The Psychology of Depression and Anxiety - Dr. Scott Eilers

If you don't feel excited about the future, it's hard to want to do much of anything. When depression and anxiety are severe, our lives often fall into a black hole where we do little, feel little, and remember little. I barely remember anything about my late teens, and it's mostly because I barely did anything worth remembering. Now that I'm in a better place mentally, I can look...

It's easy to lose hope. It's easy to feel like you've tried everything. And maybe, to some degree, you have. Perhaps you hold all of the pieces needed for recovery, but haven't ever put them together correctly. I think we've done an unfortunate job of over-complicating mental health. We've developed a complex set of mutually exclusive theoretical orientations to explain why...

Depressive episodes often start with nothing more than a bad day or two. We don't feel like ourselves so we don't engage in our normal activities. After a few days of just "getting by," our perception of ourselves starts to change. We find it harder to keep the negative thoughts and feelings at bay as the evidence against the shame and the worthlessness feels further and further...

If certain sounds enrage you, sounds that most people aren't bothered by or don't even seem to notice, you may have something called Misophonia. Misophonia literally means "hatred of sound" and people with misophonia experience intense anger responses to sounds like chewing, breathing, tapping, and other repetitive noises. This is a newer term, and we don't yet know if it is...

We're constantly asking and answering questions inside of our own minds. While many of these questions and answers are subconcious, meaning we don't realize we're asking and answering them, they can still have a tremendous impact on our lives. Once, my life was guided by a question that led me absolutely nowhere. I just did whatever I felt like doing in the moment, with no regard for w...

If therapy and medication aren't getting your symptoms of depression and anxiety where you want them, there's another option. It's free, it doesn't require the help of another person, and it has no side effects. It's physical activity. Exercise. Movement. Whatever you want to call it. Meta-analyses of over 1,000 studies demonstrate that physical activity works at least as well...

Have you ever wanted to go to sleep and just never wake up? Do you wish something would happen to you today to put you out of your misery? Do you want to die, but don't want to be the one to make it happen? These are all forms of something we call passive suicidal ideation or passive SI. Millions of people experience this, yet almost nobody talks about it and even many mental health profession...

We all just want to be "happy," but if you don't even know what happiness is how can you possibly hope to obtain it? This question has been haunting me since I was four years old. The idea of spending most or all of my life chasing after something, only to finally capture it and realize it wasn't what I wanted terrifies me. I sincerely believe that most of the world is focused on...

I know everybody wants something that works quickly and changes things dramatically. Maybe you’ve tried some of those ideas, and if you have what you’ve probably found is that they work really well for some fairly brief period of time before fizzling out completely. If you're sick of getting your hopes up for strategies or treatments that don’t work in the long run, this episode is for you. Th...

Psychosocial boundaries are the invisible yet very real walls that keep us separate from other people and from the world in general. Our boundaries enable us to maintain our truths and our beliefs in the face of other people with different perspectives and stay true to our values in situations that test them.

Anger, more than other emotions for most people, is a feeling we generally try to avoid. Anger is seen as unsafe, destructive, and out-of-control. And is certainly can be these things. But anger is not inherently more damaging or dangerous than any other feeling. It’s simply part of the spectrum of human emotion, and it plays a critical role in our relationships with ourselves and with others. Ang...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts (NOT impulsive thoughts, as we discuss in this episode) and compulsive behaviors. OCD is one of the most misunderstood and mischaracterized mental health diagnoses, and the term "OCD" is often used to describe patterns of perfectionism, rigidity, and high achievement that typically have more in commo...

Your mind comes equipped with a mostly outdated survival response called a negativity bias. That’s why no matter how good your life is, you also seems to focus primarily on the worst parts. Your brain is trying to prepare you and protect you, but sometimes the process backfires. You can manage your negativity bias by clarifying your core values, supplemental values, and hobbies. This helps put pro...

One of the most common questions I hear as a clinical psychologist who specializes in depression in anxiety is “how do I deal with the guilt and the same that I constantly feel?” It’s a tough question that doesn’t have a single, easy answer. However, for many of us, much of our guilt and shame comes from distorted, unrealistic thoughts. Our minds only see the mistakes we’ve made, the areas we’ve f...

In this episode I interview executive functioning and nervous system regulation coach Sasa Harper. I’ve known Sasa for a while, and she’s what would be called a peer support specialist in my world, meaning she is someone who has struggled with executive functioning and nervous regulation, is now in a place where she is doing well in these areas, and teaches other people how she got there. While Sa...

Symptoms like depersonalization, derealization, dissociation, delusions, and hallucinations can be incredibly disturbing. They are often thought of as being signs of a psychotic disorder or severe trauma, but if these symptoms only occur during depressive episodes, they may actually be part of a mood disorder. We can also experience disconnections from reality because of intense psychological dist...

Christopher Spence Pratt, also known as ValiantFate, has an amazing story to tell. He has overcome severe depression, suicide, alcohol abuse, and intense bullying to build a life he generally enjoys out of one that made him miserable. In this episode we talk about his story and the strategies he used to get her including fitness, gratitude, goal-setting, and asking for help.

Self-diagnosis can only take you so far. If you want to be able to access a full range of treatment services, get your insurance to pay for it, and check out other conditions whose symptoms often overlap with depression at anxiety, you will eventually need to have formal testing. In most cases, this testing will be a fairly simple process. It usually consists of a structure interview focused on un...

Major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder have a lot in common. Both are mood disorders, meaning they involve fluctuations in mood that can be totally unrelated to life events. Both involve depressive episodes, which are periods of low mood. In fact, the only real difference between major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder is the presence of manic, or manic episodes, in bipolar disorder...

Mental illness can cause physical illness. Depression and anxiety in particular can wreak havoc and your body and make you more vulnerable to illness, injury, and even premature death. In this episode we explore all of the ways in which depression and anxiety can negatively impact your physical health.

It’s difficult, but not impossible, to stay productive when you’re struggling with your mental health. Everything feels so much harder and so much less rewarding. You need a way to counter-balance those variables if you want to be able to continue to function when you don’t feel well.

Anhedonia translates to “without pleasure.” In mental health, it refers to a disruption in brain functioning that impairs our ability to feel joy, excitement, accomplishment, love, and other similar feelings. It can happen for many reasons, but depression is the most common. It isn’t as unstoppable as it seems…

We learn “rules” early in life. Rules like “nothing I do will ever be good enough” or “I am unlovable.” We don’t automatically re-evaluate these rules once we have a fully formed adult brain. In this episode I talk about how these limiting belief systems are formed and how we can begin to challenge them.

People with anxiety disorders often experience related struggles that aren’t well documented or understood. These includes things like over eating or binge eating, perfectionism, people pleasing, excessive apologizing, and misophonia or other sensory sensitivities.

Dive deep with me into the symptoms of chronic anxiety. We discuss what it actually feels like to be living with chronic, daily anxiety and break down all 7 of the DSM-V symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder in detail.