Your Brain on Depression: A Fascinating Interview with Neuroscientist, Dr. Alex Korb

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The following is an edited transcript of the podcast recorded interview with Dr. Alex Korb.  

Hi, I’m Dan Lukasik from lawyerswithdepression.com. Today’s guest is Dr. Alex Korb. Dr. Korb is a neuroscientist, writer, and coach.  He’s studied the brain for over fifteen years, attending Brown University as an undergraduate and earning his Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has over a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles on depression and is also the author of the book, The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression One Small Change at a Time. Interesting, he’s also coached the UCLA Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team for twelve seasons and is a three-time winner for Ultimate Coach of the Year.  His expertise extends into leadership and motivation, stress and anxietymindfulness, physical fitness, and even standup comedy. Welcome to the show.

Depression Quotes and Sayings About Depression

Depression quotes and sayings about depression can provide insight into what it’s like living with depression as well as inspiration and a feeling of “someone gets it.” These quotes on depression and depression sayings deal with different aspects of the illness such as grief, sadness, loneliness and other related issues. Feel free to share them on your website, blog or social page for your own enjoyment or to help others.  Read them Here.

Weathering the Dead Zone of Depression

There is a dead zone in a depressed person’s life where nothing seems to happen.

Except for the pain of the absence of everything.

Such anguish is so overwhelming that every other concern is squashed in its wake.  Our capacity for willful actions seems to be gone; we can’t “figure it out.”

We are stuck.  And it sucks.

I have learned a lot about this “zone” over the years, its patterns, and how to handle it.  It’s really like learning to surf a giant, dark wave.  To handle these waves, you need to prepare yourself before the next big ones roll in.

When I’m entering a dead zone, I use positive affirmations I’ve created to “talk back” to my depression. I don’t let the toxic voice of depression drown me out.  It’s important to empower yourself in whatever ways you can during these times because depression will lead you to falsely conclude that

On Depression, Hope, Hopelessness, and Freedom

Hope is a desire for something combined with an anticipation of it happening, it is the anticipation of something desired. To hope for something is to make a claim about something’s significance to us, and so to make a claim about ourselves.

One opposite of hope is fear, which is the desire for something not to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening. Inherent in every hope is a fear, and in every fear a hope. Other opposites of hope are hopelessness and despair, which is an agitated form of hopelessness.

Hope is often symbolized by harbingers of spring such as the swallow, and there is a saying that ‘there is no life without hope’. Hope is an expression of confidence in life, and the basis for more practical dispositions such as patience, determination, and courage. It provides us not only with aims but also with the motivation to attain those aims. As the theologian, Martin Luther said, ‘Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.’ Hope not only looks to the future but also makes present hardship easier to bear, sustaining us through our winters.

At a deeper level, hope links our present to our past and future, providing us with an overarching narrative that lends shape and meaning to our life. Our hopes are the strands that run through our life, defining our struggles, our successes and setbacks, our strengths and shortcomings, and in some sense ennobling them. Running with this idea, our hopes, though profoundly human—because only humans can project themselves into the distant future—also connect us with something much greater than ourselves, a cosmic life force that moves in us as it does in all of nature. Conversely, hopelessness is both a cause and a symptom of depression, and, in the context of depression, a strong predictor of suicide. “What do you hope for out of life?” is one of my most important questions as a psychiatrist, and if my patient replies “nothing” I have to take that very seriously.

Hope is pleasant in so far as the anticipation of a desire is pleasant. But hope is also painful, because the desired circumstance is not yet at hand, and, moreover, may never be at hand. Whereas realistic or reasonable hopes are more likely to lift us up and move us on, false hopes are more likely to prolong our torment, leading to inevitable frustration, disappointment, and resentment. The pain of harboring hopes, and the greater pain of having them dashed explains why most people tend to be modest in their hoping.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, the philosopher Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, a mythological king of Ephyra who was punished for his chronic deceitfulness by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Camus concludes, ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognizing and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

Neel Burton, M.D., is a psychiatrist, philosopher, writer, and wine lover who lives and teaches in Oxford, England. He is a Fellow of Green-Templeton College, Oxford, and the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Richard Asher Prize, the British Medical Association’s Young Authors’ Award, the Medical Journalists’ Association Open Book Award, and a Best in the World Gourmand Award.He is author of Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the EmotionsHide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception, and other books.

 

 

 

Seeds of Hope

Reverand, Susan Gregg-Schroeder writes, “I now know that depression affects all aspects of life, including our spiritual well-being.  It strikes at our very soul, making us feel cut off from ourselves, from others, and from our understanding of God.”  Read the Blog

The Tunnel of Depression

Depression makes a person’s world very small and narrow.  During a depressive episode, he enters a long tunnel of despair; a dark passageway encasing him in its concrete walls.  If he can see an exit, it is in the far distance, a sliver signifying a long and arduous journey ahead.

The tunnel constricts his vitality, his link to the world which isn’t all doom and gloom; where miracles and beauty and goodness are happen, But he cannot see it, cannot perceive the actuality of such events.  His reactions to these events is often sadness; a despair borne of his inability to feel the happiness of such things.  There is also a sense of hopelessness because the failure to enjoy such things isn’t just temporary.  He feels it’s permanent.  He will never feel the joy of a great vacation, a heart-felt complement or the glow of a child’s sweet face.

As he travels the tunnel, it can close in on him.  He can feel suffocated; that he will die of asphyxiation before he blows out the other side of the tunnel.  His breath feels like it is being sucked out of his lungs.  He just doesn’t have the stamina to continue.  But continue he must, if only on bloodied knees.

As long as you’re on your knees, it might help to pray.  Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from depression his entire life, once wrote:

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere to go.  My own wisdom, and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day.”

Lincoln knew all too well the tunnels of depression.  But he kept going, kept persevering.  And you will too.

Flashlights can help us in the tunnel as can wise guides or trusted friends; flashlights of skills about how to deal with depression before we go into the tunnel.  One of the most important skills is the hard-won knowledge that there is a beginning, a middle and end to our depression — even if we don’t feel this is so at the time. A wise guide can be a therapist who can tell us what to expect and not to listen to the howling winds of depression that blow through the tunnel, to ignore the bats of doubt that live in the recesses of the walls.  A trusted friend, can be someone who experiences depression him or herself, but is well enough at the time to walk through the tunnel with you, step by step.

While flashlights don’t light up the whole tunnel, don’t make the depression magically go away, they do provide a beam of concentrated light that burns through that darkness and provides a path, a walkway to an opening that is the end of the experience of a depressive episode.

Often, folks with depression can see the entrance to the tunnel and are heart-struck with a sense of real dread.  Having experienced depression before, they know just how bad the journey will be once they’re through the portal.  But they are pulled, as if from a rope emanating from the dark reaches of the tunnel, into depression.  Attempts to turn around work sometimes.

Sometimes we are strong enough.  Sometimes, we have the strength to override the gravitational pull of the tunnel.

But sometimes we don’t.  And in this sense, it’s confounding.  Because if we can do it sometimes, why can’t we do it all the time?  Maybe that’s part of the mystery of depression.  Because sometimes, even when armed with the best of skills, we still must enter the tunnel of depression.

But we must always remember the bright light that awaits us on the other side.

 

 

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