Moderate stress can help improve our work performance. However, if you are in a stressful situation for a long time and do not relieve it in time, in addition to causing depression and mental health problems, there is also a risk of cardiovascular disease. According to a study published in the “Journal of the American Heart Association” in January 2023, depression is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and poor cardiovascular health. People who perceive poor mental health have a significantly higher risk of heart problems. high.

For many scientists and physicians, depression remains a mental illness. It’s classified as an emotional disorder, and it’s usually blamed on negative thinking: You’re being too hard on yourself, or having too many self-defeating, catastrophic thoughts. Or it could be that a traumatic event triggered the depression, especially if your genes make you vulnerable.

Or maybe you haven’t properly regulated your emotions, making you overly reactive to negative events and too unresponsive to positive events. All explanations assume that thinking controls feeling, the old “triple brain” idea. Logically, just change your thinking or regulate your emotions, and the depression will go away. The mantra seems to be “Don’t worry, be happy; if it doesn’t work, try an antidepressant.”

The brain and the body behave as if nothing happened, but they are swallowed by emotions

27 million people in the United States take antidepressants daily, yet more than 70 percent experience persistent depressive symptoms, and psychotherapy doesn’t work for everyone. Symptoms usually begin in adolescence into early adulthood and then recur throughout life.

The World Health Organization predicts that by 2030, depression will cause more premature death and disability than cancer, stroke, heart disease, war or accidents. 2 These are the dire consequences of “mental” illness.

Many studies have attempted to find a universal genetic or neurological nature of depression. But most likely, depression isn’t just a single thing.

Melancholy (you guessed it) is a concept. It’s a diverse group of instances, so there are many regressive paths to depression, many of which start with an unbalanced body budget. If depression is an emotional disorder, and emotion is an aggregate of how well your body budgets, then perhaps depression is actually a disorder of misbudgeting and prediction.

We know that your brain is constantly predicting your body’s energy needs based on past experiences. Under normal circumstances, your brain also revises its predictions based on actual sensory information from your body. But what if such revisions do not have the proper effect? Your moment-to-moment experiences are constructed from the past, not corrected by the present. In a nutshell, this is what I think happens when you’re depressed.

Your brain is constantly mispredicting your metabolic needs.

As a result, your brain and body act like you’re at peace, but trying to fight off infection or heal from injury, just like chronic stress and pain. As a result, your emotions go awry: You experience debilitating misery, exhaustion, or other symptoms of depression.

At the same time, your body rapidly metabolizes unnecessary glucose to meet those high but non-existent energy needs, leading to weight problems and making you more likely to develop other metabolic-related diseases that go hand in hand with depression, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

The brain’s budget imbalance drives people into depression

The traditional view of depression is that negative thoughts create negative feelings. I think it’s the other way around.

How you feel in the moment, acts as a prediction that drives your next thoughts and your perceptions. So the melancholic brain makes predictions based on past similar withdrawals, relentlessly constantly drawing from the budget. It means constantly reliving difficult, unpleasant events. You end up in a cycle of budget imbalances that cannot be broken because the misforecast is ignored, dialed down, or not entered into the brain.

In effect, you are stuck in a cycle of predictions not corrected, stuck in a harmful past with high metabolic demands.

A melancholy mind effectively makes itself miserable. It ignores mispredictions the same way the chronic pain brain does, but shuts you down on a much larger scale. It keeps your budget in debt for a long time, so your brain tries to cut spending. What is the most effective way? Stop moving and don’t pay attention to the world (misprediction). This is the fatigue that cannot be eliminated in depression.

If depression is a disease of chronic misbudgeting, it is not strictly a mental illness, but a neurological, metabolic, and immunological one. Depression, an imbalance of many intertwined parts of the nervous system, can only be truly understood by looking at the whole person, not a single system like a machine part. The tipping point for major depression can come from many different sources.

You may have chronic stress or abuse, especially as a child, causing you to carry around a model of the world built from harmful past experiences. You may develop physical conditions like chronic heart disease or insomnia that lead to bad guilt forecasts. Your genes probably sensitize you to your environment and every little problem.

Additionally, if you are a woman of childbearing age, the connectivity of the guilt network can change over time throughout the month, making you more susceptible to unpleasant emotions, ruminations, and possibly higher risk at certain points in your cycle Suffering from emotional disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Positive thinking” or taking antidepressants may not be enough to bring your body budget back into balance, and other lifestyle changes or system adjustments may have to be added.

Improve blues, start with solving wrong budgeting

Emotional construction theory suggests that we can treat depression by breaking the cycle of misbudgeting—that is, changing our guilt predictions to be more in line with what’s going on around us. Scientists have found evidence of this.

When antidepressants and cognitive-behavioral therapy kick in to make you feel less depressed, activity in key body budgeting areas returns to normal levels, and so does the connectivity of the interoceptive network.

These changes are consistent with the idea of reducing overprediction. We can also use more misforecasting to treat depression, for example, by asking him to write down his positive experiences every day, which can reduce the burden on the body budget. The problem, of course, is that no one treatment works for everyone, and some people just can’t find a treatment that works.

One of the most promising avenues of treatment I have ever seen was Helen. Marberger’s seminal research (Chapter 4) in which she stimulated the brains of patients with treatment-resistant depression with electrical currents. Her technique provides immediate relief from the excruciating pain of depression, but only when the electrical current is turned on, when the patient’s brain switches from exhausting inner focus to the outer world, so the brain can predict and deal with mispredictions normally.

It is hoped that these preliminary but encouraging results will eventually lead scientists to develop more durable and effective treatments for depression. At the very least, these results should help make it clear that depression is a disease of the brain, not just a lack of happy thoughts.