Depression: When you feel numb instead of sad

In this episode:

• Venessa, hosting the conversation

• Britt

• Justin Stephenson, Clinical Psychologist

Venessa: We often associate depression with feeling low, but for many, it's more complex than that, a mix of emotions that can be confusing and sometimes hard to name. Britt, when you started to realise that something wasn't right, what feeling stood out the most to you?

Britt: Honestly, numbness. I've always been somebody who's felt everything quite deeply. I've always felt either very high or very low. But the numbness is what caught me off guard, because it kind of creeps in, and it takes away your joy. But it doesn't necessarily replace it with sadness. It just is that removal of it, so everything just feels a little bit grey. Like I say, the colours just feel a bit muted, and I think that was the first time I thought, "Okay, this is something more than just grief." Not that grief isn't this big, massive umbrella, but it's something that's a bit more than that.

Venessa: You're saying that it was just taken away but not replaced with anything. I bet that was quite interesting or strange.

Britt: Yeah. So it very much just feels like a hole. It's really hard to explain. I think of it like a black hole in space. It's just that removal, and this feeling of it just constantly going in on itself. And it feels like it's in your chest, and that kind of stops you from enjoying life, and I think maybe that's where people confuse it with sadness, because it isn't always just crying and feeling low and with a sad face on. Sometimes it's just the absence of anything instead.

Venessa: So Justin, beyond sadness, what emotions commonly show up in depression?

Justin: Yeah, so I think as Britt said there, sometimes people will feel quite irritable, quite sort of angry, and the sort of catch-22 with that is if you say, "I'm not generally an angry person," you experience anger, and that can unintentionally feed back into the depression because you think, "Well, this isn't me. Why is this happening?" That way. Other really quite normal feelings for people to have sometimes, yeah, there is sadness, but not always, and quite often people experience just the general numbness or greyness that Britt described there. There can also sometimes be feelings of shame and guilt.

Britt: Mm.

Justin: So sort of, "Why can't I manage this? Why do other people seem to be okay with this?" The guilt tends to be quite strong, particularly when people go, "I need to support my family, or my friends, or my loved ones," or, "I feel like I'm taking away..." And people become quite self-critical during those periods. So it can be a whole host of emotions, and the really difficult thing is when those start to occur, it does just create this bit of a vortex where people really get stuck in that depression. And so perhaps to protect themselves, they withdraw even further, and that, again, makes it even harder to come out of that phase.

Venessa: So Britt, when those unexpected emotions showed up, how did you notice them in your body or your behaviour?

Britt: So for me, sleep is a really big indicator. I normally just sleep for a good eight, nine hours and have done with it. But I often find that when I'm reaching those states, that I end up either sleeping too much or not at all. So I'm either awake until 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, just on my phone or reading or playing games or something, or I'm sleeping way too much, and I will end up sort of sleeping until the morning, or I'd go to bed really, really early, just to almost finish the day because I'd had enough day. So I just wanted to be asleep. And I would find that I would be sleeping way too much, and that would go on for a while. That would go on for days to weeks, and then the problem would then come. I would get headaches, and those headaches would ultimately turn into migraines, and I don't know if you've ever had a migraine, but when you're dealing with migraines constantly, you become not a nice person to be around. So that would inevitably end up with me feeling quite angry and being quite snappy at people, and even people who were trying to be kind to me and trying to express concern for me, I would almost shut them down because I didn't want to talk about it. "I'm fine." I would say that constantly because it was just an easy way out to come away from it. So I know for me personally, manifesting in sleep and head pains, and then that resulting in a change in my emotions and making me just react in a different way than I would normally react, and that's when you kind of go, "Okay, something is wrong."

Venessa: So again, Justin, why might anger or numbness feel safer than sadness for some people, then?

Justin: Yeah, so particularly with sadness, we feel sad when we feel vulnerable and a host of other feelings, and we have to experience that emotion. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes when people are depressed, numbness feels easier to access, or the anger feels easier to access. Sometimes people don't have a choice in it at all, and they kind of just feel what they're going to feel. I always say to people, anger's a very active emotion, so we do something with it, and that can also be very helpful in depression because I'm going to put on my trainers and go for that walk because my partner's really irritated me, or whatever it is. And so it can sometimes shift that for ourselves.

Britt: Mm.

Justin: Sadness, and I think particularly in the case of grief, might help us process loss as well. And so those emotions are all quite complex, and they occupy different roles in depression.

Britt: Mm.

Justin: And the key thing is just being aware how are you feeling that right now, and what could work for you from that as well?

Britt: And I think just going off what Justin said, anger is obviously the emotion of wanting to change something, but especially after grief, after something so insurmountable, you can't change it. So then you just become angry at the anger that you can't change anything. Things can't go back to normal. Things will never go back to normal. And that is what you end up holding onto a little bit because yeah, you just feel angry at the situation and angry at the world, and then you become angry at other people without meaning to.

Venessa: Okay. So Britt, what helped you feel safer acknowledging these emotions rather than pushing them away?

Britt: Well, for the one thing, it's acknowledging what's happened does make it easier to carry on. But for me, one of the things that made me feel incredibly safe, and this might sound silly, but it was knowing that I'd been through the worst time of my life. It's not going to happen again. It's literally like your house has fallen down, and you're standing in the rubble, and you're picking up bricks, and you're like, "This is awful," but the house won't fall down again. You've been through the worst time, and you've come out the other side, and you are still, for better or worse, standing. So it's about knowing that you had the strength to get through that, you've got the strength to keep going.

And having a good support network, like I've got an amazing husband who's just my everything, and having someone there to listen or just be there when you don't want to talk about it, just having someone as that buffer, as that sort of little pillow. But also knowing that you also don't need that person. You have the strength inside you. And like I say, once you've been through hell and back, you know that it's not going to get any worse. So you just have to keep going from there.

Venessa: Small everyday strategies, you've talked a lot about those. Is there anything else you'd want to add about that?

Britt: Honestly, just giving yourself a break, just taking the pressure off of yourself because we're so het up in this feeling of, "Okay, something's wrong. I need to fix it. Something's wrong. I need to go." And it's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Just take a step back, take a deep breath, and just take things slowly. We're so quick to put pressure on ourselves when really it's just us that's doing that. No one else is putting that emotional pressure on us. So it's just, yeah, about taking a step back, giving yourself the grace to go through whatever it is that you need to go through and just allowing it to happen rather than shouting it down.

Venessa: So Britt, what would you want someone to know if they think they're not sad enough to be depressed?

Britt: Well, I'd want them to know that sadness isn't quantifiable. It's not measurable. There isn't a sadness measuring stick that someone comes at you with and says, "Actually, you haven't cried enough. You haven't thrown yourself on the bed in tears." It's not always crying into a tub of ice cream. And we kind of think that you have to be just in tears all the time to be taken seriously, when really depression, what I've found anyway, it's got nothing to do with happiness or sadness. Someone once actually called me the happiest depressed person that they know because I am always laughing, and I'm always cracking jokes, and I'm always trying to make other people laugh. But it's got nothing to do with that. It's how you feel inside.

And I know for me personally, even though I'd lost everyone and everything, I still felt that I was almost too privileged to be depressed because of the things that I'd been through and the love that I had before it had been taken away from me. But depression affects everybody from all walks of life, from all ages.

And that was another thing. I got told I was too young to be depressed when everything first started happening because I was supposed to be young and happy, and it... But again, that's just bordering it down to an emotion rather than sort of a state, if you will. And I think that if you think that you're not sad enough, I would say stop listening to that immediately, and instead listen to what is really going on inside and know that it's not for anyone else to measure. It's not for anyone else to decide. It's for you to decide what's going on with you. Yeah.

Justin: Maybe just to add to that, I think it's really important because we speak about sadness and depression, but one of the core things we normally speak about is low mood. And low mood does fit very much with that sort of numbness, that there's not that range of emotion we normally feel.

So while people can feel sad and depressed, that's not the hallmark of what depression is. And I think Britt raised a really good example there. And I've worked in group settings where you can see this. There's a group of people who are really depressed, and they will smile, they will laugh, and that can be genuine interaction. But what happens is that spark doesn't stay.

Britt: It's temporary.

Justin: ...that's what's really hard. So it's not that people can't have these moments of joy. And I think sometimes that sort of gets, "Well, you can't be depressed if you're laughing." Of course you can, but a couple hours later, that hasn't stayed with us the way we'd hope it has, and it makes it harder to go back into those situations as well.

Britt: Yeah, I would always say that it would be like my base-level would almost be sad, if that makes sense. So it's like I can be happy, and I can be sort of angry at things, but I would always end up going back to that just flat...

Justin: Mm.

Britt: ...that flatness. So yeah, I don't think sadness is a good quantifier of depression at all.