Are you depressed or just sad? Here’s how to tell…

 One in seven adults struggle with over 18 million people. In a year will struggle with this thing called depression I want to tell you today about my testimony of struggling with depression But I want you to know if you're feeling it midlife woman bravehearted sister. You're not alone! We're gonna talk about it today on the Bravehearted Woman.

So depression in the United States is on the rise. If you are a midlife woman listening to this, you may be embarrassed or afraid to tell someone that you yourself are experiencing a little bit of the blues, you might call it. It may be situational. It may be chemical. We have so many moving hormones at this point in time in our life. It may be because you're sad over relationship changes, or you're in that place where you don't know what your purpose is anymore. But the leading cause of disability for women ages 15 through 44 is depression and the rise of senior citizens struggling with depression is incredible. There's no shame in that. We have to look at it.

Now the brain is an incredible organ. Depression is a serious medical condition and it's associated with symptoms of feeling a loss, feeling blue, melancholy, yes, but when you don't find pleasure in the things that used to bring you joy, you have a loss of energy, or you have difficulty sleeping, or maybe concentrating, or maybe you feel really irritable. Maybe you're experiencing sleeplessness or your appetite has changed. Things that you used to really enjoy or they used to be easy for you, now just feel really frustrating and overwhelming. It is possible you're struggling with some depression.

The brain is a unique organ, as I said a moment ago, because it is the brain and the mind, the mind where thoughts are cultivated, where thoughts enter, and then the brain, the function of the organ and the mind and brain connection. They're two different things, and yet they're one and the same if you will. Thoughts lead to the condition. The condition of the brain leads to thoughts. They're intricately connected, but there is a distinction. And so we're always thinking about our mind. We're thinking about our brain. I'm not always thinking about every other organ in my body. I don't think that the largest organ of my body is my skin.

Although lately as a midlife, yes, woman, I do think about my skin quite a bit in the changes. I don't think about my heart all the time or my liver or my kidney yet. Those organs are functioning, but it comes to the brain. We're talking about it all the time. We're thinking about it all the time. It is by far the most unique and complex organ of our body and it needs to be cared for. Your brain needs to be cared for because mood disorders are very real. You might have a mood disorder because of a chemical imbalance or you might have a mood disorder because of the way you're thinking, how you process things, how you frame experiences, and how you look at the lens through which you look at experiences. So, let's think about this.

Depression ~ I'm going to get through this. Here are some signs and symptoms according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and some thoughts about depression. I want you to see if any of these things resonate with you. Prolonged sadness or unexplained crying spells. A significant change in appetite or sleep patterns, we talked about that. Inability to focus, anger, worry, agitation, anxiety, irritability. Pessimism, just feeling negative and indifferent, maybe no joy. A loss of energy or even persistent lethargy, and feelings of guilt. We don't often realize that feelings of guilt or this pervasive worthlessness can be a sign of depression, inability to make decisions, just feeling really indecisive, inability to take pleasure in former interests. Experiencing some social withdrawal. You don't want to be around people. You want to isolate unexplained body aches and pain. Yes, it could be depression and reoccurring thoughts. of death, getting out of pain through suicide. And I want to say right away, if any of those things are something that you're struggling with right now, please tell someone and get some help.

Once again, depression is something that brings a lot of shame because we think that the brain is just the mind, just the way we see life, just the way we think. We forget that it is an organ of the body that can malfunction, just like my eyeballs are an organ of my body. They can malfunction. That's why I wear a contact. That's why I've had cataract surgery. That's why you may wear glasses. Now there are a lot of different kinds of depression and often depression coexists with something else, some other physical illness, perhaps, or some other mental disorder like anxiety disorder or an eating disorder, or any other kind of situation that might be worsened by depression. It's important that depression and each co-occurring illness be appropriately diagnosed.

So I want to tell you about my story. I am a survivor of childhood trauma, and I thought that when it was over, it was over. I'm out of the house. It's done. It's part of my childhood. I'm an adult now. I didn't know, nor did I connect the dots, that many years later into my 30s, I would wake up one morning with debilitating anxiety.

One day I was fine teaching Bible study, living life, and doing great, and the next moment, I was waking up something was wrong. I felt this terror. I felt my heart racing. I felt like I was a vase that was breaking or cracking, nothing connected. I couldn't form a thought. I couldn't speak, I just felt panic. Now, I was young enough that I didn't know about panic disorder. I had never had a panic attack. I really hadn't experienced any kind of depression or feeling sad or blue. I was just kind of this kid that just pushed through life and I was that way as a young adult and you just did what you had to do. So when I woke up that morning, I wasn't aware of what was going on. Now I know that I was having an episode. We used to call it a nervous breakdown. We don't call it that anymore. A chemical imbalance. There was something that my brain just all of a sudden, it just felt like it was broken. I went to the doctor right away. I said something was wrong with me. I said, I need some medicine, something, give me something, fix me. He gave me a little something, but it didn't get any better. Turns out I would live for the next five months with debilitating anxiety. Then I found out that the same root of anxiety at the other end was a deep, dark depression.

Every day at about three o'clock, I felt like this black bag came and suffocated me, just fell over the top of me. It was like that until 7 o'clock or 8 o'clock at night when I wasn't feeling completely depressed and sad. I was anxious, pacing, and couldn't think straight. I couldn't go outside of my house. I couldn't drive. I couldn't cook dinner. I had three little children. And what I came to realize was that my doctor said, I can't fix this with medicine. You're going to have to talk to someone. I'm suspecting that you have childhood trauma. Well, yeah, who doesn't have childhood trauma? You know, I know what my trauma is. I've already dealt with it. I forgave everybody. I thought, all I have to do is forgive and it's over. I mean, doesn't that take care of it? Once you forgive, right? That's the end of it. Yeah. That is what we call wanting the easy lane or the easy button or the bypass surgery, where all I have to do is fall asleep, wake up, and lose a gazillion pounds. Can I just forgive and then fall asleep, wake up and all my problems are gone? Everything's resolved. All my brokenness and the woundedness in my personality is all gone. Well, doesn't always work that way sometimes. I do even think for a long period of time, God gave me a miracle, a miraculous intervention that brought me through. But when I was strong enough. When I was wise enough and mature enough, it was as if the Holy Spirit said, we're going to circle back here and you are going to deal with this. And since you don't want to, your body is keeping the score. Your body is telling you that you have trauma locked in your muscles, in your tissues, in your cells, in your brain, in your heart, in your unconscious, in your subconscious. Because I knew a little bit about it. But I did a really good job at keeping all the balls under the water until the day came when I couldn't do that anymore ~ depression.

At that time, I was a Bible teacher. I was leading the women's ministry. I was a leader in the church. I felt so embarrassed and so ashamed that I was struggling with depression, that I was struggling with anxiety. Well, I did get a counselor. I did get a coach and I had to walk through the events of my childhood and I had to learn how to honor myself by remembering and processing the trauma that I went through. I also found a protocol for medication, which lifted me up out of the seriousness of the depression because after a while it lingered for so long that I really had what they called a death wish. I wasn't suicidal. I loved my life. I loved my family. I loved what I was doing. I was happy, but I didn't want to suffer anymore. So if my life was going to be gone as I knew it, then I just didn't want to go on. And that's what they call a death wish. It was definitely a result of post-traumatic stress disorder, and I suffered the depression and the symptoms.

Let me give you some stats on PTSD for a moment. and complex PTSD. It affects about 8 million adults in one given year, and it frequently occurs after a violent personal assault, such as a rape or a mugging, or some domestic violence, certainly after terrorism or, in my case, abuse, sexual abuse. PTSD can occur. Of course, we used to always connect it with Vietnam vets and the fact that they were experiencing atrocities that were well above and beyond their ability to process. That's what happens when there is so much stress, anxiety, and trauma that it overloads your system and your ability to process and understand what's going on. It will just cause your system to kind of shut down and go subterranean in terms of memories, perhaps you can have blackouts, but your body will give you triggers, things that will remind you of the trauma that you've been through.

I don't have all the memories. I do have very clear memories, and I know exactly what happened to me, but I don't have beginning memories. I don't have ending memories. I just know what happened. So the body, after a while, after absorbing and keeping the accumulation of all of that stress began to overload my system. I struggled with depression and I struggled with anxiety.

So let's talk about you. Let's talk about midlife. In the last two shows that we've done, I've dedicated myself to talking about the midlife crisis that can happen to women, but I want to delve just a little bit deeper into this thing called depression. There is no shame in that. If you're feeling some sadness, I want to tell you, first of all, it's real. It's not just in your head, although it's in your head, it's your brain. It is your thought life because the mind and the brain are. distinct and yet work together. So if your brain is malfunctioning, if you have a serotonin depletion, if you have an imbalance in your chemicals, your dopamine, or any kind of other chemicals that we have. There are numerous amounts of cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and all the other chemicals. If that's gone tilt, you could be experiencing some depression.

Now I'm not a doctor, but I've worked with it long enough to understand that the organ of the brain can malfunction. But I also know That so can thoughts lead to depletion, stressful thoughts, the way that we think, and the way that we process the lens through which we look. So if you're living as a victim in life, if you have experienced some trauma or some devastation, the loss of a child, certainly the loss of a loved one, a divorce, there are many things. Science doesn't get to tell us, Oh, you can have PTSD from this, but not from this. Your body is the one that will tell us what you're suffering from any kind of event that just overloaded your circuitry and caused your body to go an overdrive. You just kind of snap or you feel it just kind of go tilt that, that will tell you that. You've experienced a deep trauma that needs to be processed.

I'll put it in the show notes that there are many amazing places. ITT is one intensive trauma therapy. There are many places that can help you process. I, as a coach, I'm trauma-informed, and I can help you walk through some trauma. But there are others who are really gifted and deeply saturated in this whole arena.

However, all of that being said, again, those are the reasons why you might be experiencing something. Think about what we go through as midlife women. Think about it. First of all, our bodies do go through those hormonal changes, right? We go through the menopause. There's a shifting and a floating and a moving. We're having hot flashes, some of you having cold flashes, There's hair loss. There is the loss of our stem cells working for us, and so the aging process starts. We're feeling our skin beginning to lose its elasticity and aging lines. There's brain fog, especially if in this post-COVID world, where some of you have long COVID, where you may have brain fog, you may have a lapse in memory just because now aging is setting in, but you also are juggling much more than we used to. You've got the empty nest perhaps, but maybe it's the boomerang generation and they've come back. You had an empty nest, but now they're all back. Now you have grandchildren, you have multiple lives to be worried about. We don't just walk away and forget all those beautiful lives. We carry that. You might be watching your husband who is depleting in his health. If you're married, you might be thinking if you're single, I don't have any kids. I don't have a husband. I'm all alone. Situational depression can set in. We start thinking about how much time we have left versus how much life we've lived. You may have regrets, pay attention. To your mood, pay attention.

And I want to tell you that sometimes menopause can be a vent that unearths dormant situations. Some people have experienced the adult onset of bipolar or you might find out that you do have anxiety that was always just a little bit at bay, but now it's increasing. You may be someone who has struggled with chronic illness, and at this point, you just feel so tired. I'm so tired. I can't keep going. I can't keep doing this. Then, depression is setting in. I want to give you hope today because depression is very treatable. And yes, it may be like me. You may have to see the medical doctor and have medical treatment. You might have to take something to get yourself up out of that pit, but you probably are going to need some talk therapy, some processing. If you have trauma, you absolutely have to process your story and what happened to you. If you've lost purpose in your life, if you don't know what it is that you do anymore and you feel just useless or invisible, of course, you're going to feel some sadness. You may need to get involved and start serving people and come out of this depression.

For me, I did all of those things. I took medication. I did talk therapy and I got busy again, taking baby steps until finally, it lifted. I've had my life back a thousand times over. I don't struggle today. However, I will tell you, I know what the precursor is. I know when I'm getting to that place where like, Ooh, Dawn, you're stripping the gears. You're doing too much. You got to slow down. You got to unplug for a while. I know when I need to let my introverted self have that quiet time to refuel. I'm what they call an ambivert. I'm an extrovert and an introvert. I get fueled both ways by people and by myself. So that kind of adds to the swinging pendulum a little bit. I'm very balanced in my temperament and my personality, but sometimes I get really juiced being around people and my friends or ministering or preaching or being on the stage. Then sometimes I'm like, I'm checking out. I will see you guys in about 12 hours. I'm done. I have to pay attention to that because I've learned my body.

All right. So that's kind of my personal testimony about depression, mental illness, if you will, an anxiety disorder, something that needs to be watched because we do know that trauma isn't just an event. It's a biological event. It does change your brain chemistry. It is a biological transition. You go from one state to another physiologically. You are changed. Post trauma people do know that their bodies have. undergone also some impact. If you think about breaking an arm, you know, your arm is different. It's changed. It's not in the same state that it was before it was broken. It can still work and you're fine and you're healthy, but you may know that there's a tendency for weakness there, or some arthritis might try to set in there. When you've had trauma in your life, you do know that it is a biological experience. Maybe you haven't put those dots together, but something does change in your life and in your physical brain. So how about you?

Let me go through those symptoms one more time. Are you experiencing sadness that just doesn't seem to lift? Are you feeling blah? Do you feel like you want to cry all the time? Maybe you don't know how to access your tears. Maybe instead you're trying to avoid the pain that you're feeling. Maybe you find yourself shopping a lot or going to fill it with other things. Maybe you're drinking more than you have in the past. Maybe your social drinking has really elevated. Maybe you find yourself spending money or you just want to sleep all the time. Maybe you feel angry or worried, or maybe you just find yourself wanting to veg out and just watch TV because you just have a loss of energy. You feel like, I'm just so tired and you just feel lethargic, or maybe you're starting to feel guilty and you don't know why. God loves you. You're forgiven, but you feel like some shame or some unworthiness, or you just wonder about your identity, you've lost some confidence. You're not concentrating like you used to. Please pay attention to those. I want you to talk about it. You can write me. You can call me. I can give you a FREE strategy call. You can figure all that out. You can find me at braveheartedwoman.com. I want you to make sure that you connect with someone and say, Hey, that's me! I'm struggling. I've even had some thoughts about uselessness and feeling what's the point and thoughts of I'd rather be in heaven. If you'd rather be in heaven, heaven one day is going to be a beautiful place and we can't wait. But it's God's decision when we go talk to someone. Hey, this is Dawn Damon, your Braveheart mentor, bringing you a different kind of word today, talking to you about depression.

I do have a free gift that I want to give you. It's always my joy to give you a download that I think would be powerful for you. Today I think it's the Brave Affirmations for an Abundant Life. I want you to think about the words that are coming out of your mouth. I want you to think about how important it is to speak life over yourself, over your mind, over your brain.

I also want you to think about some of the physical things that depression can lift. I didn't talk about how to get out of depression. Talk to someone. Tell someone. Get treatment for sure. Start exercising. It's a beautiful way to break the heaviness, the blues, the blahs. If you're exercising and it triggers anxiety or you feel even more depression, you may be battling a chemical imbalance. Talk to someone. You may be struggling with something neurological. I don't know, but I know it's worth paying attention to. But exercise is a beautiful way to break up depression. Also, take walks, get outside, take in, breathe in, and breathe out. By the way, oh, I should do a podcast episode. The power of breathing in from the nose, out from the mouth, and how it's literally like taking a tranquilizer for your body. Your breathing can re-regulate your nervous system. It takes you out of this hyper overdrive into a soothing, calming nervous system state. You can do that with breathing. I can't tell you how many times I've had to do that when all of a sudden anxiety would come upon me. I learned how to regulate and let that panic attack kind of flow over me, not fight it, not resist it, not wrestle, but just let it flow. So that's my gift for you the affirmations that you need to speak the powerful words that you need to speak That's another thing that will help you lift depression If you can't think straight put scriptures all over your mirrors and your bed where you'll see it small things, not big old chapters Just little at a time just begin to renew your mind drink lots of water because the brain runs on water and good fat. So eat almonds and nuts and drink lots of water, eat nuts. So we don't go nuts. Can I say that I just did?

So, all right, everybody, I love you. I want to help you and encourage you to speak life into you. I want you to know depression has come to pass. Not to stay life ahead of you, my sister, beautiful, glorious, yours for the taking. I pray Jesus set you free and I thank you for listening today. All right, that's what I got for you. I will talk to you soon and leave you like I always do. Dawn Damon saying it's time for you to find your brave and live your vision!