It’s natural to feel down or anxious from time to time. What’s not natural, however, is prolonged feelings of hopelessness and despair. When these emotions grab hold, and won’t let go, it is likely you may have depression. Depression makes every day a constant challenge. You no longer enjoy life as you once did. Just getting out of bed can feel overwhelming.

But, through education and therapy, you can overcome depression and get back to the life you were meant to live.

If you’re unsure of whether you are suffering from depression, read on to learn 4 common signs of the disease.

Signs of Depression

How can you tell if you are depressed? It may seem like an odd question, but a surprising number of people do not recognize that they may be suffering from depression. While some signs are obvious, others can be subtle.

Every individual will manifest symptoms in a different way, so it’s important to recognize any changes in your behavior. With this in mind, here are four signs you might be struggling with depression.

Changes in Weight

Depression can affect individuals in different ways. Some people may find they have no appetite at all and, before long, lose a significant amount of weight. Others may find their desire for food increases and they easily gain weight.

Changes in Sleep Cycles

As with a person’s appetite, the changes to one’s sleep cycle can also go in one of two directions. You may notice you feel lethargic and want nothing more than to sleep all day. Then again, you may find you can’t fall asleep and are restless all night long.

Anger and Irritability

It has been said that anger is depression turned inward. If you suddenly find yourself with a short fuse, and things that used to not bother you now cause you to fly off the handle, it may be a sign you need some help.

Physical Ailments

Many people don’t realize that depression can manifest itself physically. It is common for sufferers to feel sick to their stomach with whole body aches. Some may find they seem to have a cold or flu that won’t go away, while others may notice their chronic conditions, such as arthritis, are exacerbated by depression.

It is important to recognize these signs so you may seek treatment as soon as possible. While depression may feel like a life sentence, reaching out for help will put you on the path toward joy and peace once again.

If you or a loved one is interested in exploring treatment, please contact me today. I would be happy to speak with you about how I may be able to help.

It is said that if you live long enough, you’ll eventually hit middle age. Once they hit that mark, many people begin to look around at their life and notice what is working and what isn’t. Unfortunately, some people notice much of their life isn’t working, at least not in the way they thought it would, and a crisis strikes.

What’s Really Going on in a Midlife Crisis?

For many of us, middle age is the first time in our lives that we pause for a moment to reflect. Birth, in a way, is like a slingshot, catapulting us into life at a significant speed. That momentum never slows as we gain an education, make friends, choose a career, commit to a significant other, have children, raise them as best we can, and plan for our retirement.

Eventually the pace of life begins to slow and we find we have more time to take stock of our lives; of what we’ve become and where we seem to be headed. And what do many of us find at this juncture?

We find we’ve been so busy earning a good living, keeping up with the Joneses (whoever they are), and pleasing everyone around us, that we haven’t always made decisions based on our own self-interests. In other words, we find ourselves lost and unable to recognize our lives as anything that we once imagined.

4 Ways to Cope with a Midlife Crisis

It’s important to understand that in this situation, the word “crisis” is a bit dramatic. Midlife crises aren’t traumas; they are instead wakeup calls that alert us to the fact we need to start taking better care of our minds, hearts and bodies.

With this in mind, here are four ways you can cope with your own midlife wakeup call.

Get Active

As I mentioned, midlife is generally when many of us finally begin to slow down. While this slowing can lead to mental and emotional insights, it can also lead to aches and pains. In other words, slow your pace of life but not your physical activity.

Now is the time to become even more active. If you haven’t been exercising, start now. Take up a new sport, try dance lessons, go hiking. Keeping your body limber and pain-free will help you stay positive.

Embrace Your Creative Side

Everyone has a creative side. That’s what life is, one big creative project. But many of us completely ignore our creative impulses either because of a lack of time or a belief that we’re “not talented enough.” That’s hogwash! Tapping into your creativity is one of the best ways to reconnect with your true self.

Do something to feed your creativity. Write in a journal. Learn how to paint. Take piano lessons. Not only will this bring you joy, learning something new keeps your brain young and active and fends off dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Make Some Changes

Midlife is an opportunity to make some changes you’ve been wanting to make. A change could be a simple as finally painting a room in your house, to getting your teeth whitened or a tattoo you’ve had your eye on, or to finally dumping some of your toxic friends. Start making choices based on your own needs, you’ve earned it.

Hang Out with Like-Minded People

Social interaction is key to a happy and healthy life. But many of us spend the majority of our adult lives around people we don’t like very much: namely coworkers and the parents of our children’s friends. Now is the time to surround yourself with those people who support and nourish you, and share common passions and interests.

A midlife crisis doesn’t have to be a crisis at all but a chance for you to take control and make different choices in your life.

If you or a loved one is experiencing a midlife crisis and is interested in exploring treatment, please contact me today. I would be happy to speak with you about how I may be able to help.

Did you know that on most days, the average person has between 25,000 and 50,000 thoughts? That’s an impressive amount of thoughts.

But when happens when the majority of these thoughts are negative? Imagine the impact on your psyche and your life if you had thousands and thousands of negative thoughts each day?

This amount of negative thinking is a hallmark of depression. Negative or pessimistic thinking is depression speaking for you. It is the voice of depression. What many people don’t realize is that depression is manifested in negative thinking before it ever creates a negative thought itself.

This is why it is imperative for those suffering from depression to become acutely aware of their thought patterns. If not checked, negative thinking becomes a habit, one that has the potential to completely shape your life.

Change How You Think

One of the most powerful ways people can lift themselves out of the darkness of depression is to change their thinking patterns. This is why cognitive therapy is such a profound change agent. The approach is based on the fact that thought-processing errors contribute to a depressed mood.

By changing how you think, you automatically change how you feel. Once you become aware that changing your thinking is important, you are presented with an active choice you can take to benefit your mental health.

You will no doubt find that changing your thought patterns can feel about as easy as changing a tire in the rain with nothing more than a hardboiled egg and a paper clip. But it can be done.

Here are some tips on how you can begin to change your negative thoughts:

Keep Track of Your Thoughts

Many people are in denial about their thought patterns. They don’t want to believe they are overly negative or pessimistic. Catching yourself and recording as many negative thoughts as you can will help you to see your own mental patterns.

What will these thoughts look like? You could write things like, “I hate my feet.” “My boss is an idiot.” “I hate spring.” “I hate getting up this early.” “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Be particularly mindful of making sweeping generalizations from one specific event so that your entire future looks doomed. For example, a generalized thought such as, “My girlfriend broke up with me so I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life alone.” This kind of extreme, black and white thinking is a sure sign of depression.

Identify Triggers

Once you get an idea for the frequency of your negative thoughts, try and pinpoint the triggers for them. Your journal will also come in handy here, because it will point out certain types of events that set off a chain of negative thoughts. Triggers can include being rejected or ignored, or having an unkind remark said about or to you.

Positive Conversion

You have so far learned that the human thinking process is habitual. But the good news is, you can create good thinking habits.

To do this you’ve got to start converting all of those negative thoughts into positive ones. It will be hard at first, and you will most likely feel as if you’re lying to yourself and pretending to be a glass-half-full Pollyanna.

But, as they say, “You’ve got to fake it until you make it.” Though thinking positively may feel foreign to you and like a waste of your time, you are retraining your brain to think (and feel) good.

Every time you have a negative thought, stop, recognize it as negative, and immediately flip the switch and create the positive opposite thought in its place. This could look like:

Negative thought: “I’ll never get this report done on time.”

Positive Switch: “I’m making great progress and being careful to always check my work.”

To get the hang of how to do this, go through your negativity journal and create a separate column in which you will write the positive opposites of your many negative thoughts.

If you feel too dark and down to complete these exercises, please consider reaching out to a trained therapist who can prescribe medication, should you require it, and help you work through your negativity.

If you or a loved one are suffering from depression and are interested in exploring treatment options, please contact me. I would be happy to discuss how I may be able to help.

Of all the words in the English language, depression must be one of the most misunderstood. Why does this term seem to confuse so many people? Why is its real meaning so hard to grasp? It is because the term has two starkly contrasting meanings, depending on who is using it.

Among clinicians, the term depression is used to describe a debilitating syndrome that robs people of their energy, memories, ability to concentrate, love and experience joy. This is not just an emotional state, but a physical one that impacts specific regions of the brain. Depression actually lights up the brain’s pain circuitry, inducing a state of suffering that can become debilitating.

Beyond this, depression is actually neurotoxic, meaning the disorder can eventually lead to the death of neurons in critical memory and reasoning areas of the brain, including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Simply stated –  depression causes brain damage.

Colloqiual Usage

Confusion abounds when the term ‘depression’ is used by people in everyday conversation, however. In these instances, they usually are referring to something far less serious or clinical. In fact, most people use the term as a synonym for mere sadness or being slightly upset.

For instance, you will often here people make comments such as, “I was so depressed when Starbucks dropped its pumpkin spice latte,” or “Oh my God, I just ripped a whole in my favorite pair of jeans. I am like, so depressed right now.” No, you’re not, you’re bummed, pretty disappointed in fact, but you are certainly not depressed. These kinds of disappointments, while frustrating, are simply a part of life.

But ripped jeans and discontinued menu items have little effect on our ability to function, and the feelings of disappointment and annoyance rarely last for very long. A friendly word from a loved one or a hug is generally all that’s needed to get over the perceived “crisis.”

In contrast, clinical depression often persists for months, and no amount of friendly support from loved ones is enough to make it any less debilitating.

Time for New Language?

And that is where the confusion lies, and why many people simply don’t understand the true ramifications of clinical depression. It is also why those who suffer from depression are met with relative indifference when they open up to friends and family about their condition.

The sad reality is that, because of this profound confusion, many depressed patients are expected to simply “snap out of it” by their friends and family. No one would ever take this attitude with someone suffering from cancer or kidney disease; the admonition is equally offensive and inappropriate in the case of clinical depression.

Perhaps it is time to come up with a new term to describe the symptoms of clinical depression. By using new language, more people might understand the disease and show more compassion toward individuals suffering from it.

If you or a loved one is interested in exploring treatment, please contact me today. I would be happy to speak with you about how I may be able to help.