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If you are suffering from depression, you are not alone. In this country alone, it is estimated that over 300,000 people are suffering from depression. And women are 2 to 3 times more likely to suffer from depression than men.

But who cares about statistics when you’re depressed.

It doesn’t matter how many other people are suffering from a similar disorder, when you are depressed it is an experience unique to you and you feel very much alone.

Nobody understands the mental turmoil that you are going through. And it can be for this reason that you don’t speak to anyone about it anymore. Previous attempts to speak to family or friends may have resulted in loving but misguided attempts to help, telling you that you are; over-reacting, too sensitive, going through a phase, just in a bad mood or simply being foolish and that you should just snap out of it. Or many other less than helpful common responses.

While they are coming from a place of love and a desire to help, their lack of skills has the opposite effect and further compounds your feeling that nobody really understands what you are going through.

According to statistics two thirds of people that are “clinically” depressed have never sought professional advice, although I don’t know how they actually know that! (Think about it)

And the reason that you have never spoken about it is because it is such a personal experience that you are having, that you know nobody will understand. And if they don’t understand then how could they possibly help.

Or maybe you worry that you’ll end up medicated on anti-depressants or being labelled as having a mental health disorder which, despite ongoing efforts to change the perception around the topic of mental health, still feels like a social stigma that you’d rather avoid.

When we are depressed we can have feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and worthlessness. We can continuously replay negative, disempowering events in our mind and have constant internal dialogue that drains us emotionally and contributes to our feelings of self-loathing. And we can’t stop it. It becomes constant and distracts our focus and drains our energy and zest for life. Everything that happens in our lives when we are depressed seems to re-enforce our self-loathing and our feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and worthlessness.

And as a result we become mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted. This can manifest itself in a loss of interest in the things that used to excite us, social withdrawal, feeling tired all the time, memory loss, short temperedness, uncharacteristic behaviour and changes in our sleeping patterns and many more besides (remember your depression is unique to you).

And so it feels that you are trapped. Trapped in a vicious circle. The circumstances of your life have contributed to your depression and now your depression is sapping all of your energy and focus which in turn negatively effects the circumstances of your life and so on and so on. And we have either turned to someone for help who lacked the skills or we have kept it locked away inside. Either way this has further contributed to our senses of isolation as we are not being understood, fuelling our depression further and so the cycle continues again

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And It Feels Like This Will Never Change! 

You feel like you are in a black hole, numb, alone, helpless, hopeless and worthless.                          

So what’s causing your depression?

Well if you were to believe most “experts”, you would think that depression is caused by your faulty bio-chemistry, an imbalance in certain chemicals in your body that effect your emotional state. It is exactly this imbalance that the medical and pharmaceutical industry tries to treat with their medications.

Now while this sounds plausible the truth is that this is only treating the symptoms of depression not the cause. Something is happening within your body that is causing that imbalance in hormones that is resulting in your depression. So tackling the symptom rather than the cause ends up masking the problem, never treating the root cause and keeping a lot of people unnecessarily dependent on expensive medication for a long time. The fact that this is the “go to” solution for depression is very flawed logic indeed.

The truth is that it is our brain that influences the production of our mood enhancing hormones and its ability to do this is effected by either:

External influences or Internal Influences

External influences on our delicate hormonal balance can be effected by the consumption of alcohol, a poor diet, lack of exercise, allergens, and drug-abuse or prescription medication to name a few. All of these are sources that can potentially upset the delicate balance in our hormones that determines our emotional state.

However, the most significant contributing factor in most cases of depression are the internal influences.

And by internal influences I am talking about...... 

In other words – our thinking!

It is our thinking about and our reaction to, the events in our life that determine the meaning that we give them. And the meaning that we give the events in our life can be empowering or disempowering, joyful our meaningless, positive or negative, happy or sad. And this determines on bio-chemical level within our bodies what hormones are being produced and the balance between the various mood determining hormones. Our thinking process literally influences our physical body on a bio-chemical level and determines our world.

Read that again until it sinks in.

Even the external influences are effected by our internal thought process. Our consumption of alcohol is determined by how we think about alcohol and what it does for us, and how we enjoy it and the importance it has in our lives. If we change our thinking in relation to alcohol we change our behaviour with it and towards it. As a result an external influence on our bio-chemistry can be eliminated by a change in our internal thinking. The same is true for diet, exercise and drug dependence etc.

If you believe that this is an over-simplification of a complex issue then I urge you to click the x on this page now and we can respectfully say our goodbyes. But if you can see the truth in this and you want help to change that which feels like it will never change, then you are one step closer.

You see feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are justifiable when you consider how poorly we have been equipped to manage our own mental health. Throughout our education time is spent learning mathematics, history and geography while no time is spent teaching us emotional intelligence and how to manage our mental health. In fact more time is spent learning about Pythagoras's theorem than how to positively affect and influence our thinking. As a result, regardless of your academic performance in school you never developed the skills and strategies to help you manage your mind and your emotional state, because our emotional and mental health education never happened.