How Small Feelings Can Cause Big Depression
What Causes Depression?
- Depression is the body’s way of preventing a total mental breakdown.
- You always risk frustration, so listen to it and allow it to guide you.
- Overcoming depression means facing the reality of your situation.
In this article we are going to put together everything we have been discussing in the previous articles. This will allow you to see how ignoring your primary and secondary feelings leads up to, and eventually causes, depression.
How Feelings Cause Depression
Your primary and secondary feelings are like leaving a pressure cooker on a hot stove. The longer the pressure cooker is heated, the more steam is created inside it.
Eventually the steam will create so much pressure, that it erupt from the cooker in a furious rage.
Your Safety Valve
Depression is your body’s safety valve, and is designed to stop your built up emotions from exploding and causing you a total mental breakdown.
It does this by telling you that if you keep doing what you are doing, you are going to explode (have a breakdown) and so you should stop and take some time out to rest.
During this phase a person is likely to think that there is no hope for them, and they will feel like giving in. This mindset is hardly surprising, since everything they did in the past wasn’t successful in changing how they felt, so why would anything else help?
However by listening to depression and taking some time out of your life to recover, this feeling of helplessness will eventually pass and you will soon start feeling motivated to change your life for the better.
Note: When I say motivated I don’t necessarily mean feeling all pumped up and ready to take on the world. I am using the term motivation in a general sense to describe a shift in your thinking from feeling helpless and wanting to give up, to a mindset that you are at least going to try and make things better for yourself.
The Risk Of Frustration
It is during this shift in thinking that occurred after you had given yourself time to rest from your daily routine, that you risk feeling frustrated again as you try to satisfy the unsatisfied need that originally lead to your depression.
At this stage it is important to remember that any frustration you experience is your body’s way of telling you that what you are currently doing to satisfy your unfulfilled need is not working, and so you should try doing something else otherwise you will fall back into depression again.
Listening To Frustration
So frustration is something you always risk experiencing, but if you learn to listen to frustration and stop doing the things which are causing you that frustration, you rapidly increase the likelihood you will successfully satisfy your unfilled need.
For example, a person who eats because they are feeling lonely is likely to become frustrated, because no matter how much food they eat it cannot satisfy their need for a relationship.
If this person keeps distracting themselves from their feelings, eventually their primary (loneliness) and secondary (frustration) feelings will lead to the tertiary feeling of depression.
However if this person were to listen to their frustration, they would be able to see the connection between their eating habit and their loneliness.
With this level of awareness, this person will then be able to take the appropriate steps to address their need for companionship.
Of course this does not automatically mean that they will be successful in fulfilling this need, and it is possible they may experience further frustration from their future actions.
However by listening to their frustration, rather than distracting themselves from it, they will vastly increase their chances of fulfilling their unfulfilled need because eventually they do the right thing.
This is not easy however as it takes a lot of courage, because it means you have to face the reality of your situation which can be painful.
Although this is true, in the long term facing your reality now will mean avoiding a lot more pain (such as depression) later on.
How Primary Feelings Can Cause Depression
Let’s recap what we have learnt so far about the different types of feelings, and how they lead up to depression.
Primary feelings are our first indication that our needs, wants or desires need to be fulfilled.
The secondary feeling of frustration then comes along to tell us that what we are currently doing is not satisfying our unfilled need, want or desire and so we should try something else.
If we still fail to satisfy our needs, wants or desires then we experience the tertiary feeling of depression. This acts like a safety valve, preventing us from going into a total mental breakdown.
The message depression tells us is that if we keep doing what we are doing, eventually we are going to explode. Just like how steam will eventually erupt from a pressure cooker that has been left to boil.
If we give ourselves time to rest and learn to listen to frustration however, eventually you will take the right course of action that successfully satisfies your unfilled need. When this occurs, you will no longer experience depression in your life.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the different types of feelings, why it is important to listen to your feelings and the consequences of ignoring your feelings, in the next few articles we are going to start looking in detail at these feelings and the messages they communicate to us.
You can find the meaning of your primary feelings in the articles below (click to open them):
The Meaning Of Frustration (secondary feeling)
Is Depression Good For You? (tertiary feeling)
Please note that your primary feelings can occur in combination, so you may have to decode multiple meanings from the feelings you are experiencing.
