The inertia metaphor for depression is interesting because dopamine is associated with both mood and movement. So you see dopamine deficiency in mood disorders like depression and movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease or restless leg syndrome. When you’re depressed and it takes enormous effort to move each muscle, that might be your brain searching for sources of dopamine because the usual sources aren’t working.
I’ve personally had the experience of lying motionless on my bed because I felt like I had exhausted all my options and I couldn’t see anything beneficial to do about my situation. It almost feels like the energy that would let me get up has been sucked out, and my body is just limp. I think in times like these, my brain isn’t able to find a promising action to take, and so it can’t find a source of dopamine to generate movement.
If Scott Alexander is right that depression is a “trapped prior on low mood”, maybe the brain rejects options that would produce dopamine because that would disrupt the expected low mood, which would be surprising and uncomfortable. So we actually maintain the conditions for low mood because our brain thinks it’s necessary in some way.
If there’s a non-chemical way to combat this, I think it’s by finding the cause of that prior and working with it until the brain is convinced it no longer has to maintain the low mood. I think that’s what therapy, meditation, or lifestyle changes are actually doing when they work. The brain gets enough evidence that the low mood is unnecessary, and it stops expecting it.
In my case I noticed that I was punishing myself with negative emotions because I had high expectations that I wasn’t meeting, and I felt like I could transform myself into that ideal if I just felt sad enough. Over time I gradually convinced my body that this didn’t help, and that I was more productive when I let myself relax into a kind of neutral, default state. This involved going back and forth many times between a low baseline and a neutral baseline until my body decided the neutral baseline was better. When my brain wasn’t automatically rejecting every plan I came up with, then I found I had plenty of energy and motivation.
But that’s just my model of how it happened, and I don’t expect my experience to replicate for everyone else.
Thanks for sharing! I definitely like Scott’s take on depression being a trapped prior.
When I’m depressed, sometimes a friend will make me go do stuff anyway and it usually makes me feel better, although I never expect it to make me feel better. Even when I know that it will.
Nice, these are interesting descriptions!
The inertia metaphor for depression is interesting because dopamine is associated with both mood and movement. So you see dopamine deficiency in mood disorders like depression and movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease or restless leg syndrome. When you’re depressed and it takes enormous effort to move each muscle, that might be your brain searching for sources of dopamine because the usual sources aren’t working.
I’ve personally had the experience of lying motionless on my bed because I felt like I had exhausted all my options and I couldn’t see anything beneficial to do about my situation. It almost feels like the energy that would let me get up has been sucked out, and my body is just limp. I think in times like these, my brain isn’t able to find a promising action to take, and so it can’t find a source of dopamine to generate movement.
If Scott Alexander is right that depression is a “trapped prior on low mood”, maybe the brain rejects options that would produce dopamine because that would disrupt the expected low mood, which would be surprising and uncomfortable. So we actually maintain the conditions for low mood because our brain thinks it’s necessary in some way.
If there’s a non-chemical way to combat this, I think it’s by finding the cause of that prior and working with it until the brain is convinced it no longer has to maintain the low mood. I think that’s what therapy, meditation, or lifestyle changes are actually doing when they work. The brain gets enough evidence that the low mood is unnecessary, and it stops expecting it.
In my case I noticed that I was punishing myself with negative emotions because I had high expectations that I wasn’t meeting, and I felt like I could transform myself into that ideal if I just felt sad enough. Over time I gradually convinced my body that this didn’t help, and that I was more productive when I let myself relax into a kind of neutral, default state. This involved going back and forth many times between a low baseline and a neutral baseline until my body decided the neutral baseline was better. When my brain wasn’t automatically rejecting every plan I came up with, then I found I had plenty of energy and motivation.
But that’s just my model of how it happened, and I don’t expect my experience to replicate for everyone else.
Thanks for sharing! I definitely like Scott’s take on depression being a trapped prior.
When I’m depressed, sometimes a friend will make me go do stuff anyway and it usually makes me feel better, although I never expect it to make me feel better. Even when I know that it will.
Brains are weird.