What is depression?

[Nick_98]

Depression is fluctuations. 

Depression is mood fluctuations.

Depression is your own mind going in and out between one thought to the next , this creates friction, friction is a form of fluctuation , fluctuation is depression. 

Going from one thought to the next , from one mood to the other , causes friction, friction is depression. fluctuations are depression. 

To heal from depression you need inner stability. Inner stability means less fluctuations , less friction.

Inner stability is when your mind doesn’t pull you like a dog from one idea to the other one.

Stability is inner peace. 

 

[enchanted]

7 minutes ago, Nick_98 said:

Depression is fluctuations. 

Depression is mood fluctuations.

Depression is your own mind going in and out between one thought to the next , this creates friction, friction is a form of fluctuation , fluctuation is depression. 

Going from one thought to the next , from one mood to the other , causes friction, friction is depression. fluctuations are depression. 

To heal from depression you need inner stability. Inner stability means less fluctuations , less friction.

Inner stability is when your mind doesn’t pull you like a dog from one idea to the other one.

Stability is inner peace. 

 

Depression sucks but I believe that majority depression is lack of excersize, poor diet/dehydration, and poor sleep.  

Excersize, diet, sleep is how you get inner stability. 

Edited May 24 by enchanted

[enchanted]

Books like the myth of Mental Illness by Szász argue that psychiatric labels, like depression, can prevent us from healing by taking away our agency. When we view depression strictly as a medical disease, we assume it requires a medical cure, like pills or therapy. This causes us to overlook the massive, proven power of daily lifestyle habits, ike long-term exercise, diet, and sleep, to change our brain chemistry and improve our mental health.

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, Nick_98 said:

To heal from depression you need inner stability. Inner stability means less fluctuations , less friction.

Inner stability is when your mind doesn’t pull you like a dog from one idea to the other one.

Depression is fluctuations. 

Depression is mood fluctuations.

Depression is your own mind going in and out between one thought to the next , this creates friction, friction is a form of fluctuation , fluctuation is depression. 

Going from one thought to the next , from one mood to the other , causes friction, friction is depression. fluctuations are depression. 

To heal from depression you need inner stability. Inner stability means less fluctuations , less friction.

Inner stability is when your mind doesn’t pull you like a dog from one idea to the other one.

Stability is inner peace.

Distinguish between manic thinking and depressive thinking. The distinction is the level of perceived control and harmony with one's wants, desires, values.

 

6 hours ago, enchanted said:

Depression sucks but I believe that majority depression is lack of excersize, poor diet/dehydration, and poor sleep.  

Excersize, diet, sleep is how you get inner stability. 

I don't think it's the majority of depression. The majority of depression is in being in conflict with yourself, and in the more severe forms, you see no way out.

Can you be in conflict with your values, desires, wants while being physically fit, and how does that look like?

 

5 hours ago, enchanted said:

Books like the myth of Mental Illness by Szász argue that psychiatric labels, like depression, can prevent us from healing by taking away our agency. When we view depression strictly as a medical disease, we assume it requires a medical cure, like pills or therapy. This causes us to overlook the massive, proven power of daily lifestyle habits, ike long-term exercise, diet, and sleep, to change our brain chemistry and improve our mental health.

I would say poor health brings you into a low-functioning state which can exacerbate existing internal conflict and depression. If you simply lack internal conflict, poor health just comes off as e.g. reduced working memory, brain fog, lower energy capacity, exhaustion, numbness, lower sensitivity, bodily aches and pains.

It's the distinction between having a car with a poor engine vs a car where the steering wheel is stuck in one position so you can only drive in circles. Even with a poor engine, you can go where you want to go, but it may be a bit harder or take a bit more time or work. But if your steering wheel is stuck, even with a good engine, you will be stuck driving in circles.

Edited May 24 by Carl-Richard

[enchanted]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

Can you be in conflict with your values, desires, wants while being physically fit, and how does that look like?

Great points and questions you bring up. I'd still stress the importance of excersize, since it changes brain chemistry. A person who excersizes regularly is much more likely to have a brain that can solve life's problems and be more resilient to stress. Diet, sleep, and excersize comes first regardless of how well it solves the depression. Try pills, therapy, philosophy, meditation second. 

Edited May 24 by enchanted

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, enchanted said:

Great points and questions you bring up. I'd still stress the importance of excersize, since it changes brain chemistry. A person who excersizes regularly is much more likely to have a brain that can solve life's problems and be more resilient to stress. Diet, sleep, and excersize comes first regardless of how well it solves the depression. Try pills, therapy, philosophy, meditation second. 

Resilience only takes you so far when your own resilience is used against itself. Big muscles when smashing a hammer against your own skull. Inner conflict is the ultimate pathology because it turns your resources into resources for self-destruction.

In fact, being very resilient and active in response to inner conflict (by actively ruminating and trying to find a solution) is over time a losing strategy if the problem doesn't seem to have a solution (you're essentially just wasting energy and beating yourself up for no seeming reason), so you move over to helplessness and a more passive state where you don't entertain solutions, and this is directly tied to the experience of low mood and low energy (it comes from a lack of movement, lack of discovery, lack of action, a more passive form of suffering). 

What people with depression usually do is they oscillate between states of rumination and helplessness and opt for pseudo-solutions and various coping mechanisms and dissociate themselves from the causes of the internal conflict (which limits their cognitive scope, their emotional attunment) and end up in this overall lousy and low-functioning state (and if they get really helpless to the point of hopelessness, they might take their own lives). You don't take your own life if you merely have poor cardiovascular health. That's at best a contributing factor among many others. Calling poor health "depression" is understandable due to the symptom overlap but overall a bit misleading.

Therapy and identifying the source of conflict might ideally be the first course of action, then getting to the point of solving it might involve trying to increase resilience again.

Edited May 24 by Carl-Richard

[Hojo]

When you are depressed you are doing it to yourself. Because you need to be able to appreciate feeling the beauty of life. If God is not happy in his current beautiful form he needs to create something worse so when he gets back he will be appreciative of his current state.

Human life is like depression for God. He needs to be a human so he can appreciate being God.

Once it goes which is inevitably does then God become a human again.

Edited May 24 by Hojo

[UnbornTao]

Yeah, what is it?

You've likely been depressed before, even if just slightly.

What goes on in your experience when you go through that? What are you specifically referring to when you say you're depressed - is it the same as a physical wound, for example?

What goes on in your mind, and how are you approaching life such that you experience that feeling?

Where does it come from?

Can you notice the assumption that depression is a "thing" - fixed, objective, some state that somehow "happens" or comes "to you", like the weather?

Edited May 24 by UnbornTao

[Rishabh R]

Dipression is not being aware that reality can surprise you.@Nick_98 What you are describing is mood swings not depression.

Speaking of assumptions - Dipression is a feeling of hopelessness based on the assumption that nothing will change even if one takes actions. Even though that is a faulty assumption in most cases.

[oOo]

From a non-clinical perspective, depression is the inability to embody a positive consciousness reality alternate to their present experience.

With that context, I created the following questions that may aid in developing the self awareness of another, or at least, aid with said attunement.

• Who is the author creating this character and its story in real time?
• What is the author doing right now through this character?
• Why has the author created this character and story, in this form, at this point in the story?
• What story is the author dreaming about now?
• Is the dominant dream creating the author’s next action the best available dream, compared with every other story the author could create?
• Does that dream add the most to the author’s life story, regardless of how the author currently views their life story or what has happened so far?
• What is the author going to create and test next?
• How does the author construct their life story in their consciousness?
• Is the life story being constructed linearly, non-linearly, relationally, multidimensionally or through some combination of these?
• Is the author being bold in perspective, or perspectively bold?
• What is the most perspectively bold frame the author can generate without losing contact with perspectivism itself?
• How quickly can the author generate and shift the perspective they are creating?
• How quickly can the author recreate the story of the character inside that new perspective?
• How quickly can the author implement and test that character against reality in real time?
• What changes when the author moves between the meta-world and the meta-substrate?
• Does the author’s imagined perspective produce a real change in attention, body state, emotion, behaviour, decision, discipline, or reality contact?
• What would prove that the author is not merely imagining the character but rather actually authoring the next movement of the life story?

These questions are by no means complete and are very preliminary at best, I created them haphazardly a little time ago. My lifestyle requires me to be very fluid while my adherence to any one modality quite assured, so at the time I found these questions useful and may in return, aid anothers discovery route. This challenge acts as a daily stress test on my level of self awareness. The capacity to shift and energetically embody different consciousness realities becomes its own protection and evolution beyond friction inducing condciousnes realities, where depressive symptoms are an example of those. Paired with the grounding of self and broader bodily awareness, the capacity to embody alternate condciousness realities becomes its own healing, and unique avenue of personal growth. Further combined with a deeper empathic imagination, one could say this also allows one to relate to, learn from and understand experiencer's of depression. My non-clinical advice for anyone looking to expand on a similar pathway is to move from map to action as 1:1 as possible. Moreover, quite often depression is a combination of learned helplessness and imbalanced external and internal locus of control, the very symptoms that control the gravity of even attempting to embody an alternate state. That said, by at least being aware of these realities, combined with maturity on how ones emotional system works from a grounded baseline say through a disciplined meditation and emotional awareness practice, training consciousness through a feedback loop of exploration, embodiment, learning from those shifts, then realigning to neutrality, will in most cases than not, strongly mature ones ability to curb negational consciousness states that fall outside our healthy human experience.

[oOo]

15 hours ago, oOo said:

From a non-clinical perspective, depression is the inability to embody a positive consciousness reality alternate to their present experience.

With that context, I created the following questions that may aid in developing the self awareness of another, or at least, aid with said attunement.

• Who is the author creating this character and its story in real time?
• What is the author doing right now through this character?
• Why has the author created this character and story, in this form, at this point in the story?
• What story is the author dreaming about now?
• Is the dominant dream creating the author’s next action the best available dream, compared with every other story the author could create?
• Does that dream add the most to the author’s life story, regardless of how the author currently views their life story or what has happened so far?
• What is the author going to create and test next?
• How does the author construct their life story in their consciousness?
• Is the life story being constructed linearly, non-linearly, relationally, multidimensionally or through some combination of these?
• Is the author being bold in perspective, or perspectively bold?
• What is the most perspectively bold frame the author can generate without losing contact with perspectivism itself?
• How quickly can the author generate and shift the perspective they are creating?
• How quickly can the author recreate the story of the character inside that new perspective?
• How quickly can the author implement and test that character against reality in real time?
• What changes when the author moves between the meta-world and the meta-substrate?
• Does the author’s imagined perspective produce a real change in attention, body state, emotion, behaviour, decision, discipline, or reality contact?
• What would prove that the author is not merely imagining the character but rather actually authoring the next movement of the life story?

These questions are by no means complete and are very preliminary at best, I created them haphazardly a little time ago. My lifestyle requires me to be very fluid while my adherence to any one modality quite assured, so at the time I found these questions useful and may in return, aid anothers discovery route. This challenge acts as a daily stress test on my level of self awareness. The capacity to shift and energetically embody different consciousness realities becomes its own protection and evolution beyond friction inducing condciousnes realities, where depressive symptoms are an example of those. Paired with the grounding of self and broader bodily awareness, the capacity to embody alternate condciousness realities becomes its own healing, and unique avenue of personal growth. Further combined with a deeper empathic imagination, one could say this also allows one to relate to, learn from and understand experiencer's of depression. My non-clinical advice for anyone looking to expand on a similar pathway is to move from map to action as 1:1 as possible. Moreover, quite often depression is a combination of learned helplessness and imbalanced external and internal locus of control, the very symptoms that control the gravity of even attempting to embody an alternate state. That said, by at least being aware of these realities, combined with maturity on how ones emotional system works from a grounded baseline say through a disciplined meditation and emotional awareness practice, training consciousness through a feedback loop of exploration, embodiment, learning from those shifts, then realigning to neutrality, will in most cases than not, strongly mature ones ability to curb negational consciousness states that fall outside our healthy human experience.

 

 

 

Hello again.

 

 

 

 

To anyone suffering right now, stay strong.

 

 

Beat regards.

 

 

 

[Yimpa]

On 5/24/2026 at 2:43 PM, enchanted said:

Try pills, therapy, philosophy, meditation second. 

Can't live without em.

[kag101]

It’s all about getting fed up with wearing a mask. 

[enchanted]

12 hours ago, Yimpa said:

Can't live without em.

That's great. Make sure you add plenty of excersize, healthy diet, and consistent sleep. 

[integration journey]

On 6/12/2026 at 6:38 PM, Yimpa said:

Can't live without em.

Is that lexapro

[Yimpa]

3 hours ago, integration journey said:

Is that lexapro

Nope, those are Smarties candy. I found this at my sister’s place when I visited her, and I was intrigued. I actually thought this pill bottle was real when I saw it at first, but she confirmed that it’s just a gift she got from a friend.

I haven’t taken SSRIs since 2019.  I got off of SSRIs after I started medical marijuana.