Depression Signs Symptoms and Causes Part 1 of 4

I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation of Integrative Behavioral Health. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. And today we are talking about symptoms and causes of depression. This is part one of four. Today we are going to talk about the affective or emotional symptoms of depression and kind of what causes them. And really quickly, a lot of times when people are experiencing depression, they may experience apathy. They just, they don't really care. It's just whatever. I. I just. I can't. My. My give a dang's busted. So apathy. And along with apathy goes low motivation. If you don't care about much of anything, it's hard to really get motivated to care, and it's hard to get motivated to do anything. So they kind of go hand in hand. Guilt is another feeling that's associated with depression, and we don't want to ignore that. When we start feeling guilty, it kind of compounds our depression, sometimes hopelessness and helplessness. Now, these are sort of the trademarks of depression. When people feel depressed, they often feel hopeless about the future and helpless to do anything to change it. They may experience mood liability. You know, they, they. Which means their moods vacillate. They're. They're depressed. They may be happ for a minute, then they may be anxious for a little bit, then they may be depressed again. They may experience irritability. And that kind of goes along with emotional disregulation. We have talked before about the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, or our quote, threat response system. When that is activated for too long, too much for too long, because you are constantly or almost constantly anxious or angry or stressed out, eventually the body starts becoming resistant to the stimulatory effects of those neurochemicals and hormones that are triggered under stress. The body says, okay, you've been stressed for this long, ain't nothing gonna happen. I just, I can't care about that anymore. So the tissues become tolerant or resistant to it, which leads to a feeling of drum roll, please. Depression. People just. They don't have the, the neurochemicals to really care. When we are happy, when we are excited, we need to have dopamine, we need to have norepinephrine, we need to have adrenaline that helps us get a. Get that rush that we are experiencing. And those neurochemicals are kind of interpreted by the brain, depending on the situation, as either anxiety or excitement. But when we. When our body is resistant to those excitatory Neurochemicals, then we just. It's hard to get excited about much of anything until there is a huge, major, big issue that floods it with enough. And the best analogy I can give you is drug addiction, because just like the body becomes tolerant to certain drugs like opioids or alcohol, and eventually you need more of that drug to get the same high. The same thing is true with our excitatory neurochemicals that are released from our, our stress response system. At a certain point, your body becomes tolerant because it's been exposed to it so much and it needs more of all of those chemicals in order to even get you motivated, in order to even get you to care about something. And. But when that happens, you go from what I call a state of flat. You just don't care about anything. You're kind of flat, kind of feel like Eeyore to feel furious. And you are just enraged. You are totally anxious. You just, you can't take it anymore. So there's a lot of variability in your mood. When you actually do have enough excitatory neurochemicals to trigger a reaction, it's a strong reaction. Oftentimes in depression, when we talk about stress, we talk about fight or fleet, but there are two others that a lot of times we don't give credit to fight in. In the face of a threat, of course, flee if you don't think you can fight and win if it's not worth the fight. Got it. Freeze. Sometimes we freeze because we just don't know what to do. And the fourth one is forget about it or whatever F word you want to use there. And, and that is when you've hit that state of depression and you, you just don't care. You know, the bills are due and you don't have enough money to pay them. Whatever. I just, I just don't even have the energy to care or get stressed out about it anymore. That is when you know or one of the signs that you may be experiencing some significant depression. Guilt. A lot of times when we feel depressed, we don't have the energy, we don't have the motivation to do the things that we think we quote, unquote, should, which contributes to those feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and helplessness. When we are feeling depressed, when we are feeling like there's nothing that we can do to change the situation. Obviously there's likely a lot of cognitive issues going on that are extreme and using extreme words like all the time, every never. But it's important when we are stressed out, when we are in that negative mindset, we notice and assign more weight to the threats in our environment. And we tend to discount the positives which enhance our feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. So what do we talk about? What, what are some things that may cause this? Well, physically, if we are not, and I know y' all have heard this over and over again, I sound like a broken record, and I'm going to continue to sound like a broken record. If you are not eating a reasonably healthy diet, then your body is not guilt getting the building blocks it needs in order to make the neurotransmitters to help you feel happy and energized and all those things that you want to feel. So it's important that you're making sure that you are eating enough, you know, good quality food so your body can make things like serotonin and melatonin and dopamine. That's important. It's important to make sure you're drinking enough water because all of our body's chemical reactions take place in a fluid environment. If you are dehydrated, guess what? You're making it harder for those nerve signals to and those reactions to take place. So nutrition is important, hydration is important. Caffeine, nicotine, any kind of stimulant. Stimulants hyperactivate that HPA axis, which is going to contribute to the development of that flat state. Because eventually if you're drinking too much caffeine, your tissues, your, your cells are going to become a tolerant to that stimulation and it's going to take even more in order to feel awake. And some people get to the point where it takes, you know, they just can't even drink enough. And when they drink coffee, it actually makes them sleepy. And that's telling you that if your body is not responding effectively to a stimulant, that's telling you that there may be something going with that HPA axis becoming disregulated. So those are important things to pay attention to with nutrition. Cut back on the stimulants as much as possible, including caffeine. I know, it's one of my favorites too. Make sure you're getting enough good, healthy nutrition and make sure you're drinking enough water. There are a lot of long videos on the YouTube channel that go in depth into nutrition for mental health. So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time there. Other physical aspects that can contribute to symptoms of depression, Thyroid imbalances. If you have hypothyroid, you will often have a lot of symptoms. Of depression. So that's important to get evaluated. If your gonadal hormones, your estrogen, your testosterone are out of whack, that can contribute to symptoms of depression. So those are two things that are very easy to get evaluated by your medical doctor to see if those things are are in line. Vitamin D is another thing that contributes to or is associated with depression, especially seasonal affective disorder that also can be evaluated in a very simple blood test at your doctor's office. Now vitamin D, yes, we get it, some of it from the foods that we eat but a lot of the vitamin D we get, we get from the and some places the doctors may, your doctor may recommend taking a vitamin D supplement. That is something you need to check out with your physician. So we've gone over nutrition. It's important to recognize and the thyroid hormones go nadal hormone imbalances, those are important. Chronic pain is going to likely increase your feelings of depression. It chronic pain often impacts your sleep quality. Chronic pain contributes to systemic inflammation. And we know that there is a direct correlation between increased systemic inflammation and increase in depressive symptoms. So pain is another thing that is a symptom of depression, but it also can worsen depression. When we are depressed and our serotonin levels are low, it impacts our pain threshold. We tend to feel more pain. Our pain pain tolerance tends to be lower when we're depressed. A lot of people when they are depressed will tell you it hurts to move, it hurts to get out of bed. It feels like they are toting around a 200 pound rucksack on their back and that's a big deal if they weigh 150 pounds. And I'm not making light of it, been there, done that, it's horrid. So recognizing that there are a lot of physical symptoms of depression that we often overlook, making sure that you're physically healthy, you're. The other thing for physical is making sure you're getting enough sleep. If you are not getting enough sleep and your circadian rhythms are out of whack, then that is going to upset the balance and the secretion timing of a lot of your hormones and a lot of your body systems. Sleep is super duper important. Now when you are depressed, when people are depressed, it is likely that your attitude changes, your thoughts may change, they may became become more negative which contributes to your depression. So you need to consider a multifaceted approach to it. But I believe firmly in my heart of hearts that it is insufficient for recovery to if you fail to attend to the physical causes of Depression, the underlying issues that are keeping those neurotransmitters from being available and as effective as they are supposed to be. Affective causes of depression Sometimes things just make us sad. Things happen when we are. Something happens that we are. We lose something we're trying to find. My words here. If something we care about goes away, we may be depressed. If we feel like a situation is not going to go our way, we may feel hopeless and helpless. And that can contribute to depression. When relationships end. A lot of people experience depression. Depression in and of itself is a very normal feeling. And it tells you, hey, something's missing or something's gone that was important to you or you have to grieve the fact that you don't have the power to change something that is a normal reaction and a normal feeling. We don't want to get rid of it completely, but we also don't want to nurture it and say, sit on it and stew in it for days, weeks, months on end. At least I don't think most of us do. So when you feel depression, that's not a bad feeling. That is a feeling you, what you do with it can be helpful or hurtful. Cognitively, when you feel depressed and, and you're experiencing low motivation and guilt, it's important to identify reasons to get motivated. Sometimes you have to light a fire under your own self even to get motivated to do simple things. And it's important during this time to set micro mastery experiences. And what I mean by that is simple tasks. Not, you know, get through the whole day without going back to bed, but get out of bed and take a shower. If you do that score, that's one thing that you didn't do yesterday that you did today, and you know, tomorrow it may be get out of bed, take a shower, and, you know, stay up for an hour and you build on those mastery experiences. And those things are really important. If you are to the point where you're having a hard time getting motivated to even shower or stay out of bed. You know, that is a point where you really need to be consulting your doctor and or a counselor in order to help you figure out how to start putting one foot in front of the other. All we're doing here today is talking about potential causes of, of depression so you can identify areas where you might want to link to or that you might want to talk about with your doctor. Environmentally, when we are in an environment that is depressing, it can contribute to depression. If you are triggered by things in your environment, y' all know I'm triggered by those ASPCA commercials and a variety of other things. But identifying triggers in your environment that will trigger depression, but also identifying triggers in your environment that will trigger happiness. You know, you want to eliminate the things that are going to unnecessarily trigger depression. Like I'm not going to watch those commercials, but I'm going to put things in my environment that trigger happiness. Like my own animals and pictures of my children and things like that, that when I see them they remind me of happy times I am going to. I personally arrange my environment to trigger happy memories. I can through smells, through sights, through sounds. So my environment is more conducive to happiness than triggering depression. Interpersonally or relationally. Our relationships can contribute to feelings of depression when they end, when they're not going the way we want to. When someone gets sick, it can contribute to those feelings. And we do want to recognize that. We also want to recognize that our relationship with ourself can contribute to feelings of depression. If we are have low self esteem and we feel badly about ourselves, then we may feel hopeless and helpless to change that situation. So it's important to start exploring ways to enhance our self esteem so we can feel more lovable and we can start loving ourselves and spiritually, spiritually. The way we're talking about it here is finding connectedness and meaning. If you don't see where you fit in the world, you don't feel like you matter in the world. You can't find meaning for anything that you do. It's hard to get motivated when you are taking care of yourself, when you are feeling fulfilled in your relationships, when you are feeling connected and feel like there's meaning to what you do in the world that enhances, that causes your body to secrete some of those neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin. Just real quickly, for those of you who haven't watched my videos on neurotransmitters, serotonin is your basic calming kind of happiness. Neurochemical it too much serotonin, you can feel anxious. Serotonin is one of those modulating neurochemicals that's in there, but it's involved in just about everything from heart rate to blood pressure to mood to pain tolerance to appetite. So you want to make sure serotonin is balanced. Norepinephrine helps us with focus and energy. Dopamine is not actually our pleasure chemical, it's our perseverance. Neurochemical it when we have a surge of dopamine, we want to do it again. Whatever it was, we want to do it again. And dopamine keeps us motivated and keeps us going toward whatever that is that we were striving toward. Endorphins are the pleasure chemicals that trigger the release of dopamine. When we do something that's pleasurable, our body goes, oh, yeah, let's do that again. So it secretes dopamine to get us kind of to fall in line. Dopamine is also involved in energy. Some people, when their dopamine levels are too low, may feel really depressed when their dopamine levels are out of whack there. There are a lot of things that are associated with dopamine imbalances, including Parkinson's disease and restless leg syndrome and schizophrenia. So it's important to understand that a lot of these neurochemicals are associated with a lot of things, but they are all also essential for normal everyday functioning that we want to do. We want dopamine. So thinking about ways that you can increase your motivation will help you increase dopamine, which may help increase your energy levels. Thinking about ways you can increase serotonin may help you feel calmer. Melatonin, our sleep chemical, is made from serotonin. So if you're increasing serotonin, then you probably are going to have more melatonin available eventually to help you go to sleep. Now, that's a gross overgeneralization. But the important thing is to give your body and. And I'm going to talk about regularly the concept of your body factory. Think of your body as a factory with different departments. And the factory needs raw materials. That's the air you breathe and the. The food you eat and what you drink. Okay, you're giving it the raw materials. Each department in the factory has its own function to process and make what it needs to stay happy and healthy. And all those sorts of things like your neurotransmitters and your hormones and tissue repair and, you know, clean, clearing out free radicals and antioxidants. Every department has a job. The activities that you do, like sleeping and. And things can help your body factory keep running along. Just like a factory, you know, a real factory shuts down at night so the janitors can come through and clean, you know, you sleep at night, and body janitors come through, help wipe out those free radicals and clean up any, you know, anything that needs to be repaired. And like a regular factory where machines have to go down for maintenance and they need to be, you know, periodically oiled to keep them running healthfully, you do too. When you go down for maintenance, that's your relaxation time. That's your time when you're not putting, you know, full bore stress on your body and you're allowing it the time to make sure that it is doing fine, assess the health of the machinery and make any adjustments necessary. So with that, there are a lot of different symptoms of depression. And over the next four days, as we talk about them, some of them will surprise you, maybe like low libido, for example, and, and in terms of physical, you know, we're going to talk about pain and increased illnesses. Those are, those can all be symptoms of depression. And you want to pay attention to that and ask yourself what's going on that is suddenly causing these things? What changed in my environment? What is it when in a period of time in my past when I wasn't feeling this way, what was different and how might I be able to return to a healthier state of being? All right, there has been a lot of activity in the chat room, so I do thank you for being interactive. Love hearing from you. I am glad you guys are finding some of these things helpful. As always, please feel free to email me at wellness_one yahoo.com if you have particular questions, general questions about mental health. Remember, this is education, not counseling, and I will answer those in the Monday shows. Love to try to do things that are meaningful to you guys instead of just kind of trying to guess what might hit the mark. In terms of people who have low dopamine. You know, there are a lot of ways to naturally increase neurotransmitters. And I do have a video that I did last two weeks ago, I believe on increasing neurotransmitters naturally. That talks a lot about different ways you can increase dopamine. One of the best ways that's real general is anything that brings pleasure is going to increase dopamine. Anything that makes people happy. They have found that certain essential oils can increase serotonin and dopamine levels. They found that yoga, tai chi, relaxation can increase serotonin and dopamine. They found that playing with a dog, if you like dogs, of course, can increase serotonin and dopamine. So the big take home from that is anything that produces a feeling of pleasure in somebody is going to help increase their dopamine levels. But we need to be conscious of the fact that if their dopamine levels are really, really low, they may be struggling to even have the energy to get up out of bed. So we don't want to set goals that are super high. We want to set those micromastery goals. So what is it, you know, what would be one mini step forward that might indicate a little bit more dopamine is happening for that person? It's also important to look at medications. Antipsychotics, for example, will significantly reduce dopamine levels, which can cause people to feel exhausted all the time, significantly depressed in those cases. It's important to really talk very openly and frankly with the doctor about quality of life and see if there are other medications or ways to medicate the side effects or whatever you need to do. And as well as recognize with things like Parkinson's that are progressive, recognizing the impact of just coping with the chronic illness and grieving, the loss of functioning, the impact that they that may have on people's moods. It may not just be the dopamine from the Parkinson's, it may be a bigger cognitive life focus issue. In terms of trauma. When we experience trauma, if it's not effectively resolved, it can contribute to feelings of hopelessness, hopelessness and what I call unsafeness. And yes, that can contribute to feelings of depression because especially if the trauma was frequent, continued for a long time, or happened when the person was very young, they may have adapted to perceiving the world as very dangerous and a feudal place to be. So it's important to help that person start examining their cognitions, examining the way they perceive the world, and trying to find ways to enhance their perception of safety and personal empowerment. Alrighty everybody. Those were some great questions. I really appreciate you being interactive and being here today. Tomorrow we are going to be talking about depression symptoms again. We're going to focus more on the physical symptoms of depression and why they occur. And again, get I'll give you some quick tips that might help you identify identify avenues to pursue to explore and address those symptoms for you. Have a great day.