Why do you get tired/ no energy when you’re depressed?
In: Biology
Just from my perspective, so YMMV.
It’s like you’re caught in a river and you’re holding onto a branch and you’re watching other people wander by on the bank, and they’re looking at you funny because you’re not able to keep up with them.
And you ask for help, but mostly people will shout encouraging words at you and keep moving on. Occasionally, someone stops to help you hold on, so you’re a little better, but eventually they get really fucking tired of helping you hold on and they give up and go on with their own lives.
You get exhausted just from holding onto the branch and doing your absolute best not to let go and let the river take you.
That’s depression. Struggling every minute of every day to hold on while everyone else ignores it out of a need to observe decorum, or you get encouraging words from people who are just passing by, or you get yelled at for not pulling yourself forward against the river by people who’ve never even put a pinkie toe in that river.
Depression just sucks the life out of one. When I have it, I can barely function. Positive words given can’t be heard, reading anything is out, just can’t take it in. Often I find joy in God but during depression, even He can’t reach me nor am I able to reach Him, no Bible quotes have the power or influence as before. It’s living in hell.
Depression can be caused by lots of things. The main reason I’ve been depressed in my life is unresolved emotional issues. For instance, my dog died like 8 months ago. Sometimes I’ll feel depressed, I won’t know why. Then I’ll lay in bed more and suddenly I’ll feel upset about my dog. Then I will cry, and vent in my journal and feel a sense of catharsis and the depression will lift some, or maybe if I’m lucky completely.
Other times in my life I’ve had a depressive crash after intense anxiety, since that’s exhausting. I often get depressed when I push myself too hard. In the past I got depressed, because I was very unwise and beat myself up and had a lot of attitudes that caused me to struggle and wore me out. Often times people have negative thought patterns, that cause negative emotions and it spirals out of control, and they get stuck in it.
Clinical depression, the illness, involves a chemical imbalance in your brain. You don’t have the right amount of neurotransmitters moving in the right quantities to the right places.
People with depression still feel emotions – you can feel happy for a little while and have depression – because depression itself is an illness and not an emotion.
The reason people often feel more tired when they have depression is due to this same chemical imbalance. The brain’s rhythms and cycles are all out of whack due to the illness. Most chronic illnesses have this effect on the sufferers.
Ah depression. Depression makes you tired indeed, but why: Because your body and mind are always in negative state, you have weight changes, loss of energy, difficulty thinking and talking, isolating yourself from friendships, difficulty concentrating on normal tasks, lack of interests, more anxious and your mind has more negative thoughts now than ever before. It’s exhausting to live with this person you don’t want to be.
I still have those days when I have to force myself out of bed. And I can’t rally the energy
of motivation to do anything. A friend say things like: ‘just stop it and deal with it or there are worse things in life.’ It makes me cringe to just think about her saying that. But to my five year old self I would say:
Depression and anxiety are teammates and I’m the opposing team. Their one and only goal is to drag me down. They make me paranoid, they make me feel useless and steal all my energy and motivation. However, sometimes they go on a trip and I have the time of my life. I never know how long the vacation will last, but I get stuff done while they’re away. Because I never know when they’ll come back. It may be a few hours or a few days.. I just never know. I do know that I have to be prepared to go back into battle when they return from vacation. And the best thing to do that is talk about it with people you love and care about. Not with ‘friends’ who say you’ll just have to deal with it. Because you can’t move forward when you are surrounded by negative people.
Because motivation is the credit card you can use to buy fuel. Problem is no gas station in this state accepts yo Discover-card-carryin ass, so you gonna be walking a bit. Either that or lying down. Or looking for a garage to take a CO nap in.
People say, “Just get something better than a Discover card!” But we can’t all qualify for your aristocratic American Express. There are arms races, and there are emotion races. Here it is.
It’s a common belief that “depressed” means “really sad”. This is incorrect.
It’s “depression” as in “pushed down”, like how that little wooden stick that a doctor pushes your tongue down with is a “tongue depressor”. When you have depression, *everything* is “pushed down”.
Your energy? Pushed down. Ability to do even simple tasks? Pushed down. Emotions? Pushed down. Your brain’s “processing power”? Pushed down.
So “you get tired when you’re depressed” because tiredness is part of what depression *is*.
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