Lessons, Depression, Meditation

I got word back from my PhD advisor today: postpone the upgrade (an ‘upgrade’ is a sort of checking in with your work to see if you’re adequately on track to complete your degree). I have some good work, but it’s all still a bit too scattered and there are still some sizable gaps. Sigh.

It’s a tough break, but also an opportunity to grow a bit: accept that the world doesn’t always work as we’d like – especially if we aren’t working as hard as we should, etc. etc.). As Ajahn Brahm says in this wonderful video:

A great story that everyone should check out is “Depression’s Upside” from the NYTimes. As a past sufferer of depression, and still somewhat prone to seasonal affective disorder, it confirmed a lot of my experiences. It covers a recent publication that speculates that depression must have some evolutionary ‘reason’ – namely the promotion of analytic thinking, which helps us deal with difficult situations and move beyond them. It also is found to boost creativity – something quite obvious to many creative depressed people. The problem, of course, is pinning down exactly why this happens and then determining whether it’s worth it to be depressed when there are treatments (drugs specifically).

Aristotle was there first [to recognize the value of depression], stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.”

[the article’s authors] Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma.

Although Nesse [another researcher] says he admires the analytic-rumination hypothesis, he adds that it fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorder.

I can attest to the truth of each of the last statements. Sometimes a little extra rumination on something is great – I’ll be locking myself in my study a good bit over the coming months to focus on my thesis. But sometimes it goes nowhere but in circles. You need breaks, and sometimes depression gets to be an unbroken cycle of repeated thoughts. When that happens, and you can’t break out – get some drugs.

Meditation vs Medication has been a hot topic in Buddhism for a while now. Based on my own experience and work with others, meditation during times of deep depression can be pretty useless. But in mild or moderate depression, meditation is a highly powerful tool. It has been proven to stimulate the right frontal-cortex, which is associated with euphoric “it’s all good” feelings and thought processes that can break those painful depressive spirals.

Depression is also rightly described as extremely ‘self’ involved, as one’s thoughts spiral aimlessly around one’s own issues, making it difficult to empathize with others – sharing either in their joy or pain. Meditators over time develop a clear sense of ‘expansiveness’ wherein their current problems or issues seem relatively small. Meditation also puts one in close touch with the reality of change: just watching the mind, or a pain very closely makes it clear that thoughts or feelings are constantly arising and falling. Difficult thoughts or even sharp physical pains can be seen to dissolve under analysis.

It’s no cure-all, but it’s pretty amazing stuff. Give it a try, and if you have already, let me know how it’s worked…