Question:
Does stress cause depression or does stress lead to poor sleep & diet, which in turns leads to depression? When I am not depressed I can handle a lot of stress without becoming depressed? Are stress and depression related?
Answer:
Stress and depression are related, but whether they "cause" each other is
up for grabs. Fact is, cause is not linear, but circular. Huh? What I
mean is this: everything's connected, so everything influences everything
else. So, your physical condition influences your mental/emotional state
and vice versa. And, how you interpret a thing in your mind makes all the
difference in how you respond to it emotionally. "Does stress cause depression?" you ask. Well, it could. If you were
experiencing stress about not having enough money, for example, you could
interpret that to mean you're a bad person because you're not making
enough money, and that "interpretation" could invite you to feel
depressed. Make sense?
You see, any event you experience in life must go through your personal
memory bank before any meaning or interpretation can be attached to it.
And there has to be some meaning attached to the event before you respond
to it. The first response you have is usually an emotion or a feeling
before it turns into an action. Then, to complete the circle, that next
action becomes another event in your life, etc. Event, Interpretation,
Emotional Response, Action, Event, etc.
For example, in the last Super Bowl the Green Bay Packers defeated the
New England Patriots. That's the event. For you to have a response to
that event, you have to search your memory bank to determine whether
you're a Packer fan or a Patriots fan (or give a rip about football at
all). That influences how you interpret that event, and then, how you
actually respond to it. If you're a Packer fan, you celebrate. If you're
a Patriots fan, your response is a little different.
There's more. "Does stress lead to poor sleep & diet?" you ask. Well, it
goes both ways. Poor sleep and diet is itself a source of physiological
stress; I mean, poor sleep and diet leads to stress as much as the other
way around. It's all related.
You say, "When I am not depressed I can handle a lot of stress without
becoming depressed", and my hunch is that when you're not stressed, you
can handle your emotional life much better, or any other "event" in your
life.
Stress causes depression, and depression causes more stress. And so it
goes. How do you get off the treadmill? How do you interrupt the cycle? I
believe it's always a good idea to work hard to reduce as much stress in
your life as possible, in all areas of your life -- physical, mental,
emotional, spiritual, sexual, vocational, recreational, familial -- and
from all sources -- nutritional, chemical, biological, mechanical,
electromagnetic, hypo- and hyperthermic, mental, and emotional.
To help provide more information about all this, I've recently opened up
a Stress Management Reference Center. I hope this information has been
helpful, and I hope you'll visit the reference center and find additional
help there. I'd also appreciate your feedback on the reference center so
that, together, we can make it a more useful resource for everyone.
Here's the address:
http://www.holoworks.com/HWRef/Stress.html
