What is normal? How do you differentiate between depression and life’s “normal” ups and downs?

People who’ve never experienced depression may mistake it for extreme sadness. In reality, depression is much more complex than that. Depression tends to amplify all negative emotions, including shame, anger, and anxiety.

This can take you to some very dark and isolated places. When I was an undergraduate student, my psychology professor began the lesson on depression with a story told to him by a former patient:

“Living with depression is like being in an emotional hole. When you’re in the hole, it’s dark and hopeless. It feels like there’s no way out. But when you’re not depressed, it feels like you’re standing outside of the hole, looking down. And you can’t even imagine how it ever felt to be inside it.”

You might relate to this description, or your experience of depression may feel completely different. Either way, when we are depressed, our relationship with our emotions, especially negative ones, is affected.

Disappointments can trigger days or even weeks of sadness. Things that other people can just brush off, like an unanswered text, can set off intense feelings of self-loathing and anxiety.

“Every day, I feel depressed and hopeless. Something triggers my anxiety, then I can’t stop myself from worrying about everything. I may have a positive mood swing, but it is short-lived, and I fall into depression and hopelessness again.”

Anonymous

Feeling normal doesn’t mean feeling happy all the time, or even feeling less intense sadness. People without depression experience all the same emotions as people who are depressed. The most notable difference is how deeply people with depression are affected by negative emotions.

Depression and sticky negative emotions

Negative emotions on their own are not a bad thing. In fact, they are an important tool for understanding ourselves and making sense of the world. However, in the depressed brain, negative emotions hold outsized importance. They overstay their usefulness and cloud our perceptions and judgment.

“When I was depressed, sadness felt like the truth, and happiness seemed like a false illusion.”

Anonymous

One theory that illustrates the relationship between depression and emotions is the theory of explanatory styles, which summarizes the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences.

When we are emotionally healthy, we are more likely to have an optimistic explanatory style.

This means that…

We believe that life has more ups than downs and that the downs are only temporary.
We retain our self-value and self-love, even if something doesn’t go our way.
Our negative emotional responses come and go, and we do not hold on to them.

The depressed brain has a completely different reaction to negative, or even neutral, emotions. When we are depressed, we are more likely to interpret our emotions in a pessimistic explanatory style.

In a nutshell, when we are feeling negative emotions, we are more likely to believe that:

The negativity is permanent – “I will feel like this forever.”
The negativity represents everything – “Nothing can make me feel any different.”
We are at fault – “I feel terrible because I am such a bad person.”

Even worse, feeling depressed can make us view positive emotions in a negative light:

“I feel guilty that I don’t enjoy my life more.”

“If people knew how I really feel most of the time, they wouldn’t like me."

“I don’t deserve to feel happy.”

These negative thoughts feed into the negative emotions and strengthen their staying power.

What causes this cycle of pessimistic thoughts and low mood is not exactly clear. What we do know is that constantly feeling negative emotions makes depressive symptoms worse.

While depression can make negative emotions feel more intense and enduring, it is equally common to feel no emotion at all.

Depression and emotional blunting

“Emotional numbness feels like a void. When you watch a sad scene in a movie or hear a funny joke, you know you should have an appropriate emotional reaction, but you don’t. You have to fake the emotion to appease those around you. But inside, you just feel hollow.”

Anonymous

All too often, living with depression means alternating between periods of deeply low emotions and periods of numbness.

People with severe depression may notice that their reactions to emotional events, both positive and negative, are numbed. Negative emotions and emotional numbness are how the depressed brain protects itself. Some common experiences include:

Finding it difficult to cry
Losing interest in once-enjoyed activities (anhedonia)
Unable to relate to the emotional experiences of others

While researchers are still learning how depression causes emotional numbness, it may be related to the ways depression alters brain function, especially in the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with emotional regulation.

To complicate things further, antidepressant medical treatments, like SSRIs, sometimes result in feeling numb. In fact, they can cause a phenomenon known as “emotional blunting.” It’s a side effect more than 50% of people on antidepressants experience. For this reason, it can be very difficult to identify if emotional numbness comes from depression or treatment with antidepressant drugs.

“Antidepressants lifted the dark clouds but left me numb. When I couldn’t feel joy after my nephew’s birth, I knew something was wrong.”

Anonymous

Being in a depressive or emotionally numb state for weeks, months, or even years at a time can make it very hard to remember what “normal” emotions feel like. It can even feel as if those parts of us that could experience positive emotions are gone, and we spend most of our energy trying to get them back.

“Depression makes me feel as if I’ve lost all the best parts of myself - my sense of humor, my passion - all the things I’ve loved about myself. Depression sucks my energy so I cannot invest in those parts of myself anymore, even though I fight so hard to hold on to them.”

Anonymous

All of this is to say that emotional numbness is a perfectly normal symptom of depression. It is not your fault and not a reflection of who you are as a person.

If you have noticed a change in how you experience emotions, the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale can help you better understand your symptoms and get an indication of your depression severity: MADRS-s depression severity test.

What does it mean to feel normal emotions?

“I went through a terrible situation and started to experience grief. I worked through it with my therapist, and it was clear it wouldn’t progress into depression. I could go through the emotions with the coping skills I learned. I realized that living life means feeling everything- good and bad. But I can get through it.”

Anonymous

People recovering from emotional blunting may question if their reactions are “normal.” After feeling numb for so long, feeling any kind of emotion can feel strange. On the other side, any sign of sadness or negativity is looked at with suspicion. It is common to ask, “Is my sadness or anger OK, or is this another sign of depression?”

The truth is, when it comes to emotion, there is no “normal”. Some people naturally feel emotions more or less intensely than others. Emotional health isn’t measured by the types of emotions we feel, but by how we react to our emotions.

Psychologist and Director of the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence Dr. Marc Brackett explains emotional health like this:

“..As a society [we] often times think of emotions as good or bad. Right? Happy as good. Sad is bad, right? Content is good. Anxiety, stress, overwhelm is bad. [But really], emotions are information, they are data. They help us make informed decisions. They help us build and maintain healthy relationships. There's no good or bad emotions. If we can learn how to use our feelings wisely, we can achieve all of our dreams.”

When we view our emotions as a navigation tool, we can use them to support our wellbeing. Our emotional reactions can give us insight into ourselves and our values.

Expanding our vocabulary beyond the basic emotions of sadness, fear, happiness, and anger gives us the language to express our feelings. The emotion wheel is a great tool for this. You can use the emotion wheel in this simple exercise to label your feelings.

Emotions Wheel Exercise

Step 1: Find your primary emotion in the center of the wheel.

Step 2: From there read through the secondary emotions under the primary emotion. For example, under anger, you would find aggressive, distant, and critical.

Step 3: Consider if any of these secondary feelings better describe your emotion. If so, choose that emotion and read through the tertiary emotions.

Under the secondary emotion distant, there are two tertiary emotions, withdrawn and suspicious.

Step 4: Using the secondary and tertiary emotions, answer the following questions:

I feel---- because----
If I wanted to describe my emotional state to someone else, I would say---
What can I do the next time I feel like this?

Just identifying our emotions can greatly reduce their intensity. The emotion wheel is also good for labeling and appreciating positive emotions.

Talk therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can also support emotional health. So can medically supervised tapering from antidepressant drugs. Using a tDCS device like the Flow headset stimulates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and reduces negative emotional reactivity.

So, what does recovery feel like? Here is how people who have recovered from depression describe it in their own words:

“As I recovered from depression, I felt every emotion, high and low, as if it was the first time. The first time I cried happy tears was an indescribable experience, one of the best things I ever felt in my life.”

Anonymous

Mike, who overcame 15 years of depression with the Flow tDCS device, describes his improved emotional health like this:

“Since starting treatment, the things that have changed are fairly fundamental. I can engage with my children more … and do things that I find relaxing. Being out of a depressive mood is life-changing.”

Breaking down the emotional walls created by depression is arduous and takes time. Pace yourself, follow your treatment course, and lean on people you trust for support. Little by little, the clouds will lift.