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If you suffer from anxiety and depression, try the following key dietary changes:

• Eat a wholefood and low GI and GL diet.
• Avoid or reduce caffeine intake.
• Avoid or reduce alcohol intake.
• Reduce saturated fat intake.
• Identify and control any food allergies you may have.

Article Tags:  Anxiety,  depression,  relief,  positive,  emotional health,  feel better,  

The Upside of Feeling Down

Fiona Donohoe-Bales & Kate Mirow

24 September 2009

Depression. If you’re like most people, you probably wanted to pull away at the sight of the word. Our memories and associations remind us that depression is an unpleasant state of being. In fact, depression is often defined, above all, by the absence of pleasure. That’s not a very nice place to be. At the very least, our experience of depression is uncomfortable and, at worst, debilitating and for some even life-threatening. What it is to be depressed will be different for all of us. Our subjective experience of it will always be exquisitely personal and intimate.

Depression is broadly characterised by feelings of despondency and dejection. It’s often accompanied by a sense of worthlessness, emptiness, hopelessness and despair. If we believe the figures, few of us are immune to depression. It’s estimated that one in four women and one in six men will develop an episode of depression during their lives. Interestingly, the word comes from the Latin deprimere, which means to “press down”. There’s a clue in that. What is it that we are all so busily pressing down? Many therapists believe it’s unresolved grief and unresolved anger.

Anxiety

Where there is depression, there will often be anxiety as well. The two quite happily co-exist like partners. Anxiety, though, has a different quality of energy. Depression has a heavy energy to it: an almost palpable gravitational pull that draws you inwards and downwards. Anxiety, on the other hand, makes you feel uptight, panicky, scattered and ungrounded. The literal meaning of anxiety is “twisted rope”, and that’s often how we feel when we’re apprehensive about the future or feeling out of control.

The anxious person will often find himself or herself easily agitated, quick to anger and very impatient. Anxiety is always produced in relation to time; that is, in regard to concerns about the future. Our thoughts naturally tilt us forward into a supposed or imagined future. What lies at the core of anxiety is our anger and frustration at not being able to control the world or to create it as we would want it to be. Shamanic healer, therapist and psychologist, Paul Perfrement, believes anxiety is also the fear of having to process something that hurts or is potentially painful.

Roots of mental illness

Why are we so fearful and unwilling to experience the feelings we are burying away? One reason is that as individuals and as a culture we’re uneasy with intra-psychic pain. We don’t sit well with it. In fact, we’ve become a little pain-phobic. We resist it and pull away from it. Some of us may even develop a lifelong habit of withdrawing from experiencing our innermost suffering. Perhaps we’re more willing to live with depression and anxiety than to take them as a sign there’s inner work to be done.

Our modern culture colludes with our tendency to avoid pain. To have depression earns us an unflattering image. There’s still a huge stigma around mental illness. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons we put off seeking help. A recent study of 1212 British men found that more than two-thirds had experienced depression and/or anxiety in their lives. One in three men admitted to being too embarrassed or ashamed to seek help for a mental health problem, while 17 per cent of those who had experienced depression said they suffered in silence.

Sydney GP Dr Vicki Howell says almost all the women she sees in her practice have some kind of anxiety issue. It might be generalised anxiety, panic attacks or some kind of addictive behaviour. “It can even be as simple as addictive materialism, addictive shopping or compulsive doing. There are all kinds of anxious behaviours.” She believes many women have become high on anxiety. The “busy” lifestyles these women pursue keep them from ever experiencing the feelings that hide beneath their tension and fear; it keeps them from recognising what’s really going on inside.

“As a society we don’t acknowledge pain. We think we need to have this perfect life with the perfect partner, the perfect job and the perfect kids where pain doesn’t happen. Even when someone dies the grief process has to be over and done with within the year or there’s something wrong with you.”

When you experience this kind of pain, you may deny it to your friends, to your family and, most of all, to yourself. It’s tempting to numb out on alcohol, drugs or other addictions — to fix it and fix it quickly! We may even be seduced by the promise of peace in a pill. To that end, the pharmaceutical industry has been very accommodating. Anti-depressants are now a multi-million-dollar industry.

In Australia, it’s estimated that a prescription for psycho analeptic drugs (anti-depressants like Prozac and Zoloft) is filled every two seconds. For a minority (about 1-2 per cent of Western populations) of sufferers whose depression is biological in origin, anti-depressants are a very real option and should always be considered in their treatment. In many instances, though, it’s worth looking beyond modern medicine’s preoccupation with reducing illness to a disease state and examining a more holistic approach to mental illness; one that embraces the spiritual dimension of suffering. A soul-centred approach does just that. It offers the opportunity to see some value and meaning in our suffering. We may even, just for a moment, entertain the possibility that there’s an up side to being down.

A soul-centred approach

There’s no doubt that the pain of depression and anxiety is uncomfortable and even unbearable at times. However, pain is also the most powerful motivator for change. M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author of the best-selling book The Road Less Traveled (1994 edition), writes: “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

Paul Perfrement says the contemporary view of depression is it’s a bad thing, that you shouldn’t be feeling this way and that “I should be other than I am”. In fact, what you may be doing is contributing further to your angst by creating a secondary depression. You become depressed about being depressed! When you buy into the concept that all depression is a disease rather than a state of being you will undoubtedly limit your opportunities for personal growth and spiritual development.

“Most people in this kind of pain just want to get over it. What we need to understand, though, is that often the only way to get over it is to go into it and then through it.” Most spiritual traditions teach that any feeling-oriented issue, like depression or anxiety, should be regarded as a doorway rather a problem.