A Cycle Of Depression

Depression is an awful medical condition that affects a huge proportion of adults at some point in their life. Many of you will know that depression is the name of a condition where people are suffering with unhappiness, but what a lot of you will not know is that depression runs in a cycle that makes it very difficult for the sufferer to combat.

The cycle causes people to lose hope and move down the slippery slope into the depths of despair, but what is the cycle?

Our mind locks on to negative emotions and feelings, arousing more and more negative thoughts, invading our minds so we cannot think of anything but unhappiness.

Because our mind has locked firmly onto negative thoughts and is working like a Trojan, throwing more and more ill feeling into our mind, our body responds by dreaming more when we sleep. The harder our mind works during the day, especially on negative thoughts, the more we dream at night.

When we sleep we pass through different stages called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and deep sleep. REM sleep is the shallow sleep we have where our dreams occur, if our mind is busy creating dreams in our sleep then we stay longer in REM sleep, which means we have less deep sleep making us more exhausted.

If a person is exhausted then their body and mind interprets the reality they are in, in different ways, generally this is in a more depressing way making sufferers unhappy and in some cases irritable.

Over time the lack of deep sleep can affect the repair and growth the body undertakes that is carried out in deep sleep, this can also affect the immune system making a person feel even lower than we have before.

Once the depression has got to this level the sufferer may end up drowning in his or her own despair so they cannot even bring themselves to get out of bed in the mornings. At this level of depression, the sea of woe a person is in can manifest itself further into sufferers feeling like their life is worthless and that there is no reason for living. These feelings have been known to cause people to carry out awful acts on themselves and others, including suicide.

The only way a sufferer can climb out of the depression they are in is to beak the cycle that holds them, only then can they look forward and make leaps forward to move back to normality.

Breaking the cycle may sound easy but it is far from it, if a sufferer wishes to break the chains of the cycle they will need medical help, this normally comes in the form of counseling to talk through the thoughts they have so they can try and make sense of them, this way the sufferer can put them in sort of order and try to combat them.

If you are suffering with depression then I urge you to seek medical advice and wish you every success in combating it.