocampus allowed me to just handle more complexity before it sent the overwhelm signal to the rest of my brain and caused a shutdown. Instead I got to operate more freely with more confidence that I was on solid ground, because I could see better.

But the prediction and seeing wasn’t the most proximal cause. Being able to see better made me more confident, lowered my stress response, lowered my physiological alert level.

But for someone else it could be their hippocampus shrank for some other reason. Or it’s inflammation cause by a food, and that cuts the processing power down. Or unconscious or conscious mental conflict, sapping processing power.

And it doesn’t even have to be the hippocampus. That’s just one input into the emotional system. Presence of abuse or enemies, presence of hopeless circumstances, straight up cell malfunction with neurotransmitters, all sorts of shit can go wrong.

I do think hippocampal atrophy is one of many possible paths to developing depression, and I don’t want to give the impression that what I said was a totally complete model.

It’s my model of how it happened to me, and I think it applies to a large fraction, possibly even half, of the root of people’s depression.

And I’m basing it on three things:

  • How completely and utterly it worked. Better, more complete eradication than the meds had ever accomplished. (though I’m thankful for the years they helped me and the first moments they lifted me from the muck)
  • How totally ignorant I, and apparently all my practitioners too, had been of that effect
  • How drastically little activity I was doing, as a result of exerting myself in exercise maybe once every couple of weeks. I’d do it as a quick pick me up from time to time, not as an ongoing habit.