The Cycle of Depression

Richard thinks he's found a thread connecting the mind and the body in depression, and he lays out an unusual way to get some relief from the feelings that can trail a person through both their waking hours and their sleep. His claim is that depression can be stopped by changing how a person thinks, and he builds his case around three things that he says hang together: depression, dreaming, and exhaustion. If that connection holds, then easing depression and anxiety means paying attention to a natural cycle that any of us can fall into at any point.

One of his more surprising figures: depressed people, by his account, dream roughly three times as much as everyone else. He calls this an illuminating fact, and he ties it to work done by Joseph Griffin of the European Therapy Studies Institute, saying the combination gives a clearer picture of how depression plays out in the body. The underlying pattern, as he describes it, is that a depressed person spends the day turning things over, worrying, chewing on the same problems.

That mental habit has a name in his telling: all-or-nothing thinking, a mode that runs quietly in the background and carries a bias toward the negative. Thoughts about awful things, things that have happened or might happen or seem to be happening right now, stir up an emotional reaction. The anger, the anxiety, the sense of being helpless; these feelings, repeated over time, are what settle into longer stretches of depression.

Richard frames this as an unfinished loop in the limbic system, the part of the brain that handles emotion. He uses a tiger in the bushes to explain it. See the tiger, feel the panic, run, and the loop closes. Get angry at your spouse, shout, walk off, and again the loop closes. But if you only imagine something threatening, something your own thoughts conjure that never matches what's actually in front of you, the arousal fires without any action to cap it off. The feeling lingks because nothing ever closed it out.

He's careful to say this isn't a license to vent. Acting out your anger to "finish" the loop tends to feed the anger rather than drain it, he points out, citing research to that effect. Working through depression and anxiety instead calls for learning to handle these emotional states in a way that actually completes the loops.

Dreaming, in his view, is the brain's way of clearing emotional residue out of the system. He treats the dream as a kind of stand-in, a metaphor the mind runs so the open loop can finally close and the backed-up thoughts and feelings get flushed. Imagined scenes finish the business the day left unfinished. That, he argues, is why depressed people dream more: they're more emotionally volatile, so they need more dream-time to work through everything.

The cost is rest. Dreaming is active, demanding work, and it burns energy. More of it, with more emotional loops to run, means more stress hormones released, which wears down the hormonal system and leaves a person worn out. Richard goes further and suggests this overactive sleep disrupts what he calls the Orientation Response, the mechanism that lets the mind redirect its attention and feel some pull toward motivation. Recurring dreams, he says, show up when someone keeps circling the same problem, clearing out the same emotional debris night after night.

His conclusion is that depression and other mental illness have to be treated as both psychological and physical at once. The way a depressed person thinks is bound up, he argues, with dreaming more and with the emotional arousal that keeps spinning off the same repeated thoughts.

The remedy follows directly. Cut down the emotional arousal during the day by cutting the thoughts that spark anger, anxiety, and depression. Sleep improves as a result, the Orientation Response gets a chance to recover, and motivation and attention come back with it.

The person in this piece is called Richard to keep him anonymous; the original account came from a story posted under the title "Am Researching More Into Depression" by an anonymous contributor.