So-called “happy” experiences trigger my depression more than sad ones do. This includes everything from witnessing happy people to taking part in a happy event to watching something happy in a movie. All of these things can make me more immediately sad than seeing something depressing. This seems counterintuitive — even to me — but it is what happens in my daily life. It’s one of the ways that I know I experience major depressive episodes — episodes of an illness.
Examples of Happy Experiences Triggering Depression
When I think of happy experiences that have triggered sadness in my depression, the range of examples is fairly broad. For example, if I’m walking down the street on an average day, headed to breakfast, say (which I enjoy), I might come across a couple holding hands in love. I might come across a mother smiling while pushing a baby stroller. These are happy things.
They make me sad.
Looking at these sights I can sense that they are happy, but I can also feel the tears on my cheeks, particularly if I think about what I’m seeing. It’s generally best not to think.
Similarly, I could see something happy in a movie or on television and have a similar reaction. It’s tough to see happy endings. It’s tough to see joyous weddings. It’s tough to see emotional reunions. It doesn’t matter that these things are mere photons and pictures of actors not truly experiencing the happiness — they make me sad anyway.
But Don’t Sad Things Make Depressed People Sad?
I’m not saying sad things can’t make my depression act up too. Of course, they can. For example, I’m particularly prone to getting upset over anything tragic involving animals. I can’t even think about cruelty to animals without feeling the tears tickling the back of my eyelids.
In general, though, even going through something sad is better than standing in the face of pure joy.
Why Do Happy Experiences Trigger My Depression?
Watch this video for more about happy experiences triggering my depression and why I think this is:
Acknowledging this fact — this idea that happy experiences make me sad — is depressing in and of itself, to be honest. It’s evidence as to how broken my brain is. It’s evidence as to how profound and immovable my depression is. It’s evidence that depression is an illness of the brain and not merely a manifestation of unfortunate surroundings.
People in this situation hide this. This reality is dirty and gritty and something people feel shame about, but it’s a reality for many nonetheless. And I have something to say to these sad, tear-streaked people: there is no shame in feeling sadness over happy things. I know it may feel shameful and even crazy, but it’s a product of an illness. The reason your experience isn’t like everyone else’s is that other people aren’t sick. There is nothing wrong with you, except that you have an illness. The illness is wrong. You are perfectly fine.
But the part of it that isn’t sad is this: I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that other seriously depressed people know exactly what I’m talking about. I think that when a seriously depressed person sees something happy on the street, it just makes them feel more depressed. So I hope being open about it here can start a conversation. Do you want to cry when you see joy in others? Do you feel more depressed in the face of happiness? I hope you feel comfortable enough to talk about it below.
Sometimes it can also be about a broken spirit too. Lately I’ve been working a lot on developing my spiritual life and to be perfectly honest with you, doing that has been immensely helpful to me. It’s definately been more helpful than any pill has ever been and I make no apologies for it, especially to people who tend frown on that sort of thing!
For me it’s been life changing, a silver lining during this pandemic.
Last year well meaning friends and family wanted to invite me over for Christmas thinking it would be sad for me to spend it alone. But thanks to the pandemic, I had an excuse not to go last year.
I was actually happier spending it alone, because then I didn’t have to be a witness to others joy, ie their experience of being happily married, with children, something I’ve secretly yearned to have for ages but have pretty much given up on and that makes me very sad
Sometimes when I’d complain to my mother about things that I missed out on in life, her reply would always be “well, whose fault is that?” which would infuriate me. In angered me in part because of the shitty childhood I had and my conditioned response of helplessness that resulted from being a powerless child. It also angered me because she never took responsibility for her part in all that mess. Instead it was always deny, deny, deny, gaslight and have me believe I was the crazy one
But then I’d also remember that I’m an adult now and as such I am responsible for my own life and the choices I make. This too would make me angry, angry at myself for not being a stronger, more motivated person.
It has been said that anger turned inward becomes depression. I know, at least for me, that certainly rings true, even though it might not always be apparent to others
I find I haven’t made nearly enough progress yet in unpacking 55+ years of baggage that I know would lighten my load. This would almost certainly give me the energy I need to move forward in life. But change is always hard and requires A LOT of effort, consistency, openmindedness, and patience
And if you’re someone like me who is always tired, irritable, depressed and fearful of making a wrong choice it’s very difficult to wade through the quicksand of life that threaten to pull you asunder .
The irony is that apathy will also inevitably pull you under anyways so why not do what you can to take baby steps and help yourself salvage a life worth living?
… because life is hard and then you die, you die to self and then the waves of life just simply begin to wash over you pulling you in and out as the tides constantly changes
This is the first time I have heard someone speak what I feel. I thought I was the only one the would cry over happy memories. I smile when I see happiness but cry inside. I can also feel jealousy in me at those that are happy. Why can’t I be happy? And yet I am glad for them that are happy. I know my emotions confuse others, they confuse me at times too. I was diagnosed BiPolar abut 15 years ago but I have suffered with depression since puberty so I believe I was BiPolar back then, it just was diagnosed. My mother hid all her emotions so I felt bad when mine showed. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s that I realized it was ok to be sad. I am doing really well now and am happy to say I am stable. Thank you for sharing.
I get it. It’s like grieving the loss of what you feel you’ll never have by no choice of your own. You didn’t ask for this brain. I like how you tell it to stop and switch to a safe thought. There is so much happening on a neurological level when we force ourselves not to travel down and dig those ruts deeper by choosing to take another path. Easier said than done We’re! We’re retraining our brain.
I wish you hadn’t separated the core of your essay out of th he essay and jnto a video. I don’t take info in that way very well and fewer and fewer people use writing, which is a better medium for critical thinking than a video, I have to navigate around the internet to find written material. So, having done so. It’s disappointing to click on an essay and then have it switch to a video log.
But, as to your topic, or at leadt as much as I was exposed to, it is an interesting topic that I believe should be obvious to us but something in how we catorize the world and experience renders it not obvious
See. You say, I saw something happy and had the wrong feeling, is this some insidious facet of my disease? That’s what I hear, and relate to in some ways.
But might it be that assigning an emotional definition to an event sets you up to have the wrong feeling about it?
À couple walking and holding hands is a couple walking and holding hands, nothing more. The Image isn’t happy or sad, or good or bad, or romantic
When à person sees that image they don’t just tuck it away. Our minds fasten on it, even briefly and then we may have a flurry of thoughts, memory triggers, fantasies, judgements, narratives. That flurry of meanings is what we emotionally respond to to. We respond to the meaning which is an interior entirely subjective experience separate and unrelated to the couple walking and holding hands.
An optional response is never right or wrong. They just are. We only need to evaluate an emotion if we are thinking we’d like to have a different one, or if the emotion seems to call for a response or action. For example if I hear a loud noise that startle and frightens me, I may need to listen to that emotion as a warning and flee, but I may find it was just someone dropped a pan, and I laugh the fear away in mild embarassment. Sometimes in life it is very importantvto find out if wan emotion or the scale of that emotion seems reasonably appropriate or not before we act, lije if I feel a bit dismissed by someone, and it’s been hapoeming all week, I still need to remember that the hot strong feeling I am having is cumulative and not a sign that some minor perceived slight needs to be responded to as an attack–which is what my anger is saying.
Beyond stuff like that emotions aren’t wrong and we tend to feel heaviest when we allow them to have their audience, that being us. Not trying to sweep them away, a liutle validation without inviting it to become the grand narrative for the day if it is an uncomfortable feeling like sadness, and not clinging to it like a needy lovesick adolescent when the feeling is happy. And even recognising that maybe it’s lots of seemingly contradictory feelings. Feelings can coexist and don’t need a logic to do do, there isn’t an rlrction where we have to decide this event triggered more sad than happy so we have to call it sad. Human consciousness and the neurostructures supporting it are far more complex than we yet are able to comprehend.
The images you chose are highly charged images, they’re things people long for, they are the goals mapped out right on up from our DNA. It seems reasonable to me that lots of people, especially as we age and mature, will have many emotional responses to the ideas and experiences triggered when we look at images of couoles, family, celebrations.
Personally I have missed many things and lost many things due to mental illness and a maladapted personality that is probably partly just me, but is paryly from excessive adverse experiences as a child. My best is often nowhere near nominal, and my worst is non-functional and insufferable. So, when I come upon the endless images of life we see everywhere when we leave the house, I have lots of strong emotional responses. Sonetimes I can be aware of many, what you would call a bouquet if it were scents, sometimes they’re so loud and various that I couldn’t articulate any, it’s jyst painful emotional noise. Sometimes one stands out like joy, or grief.
What you describe sounds to me like grief, pain of loss. Seeing a couple might make me feel loss of past loves, loss in the aftermath of bad breakups, loss of realistic hope for opportunities as I age, fearful loss that maybe I can’t love anymore. A very dense mash of emotions, thoughts and memories.
I don’t always though, sometimes I feel. Happy at such a sight, reminded (by my assumptions about what I am seeing) that there is still love in the world, sometimes a really unfettered joy and some visceral feeling of young intoxicated love.
Relating it to illness, when I am experiencing what we call depression, I tend toward negative thoughts, pessimism, cynicism, amplification of loss and hopelessness, etc. And my thinking can be quite rigid. I’ve learned to try and key the thoughts come and go and not pay too much attention to them. If I’m looking at a couple and going into a rumination spiral. I font indulge it, I love my focus elsewhere. Thst may not be for everyone, but between cognitive practice and repetition and constructs and techniques found in mindfulness, it has helped a lot for me with how bad a day in depression is going to be, and sometimes how long it lasts. It’s not as simple as feed it or don’t feed it, but I liken it that way sometimes.
If your illness has cost you it seems reasonable you might have a lot of hard earned grief. If you ask me, grief is a near bottomless well.
So, I just wanted to respond to the portions of your essay that I glimpsed. Hopefully it is coherent, I have been at savage war with my phone’s haunted keyboard that undermines my typing constantly. I catch as many as I can. But there’s no beating a machine and it routinely swaps out my sensible typing for gobbledigook.