Is it Safe to be Sad?
Sitting up at 4:38AM in a best-western hotel unable to sleep due to an underlying and overwhelming sense of unease, I began to think about the motives and causes of my behaviour.
I’ve been doing this a lot recently, I’ve been studying CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) as part of my MSc and relating this back to work I’ve done in therapy sessions previously. So I’ve also been trying out all the different techniques but the one I really have a thing for is the ‘Hot crossed bun’. Recording thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviours and exploring the links between them.

I’m attending the wedding of a close family friend in the morning. During the day I didn’t consciously feel anxious at all. I arrived at the hotel and immediately began to feel an enormous weight. I became incredibly depressed and my thoughts ran to the deepest dark places where they so often stray when I’m not careful.
I’m here with my family who were concerned, I’m very fortunate. However, I found myself unable to articulate any problem and felt a complete sense of numbness. I resigned myself to allowing it to pass.
As I dutifully carried out the techniques I’ve learned through CBT and Mindfulness practice, the now familiar curious mindset (which for me was the main benefit of (eventually) sticking with mindfulness as a daily activity) set in. I began to wonder if my depressive state itself was a social behavioural strategy.
This makes a lot of sense in the context of my life. I can’t count the number of times where I’ve been terrified of a social situation only to attend in a depressed state, spend the night quiet and keeping out of the way only to go home and cry about it later. But that never feels as bad as how it does to imagine those social situations in the first place and definitely not as bad as I imagine it will be if I acted like ‘myself’.
So I’ve been keeping myself safe from the monsters under the bed (or down the pub to be exact). The only problem is, these demons are anxiety flavoured and they love it when your safe, that’s the only time they can convince you everything else is scary.
This behaviour makes sense if you think about it in terms of evolution. Fear and consequently anxiety are your ‘danger senses’. Tuned to smell trouble and stick it right in your face. Bringing along baker’s dozens of turbo-charged hot-cross madness. Sickening sensations, loud and rapid thoughts, fearful emotions and avoidance behaviour.
The most extreme form avoidance is depression. Now depression is a complex beast, but that it causes withdrawal, particularly social, is undeniable. It sucks your motivation with anhedonia (loss of pleasure in enjoyable activities), keeps self-esteem low which narrows the number of possible futures you can imagine for yourself and keeps the ones you do see negative.
The debate on the evolutionary basis of depression is fierce and inconclusive in Psychology. However, the logical-deduction in several of the main theories is along the same lines. Depression CAN keep you safe, in very specific circumstances.
The Prevention of Infection hypothesis posits that depressive behaviours encourage rest and recuperation attempting to address the links between acquiring illness or disability and depression.
‘Analytical Rumination’ and the Social Navigation hypothesis proposes that depression combines lack of action with rumination allowing a ‘sober’ perspective on complex problems or social dynamics respectively. This allows the individual to emerge from the depression with better social strategies or limiting the damage caused by social mis-steps. Again, we see the depression promoting safety in the face of danger.
Bargaining and ‘Honest-signalling’ hypothesis both posit that depression serves to highlight an unmet need in terms of evolutionary survival or fitness. Bargaining includes the wider family suggesting that by neglecting social roles through depression, it jeopardises a social group as a whole. Thereby motivating group members to fulfil the unmet need. We can see here again that to prevent further ‘harm’ to the individual or group, depression sends out a warning sign.
Rank Theory and Social Risk Hypothesis both map very neatly onto my anecdotal experience today. Rank Theory suggests that in a prolonged fight for dominance, depression encourages the person to back down and accept a subordinate position to avoid further harm. I recognize this too from my personal history, I’ve always been high-functioning even when clinically depressed, anxious or manic. There’s certainly been times where I’ve challenged people in power unsuccessfully, become depressed, refused to quit and suffered further harm. That’s not to say I regret those choices, but at that time in my life I definitely ignored the signs my body and mind were sending me.
Social Risk Hypothesis is similar but focuses less on the establishment of dominance and more on social group acceptance suggesting depression prevents continuation of behaviours likely to result in social harm or eventually expulsion. Anyone else ever felt that ‘They are all going to hate me?’.
To come to the beginning at the end, ‘Psychic Pain’ and ‘Behavioural Shutdown’ models are the oldest and most basic evolutionary perspectives and as you might have noticed they all feed into all the other theories. At the root of it, they suggest that depression (or sadness to be correct, with depression being it’s bigger badder brother) is the mental equivalent of physical pain. This causes the person to shut that behaviour or avoid it entirely to prevent harm to biological fitness.
I knew these theories before, I’ve been to therapy sessions and tried all sorts of techniques for years . It wasn’t until today that the dots connected, and the pieces clicked. I’ve learned over time that there’s no magic bullet for your mental health, but I feel today I’ve learned more about myself and more about mental health in general. That’s a feeling that I’m happy to say I’m also becoming familiar with nowadays.
So here I sit again having yet another psychological epiphany. It feels at times like my life is a series of learning psychological concepts, thinking I understand them and then going through a personal experience that makes me look at the whole topic again with new eyes. That’s why to me, the human mind is the most mysterious and beautiful thing in the universe.
So today I’m going to go and face the unknown with the understanding that my anxious risk-fire-alarm’s far too sensitive to social situations and it has a nasty habit of setting off my depression-sprinklers.
If you’re feeling sad today, firstly don’t worry! It’s as natural as breathing. But you might want to ask yourself, do you feel safe and secure? Did you before you got sad? If the answer’s no, try seeing if you can work out whether it’s a real risk or just an anxiety-flavoured-hot-crossed-monster-under-the-bed.
I’ve lived with depression and anxiety long enough to know that answering those questions won’t make it go away, but maybe it will help you take control.
If you know someone whose going through a tough time, if you can’t think of any reason why they might be upset, maybe try thinking why they might feel under threat.
You could have the conversation today that changes someone’s life.