1. No specific goals
People who are depressed have a tendency to over-generalize and abstract (“It’s all the same to me, I don’t care…”).
That’s why depressed people tend to have more generalized goals than those who are not depressed
For example, depressed people may say to themselves: “I want to be happy,” but this gives no indication about how it will be achieved.
Non-depressed people, in contrast, are more likely to have specific goals like: “I will keep in touch with my family by phoning them once a week.”
Since they are so precise, specific goals are more likely to be achieved than generalized goals.
2. Rumination
One important symptom of depression is rumination: when depressing thoughts roll around and around in the mind.
Unfortunately you can’t just tell a depressed person to stop thinking depressing thoughts; it’s pointless. That’s because treating the symptoms of depression is partly about taking control of the person’s attention.
One method that can help with this is mindfulness. Mindfulness is all about living in the moment, rather than focusing on past regrets or future worries.
3. Learning mindfulness as children
Since mindfulness is useful in battling depression, why not teach it to children?
A recent study has shown that teaching mindfulness in school reduces the likelihood of future episodes of depression
If a child can learn to control their attention at a young age, they will hopefully have this gift for the rest of their lives.
4. Depression blurs memory
One of the lesser known symptoms of depression is its adverse effect on memory.
Over the years studies have shown that people experiencing depression have particular problems with declarative memory, which is the memory of specific facts like names or places
Part of the reason for this may be that depressed people lose the ability to differentiate between similar experiences. It’s another facet of the tendency to over-generalize.
Depression blurs other types of memory as well, though, including the ability to recall meanings and to navigate through space.
5. Hard to remember the good times
Precisely because of memory difficulties and depressed mood, it can be difficult for depressed people to remember the good times.
One technique that can help is creating an emotional ‘memory palace’: a mental store of specific happy memories to travel back to when times are hard.
The research is at an early stage but may prove a useful tool for people experiencing depression.
6. Depressive realism
There’s some evidence that the way in which the depressed view the world is more accurate than the non-depressed: this theory is called depressive realism.
Non-depressed people tend to be a little too optimistic: they think they’ve performed better in tasks than they really have and predict better performance than they actually achieve in the future
Depressed people, in contrast, appraise their own performance more accurately.So, in some ways, people experiencing depression are more realistic.
7. Accurate time perception
One example of this increased accuracy is in time perception.
A recent study has found that depressed people have a more accurate perception of time than the non-depressed.
Accurate time perception may not be much of a consolation for the depressed, but it does hint at how attention is allocated in depression and why depressed people often say that time seems to drag.
8. Exercise treats depression
It’s very clear that exercise makes you feel better for a short period, but can it really treat depression in the long-term?
A new review of 26 years of research finds that it can. These studies suggest that not only does exercise make people feel better in the moment, but it also helps to stop future episodes of depression.
It’s little wonder that many have called for exercise to be prescribed by physicians for depression.
9. More physical pain
Adding insult to injury, it seems people who are depressed may also experience higher levels of physical pain.
A recent study found that those induced into a depressed state were less able to cope with pain
10. Thinking style
People commonly think that depression is at least partly caused by big, bad life events.
This is true, but depression is also about the way people react to those events and indeed, ordinary, everyday stressors.
