60 Hidden Signs You Might Be Battling Depression

Everyone has secret sorrows the world knows nothing about. Often times, these sorrows form a permanent cloud in the person’s mind, not allowing them to function what the society deems as normal. They are named cold, frigid, and emotionless. That’s the thing about depression – you might not even know if you have it. Scientifically, it is described as a mood disorder with feelings of anger, sadness, and loss that interfere with a person’s daily activities. There isn’t always a reason for depression. The pain doesn’t seem to have a purpose. While the sadness is transient and temporary like flu, depression goes on like cancer before it consumes you. And that’s the thing about depression, you might not even know you have it until you look within close enough.

Here are 60 hidden signs you might be battling depression:

1. Oscillating Between Happiness And Sadness In A Matter Of Moments: Depression can hit when you’re with your friends doing one thing you absolutely love. The disposition changes just like hitting a switch button. It’s a small margin between the two.

2. Lack Of Interest: A day feels like a year long. You have zero excitement or curiosity to do things you have a stark liking for. Instead, you might choose to sit on the couch all the time doing absolutely nothing. Sounds similar?

3. Social Anxiety: You don’t want to sound depressed while interacting with friends and family. The pressure builds up and it comes out as you having a bout of anger every now and then. This makes you super awkward. Here’s all the conversations you don’t want to have.

4. Trying Too Hard To Make Others Happy: You believe that focusing on others’ happiness, making them laugh is a way to defeat depression. It’s also a coping mechanism when the world around you seems to be tumbling down, extracting joy from the silly jokes and buffoonery will act as one of the natural cures of depression. Remember Charlie Chaplin? 

5. Insomnia: Sleep loss can often result in not being able to derive pleasure from the little things in life and that’s how borderline depression begins.

6. Eating Habits: You either too little or eat too much. You find fault in foods that you love, your palate doesn’t find flavour, you munch on snacks and candies, often at odd hours.

7. Being Anti-Social: You don’t like stepping out anymore. You cancel plans and going to social events in a bid to avoid people and have them delve into your underlying problems. 

8. State Of Rest: You abhor working out, be it going to the gym, doing yoga, or going for a jog. You can’t simply take it and unfortunately, there is no acupuncture for depression available.

9. Running Away From Attention: That’s the only running you do. You always want to be away from the spotlight and obscure yourself in the background. If by mistake you happen to get attention, you’re a gold medalist in diverting it onto someone else.

10. Inability To-Plan Long Term: Planning ahead, making to-do lists, and preparing for the future seems like a ridiculous idea, as ridiculous as thinking the Earth is flat.

11. Disassociation: Complete indifference and dispassion at tasks in hand are what depression is all about. You lack the verve to do anything. You don’t cry or get incensed. All you can do is stare at the fan or the wall and do things when someone asks you.

12. Lack Of Concentration: You face a hard time thinking, concentrating, and remembering. In addition, you try to do multiple things all at once never giving the due importance on any task.

13. Low Sexual Desire: There’s a definite loss in libido. You’d rather be curled in your blanket than satisfy your most banal desires.

14. Muting Colours And Sounds Of Life: The existence seems like a vapid canvas with no beauty of colour and sound to fill it up. Having the lights turned off, donning sunglasses indoors, streaming on Netflix all the time, or listening to music with headphones shutting down the outside environment are all symptoms of depression.

15. Body Pain: Whenever anxiety or depression hits, the body reacts with a dull, constant, and throbbing pain. Lethargy sets in resulting in spasms and pangs.

16. Procrastination: Even the easiest of tasks feel like a burden too hard to carry out. This is all about depression in a nutshell.

17. Untidy Room: One of the many signs of depression is having a room that is messy. You go on for days without making the effort to take a bath or cleaning up the bed. The junk all adds up. Even in the rare circumstance, you were to follow basic hygiene rules, you are not concerned to clean your room or the wardrobe.

18. Bunking School, College or Office: Depending upon where you’re in life, you start missing going to these places which then results in bad grades or dissatisfactory performance at the workplace. Often times, these people are ridiculed for their lack of commitment. They are labelled as crackups and they don’t turn to a depression chat room or a depression hotline to come out of the fix they are in. Instead, they turn to drugs, sometimes harder drugs, ruining their lives. Have you ever seen a druggie who was happy with their life?

19. Failure To Leave The Bed: It’s not as if you have a fixation for your comfy bed but its hard to just leave. You wake up, you fall back to sleep again and you repeat the same cycle over and over again until you can’t sleep. Here’s a typical timeline of someone suffering from depression.

20. Utter Disregard For Personal Hygiene: You don’t really care about how you look. You don’t shower, comb your hair, cut your nails, or even brush your teeth. These things seem mundane and not worth the effort or time. 

21. Cycling Through Emotions: Emotions such as fear, panic, anger, grief, shame, anxiety, insomnia, OCD, narcissism, loop back on themselves creating a never-ending cycle of depression. Mental health and associated disorders isn’t an individual subject matter. In fact, anxiety or depression often presents similar symptoms. Similarly, other conditions such as borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. have more or less the same signs.

22. Tastelessness: Food starts tasting like rubber. The things you relish seem off and in addition, and question, “What’s for dinner seems absurd.”

23. Opposing Treatment: When you’re suffering from depression, you don’t realise that there is something wrong and even if you do, you resist help and treatment. On most occasions, you believe you deserve to suffer. You wouldn’t listen to your friends or family who bust a gut to get you the help you need. At times you even snap at them for trying to be by your side. Eventually, they leave you to your misery making you feel lonely that produces the notion that you don’t deserve them and any happiness that they might bring. 

24. Being Too Generous: Germinating as a way to defeat depression, you over commit and over give in your relationships. It’s as if you’re trying to buy your way into friendships, family, and romantic relationships. You feel worthless and this is your magic bullet in trying them to be with you. News: This is not one of those natural cures of depression. If anyone needs to receive and not give as much is probably you.

25. Carelessness: The inattention you give to your needs results in the utmost carelessness. Someone can deceit and scam you and you wouldn’t care because of the ingrained belief that it doesn’t matter anymore and you don’t matter.

26. Simple Tasks Become Difficult: A simple, easy task becomes as complicated as finding a needle from a haystack. Answering the phone, doing laundry, buying groceries and other straightforward work constitutes the daily grind.

27. Starving Yourself: You don’t even know when was the last time you ate and you never actually feel hungry. 

28. Odd Sleeping Patterns: Either you don’t sleep at all or you sleep 20 hours at a stretch. You might wake up in the middle of the night not knowing how to sleep again. In addition, you might stop dreaming altogether, not even bad dreams. Another sign of depression!

29. Forgetfulness: It’s like a new slate every day. You start forgetting what you did yesterday, any future plans or commitments. Heck, you don’t even remember what you are doing at the moment. Everything becomes blank.

30. Looking Forward To Nothing: There is absolutely nothing in this world that excites you anymore. You just go through life as if it was a chore. The struggle to get out of bed is real without being afraid of nagging and constant anxiety.

31. Neglecting Home Tasks: You don’t clean the house, do the laundry or the dishes and a day arrives when the floors are covered with dirt, there’s nothing to wear and eat. But, you don’t care you can go on wearing the same filthy clothes, eating shitty food from a local restaurant.

32. Dependence: It’s a catch 22 situation. You want to be alone and you want people to help you out as well. However, you never ask them, do you? You simply tell them what is lacking and leave it to them to figure out that it was a call for help. 

33. Feeling Of Being A Burden: One of the most common symptoms of depression. Every time, you talk to your friends and family about your issues and the things that trouble you, you feel becoming weaker. Apart from this, you have the notion that the people you care about hate you despite being aware, they’ll drop anything to just be with you and help you in any way. You don’t want them to experience the burden of your problems and wish them to be happy always, in the process you start distancing yourself.

34. Isolation: You start to keep yourself away from people and bottle up all your pain points in your head. Depression Facts!

35. Bad Habits: Alcohol and depression. Smoking and depression. Drugs and depression. How many times have you heard the combination together?

36. Cleaning: You quit cleaning. The trash bags keep piling up and you don’t even realise it. It’s as if you are in a trance just going through the motions. This is not how you defeat depression.

37. Getting Angry: The first reaction to anyone saying anything is anger. In fact, you angry at them for quite literally breathing. Depression anger is real. 

38. Feeling Of Aloofness When Hanging Out: When you’re out and about with people, there is lingering and perpetual loneliness that accompanies. Even though you are present at the moment, you are never really there.

39. Mental Fatigue: The feeling of drained out is present. It’s as if there is a chain that keeps you in shackles all the time and the more you try to release yourself, the more worn out you feel. It’s like being stuck in a labyrinth.

40. Sudden Glee: After a long spell of depression, you suddenly feel cheerful and relieved. That’s because you have been getting suicidal thoughts and can’t stop imagining the respite, it’ll bring. You start giving out your stuff to the people you love getting rid of any sense of attachment. 

41. Masturbation: You masturbate all day till you’re dry. Yes, depression hurts. Does masturbation causes hair loss, the easy answer is yes but it causes a host of other problems.

42. Being Passive: You don’t live life to its full intensity. It’s as if you are always saving energy for later not doing things that get the adrenaline up, just going through motions with half-ass effort.

43. Loss Of Interest: Withdrawn and pensive, you lose interest and passion in doing the things you initially couldn’t wait to do.

44. Weight Fluctuation: You either gain weight or lose plenty of it. 

45. Not Thinking Clearly: An ever-present murkiness always covers the thoughts.

46. Insurmountable Task: A simple job becomes impossible as you keep putting it off, delaying it. For instance, you’d need to make a phone call to a client but you don’t do it. You find excuses why the time isn’t opportune, why the client would be busy, why it’s not good to call at the end or the beginning of the week. You would answer emails, make that research paper but the elementary task of making that call is as hard as climbing Mount Everest on one limb. 

47. Bringing Pain To Yourself: You come up with different ways to cause yourself pain in an effort to numb yourself. This craving for pain changes people.

48. Social Withdrawal: Carrying conversations with people becomes hard. Instead of actually thinking, asking questions, and answering, you stick to a few words or phrases. This has nothing to do with being in a bad mood. It is just the result of your fascination with lurching in your own misery.

49. Being Jovial: In order to compensate for your sadness, you try extra hard to crack jokes and make people laugh. This is just an attempt to hide depression from others.

50. Amnesia: You have trouble remembering things. It is another symptom of depression.

51. Teeth Problems: You tend to have poor gum and teeth health.

52. Stomach Issues: You experience poor gut health resulting in indigestion, gastroenteritis, and other problems.

53. Adherence To Silence: You love the quiet. You don’t like to listen to music or hear the voice of a loved one. You’d rather be cocooned in your world with your gloomy thoughts.

54. Excessive Use Of Social Media: You end up spending more time on Instagram and Twitter than with actual people in your life. When you do that, you end up comparing yourself and feeling bad.

55. No Sense Of Time: The time keeps changing but you have no sense of what day or time it is. You often don’t know what needs to be done and have no real agenda.

56. Self Loathing: You are too hard on yourself and criticise yourself for perceived mistakes.

57. Sudden Affinity For Dangerous Sports: A classic escapist’s behaviour, this is one of the many ways you try to defeat depression.

58. Helplessness and Hopelessness: The idea that things can get better is outrageous and nobody can do anything to change that.

59. Pessimism: Holding a negative view of the future is a common symptom of depression.

60. Chronic Pain: Backache, shoulder pain, arthritis, headache and other forms of pain are constant.

These 60 hidden signs you might be battling depression reveals one important fact – it is not one size fits all and every part of it is hideous and ugly. The worst of it is you don’t even know you have it and if you do, you don’t want to accept it. You can read all the articles about how to combat depression, how to self treat depression, natural cures of depression, and others but it mostly won’t do you any good. You willingly can’t avoid depression – it catches you by the throat, chokes you until all life is sucked out of you.