Depression (low mood)

Our minds have evolved over many hundreds of thousands of years to be constantly watching out for threat.

The mind works on a ‘better safe than sorry’ principle.

Imagine that you are a tribal warrior crossing the savannah in 20,000 BC to get your village.

If you saw a shape in the grass and thought – ‘That’s a rock’ and it was actually a lion – you would be lion lunch and your careless genes would not be passed on.

BUT if you thought:

‘That’s a lion!!!’

The threat/self-protection system in your body would react automatically to keep you safe. E.g You would run, hide and wait until it was safe.

Here is a video that explains this in more detail:

Detecting ‘threat’ can be about the world being unsafe, which causes anxiety, or it can be about detecting faults and flaws in ourselves, looking for reasons why others might reject us, so that we can prevent that from happening and stay safe. If we believe the thought and see it as a truth – it can cause low mood, feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem.

If you are a human then pain is inevitable, no one gets through life without experiencing distress and difficulty and challenging times.

While we will all experience the unavoidable reality of pain, we also suffer because of our capacity to over analyse what has happened in the past, worry about the future and get stuck inside unhelpful judgements of ourselves and others.

Our mind is constantly busy – telling us random things, rehearsing stuff we need to say or do, bringing up memories, predicting what might go wrong and making up things to worry about etc. When it is triggered into an unhelpful and emotionally laden thought, such as ‘No one will like me’, ‘I’m a loser’, it grabs our attention.

When we believe thoughts as truths, it affects the way we feel and behave.

Why are our thoughts often so negative? Watch this to find out:

Let your mind do its’ thing:

Set a timer for 2 minutes

Notice the activity of your mind. Even if your mind says, ‘I’m not doing this properly’, or ‘Nothing is happening, I’m not having any thoughts’.

Jot down briefly what comes into your mind during the minute

After 2 minutes

Take a look at what you wrote. What do you notice? Was it just a random jumble of thoughts or are you preoccupied with something? Were they profound life changing things or do you now know what you are having for dinner? Just notice.

The function of the mind is to pump out thoughts, like your heart pumps blood around your body.

One of the most common types of thought, especially for young people, is the concern about not fitting in, being rejected from the group or not liked by others. This is a hard-wired fear. Our brains and bodies have not changed in the last 100,000 years. Imagine what life was like 100,000 years ago – we lived in a harsh, unsafe environment. Babies don’t show a fear of heights until they are around 7 – 9 months of age. This is about the time when they can move independently and might harm themselves, so a fear of heights meant they were more likely to survive. In the same way. Adolescents would typically leave their family tribe and form a new tribe of same-age peers. Fears of not being included appear as self-criticism and reasons for others to reject us, of not being liked or approved of. This is the mind’s way of trying to protect us from putting ourselves at risk of rejection. Research shows that adolescents will change their opinion about something in order to match the opinion of others. Fitting in and being included in a tribe were vital to survival – if you were alone, you were vulnerable and likely to be killed or die. That fear still appears today because our stone-age brain hasn’t caught up with the changes in our environment. In fact, we are more likely to worry about it because of social media and the internet telling us how we should be and what we should look like. We ‘compare and despair’.

• The low mood continuum is the feeling of being sad through to depression. The severity depends on the persistence of unhelpful thoughts, the attachment to unhelpful thoughts, the impact on behaviour, including appetite and sleep. Most often is it connected to an unwanted life event or situations both real and imagined. Low mood is an important emotion that helps us to process things that have happened to us.Its function is also to alert others that we are vulnerable and need comfort and protection.

• Signs– crying, withdrawing from others, finding it hard to talk, taking steps to prevent further loss so may lead to worry.
• Helpful responses – comfort, soothing, compassion, listening, empathy
• Unhelpful responses – telling them to stop crying/ being sad,, low or depressed minimising or invalidating their experience.
• Although crying is often a helpful way to process sadness (crying is also a universally human behaviour), many people have had experiences of being told not to cry and therefore they may try to avoid crying. Other noticeable behaviour is being more hunched over, not making eye contact, withdrawing from others, speaking quietly. Anxiety can be closely related to sadness as the young person may be trying to avoid further loss- leading to avoidance due to worry about social rejection or failing to achieve.

Have a look at this video for more information on how to deal with unhelpful thoughts and feelings.

• Comfort – using touch (appropriate – hold hand, hug with permission, back rub).
• Self-Soothing – soothing and nurturing activities, such as baths, warm drinks, other self-care, walking in nature.
• Listening – focussed, non-judgemental listening without interruption.
• Being (self) Compassionate – noticing the suffering, acknowledging that we all suffer, being kind and caring.

Self-compassion is vital. Research shows that it is protective and far from stopping recovery, it actively promotes it. Unhelpful self-talk – criticising ourselves or judging ourselves harshly leads to activation of the threat self-protection (fight/flight) system. Our defences go up, our thinking becomes narrow and our body is flooded with stress hormones. We can’t get away from this internal bully so the ‘threat’ keeps going. We are both the attacked and the attacker.

Compassion activates the soothing system, the body is flooded with nurturing hormones that make you feel safe. You are more flexible in your thinking and calmer in your body. From here you are likely to make more helpful decisions and responses.

Link to self-compassion video:

Many situations can be improved by problem solving

• Be clear on what the problem is: E.g. I am stressed about exams and think I will fail and that my life will turn out badly.
• Generate as many different solutions to the problem as you can: create a study plan with breaks included, revise, speak to my subject teachers, be more present when I notice my mind trying create a worry.
• Choose one solution: I could notice when my mind makes unhelpful predictions, focus on what is important in the present moment and revise.
• Make a specific plan for the solution

• Low mood leads to low motivation and withdrawal. It is important to maintain pleasurable, meaningful and social activity to prevent further deterioration in your mood.
• Developing an activity schedule and sticking to it is one of best ways to improve low mood.
• The 6 ways of wellbeing. It is important to maintain the 6 areas of well-being as part of this activity scheduling. Even if you don't FEEL like doing it, just doing it will help to improve your mood.
  • Connection: be with friends, family, pets
  • Self-care – sleeping well, eating well, personal care etc.
  • Being active – going out for a walk, bike ride, doing PE
  • Giving – doing something for someone, a pet, your community etc.
  • Being present –use all of the senses to focus on the here and now
  • Learning – challenge yourself to learn something new

Finding a way to switch feelings off is the mind simply doing its work of figuring out how to escape or avoid what feels like unbearable emotional pain.

Suicide is offered as a solution to switching off feelings, by the clever, problem solving mind. Once you have the thought of it, you come to believe in the thought as an option. After all, you thought of it! And then you have the thought – ‘I am suicidal’ and feel scared by what that might mean.

Self-Harm and suicidal thoughts

The problem is that supressing unpleasant emotions or avoiding them in some way through self-harm, drug or alcohol use, or other forms of avoidance makes things worse.

We become lower in mood and more anxious.

In addition, adolescence is the time when we are old enough to start thinking about our existence and a young person with low mood might start to wonder about the meaning of life – “What’s the point when we all die anyway?”

Self-Harm and suicidal thoughts: How to handle it

Normalise > Validate > ReFrame > Activate

Normalise –

“We all have thoughts like that”. “Many people feel that way”.

Validate the distress-

Acknowledge it, say what you see using empathy and compassion, ‘I can see this is really tough for you’. Sitting alongside rather than face to face is better.

Reframe –

Frame the issue as an effort to deal with pain.

“Life is tough sometimes and your mind is trying to figure out what you can do to make the feelings you don’t want, go away”

Activate –

Encourage active steps that will help the young person deal with their pain in a healthy way. Identify it, where do they feel it in their body, what emotion is it? Allow it to be there – it will pass in its own time.

Follow the steps above for dealing with low mood.

Devise a plan for what to do instead of self-harming.

Seeking more help

Sometimes you need help in addition to what your family, friends and school can offer.

•Specialist mental health in school’s teams (MHSTs)

•Kooth is a free online counselling and emotional wellbeing support service offered to young people aged 11 - 25 years (up to their 26^th birthday) living in Dorset, Hampshire and the IoW with a safe and secure means of accessing support with your emotional and mental health needs from a professional team of qualified counsellors.

•GP

•Counselling

•Youth work

CAMHS: This help might come in the form of psychological therapy and/or medication.