Depression Starts in the Mind: What Meditation Taught Me About Thoughts vs. Feelings

For the past year I've been enrolled in a graduate program in clinical mental health counseling at Naropa University in Boulder—a three-year master's program with a track called Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling. A foundational part of my education has been meditation. So for the past year, I've been thinking about thinking, and having feelings about feelings.

For all the awful feelings that accompany depression, I'm increasingly convinced that its source is thoughts, not feelings. Feelings are the result; thoughts are the cause—with the caveat that depression is extraordinarily complex and often seems to have no source at all. For me, it begins pulling me down when I can't let go of a recurring thought: "it's no use, it will never work, I'm doomed." Then the feelings set in—paralyzing emptiness, disinterest in others, isolation, despair.

The Brilliant Minds Navigating Depression

Some of history's most famous depressives possessed extraordinary intellect, occasionally paired with enormous creative gifts—Sylvia Plath, Bruce Springsteen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke. But my poster child is the novelist David Foster Wallace.

Wallace rocketed to literary fame in the '90s, culminating in his masterpiece Infinite Jest, all the while struggling with addiction, abusive behavior, and crippling depression. He died by suicide in 2008.

Two Questions That Changed How I Think

The work I return to again and again is the commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, called This Is Water. At its center are two questions that are foundational to my understanding of depression.

Question one: What is your default mode? Are you aware that you move through the world with a set of beliefs and expectations that act as self-fulfilling prophecies? In meditation, we learn to separate from what we call our "self" —which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a series of tapes playing in our heads that we didn't put there. Our default mode is our automatic thinking: "of course there's traffic, because I'm a loser; no one at this party likes me; I'll never get my finances together." Most of the time we don't even realize we're having these thoughts. All we experience are the feelings.

Question two: How aware are you of what's happening around you, right now? Wallace uses the example of a bad day capped off by a crowded grocery store and a very slow checkout line. He invites us to really see the people around us. That woman checking people out like an automaton? She might be about to lose her home. The man who cut in front of you? His wife might be in labor. Wallace writes that if you're running on your default setting, you won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable—but if you truly learn to pay attention, a crowded, hot, consumer-hell situation can become not only meaningful, but sacred.

The word he doesn't use, but I will, is empathy.

Why Feeling Beats Thinking in Depression Recovery

What often helps in recovery is not more thinking, but more contact: with feelings, with other people, with the body, with the present moment, with things that matter. Wallace suggests that the way out of situational depression is connection with others—that compassion for another person's possible heartbreak is the "stop" button on those tapes playing like demonic muzak in our minds.

In my mindfulness practice, we settle into meditation, tune into our breathing, and then notice without judgment what the mind is doing. I call it "watching the movies." Sometimes it's too overwhelming and we have to "touch and go"—visiting a thought briefly, then returning to the breath. Later we can practice "going under"—staying with a thought long enough to experience the feeling underneath it, and allowing ourselves to feel it fully.

Thinking harder about a mental health issue almost never helps. But attending to a felt sense—what's happening in your body, what you can see and hear around you, an emotion rising up—can be a foundational step toward recovery.

A good meditation instructor will tell you never to seek any outcome through practice. It's not supposed to make you feel better. Leaving a session feeling frustrated doesn't mean you're doing it wrong—it means you're feeling feelings. But like so many paradoxes in meditation, we may find that feeling the feelings is exactly the key to detaching from a self-destructive default mode. And we feel better after all.