Lifestyle Choices

Since most people spend a large portion of their lives at work, and since it usually provides a sense of meaning in life, problems related to work are a common cause of depression. The problems mentioned below may also pertain to voluntarywork or work on committees.

When you start a new job, or if you are given more responsibility at work, you may relish the new challenge. As you go on up the ladder, however, there may come a point where the extra responsibility puts too much pressure on you. This ismore likely if you are exceptionally conscientious, finding it hard to delegate to anyone, in which case you are faced with an increasing work-load. You may find that this eventually becomes insurmountable.

If you are over-conscientious, you probably tend to overvalue others‘ opinions of yourself. Your strong ideals to be worthy, superior, good, strong and, most of all, to make no mistakes, are quite impossible to attain. But at the same time there is often an irrational feeling that these impossible goals have to be reached for fear of disapproval by peers or superiors. In this position, the response is often to build a mask so that the underlying insecurity and lack of self-esteem (hence over-reliance on the esteem of others) are well hidden behind a coping and conforming image. At a low level of responsibility you may be able to keep up the image, but as responsibility increases and pressure mounts, the image may crack. For the person governed by external approval, a cracked image is intolerable. It may be followed by severe self-recrimination and feelings of complete inferiority — the precursors of what may become a grey or black depressive collapse.

Sometimes, taking on a large debt or mortgage may create a pressure to succeed financially that cannot be tolerated. One of the factors that makes it so difficult to change a job that is too taxing is the financial responsibility you have already taken on, and the standard of living you have come to expect.

When you lose your job, your position or prestige at work, or when your financial position deteriorates, you are faced with the feeling of failure. I have never met anyone who finds failure easy, but some can tolerate it better than others.

First of all, you may have been right and only lose your position because of the stupidity of others or through a necessity beyond your control. If so, you are going to feel angry, and this feeling may be repressed. On the other hand you may feel angry with “them” because you are unwilling to see your own responsibility in your failure.

For those with a greater need of others‘ approval, failure can be harder to take because of the loss of image (see Increasing pressure, opposite). For others with a depressive tendency, another failure hits an old chord within which rings with sombre tone: “Here we go again, this proves that I’m no good and never will be. I might as well give up now. I’m a useless person. There’s nothing inside me of value. I am a failure — and this finally proves it.”

Quite apart from the feeling of failure, you may also be aware of the loss of the pleasures and perks of your old position, the loss of workmates, and the loss of a whole working society and culture which you miss. You may find that you miss these aspects of work far more than you ever imagined you would.

DISAGREEMENT AT WORK

You may have experienced moments of aggravation at work, or in any situation, to which at the time and in the circumstances you thought you could not respond. Perhaps the wisest and most economical action in terms of the stability of your position seemed to be to keep your mouth shut — but how false this economy can be. Withholding your feeling has a long term personal cost, which is easy to forget if you are more focused on your work place than yourself.

Mind and body opposition

Let us suppose you are in a meeting and someone says something with which you disagree strongly and which makes you angry, or at least irritated. Perhaps it is not politically wise to say anything at that moment so you hold your tongue. Electrical recordings of tension levels within muscles show that you can, in fact, literally hold your tongue by tensing the muscles in your tongue when you do not speak a thought that you want to speak (that is, the thought remains “on the tip of your tongue“). Similarly, when you “keep your mouth shut”, you actually tense the jaw muscles that close your mouth, even though you may not be conscious of doing so. If you are angry, a natural expression of your anger is to punch with your fists or to kick with your legs; therefore when you stop your anger, involuntarily and sometimes imperceptibly, your level of muscular tension rises in both arms and legs— perhaps you feel your hands clench into fists or perhaps you just feel quite inexplicably tired.

Often your emotional attention stays directed to what you would like to have said but didn’t . . . “I think you are mistaken” . . . “But don’t you think, Mr. C that” . . . “Mr. C, I’m getting angry” . . . “Mr. C, shut up!” Or perhaps directed to what you would like to do — for instance, wave your arms in remonstration, shake him, or stuff his papers down his throat. Involuntarily it seems you are preoccupied with your intended response both in mind and in body, your mind rehearsing replies, your body tensing against actually speaking them or moving. The next speaker may be exciting and his data clear and relevant, but your creativity of thought has been lost like a needle stuck on a single groove of a record: the needle and its minute vibrations are your thought processes, and the groove is maintained by consistent, though often unrecognized, muscle tension. The amount of work done in keeping the muscles tense may be equivalent to carrying around two heavy suitcases, but the tiredness is unlike the rather pleasant tiredness you may feel after exercise: it is a tiredness without satisfaction which depletes you into a kind of morose weariness. At the same time your mind is fixed on a negative thought; that is, what you did not say, and so the anger begins to turn inwards against yourself: “What a fool,I should have said . . . I’m useless at meetings” etc. Thus, in the space of a few hours, you have the beginnings of the first symptoms of depression: tiredness, loss of energy, negative thinking, self-deprecation and loss of creativity.

The process is not the same for everyone. “Dependent” personalities do not tense their muscles so much, but appear to be able to block a reaction before it has time to reach the level of the organs of action, the muscles. While these reactions to difficulties with other people often arise in a work environment, they can just as well be the result of disagreement with anyone, be it your obstructive neighbour or your son’s unhelpful physics teacher.

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