Navigating Depression by Learning to Feel Bad

Feeling bad can open the inquiry

In literally every case of depression from very mild to very severe that I've ever encountered the depression has always been functional in some sense, it's your mind or your body trying to get you to do something, trying to deal with some issue.

Nick frames depression as a signal to investigate.

Start with humility and a functional question

Depression is complicated and varied and I try to approach it with a lot of humility, there's a lot of individual difference in terms of how people experience depression.

Depression is a response to something and so if you want to work through your depression you need to understand what is it a response to and then how can I address that core need.

Ask what the depressive state might be pointing to: unmet needs, chronic stress, loss, or physiological contributors.

Avoidance can look sensible, until it becomes the default

It's like that freeze response to just sort of conserve energy, like deflate almost, that was how they were responding, they learned that trying to put more energy into it backfired so the most functional thing was to conserve energy.

Withdrawal or numbing can be protective in context, and also become the pattern that keeps someone stuck.

Anger, self criticism, and the body

The correlation between depression and self criticism or rumination is just ridiculously high, it's extremely uncommon to find someone who's depressed who doesn't have a pretty intense self critic.

Tuning into the body is often the most accessible way for people to start being mindful, because the body's there and we're used to it, and it helps disengage the overly intellectual moral approach.

Nick highlights cognitive and somatic maintenance loops, both of which can be targeted experimentally.

Run small experiments

Be the scientist in your own life, experiment with new behaviours, not just thinking more about stuff, your brain needs to see if I do things the outcome might be different.

Find situations where it's relatively easy to do that. Practice small. Find situations where the amount of anxiety is so small that you would probably just ignore it. This is actually a really valuable practice opportunity for you.

Practice in low stakes moments, so skills generalise when intensity rises.

Scheduled approach work and deliberate practice

What I used to do with my depressed clients for maintenance and prevention is something I called scheduled sadness, you need to inoculate yourself to that, you need to build the confidence that I can get sad I can experience something difficult and that that does not mean I'm going to fall into a spiral of depression.

Find ten minutes every day, set a timer, get out a piece of paper and start listing anything that makes you sad, when the timer goes off crumple the paper up and throw it away, then come back the next day.

Nick describes scheduled sadness as a maintenance and prevention exercise for clients who are building resilience, it is a way to deliberately approach sadness and accumulate evidence that it is tolerable.

Practice

Scheduled sadness, ten minutes

Steps taught by Nick Wignall to practise approaching sadness:

1. Choose ten minutes at the same time each day, and set a timer.
2. Get a piece of paper and a pen. Write any memory, worry, loss, or situation that makes you sad.
3. When the timer ends, stop, crumple the paper, and discard it.
4. Repeat daily for several weeks to build the confidence that sadness is survivable.

This is an approach exercise, it is not analysis. The purpose is to teach the brain that sadness can be allowed and tolerated.

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Continue exploring

• Browse the Nervous System Mastery masterclass guide library for more masterclass guides.
• Read How to Reset Your Nervous System for a simple grounding sequence when heaviness becomes too much.
• Explore Conquering Chronic Anxiety for Nick Wignall’s related guide on anxiety and functional thinking.