Why We Experience Depression & Anxiety

While there are medical and chemical imbalance factors related to depression and anxiety, pharmaceutical remedies often ignore or neglect the underlying emotional and psychological drivers.  Imagine driving your car and the check-engine light turns on, but you decide not to do anything about it. Instead, you keep driving hundreds and hundreds of miles until one day, your car just decides to stop running. While there are times when it makes sense to feel depressed or anxious, prolonged depression and random bouts of anxiety have more to do with a failure to heed the check-engine light of your emotional state. Depression and anxiety are your mind’s way of shutting down certain functions until you address the underlying issues. Talking with a professional counselor about your depression or anxiety will help to diagnose what the check-engine light is telling you.

the check engine light

Fear and anger can be understood as check-engine light emotions. They come on strong with one purpose and one purpose only: to tell you there’s something wrong. The goal shouldn’t be to not feel these emotions, nor should it be to just let them run rampant and uncontrolled. The goal is to understand what these emotions are trying to tell you about the situation you’re in. 

Depression and anxiety usually mean the check-engine light turned on a while ago and the issues are now far gone enough to where it’s no longer easy to self-diagnose what the problem is. Not only have issues compounded over time, but the ability to be aware of one’s emotional state is no longer present. This is why it’s often helpful and necessary to seek the help of a professional to get your emotional state back on track. 

break down of boundaries

One of the most common causes of depression is a break-down in relational and personal boundaries. If you feel like your relationships are becoming unmanageable or you feel like you’re not in control of what happens to you or others important to you, depression might be a likely outcome of this experience. 

Often times when things are going wrong in your life or in your relationships, it’s natural to feel those check-engine light emotions. But when you feel like you might not have a voice or any power to do anything about it, those emotions eventually turn inward and after a while, this leads to a shutdown (i.e., depression). One of the main objectives in counseling is to connect with that voice and sense of power again and to regain a sense of stability in life and in relationships. Once the backlog of emotions is addressed, the fog of depression begins to lift, allowing you to engage in life again. 

Loss of Control

One of the reasons anxiety is so closely associated with depression and why they often occur together is because the underlying causes for both are so similar. Feeling out of control of your own life, your most important relationships, and perhaps even your living environment, all these things can not only lead to shutting down your emotional state but also leaking out random and unpredictable episodes of anxiety or even panic attacks. Depression and anxiety are your mind and body’s ways of telling you there’s something severely wrong and neglected in your life that demands attention. 

Ready for change?

Depression and anxiety could be caused by a number of different factors and reasons. What’s common though is the reason why it occurs. If you find yourself experiencing these things and aren’t sure what to make of it or what to do about it, reach out to us, and a trained professional can help walk you through an assessment of what’s going on, create a custom plan to address the issues, and help you decide what your options and next steps are. The effects of depression and anxiety are fairly straightforward to address. All that’s required is a willingness to talk with a professional and a commitment to do the work.