Rethinking Depression: Our Emotional Needs

There are a lot of interesting parallels between mental health and physical health. They are far more similar than they are different, for example; When you get your body into good health and good shape you will always have to stay in good habits in order to maintain good health. Mental health is the same way, it requires deliberate and constant effort. Just like your physical health, you have to form good habits and stay with them.

Your body needs sleep, water, exercise and good nutrition. And that’s just the beginning. If you don’t give these things to your body it’s going to fall into very poor health. You’re going to feel like crap. None of this news, we all know this, they teach it in schools. This common knowledge has become laced into our casual interactions.

Our Mental and Emotional Needs

Our mind and our emotions have needs too. Just like our body, we have mental and emotional necessities. They are not just what we need. They are requirements in order to stay healthy both mentally and emotionally. If you want to have good mental health you are required to have certain needs met for your mind just like your body requires certain needs met to feel good.

For example, people need to have emotional connection with other people through empathy. We need autonomy and freedom and we need to have a sense of power and control over our lives, our world and our choices. We also need to have a firm sense of identity, it’s healthy to have a good sense of who we are and what our values are. We also need to feel validated; it’s important for us to know that it’s okay to feel how we feel and be who we are. We need to have fun, we need to laugh and we need to connect with nature. People who neglect their mental and emotional needs we’re going to find themselves in a deep state of depression.

Why Don’t We Attend to Our Mental and Emotional Needs?

Too many people get hung up in their fears. They spent too much of their time worrying which is basically the equivalent of emotional junk food. Worry is useless. It serves no purpose. The only thing it does is make us more worried. It’s a negative feedback loop.

Emotional junk food goes way beyond that. I could make a list as long as my arm and maybe I should but there is one way to really poison your own mind and that is using your time pursuing and thinking about all the ways that other people have turned you into a victim. This is the mental equivalent of drinking something toxic. You wouldn’t drink paint but you might think of yourself as a victim. And if you ask me thinking of yourself as a victim is one of the worst things that you can do to yourself at least in terms of mental health. That has the potential to make you sick faster than anything else and I have a much longer write up about how victims become abusers so go check it out.

We don’t attach negative judgments and labels onto ourselves if we take good care of our physical health. It’s a good thing. We don’t frown on it. There aren’t negative stigmas attached to those that pursue good physical health. For reasons that I’m still trying to grasp, we don’t afford mental health the same luxury. People feel ashamed when they put their own mental health above others. Their own mental barriers about being emotionally and mentally healthy is just one layer in a complicated problem.

Medication Can’t Fill the Need for Empathy

It’s commonly believed that anti-depressant medication is the remedy for feeling better. Depressed? There’s a pill for that. But medication can’t provide for your mental and emotional needs. Medication can’t help a person experience empathy for example. Medication can’t give a person a greater sense of influence and control over their own lives. Medication can’t help a person create an identity. Medication can’t give us the sense that there is purpose and value in the things that we do. It can’t give us a sense that we exist for a reason. Medication can’t give us the empowering feeling that we experience when we do something hard and succeed at it. And even if could provide the sense that these needs were being met, it would be a lie and would you even want it?

We don’t take medication to lose weight. Well, I guess some of us try to but with very limited results. But as a therapist, I find out the same thing is true for anti-depressant medication: limited results. Plain and simple medication cannot provide for your mental and emotional needs. That’s the bottom line.

Social Prescribing

I was recently turned onto the term “social prescribing.” I love this term because it’s a simple yet powerful term for something that I have been doing for years with my clients. If you’re chronically depressed you might want to stop and ask yourself how many of your emotional needs are being met. Are you having fun? Do you feel connected to friends, family and partners? Do you feel validated? Do you laugh? Do you spend quality time outside? Do you do something meaningful with your time? Do get physical movement or are you mostly stationary and motionless?

You can let go of the negative labels and just go have fun. Go to a concert or go see some local live music. Invite some friends to an event or activity. Go have fun. Go laugh. Go and let go, even just for a short time. Have the courage to ask for people in your life that can give kindness, empathy and validation without strings attached. Kindness is free and we should avoid people that treat it like a scarcity. Go outside. Go for a walk. Watch a sunset while listening to your favorite music. Enjoy the moment.

Expand your interests. Do something new. Do something creative. Go draw something, write something or play something. Give a piece of what’s great about you to the world and it will give a piece back. Go make new friends. Expand your social circle.

Get out and physically move. Go for a walk. Ride a bike. Play a sport. Exercise is a natural and medically proven anti-depressant. The bottom line is that if you want different results you have to be willing to try something different. I often feel completely befuddled at the number of people that are unwilling to even try something different, even when they are completely and utterly miserable.

Try something different just to see if it gets different results and if it doesn’t work, you can easily go back to what you were doing that was leaving you lost, stuck and miserable. You don’t get a second chance at life my friends so make it count.