What Depression Feels Like: How to Help a Loved One

If someone were to ask you to describe the colors you see when you look at a variegated rose, would you be able to do it justice? Or if someone wanted to know what the burger you’re eating tastes like, could you convey the sensations, textures, and flavors in a way they’d get? In both cases, you could do a fair job of communicating what you’re experiencing, but it’s fairly difficult to express certain experiences such as depression through words.

This is one of the difficulties that a person going through depression experiences. It can be difficult to make sense of what is happening to you when you’re going through it, much less to describe your experience to others. However, understanding the experience of a loved one who is struggling with depression is key to supporting them.

Understanding and describing depression

When a loved one has depression, they are struggling with a mood disorder that affects how they feel, think, and act. Various possible forces interact to bring on depression, and these include genetic vulnerability, flawed mood regulation by the brain, and experiencing stressful life events such as bereavement, job loss, or the failure of a significant relationship. It affects a person’s ability to perform day-to-day tasks.

It can be difficult to describe what depression feels like. From the outside looking in, some of the ways to discern depression include:

• Seeing a loved one’s sleeping patterns affected, with them sleeping too little or too much.
• Changes in appetite such as eating way more or less than usual.
• Frequent fatigue.
• Expressing feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and worthlessness.
• Expressing suicidal thoughts and attempting suicide.

The person experiencing depression might describe their experience of depression in this way, but there are other ways they may do so. Each person’s symptoms of depression and experiences are unique to them, though there may be some elements that are common across these experiences.

Some of the ways that people who have gone through depression describe it goes as follows:

Your head feels fuzzy, like cotton wool

One of the symptoms of depression is struggling to think clearly and being unable to concentrate or remember things well. A person with depression might experience and describe this as feeling like one’s mind is thick like molasses – slow-moving, and difficult to form and articulate clear thoughts.

It feels like being trapped in the dark

Depression can feel like deep, unrelenting loneliness, and not being able to find a way out of the negative thoughts that assail you. You can be receiving praise from loved ones or coworkers, and still feel worthless or like a failure. Depression can affect your perception of things, giving you a negative outlook on everything you experience.

It feels like a weight on your chest

Being depressed can feel like carrying a heavy weight with you everywhere you go. It can feel almost too heavy to bear, like something that’s suffocating you and preventing you from taking a deep breath of fresh air.

It feels like blankness

Depression may affect a person by robbing them of the ability to enjoy the things that they enjoyed previously and taking the pleasure out of life. Life can feel like a tasteless, colorless, joyless blankness that pervades everything.

Like being in the wrong body

Others have described being depressed as not being able to feel fully present in their own body. It can feel like there’s not enough space to be their old self, to feel familiar sensations and responses, or like a part of themselves has been switched off and simply isn’t responding as it should. One can feel numb, and like they’re not in their own body.

These are a few examples of how people with depression describe their own experiences. For others, depression feels like simply not having the energy or the desire to do anything, and it feels like nothing matters. Each individual will have a unique experience, and they may describe it in ways that make sense to them.

Helping a loved one

However your loved one describes their experience of depression, it’s important to listen with empathy, and to urge them to seek professional help from a health professional such as a doctor or a therapist specializing in depression.

Getting a proper diagnosis will help in addressing the root cause of the problem, whether it’s depression or some other health condition that looks like it. For further information or to speak to a Christian therapist in Texas, call our office today at Stone Oak Christian Counseling.