We were astonished to find that one-in-every-three students, who are preparing for UPSC, suffer from depression, followed by issues like loneliness, substance abuse, hopelessness, sexual frustration, what not? Firstly, we should accept—no matter what we do with our life – we all are fragmented human beings – and all of us are on the verge of a catastrophe.
Evidently, our life is only 700,000 hours long and that makes it a necessity to find the right ideas at the right time and chiefly, not to get lost in our journey to find them. Chanakya acknowledges that part of the equation, and with our collaboration with new experts in psychology and practical science, we’re committed to picking out the essential issues that are upsetting students and find worthy solutions to combat them. We’re dedicating this week to such matters – one at a time.
We’re starting with depression – the third biggest health problem in the world. It’s strange what goes on in our head – wouldn’t you agree? Even though we live in a land of plenty and away from wars and direct predators attack, we’re essentially the same anxious being that we once were thousands of years ago.
The good news is; it’s the most common mental health condition – thus, the extensive research for help. In today’s world, we have enough tools to battle depression with our bare hands – so, let’s grab it by its lapel and suffocate it under the sheet of complete understanding.
Often students hesitate to talk about their depression and that’s where they go wrong. It’s hard to recognize a problem if we seldom talk about it. And most importantly, accepting that depression is not just limited to feeling sad – its tentacles extend way beyond it, is the key.
How to know if you have depression?
There is nothing we should be ashamed about – we all, at a certain point of time and place, knowingly or unknowingly, lived through the depression. It’s important to identify your depression, though often it’s unclear and faded, here are few key signs you can look out to point it out.
Tiredness
Overthinking followed by panicking and adjoined by long hours of worrying. It’s the phase where you don’t get enough sleep, or you oversleep and still wake to feel tired.
Eating
Overeating and even the loss of appetite, both are the key signals. This leads to eating disorders and behavioral changes around your food intake.
Loss of Enthusiasm
Losing the interest in things you once enjoyed – this could be anything from reluctance in continuing your hobby or not wanting to meet your friends or losing your faith in the system.
Short attention span
Hard to focus on a single task – task as simple as reading a book or a watching a video, this is accompanied by irritability and restlessness and in certain cases, the anxiety of not following up anything that’s happening around you.
Negative Mood
Low self-confidence and a feeling of worthlessness, this can lead to a typical form of guilt and intensive sadness, with incapability to explain why.
As we feel strange, we should pay more attention to our strangeness, even seek it out time-to-time and understand it. Evidently, completely understanding of your strangeness is the only way out. Sadness crops down when we accept that life is inherently difficult – that the disappointment and suffering is an inevitable part of the universal experience.
How to beat depression?
Our modern society over-emphasizes on the cheerfulness and happiness, but in truth, life mostly is about losses – of faith, goals, time and everything around it. We should understand that a good life is not the absence of sadness and losses, but the one where your losses contribute to your personal development. It all comes easy as we accept some of the universal truths – world is full of greed and folly, that inner peace is rare to find, that it is hard to comfortably love someone, that it’s very unusual to find a career which is both morally uplifting and financially rewarding, that even the most decent people around you are having a hard time.
If you keenly listen to your depression – there is a lot to learn from it. Except very few, we all have learned our lessons late – and we all have wasted a major part of our life. The key to avoiding your regret is to stop your imagination and by becoming more sympathetic to ourselves. You should accept that you’re not the only one suffering but it’s a common agony to humanity in general.
Depression shouldn’t make us desperate, rather it should make us forgiving, kinder and consequentially let us focus on what really matters – finding the right ideas at the right time.
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