THE first step towards overcoming depression is understanding it. What it is, how it works, and what it does to us.
UNTIL NOW, it has been difficult to link the psychological elements of clinical depression to the physical symptoms.
Now, however, a new breakthrough so profound has changed our ideas of what depression actually is.
And this breakthrough makes depression much, much easier to treat.
It shows us exactly what we have to do to halt depression in its tracks.
And precisely what will stop it coming back.
It removes all uncertainty, and most of the fear from depression.
If you suffer from, or treat depression, this is the most important page of the whole Depression Learning Path.
Depression, Dreaming and Exhaustion: The New Link
How your thoughts affect you physically
"Depressed people dream up to three times as much as non-depressed people."
This is a startling, and illuminating fact. And when combined with a recent breakthrough in dream and depression research by Joseph Griffin of the European Therapy Studies Institute, it gives us a clear understanding of the how depression affects us physically.
The Cycle of Depression
What dreams do
If you are, or have been depressed, you may have noticed that you
ruminate, or worry a lot during those periods. Typically, these
ruminations are emotionally-arousing as they are carried out using 'All
or Nothing thinking' (more on this later in the section) and a negative
bias. That is, you have a thought and you feel unpleasant after it -
anxious, angry or helpless.
The trouble with this sort of emotional arousal is that it doesn't
do anything. The thought creates the emotional reaction (usually anxiety or anger) and that's it.
What this does is leave an uncompleted 'loop' in the brain's limbic (emotional) system.
Normally, the emotion would be 'played through' by action being
taken. For example: You think "That's a tiger in the bushes", feel
anxious, then run away. The cycle has been completed. Or, someone annoys
you, you shout at them, and the cycle is completed.
(By the way, we are not advocating the 'playing out' of anger as a
therapeutic technique. All that does is makes people more angry!)
But what happens when the cycle doesn't complete?
When these emotionally arousing introspections remain incomplete at
the onset of sleep then the brain needs to 'do something' with the
emotional 'loops' that have been started.
What it does is create scenarios that allow those loops to complete.
We call them dreams. The dream acts out, in metaphor, a situation that
will allow the emotional loop to be completed and therefore 'flushed'
from the brain. In other words, an imaginary experience whose pattern
resembles the 'real life' one enough to create the same emotional
reaction.
Normally, this does its job, and everything stays in balance.
However, because you do so much more ruminating, or introspecting,
when depressed, the brain has to increase the amount of dreaming you do.
And before long you are:
-
Spending too much time in dream sleep (Rapid Eye Movement - REM) and missing out on physically-rejuvenating Slow Wave Sleep.
-
Depleting your hormonal system with extended night-time emotional arousal.
-
Exhausting your 'orientation response' - a crucial brain activity that
allows you to change your focus of attention and so motivate yourself.
It is also a key part of concentration.
Recurring dreams
If you are continuously having the same problems or ruminating in the
same way then you may experience recurring dreams (the same dream over
and over). This usually continues until the situation changes or you
begin to deal with it in a less negatively arousing way.
Why are my dreams so weird?
Dreams exaggerate the feelings they represent from waking life, so
even if you have just had a fleeting moment of anger at someone during
the day, the dream that flushes this out may involve you becoming
furious.
As an aside, dreams usually just 'borrow' imagery from the your surroundings.
So, for example, images from a recent T.V program may be used by the
dream when representing something from real life. So the fact that you
kill your brother in a dream, for example, doesn't necessarily mean you
have any problems with your brother at all!
Depressive thinking styles mean more arousal
Depressive thinking styles will tend to cause more negative emotional
arousal, and therefore more dreaming. This extra dreaming is to try to
'clear the brain' for the next day, but because our negative arousals
are excessive when depressed, our natural rhythms find it hard to cope
with this "over-dreaming":
Why is over-dreaming bad for me?
Basically, because dreaming is hard work.
Dreaming itself is not a restful activity. Dreaming is called
'paradoxical sleep' because brain wave patterns are similar to those of
the brain when completely awake.
Dreaming is a state of arousal.
As far as much of your brain is concerned, your dream is real. So
adrenaline and other stress hormones in your system will be active in
the body.
This is a double edged sword, because over-dreaming, as well as using
up these hormones and energy, is actually making it harder for the body
to make more. As you try to flush out the incomplete emotions, you
spend more time in REM sleep, and therefore less time in deep sleep,
when your body should be recuperating in preparation for producing these
hormones for the next day.
So if you are over-dreaming you're not resting but flooding your
system with adrenaline and other stress hormones. If most of your sleep
consists of dreams, your body and mind will begin to feel very tired
during the day. Depressed people often report that the worst time of day
is first thing in the morning.
Sometimes a depressed person may start waking up early in the morning
and not be able to get back to sleep. This may be a way of the body
trying to cut down on over-dreaming in order to try and lift depression.
This depletion is also why depressed people often feel at their worst first thing in the morning.
As the day progresses, their hormones replenish themselves and their
energy levels increase, and they are better able to motivate themselves.
Here's a more complete picture of how depression works:
(Note: Levels of the stress hormone cortisol are much higher in depressed people.(1))
And because we can clearly see that what maintains the clinical
symptoms of depression is emotionally arousing introspection, or
rumination, we know exactly how to deal with it. Cut down the amount of
emotional arousal.
Source: http://www.clinical-depression.co.uk/dlp/understanding-depression/understanding-depression/
