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Depression is the refusal of the mind to change. Depression occurs when something changes over time, and a person remembers a time when all seemed to work easily and smoothly. Suddenly, an object, place or person that person associates with being part of their key to happiness is ripped from them, and the person, longing for that same feeling of security that the memory of that place, person, or lifestyle offered, fears for the future. Depression is a mental state where your intuition knows it will have to adapt quickly, but the conscious mind is so attached to the past, and it creates a lot of anxiety for the person because the flight-or-fight response. The average person isn’t used to dealing with this response; the anxiety is part of evolutionary instinct which is supposed to motivate the person to change; but if the conscious mind is constantly interrupting, the person keeps wanting to live in the past. Because the anxiety is so sudden, they would rather bury their head in the sand and pretend that person is still alive; that they could be in that same place; that they could feel, breathe and relive the security that the attachment offered. But they can’t do that. In depression; every fear comes back to haunt the patient; every regret, every fear of the future; the human amygdala is not equipped to deal with it all in a constructive way. If we were purely rational and not creatures built for fight-or-flight responses with instincts, then the way we think on a day-to-day basis would make perfect sense. But alas; we are not. We can visualise the potential zombie apocalypse in our minds; the screams, the families being devoured alive, the sickening squelch and screaming pain of a zombie biting into your flesh; I can imagine it as if it was as real as me writing this paper; but alas, it’s not real, and is very unlikely that it ever will happen. And yet our minds panic all the same. It seems our amygdala has not evolved as fast as our conscious brains have. It’s a similar concept in depression; depression is your intuition telling you that you, as a human, need to change urgently. If you ignore it, it will only get worse.
In the wild, before there were rules, real social constructs and societies
The problem is, our conscious brains demand answers now. They don’t want to wait; they want everything to be organised and simple. Because that’s how society has recommended you the world. Which works for jobs in an Industrial Age; it doesn’t work for human emotion. The human nature is to want to be on top; to break any boundaries that tell them what to do. If you take a person who hasn’t been taught anything; that’s what they want to do. So generally speaking, we suppress that part of ourselves so that we can cope and pretending we’re happy being someone else’s robot. Depression is what occurs when we try to defy our human nature. That being said, meant to be a signal to our instinct.
Take for example a scenario where your wife has cancer:
When we go to work, we get that nagging thought; “What if my wife were to die tonight and I wished I could do more with her?” ; but then we push that thought aside, put on a brave face, and go to work. And then we come home late at 9, and see our son’s remote controller on a disc case that says, “Lego Marvel Superheroes”, and we wonder how long he has been playing that since we weren’t able to be around him during the day. We put the spaghetti bolognese in the microwave, and we wonder if that’s going to be the last dinner ever to be made by her; I don’t know what could happen; she could die tomorrow, the day after; a month; a year; literally any time, but we swallow that fear because we can’t control it.
And then it happens. She’s gone.
And just like that, all of our swallowed and suppressed big-picture thinking is rushing back to us; all of the mental rules, constructs, beliefs and memories you took pleasure in keeping you grounded no longer matter; because nothing is more powerful than human nature; and if you suppress your intuition, it will come back to haunt you one way or another. We developed those instincts for a reason; to create an easy lie-detector, to remember our way back to a location without having to consciously take note of landmarks (it’s like how turtle remember their way back to the place they were born). In other words, it’s a very dense set of instructions for the subconscious mind. It can help sort information in what’s useful and what’s not useful if you listen to it. Some people interpret it as “a sign from god” even though those are just as easily confused with impulsive behaviours that result in hate crime; it’s a reassuring feeling. Oftentimes it feels To the rational brain, it makes no sense. It seems to come from nowhere. In fact, since we are often conditioned to think like subordinates to bosses or those in power, we are often terrified of the empowering feeling it offers. We want to dissociate it from ourselves because we’ve been taught that it’s bad to be free-minded and independent; that it’ll get you killed. Alas, it’s
But to overcome depression
When pain fades with time? Why? Logically, the event being further in the past doesn’t make it any less justified; but that’s your intuition that knows the information isn’t exactly useful to the present moment, and it knows that your amygdala isn’t built for it.
But that’s just my insight into what I think depression is. If I’m wrong, please don’t hate on me. I’ve been through depression myself, and I’ve been really curious as to what evolutionary
You know when you KNOW something makes sense? Like how you know that a bullet moving at high speed will kill a man?
Well it’s like your brain shrinking down the following statement:
The Gunpowder is made of (so and so) so it is explosive because the electrons are pulled into the outer shells of other atoms and this moves space time which transfers energy between the atoms in various ways, however the average movement of energy is towards the atoms of the bullet; the bullet’s atoms will vibrate in such a way that a wave is transferred down the atoms of the bullet, compressing and rarefacting them accordingly, with the average direction being forward, and the sides of the bullet hitting against the sides of the barrel, with the electromagnetic fields on their outer electron shells repelling each other, in a way that the average direction is forward; the bullets’s shape and molecular integrity allow it to split the air molecules on all sides of it, and part the atoms of the man’s cells either side of it. The man requires oxygen to carry out respiration; but what happens when part of his heart’s muscles aren’t receiving enough blood due to the high pressure that once kept him alive now forcing blood out of the easiest exit: the wound. Now part of his heart will not be able to carry out respiration; and the muscle fibres are damaged in a way that they muscle can’t contract, and there won’t be enough blood to supply the rest of the body. The cells will eventually die from suffocation due to a lack of oxygen.
Or in other words, shooting a man in the heart will kill him.
But how did you know it would kill him? How did anyone know that the person was “dead” to begin with? How come
Intuition is able to call upon information without you having to logically reason your way through the details. It’s something we humans are very good at.
And so “denying” things to yourself over and over again, and lying and deceiving yourself time and time again, and using coping mechanisms and only thinking about temporary gratification and short-lived need will inevitably make you unhappy in the long term. You know what’s best for you long-term. Deep down. And when you think you’ve found your gut, you probably haven’t. But it’s there. Every human has it; it’s an evolutionary trait made to make using mental energy (you know what I mean) more efficient. After a while of driving a car, a person learns to trust themselves and doesn’t have to actively think about every little thing they’re doing.
This instinct would be more useful in the wild where we didn’t have rules; intuition was meant to help us figure the world out for ourselves; and it’s perfect for doing just that, and so people who are more intuition-based feel depressed when there’s nothing to figure out. It’s human nature to have to be attached to SOMETHING, otherwise we get depressed… at least we do in the mindset we’ve adopted for past situations.
Depression is when the mindset you’ve adopted for a long time is trying to cope with a changing environment. Human logic tends to like what is familiar; be that a lifestyle, person, way of thinking, or a type of cappuccino you buy from the coffee shop. We’re not actually attached to the THING, per se, we are attached to the ideas of security and certainty that that situation brings. That may even be certainty of new opportunities and experiences. That would be familiar to them. That’s why many people miss their childhoods; because they remember the freedom they felt, and how it felt like anything was possible. Well, in many ways, healthy children can be very wise creatures, as their ambitions and dreams are often untainted by a more cynical world.
To cure depression, you have to look inside and look around at your inner world. If you think you don’t have one, think again. Lie down on a bed, remove all the covers, take down all of your decorations for now. Your task is just to lie there and not move. Don’t be afraid; your thoughts won’t hurt you physically as long as you just lie in bed. Just be brave and cry; get angry, but don’t dwell on your emotions. Remember that while your internal conflicts are going on, there is a whole world out there waiting for you. You are very lucky to have been born a human being by random chance, so committing suicide is simply stupid. It will not “end” your pain. There is nothing after death; no god who will send you to “heaven”; nothing. This is the only life you will ever have; and it’s up to you of all people to change it. Throw away all beliefs and misconceptions. Throw away your impulses and desires; throw away everything you think you know. Throw away your memories and fears; anger and despair; and look a it like you’re observing the world get destroyed like in the second episode of Dr. Who.
You are afraid to face your feelings because you desire control over them, as if they’re this physical entity you can put handcuffs in and lock away in a closet. But unlike the physical entity, which will stay in the closet if you bind them well enough, your emotions are not physical objects. They are part of your biology, as much as your arm or eye is. If you try to bind them up with sellotape, they will escape between the atoms of the wardrobe, in one constructive manner or another.
Yes, human emotion can be highly impractical. But we needed it for a time when we were as small as mice and didn’t really have anything that could be considered a brain. And so emotions were the most efficient method to fulfil these needs at the time. But unfortunately in the modern age, our need for dominance, which was evolved as an “if in doubt” strategy, for instance, is no longer useful. We only need dominance so long as everyone else has a need for dominance, because we didn’t always have access to the information inside an other’s head. If everyone could read everyone in the world’s mind, and be omnipotent (and assuming the whole planet didn’t spontaneously sink into mass depression), then human society would be perfect. We only desire power because we are afraid of losing the security it offers. We like the security it offers to our statuses, because we fear getting rejected from society. That’s why people who were rejected as children often either seek the most power, or either turn out a wonderful and benevolent human being, or become mentally ill sociopaths who are okay with killing others for fun. Either way, you will end up with someone at extreme ends of the good-bad spectrum. They don’t physically want anything; they want a mental hole to be filled. And that’s where the amygdala is highly faulty in a society that demands order and every-man-for-himself-ness.
I don’t give a …. if this was not written in a traditional style. I got my point across and that’s all that matters.
