when pain overtakes

Boy, the first three days of this week were really painful. I don’t think there was a joint that didn’t hurt. I felt sick all over from the pain.

Pain can certainly plummet our moods as well.  So I put aside my pride and started taking Tylenol on a regular basis. I hate that I have to do that. It’s that or not moving and all and that isn’t an option.

So that brings me to the subject of moods. While low moods can lead to depression, and while depression certainly has low moods as part of the illness, they are not synonymous, time being the difference. A few bad days do not a depression make.

I get really upset when people confuse these states of mental health. When we experience low moods, we shouldn’t use the words depressed.

“Why?” you ask.

Because if you’d ever been clinically depressed you would know the difference. Calling a few bad days “depression” trivializes the illness. Low moods go away as soon as circumstances change. So this person then has no understanding about why someone who is really depressed can’t get better right away, too. It’s like the person with a slight headache who compares themselves to someone with a migraine. That truly is an apple to orange kind of thing.

I share this because those of us prone to depression need to take care of our health. It’s more important for us than it is for other people. And quite often most of us don’t make the critical connection between physical health and depression.

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While depression may be in our heads, it is often triggered by what is happening in our bodies.

Having just made the above statement, there is actually some exciting research to suggest that the gut is the source. I’ll be sharing this information in upcoming posts but for now I will say more and more research is supporting this premise. I find this very exciting.

Anyway, I hope you have a pain-free day and God bless.