Overcoming Depression

Oct 26

Disclaimer: This blog is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis, treatment, or guidance.

When we’re struggling with depression, our first instinct is often to “think our way out” of it. We analyze, overanalyze, and search for explanations—believing that if we can just understand the problem, we’ll find relief. But important issues, especially emotional ones, rarely get solved by thinking alone. They require tools—practical ways to shift perspective, regulate emotion, and reconnect with life. Healing is not purely intellectual; it’s experiential. It’s about learning to move forward, not just to think differently.

Depression can show itself in various ways, reflecting the unique emotional and behavioral patterns of each person. For some individuals, it may manifest as a persistent feeling of sadness, self-criticism, or low self-worth. Others might experience a relentless drive to keep moving forward despite feeling emotionally exhausted, or they may feel immobilized or emotionally "frozen." Additionally, depression can lead to social withdrawal, decreased motivation, and a loss of interest in activities that once brought joy. It's important to recognize this wide range of symptoms, as depression is a complex experience involving emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses.
- Negative emotions can manifest neurologically, either as an excessive presence of negative affect or as a reduction in positive affect. This phenomenon may also be understood as a discrepancy between an individual’s actual confidence and their self-perceived confidence.
As a therapist, my role is to facilitate that movement—to help you cultivate awareness and skills that support healing. In sessions, I create what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”—a quieting of my own assumptions so I can truly understand the person in front of me. Therapy is a space where the mind can slow down, the unconscious can surface, and what was once unseen begins to take shape.
A therapist could be seen as an engineer of the soul—someone who helps you explore the architecture of your inner world and gently redesign it to promote balance and freedom. In this process, therapy isn’t about finding all the correct answers; it’s about questioning the thoughts that keep you stuck, discovering new tools, and reconnecting with a sense of aliveness in the world around you.

When Philosophy Isn’t Enough:

Philosophy invites us to reflect deeply on who we are and how we choose to meet life’s inevitable challenges. It asks us to act honorably in the face of tragedy—to bring wisdom, integrity, and compassion to moments of suffering. These are noble aims, and they offer valuable direction…
But in the real heat of life—the heartbreak, the anxiety, the quiet mornings when getting out of bed feels impossible—philosophy alone often isn’t enough. Knowing how we should live is different from living that way.

When Healing Becomes Another Burden: Rethinking Depression and the Pursuit of Wholeness

Many people come to therapy with an unspoken belief: “If I can just heal completely, I’ll finally be whole.” This pursuit of a perfect, fully “healed” Self can become another form of striving—another way to measure, judge, and fall short. In truth, healing isn’t about becoming flawless; it’s about learning to live meaningfully amid imperfection. As the saying goes, “No mud, no lotus.” Growth often happens not in the absence of pain, but through it.

The Paradox of Identity and Shame

Depression can bind us to specific identities—the sad one, the broken one, the one who’s never enough. Strangely, even painful identities can feel safer than the uncertainty of change. Letting go of who we’ve known ourselves to be can stir anxiety, as if we’re stepping into unfamiliar territory. But healing asks us to tolerate that discomfort—to loosen our grip on shame and allow new, more flexible ways of being to emerge. When we sit within depression for too long, it can solidify into a kind of identity—“I am the problem” rather than “I am experiencing a problem.” Letting go of that identity can evoke anxiety, as it disrupts the familiar framework of who we believe ourselves to be. This creates a paradox: even painful self-concepts can feel safer than the uncertainty of change (Differentiate the ceiling from behavior…).

The Beauty in Brokenness: Rethinking Perfection Through the Art of Kintsugi

In Japanese culture, there is an ancient art called Kintsugi—the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer. Instead of hiding the cracks, the artist highlights them, transforming what was once broken into something even more beautiful and unique. The mended piece doesn’t return to its original form—it becomes something new, more substantial, and full of character.
Depression often magnifies our imperfections, convincing us that our cracks make us unworthy or unfixable. But as the songwriter Leonard Cohen reminded us, “There is a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in.” Our vulnerabilities are not flaws to be erased; they are openings through which healing, connection, and self-understanding can enter.
Perfectionism, by contrast, traps us in a constant state of striving—measuring ourselves against an impossible ideal. Therapy invites a shift in perception: to see value in the process of repair itself, not just in the polished outcome. When we can view our emotional “cracks” as evidence of growth and resilience rather than damage, we begin to experience a gentler, more sustainable form of healing.

Making Peace with Pain

No one can argue with their pain for long. Eventually, we come to understand that suffering has something to teach us. Our consciousness—our awareness of experiences—is shaped by the interaction between our boundaries and the world around us. Although depression is painful, it can deepen our understanding and help clarify what truly matters in life. Healing, then, isn’t about erasing the difficulties; it’s about learning to cultivate growth and beauty, much like how a lotus emerges from the mud.

Learning from Mistakes Without Losing Yourself

Mistakes are part of being human—but the way we interpret them has profound effects on mental health. For someone experiencing depression, even a slight misstep can feel like evidence of deep personal failure. What might otherwise be a minor error can trigger a cascade of self-criticism and hopelessness—a “depressive pit” where one mistake becomes proof of worthlessness.

The Brain’s Bias Toward Negativity

From a neuroscience perspective, this reaction isn’t simply emotional—it’s physiological. Depression alters the function of brain regions like the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and anterior cingulate cortex. These areas are involved in regulating emotions, attention, and self-reflection. Consequently, there is a heightened negativity bias; the brain prioritizes errors and perceived failures over neutral or positive experiences.

When someone is depressed, the brain’s default mode network—responsible for self-referential thinking—can become overactive, amplifying self-focused rumination. A single mistake doesn’t just register as “I did something wrong,” but as “I am something wrong.”

Reframing Mistakes: Cognitive Flexibility and Emotional Regulation

Healing from depression often involves retraining the brain to interpret experiences differently. Cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based therapies, for example, help individuals practice cognitive flexibility—the ability to view events as specific and temporary rather than global and permanent.
A mistake, then, becomes a “leaky roof” rather than a collapsing foundation. This subtle shift changes the underlying neural patterns associated with shame and defeat, reinforcing pathways linked to problem-solving and resilience.

Personality and the Role of Neuroticism

Personality traits influence how we process mistakes. People lower in trait neuroticism tend to isolate errors—they see a mistake as a single event. Those higher in neuroticism, however, often generalize: one failure feels like a reflection of the entire Self. This is why self-compassion and emotional regulation are so critical in treating depression—they buffer the nervous system’s stress response and reduce the intensity of shame-based reactivity.
- Emotional suffering may emerge from both biological influences and the accumulation of life’s micro and macro stressors—the everyday challenges and major disruptions that, together, can overwhelm an individual’s capacity to cope. The way a person's personality influences their perception and response to problems provides valuable insight into their emotional world and can be an essential guide on the path to healing.

The Social Mind: Anxiety and Attention

Social anxiety can intensify this dynamic. A slight social misstep—like forgetting a name or misreading a cue—can quickly spiral into fears of rejection or inadequacy. From a neural standpoint, this inward focus heightens activity in the insula and amygdala, amplifying emotional distress.
Therapeutic approaches often help clients shift attention outward—toward the other person or the shared interaction—reducing hyper-awareness of internal anxiety cues and restoring social connection.
- Given that depression frequently presents with comorbid symptoms of anxiety, incorporating assertiveness training can be a valuable intervention in some instances. Enhancing assertive communication skills may help clients reduce interpersonal stress, increase self-efficacy, and improve overall mood regulation by addressing patterns of avoidance and internalized distress commonly observed in both anxiety and depressive presentations.
  - Individuals who are “lower” in social hierarchy can lead to higher rates of depression.
    - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28107456/
    - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37057073/

The Other Extreme: When Errors Disappear

Manic or hypomanic states show the opposite pattern: mistakes may be minimized or even ignored, replaced by overconfidence and impulsivity. In these states, the brain’s reward circuitry dominates, making every possibility feel exciting or positive—even when it carries risk.

Both depressive overgeneralization and manic overconfidence illustrate the same truth: our interpretation of mistakes influences our psychological balance more significantly than the mistakes themselves.

Healing Through Integration

Recovery from depression isn’t about never making mistakes—it’s about changing how the mind and brain relate to them. By keeping errors specific rather than global, we preserve resilience and self-worth. Over time, these small shifts rewire neural pathways toward greater balance, emotional regulation, and self-trust.
The key is not perfection, but integration—the capacity to hold both our fallibility and our worth at the same time.

Tools for Seeing Life Clearly: A Psychological and Neuroscientific Approach to Overcoming Depression

In modern life, many people struggle not only with mood symptoms but with a deeper kind of disorientation — a loss of simplicity and coherence. When the world feels chaotic and the Self uncertain, it can be difficult to tell what truly matters. Depression often arises in this gap: a mismatch between our inner desires and how the external world seems to respond.
From a psychological perspective, this is a relevant problem. The mind constantly organizes perception around what is meaningful or valuable to us — not just what exists. When that system becomes disordered, as it often does in depression, everything can start to feel equally meaningless or overwhelming. The brain’s salience network (which includes the anterior cingulate cortex and insula) becomes dysregulated, leading to difficulty distinguishing what’s important from what’s irrelevant.

Practical Tools for Navigating Depression

Depression thrives in vagueness. Bringing gentle awareness to your inner world can begin to shift this pattern:

Track your moods and emotions throughout the day or week. Note when you feel slightly better or worse—and what you’re doing at those times. This helps identify patterns of nourishment and depletion.
Have a micro-level assessment of your life
- What is your vision of a meaningful life, and what skills are needed to be achieved in you to execute those goals?
- This may be a behavioral/practical intervention that requires the acquisition of actual skills. Who in your community can assist with the acquisition of these skills?
Adopt a beginner’s mind. Observe yourself as if you’re meeting yourself for the first time. Instead of assuming, simply notice.
- Examine your approach to challenges. Have challenges represent optimized challenges that teach, not ones that reflect who you are or what you’re worth.
Cognitive Restructuring (helps if you have a good therapist)
- Restructure schema (the way an individual’s personality shapes how they perceive and respond to problems offers valuable insight into their emotional world and can serve as an essential guide on the path toward healing)
  - Retool emotional categories and examine microconceptions of the world that are counterproductive. Look up cognitive distortions (we all do them)
Organize your environment. Especially for those high in sensitivity or neuroticism, structure and predictability create a sense of safety. It’s easier to manage emotions when your surroundings support stability. Use fantasy to organize the world when you are out of your domain of competence.
Develop a Gratitude practice
- Give credit where credit is due (to yourself and others)
- Examine resentments, and narratives (self-narrative of who you are and what your worth is)
  - Psychoanalysis is an attempt to repair the narrative of the past.
Practice emotional management before you need it. Just as you carry an umbrella before it rains, build small, grounding habits—regular sleep, nourishing food, movement, connection—so they’re available when storms come.
- A “storm” will inevitably find you.

The Creative Response to the Unknown

The unknown is a juxtaposition where it can tear you apart and be everything you always needed.
Artists transform the unknown into something partially known—turning chaos into form. I often draw from the perspective of artists, recognizing that we are all products of creation—and that creativity is an inherent part of the human spirit. We can do the same in our inner lives. When depression blurs meaning, use imagination and curiosity as tools for self-organization. Write, draw, speak, or reflect. Even small creative acts help bridge the gap between what feels unbearable and what can be understood.
- It can be helpful to explore future identities and distinguish them from the current transitional state. This process often involves affirming one’s present sense of Self while clarifying what “better” truly means on a personal level. Developing a coherent vision of the future—one that extends beyond simply being free of depression—can serve as a meaningful starting point for growth and sustained well-being.

The Architecture of Meaning: When Relevance Collapses

Healthy cognition depends on an internal framework — a schema — that helps us filter experience and assign significance. When that framework loses stability, we lose a sense of direction. Depression can be seen as a breakdown in the brain’s predictive coding systems: the circuits that help us anticipate and interpret events.
This leads to involuntary suffering — not simply the pain of life’s challenges, but a sense that the mind itself has lost its organizing principle.

Finding a Way Out

Healing begins by restoring coherence — building a structure that allows life to feel navigable again. Treatment for depression is most effective when it is multidimensional, addressing biological, psychological, and environmental factors simultaneously. !There’s no virtue in minimizing medical or practical interventions; recovery often requires every tool available!

From a clinician's perspective, the first step is to carefully differentiate between the types of distress a patient may be experiencing:

- Is this clinical depression, characterized by biological symptoms such as anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure), low energy, and disrupted sleep?

- Or is it contextual despair, stemming from a life situation that fails to support fundamental human needs such as connection, purpose, and agency?

- Often, it can be a combination of both.

The Clinical Roots

When depression has a biological basis, medical support can be crucial. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other antidepressants can help restore balance to serotonergic pathways, enhancing the brain's ability to regulate mood and motivation. Additionally, nutritional factors such as omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, stable blood sugar levels, and L-Tryptophan influence neurotransmitter function. Antidepressants can also help reduce inflammation and expand the range of choices available to individuals.
At the psychological level, therapy works to restore flexible cognition — helping clients identify distorted meaning structures and rebuild a sense of purpose. On a conceptual level, we explore how the mind interprets experience: dreams, imagination, and even rumination can all reveal the psyche’s attempts to generate a future worth moving toward.

When It’s Not Depression, But a Difficult Life (Dire Straits)

What often presents as depression is frequently a result of an unsustainable life context, such as a lack of community, meaningful work, or daily structure. Healing in these situations demands practical action: establish routines, re-engage socially, set small goals, and rebuild your sense of competence step by step.

Social connections are essential for protection against stress. Just one supportive relationship can effectively regulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, lowering cortisol levels and enhancing emotional resilience. For individuals who feel "stuck in their heads," therapy should start with developing basic interpersonal skills—making eye contact, introducing oneself, and learning to be comfortable being seen.

Scaling Back to Move Forward

When life feels overwhelming, the goal is to simplify until it becomes manageable. Success, like failure, follows a Pareto distribution, meaning that minor, consistent improvements can accumulate exponentially over time. Each small act of competence or connection helps reset the brain’s reward system, allowing meaning to return to our lives. We should not overlook the importance of making minor mental adjustments.

Seeing Life Properly

Depression distorts our perception—not only of ourselves but also of the world around us. Healing involves restoring our mind's ability to perceive relevance, coherence, and possibility. Through therapy, lifestyle changes, and sometimes medical support, we can help the brain and psyche relearn how to see clearly.

In this newfound clarity, life becomes manageable again—not because suffering disappears, but because it becomes understandable, contextualized, and shared.

From Chaos to Coherence: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Finding Meaning

Life can, at times, feel like a tangled web of suffering—a “rat’s nest of misery.” Some of that pain is inevitable tragedy, the kind that comes simply from being human. But much of our suffering is unnecessary—the byproduct of avoidance, misalignment, and the ways our minds react to challenge. The task of therapy —and of psychological growth in general —is to reduce that unnecessary misery.

Tragedy vs. Hell: Understanding Emotional Overload

From a neurological perspective, tragedy activates our stress response systems—the amygdala, hypothalamus, and autonomic nervous system. This mobilizes energy to respond, to protect, and to adapt. But when stress becomes chronic or overwhelming, this same system turns inward, creating cycles of anxiety, depression, and reactivity.

In Jungian psychology, this moment is when the "dragon" emerges—the archetypal force of chaos that arises when we suppress fear or avoid facing challenges. The important thing is not to defeat the dragon but to integrate it; we should harness the energy of this challenge to fuel our personal growth.

Chaos, Order, and the Psychological Balance Point

We can think of life as a balance between chaos (too little structure) and rigidity (too much control). Too much chaos leads to anxiety and disorientation; too much order leads to stagnation and fear of change. Healing often means helping clients find the right level of challenge—a zone where growth feels possible but not overwhelming.

From a neuroscientific perspective, this balance stimulates dopaminergic pathways linked to motivation and learning while maintaining cortisol levels within a manageable range. This represents the psychological “sweet spot” for adaptation and resilience.

The Obstacle Is the Opportunity

In therapy, we often reframe obstacles as developmental invitations. A challenge isn’t merely something that blocks the plan—it’s the thing that transforms the Self capable of executing the plan. This shift engages prefrontal cortical regions involved in cognitive reappraisal and problem-solving, reducing emotional reactivity and increasing psychological flexibility.
Maturation, in this sense, means learning to ask: “Is this the only way to look at the problem?”—and being willing to explore new frameworks.

Circumambulation and the Call to Adventure

Carl Jung described circumambulation as the process of moving around a central, as-yet-unknown truth—the gradual orbiting of the Self. We grow not in a straight line but through exploration, approximation, and re-engagement. Each mistake or failure refines the psyche’s understanding of what is meaningful.
- The band “Angels and Airwaves” always comes to mind when I think of the call to adventure.
Neuroscience echoes this idea: learning requires prediction error—the moment when the brain realizes something didn’t go as expected and must update its internal model. This mechanism, driven by the dopamine system, is how both behavior and identity evolve.

From Dormancy to Activation: Building Micro-Routines

Depression and anxiety can lead to a state of psychological dormancy characterized by low energy, feelings of disconnection, and a sense of paralysis. Engaging in small, consistent actions—often called micro-routines—can help reactivate the brain's motivational circuitry. Completing even minor tasks, such as making the bed or taking a short walk, reinforces the brain's reward pathways, helping to restore a sense of agency and control.

Over time, this process helps restore the brain's orientation reflex, which is the ability to engage meaningfully with the environment. It is engagement—not passive observation—that gives our experiences coherence. When we act in ways that align with our values, goals, and emotions, we regain a sense of direction in both time and space.

Ikigai: The Neuroscience of Meaning

In Japanese psychology, Ikigai refers to “a reason for being”—the alignment between what we love, what we’re good at, what the world needs, and what sustains us. From a neurological perspective, meaning is not abstract—it’s embodied. When our goals, values, and actions align, the prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and default mode network operate in harmony, creating a sense of purpose and psychological coherence.

Doing It Badly—But Doing It

Therapeutic growth often begins imperfectly. You can’t master a skill—or life—without first being willing to be a beginner. From a neuroplasticity standpoint, early “errors” in learning are not failures but essential signals that reshape the brain’s wiring. As the saying goes, it’s better to do something badly than not at all.

The Takeaway

I genuinely believe there’s a motivation to be unlocked in those negative life spaces…
Life’s obstacles aren’t detours—they’re part of the developmental path. The goal isn’t to eliminate suffering, but to transform it into movement, coherence, and meaning. When clients learn to see challenges as invitations for integration—neurologically, psychologically, and spiritually—they rediscover what it means to be alive, awake, and oriented toward the future Self that is still unfolding.

Thank you for reading x