Among the various feelings that depression may cause, fatigue is the most common, with more than 90% of patients with depression feeling tired. In addition to fatigue, depression often causes the following feelings: persistent feelings of sadness or anxiety, a sense of hopelessness, and a loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed. The good news is that there are ways to help you manage your feelings of exhaustion and low energy. First, let’s explore what is the connection between depression and fatigue.
Why Does Depression Make You Feel Exhausted?
There’s no single answer to this question—depression and exhaustion are related in many ways. Depression may directly cause feelings of exhaustion, but it can also indirectly affect our sleeping, eating, and exercise habits, depleting our energy and causing feelings of exhaustion.
Gaining a deeper understanding of your own experiences with depressive fatigue is an important step in managing depressive fatigue. Below we’ll take a closer look at why depression may lead to feelings of exhaustion:
Decreased sleep quality
- Depression disrupts your sleep patterns in some way, and surveys have found that about 80 percent of people with depression suffer from insomnia.
- But fatigue is caused by more than just lack of sleep. Excessive sleep is also a common symptom of depression, which can also cause patients with depression to experience a similar feeling of fatigue over a while.
- Irregular sleeping habits are one of the main causes of fatigue in people with depression.
Changes in eating habits
- When you feel depressed, you may lose your appetite, skip meals, or develop strong cravings for sweets with less nutritional value, and consuming large amounts of sugar can leave you feeling groggy and tired.
- Nutrient-dense foods like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains provide healthy antioxidants and nutrients and have stamina-boosting effects, and these are the foods we tend to put aside during a depressive episode.
Changes in exercise habits
- Exercise is a great way to gain energy, but feeling depressed may make it harder to exercise regularly. Depression can cause you to lack motivation in many areas of your life, including motivation to exercise.
- But please don’t think that this lack of exercise is due to laziness, it’s not the case. For patients with depression, it is not easy to mobilize the motivation to exercise when they are troubled by depression. If they are affected by guilt and despair, it will be even more difficult to arouse the motivation to exercise.
- It’s understandable that when you have depression, you may not exercise as regularly as you used to, or may not feel like exercising. Correctly recognizing that these changes in thoughts are caused by depression, rather than being lazy, can help you better deal with depression.
Stress caused by depression
- The uncontrollable changes that depression brings to life will undoubtedly increase the stress of patients with depression, and these stresses will in turn aggravate depressive symptoms, making people feel deeply exhausted, forming a vicious cycle.
- For example, the amygdala is a part of the brain associated with anxiety, stress, and fear. Its overactivity will lead to cognitive (thinking) biases, that is, negative perceptions of the world and self, making people deeply troubled by depression. Inextricable.
How to Treat Depression?
Since depression is the root cause of your fatigue, the most important thing you can do to get rid of your tiredness is to get professional depression treatment. The survey found that about 80% to 90% of patients with depression can feel their symptoms relieved to a certain extent after receiving professional treatment.
There are many treatment options for depression, and each treatment option offers different ways to help you cope with challenges associated with depressed mood, such as feelings of exhaustion.
Here are two main treatment options worth considering:
Medical treatement
- If you are experiencing ongoing depression, you may want to consider medication. Antidepressants are the most commonly used drugs to treat depression.
- To ensure your safety, your doctor will evaluate a variety of factors before prescribing an antidepressant, including your medical history, family history, and possible mental illness.
- If you think some of the antidepressants prescribed by your doctor might help, you can take them, but it usually takes more than a month to feel the effects of antidepressants. Although it may seem troublesome, medications can be effective in treating depression.
Talk therapy
- Talk therapy, also known as psychotherapy, is a collective name for a variety of treatments. The following treatments are all designed to treat depression, but the specific methods of operation vary cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), behavioral activation techniques (BA), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and interpersonal therapy (IPT).
- Of course, psychotherapy is not a panacea. Don’t be discouraged if one type of treatment doesn’t work for you; it may take some time to find the treatment that works for you.
Ways to Overcome Depressive Fatigue
Because treatment for depression is a long-term process, it may be helpful to consider how to directly address depressive exhaustion during this time. Here are some ways to help you relieve feelings of low energy and fatigue:
Prioritize good sleep
- Keep your sleep schedule consistent. Try to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning. In this way, your body will gradually adapt to a certain routine and get healthy sleep.
- Make sure your bedroom is quiet, dark, relaxing, and at the right temperature. You can try different room temperatures, or try using a white noise machine. Over time, you may discover the optimal room environment that helps you get a good night’s sleep.
- Move the TV, computer, and smartphone out of the bedroom. While this may be a difficult task for you, try doing this slowly because avoiding strong blue light will help you fall asleep faster.
Eat more nutritious foods
- Along with improving your sleep habits, developing more nutritious eating habits can also improve feelings of fatigue. Some foods may help relieve depression, and eating a balanced diet can help increase energy. This usually includes a variety of unprocessed carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, especially vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.
- In addition to paying attention to the types of food you eat, it may be better to have smaller meals and snacks every few hours rather than three large meals a day. Studies have found that eating more frequently may provide your body with more sustained energy than eating a large amount of food in smaller portions.
Stay connected with loved ones
- It’s not always easy to ask for help, but it’s important to have a support system because depression can leave you feeling deeply alone, so staying in touch with loved ones who care about you can be a great way to ease depression exhaustion.
Increase the amount of exercise and develop the habit of regular exercise
- While feeling depressed may make exercising more difficult, creating a realistic exercise plan and incorporating it into your daily life can really help you reduce depressive exhaustion. For example, taking a 30-minute walk every day can also increase your energy and improve depression.
Take up a new hobby
- Some hobbies can help you healthily vent your feelings, such as journaling, painting, or playing a musical instrument, which can be a useful hobby to channel and manage depression.
- You can try them one by one to find hobbies that suit you and integrate them into your daily life, slowly reducing the feeling of depressive fatigue in the process.
Try to increase your activity level
- When you’re depressed, it’s difficult to do just about anything. When you’re less active, you may feel less motivated and more exhausted.
- When you feel physically exhausted, you need to rest, but for people with depression, the opposite is true. Sleeping and sitting around a lot can make you feel more tired and give you more time to spend time stuck in a depressed mood, which can make you feel worse.
- You need to break this cycle – slowly increase your activity to help you gain more energy to do more.