this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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What is a good hobby for a depressed person? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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So i still have depression and im constantly bored, i feel like a loser who cant do anything right. I want to let my creativeness out, make something i can share with the world or family, but im probably dreaming too big. I cant stand being depressed and bored, it stinks, everyone tells me to work out but i lack the motivation to do so.

i usually just watch youtube all day while complaining to family members that have no idea what to do about me.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Running!

I was clinically depressed from 2002 to 2017. In 2017 I lost coverage and was forced to stop taking my medication.

The medication was wellbutrin. It really helped. I hated that I couldn’t get access to it, but I had to face life without it.

After having ramped down off the stuff, I was okay for a couple of weeks then the darkness started to come in.

In my research I found that exercise does the same thing as my medication (it increases hippocampal volume). So I switched from running about 1 mile per week to about 25 miles per week.

And my depression was gone. The medication managed it, allowed me to live my life. The running destroyed my depression.

IMO depression is caused by brain atrophy, which is caused by lack of moving one’s body. We evolved to be moving so much more, and just like your muscles will atrophy if you’re bedridden, your brain will atrophy if you don’t exert your body. Shrinking brain means life sucks hard.

[–] beetus 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm glad running has worked for you, but the perspective that depression is a caused by a lack of movement seems dangerous. It implies fit and active people can't be depressed because they are active. That's just not true.

Activity can help lift someone out of depression, but it's not a cure all barrier between you and the world of mental health.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Okay, fair enough. That’s a good point to bring up. I think that’s one stable path to depression and I think that if a person has never been in good shape that should be their first thing to try after they’re stabilized from any acute danger. (Meaning if the shit’s bad enough just take meds to get out of the hole and be able to operate).

Maybe their brains are atrophied, maybe those regions are losing processing power, or for some other reason signaling freeze-inducing threat.

I think the most proximal cause of my depression, at least, is a feeling of overwhelm and hopelessness, that’s so chronic it just suppressed me across the board. And for me, that overwhelm came from normal life, being fed through a hippocampus without enough processing power to plot a path through it all. I couldn’t be sure, so I slowed down across the board, ie became avoidant and unmotivated.

So what I tell myself is that the growth of the hippocampus allowed me to just handle more complexity before it sent the overwhelm signal to the rest of my brain and caused a shutdown. Instead I got to operate more freely with more confidence that I was on solid ground, because I could see better.

But the prediction and seeing wasn’t the most proximal cause. Being able to see better made me more confident, lowered my stress response, lowered my physiological alert level.

But for someone else it could be their hippocampus shrank for some other reason. Or it’s inflammation cause by a food, and that cuts the processing power down. Or unconscious or conscious mental conflict, sapping processing power.

And it doesn’t even have to be the hippocampus. That’s just one input into the emotional system. Presence of abuse or enemies, presence of hopeless circumstances, straight up cell malfunction with neurotransmitters, all sorts of shit can go wrong.

I do think hippocampal atrophy is one of many possible paths to developing depression, and I don’t want to give the impression that what I said was a totally complete model.

It’s my model of how it happened to me, and I think it applies to a large fraction, possibly even half, of the root of people’s depression.

And I’m basing it on three things:

  • How completely and utterly it worked. Better, more complete eradication than the meds had ever accomplished. (though I’m thankful for the years they helped me and the first moments they lifted me from the muck)
  • How totally ignorant I, and apparently all my practitioners too, had been of that effect
  • How drastically little activity I was doing, as a result of exerting myself in exercise maybe once every couple of weeks. I’d do it as a quick pick me up from time to time, not as an ongoing habit.