The Quicksand of Depression: How Stop Struggling and Float

Many people who seek therapy suffer from depression in one form or another. Clinically speaking, there are multiple classifications of depression that are categorized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the handbook used by mental health care providers as a guide to diagnosis. This includes categories like Major Depressive Disorder, Adjustment Disorder, and Dysthymic Disorder, among others. While the difference between these diagnoses involves specifics like the duration and intensity of symptoms, the experience of people suffering from these disorders is similar: Depressed people are sad!

The sadness associated with depression is experienced by people in different ways. Some of us experience depression as a dark mood that lasts a day or two, but not so intense that it impairs our ability to function day to day. For other people depression is a debilitating event that knocks them out of commission and prevents them from functioning normally. Some people are generally happy but periodically experience bouts of depression and feelings of hopelessness at various points in their lives. Others people report experiencing low levels of depression on a daily basis for as long as they can remember.

The Unseen Struggle of Depression

Being depressed is like being in quicksand. They’re both things that we feel stuck in and struggle to get out of. When you’re stuck in depression or quicksand, your movements feel constricted, you find it harder to take action, and simple things that were once easy are now hard to do. The difference is that depression is a mental state while quicksand is a physical one, which affects how the people around you perceive what you are going through. It would be much easier for the people in your life to sympathize what you are experiencing if they could see you stuck in a pit of quicksand, struggling to get out. Depression is not as easily visible. Most of the struggling takes place unseen, in our head. In addition, we often don’t want to reveal we’re depressed. We don’t want to let down our guard and be vulnerable. We put on a brave face and go on about our day, but inside the quicksand is dragging us down.

Depression can make it difficult to accomplish the simplest tasks. It can feel like an impossible feat to just get out of bed, similar to the way that quicksand can make something as simple as moving your arms seem impossible. The tricky thing about quicksand is that the more you struggle, the more you sink. The harder you try to get out of it, the deeper you fall into it. So what do the experts say you should do when you find yourself sinking into a pit of quicksand? Stop struggling and float. Which makes sense to me, but in every movie I’ve seen involving quicksand the people stuck at first seem annoyed, then confused, and eventually they start to panic as they realize the gravity of their situation. They definitely don’t stop struggling and float. They flail and struggle as they sink deeper into the quicksand.

Why don’t people stuck in quicksand in movies stop struggling and float? Because that would be boring! When you go to the movies you don’t want to see Indiana Jones make a choice that ends up solving the problem in a non-dramatic way. You want to see him struggle to escape the quicksand, dangerously close to sinking beneath the surface, until at the last moment his trusty sidekick throws him a snake to grab onto instead of a rope, forcing Indiana to confront his fear of snakes in order to escape certain death (nice touch, Spielberg!).

How Fighting Depression Sinks You Deeper

So what is the real life depression version of stopping the struggle against the quicksand and floating to the surface? It’s not being your own worst enemy. It’s not beating yourself up about being depressed, which will only amplify the depression and drag you down even deeper. You wake up in the morning feeling depressed. You don’t want to get out of bed. Just taking a shower seems like an impossible task. And you feel bad about this. You remember how easy it was in the past to shower, but that right now it’s something you simply can’t do and you feel ashamed about it. You can’t see this depression ever lifting and you wonder what kind of life you’re going to live. How will you ever handle something truly hard, like a job or a relationship, if you can’t even crawl out of bed? You suck!

This is what it looks like to struggle against depression. It’s the emotional equivalent of kicking and flailing as the quicksand / depression feeds off this energy and sucks you down deeper. In this situation, you can’t control whether you feel depressed or not. But you can control your attitude about feeling depressed. You can beat yourself up, feel like a failure, a broken person who is incapable of doing the things human beings are supposed to be able to do in life. Or, you can let yourself be depressed. Give yourself permission to feel sad without judging yourself. Everyone gets depressed at some point in their lives. Recognize that this is your time for it. You don’t want to get out of bed and take a shower and that’s okay. You’re depressed! Let yourself feel depressed. Give yourself permission to feel bad. Stop struggling against the depression and just let yourself float.

Learning to Float to the Surface

This kind of advice can be frustrating sometimes because it doesn’t give you any checklist items to check off. There’s no concrete set of steps you can take to make things change immediately. It will take time, and change will come slowly, but one day you’ll wake up and get out of bed and take a hot shower and come out feeling refreshed. It will be a small victory. You’ll feel like meeting that friend for coffee instead of staying home by yourself. You’ll go for a walk and see a cute dog or a beautiful sunset and smile and feel good for a moment. Or maybe longer than a moment. You’ll find yourself thinking about your everyday tasks with a feeling of positivity and realize you’re not focused on your depression anymore. Eventually you will re-engage with everyday life without the quicksand of depression dragging you down. By not fighting it you will have floated to the surface. You will look back at the pit of quicksand and remember you were able to escape it, and you will feel good about yourself for having been able to.