The Upward Spiral

Depression is a very stable state— your brain tends to think and act in ways that keep you depressed.

The big problem with the downward spiral of depression is that it doesn’t just get you down, it keeps you down.

requires.

It’s hard to fall asleep and to stay asleep. Aches and pains are felt more deeply. It’s hard to concentrate, and you feel anxious, ashamed, and alone.

feel numb, like an emptiness where emotion should be. Hopeless and helpless. Things that used to be enjoyable aren’t fun anymore: food, friends, hobbies. Energy plummets. Everything feels difficult, and it’s hard to explain why, because it shouldn’t be. Nothing seems worth the effort it requires.

People often think depression is just being sad all the time, but it’s far more than that. In fact, people with depression do not necessarily feel sad— they often feel numb, like an emptiness where emotion should be.

That’s the key to neuroplasticity— how our experiences, including what we do with our minds, actually change the activity and even the lifelong remodeling of our brains.

We now know that what you do with your mind— how you

focus your attention, intentionally shape your thoughts, and pur-posefully calm your emotions— can directly change your brain.

Think of happy memories. Happy memories boost serotonin in the anterior cingulate (chapter 8). Try to think of one

happy memory before you go to sleep— write it in a journal

or just reflect on it.

The anterior cingulate is like the screen on your computer.

There’s lots of data on your computer’s hard drive, but the screen

shows only the part you are paying attention to, and that has a

huge impact on what you end up doing. In depression, anterior

cingulate activity helps explains why you so often focus on the

negative.

However, the hippocampus does much more. It is also central

to context- dependent memory, which is the fact that it’s easier to remember things that relate closely to your current situation.5 For example,

it’s easier to recall memories from your undergraduate days if you’re

visiting your old college campus, because the context is the same.

Unfortunately, in depression, there is a large downside to context-

dependent memory. Because the “context” is depression, all those

happy memories that are easy to recall when you’re in a good mood

suddenly evaporate. Meanwhile, all the tragedies in your life

become too easy to remember.

In depression, the hippocampus not only shows abnormal

activity but also tends to be smaller in size.6 The small hippocam-

pus is likely the result of chronic stress, which can damage and kill

neurons. Depression is stressful and thus disrupts the proper func-

tioning of the hippocampus. Fortunately, it’s possible to grow new

neurons in the hippocampus, and we’ll cover that later in the book.

People with

depression often have trouble remembering happier times but have

no problem recalling sad events. This memory bias can be blamed

on the hippocampus, which sits deep in the brain, adjacent to the

amygdala; it also has strong connections to the hypothalamus. The

primary job of the hippocampus is turning short- term memories

into long- term ones, like hitting “Save” on a new document to store

21

The Upward Spiral

it on your computer’s hard drive. The hippocampus is the “save”

button; without it, you couldn’t form new memories. It particularly

likes to save emotional memories (like building your first snowman,

the embarrassing thing you said to your crush in middle school,

that great ski trip you took last year). That’s somewhat problematic

in depression, because the new memories your hippocampus forms

will skew to the negative.