Holiday blues

Hey, good evening, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Daily Mind. I am your host. Happy Wednesday.

We are now at the hump of the week, getting over that hump and that threshold and easing our way into the weekend. Thank goodness. I mean, this week could have been done fast enough. I just got two more days before I sign on on leave.

A much well-deserved two weeks. Oh, I'm telling you, it's much needed. Hopefully everybody's doing well. This seems to be bad weather just about everywhere nowadays.

Today, especially I hear where I'm at, it's just pouring bad, bad. I wanted to go out to the casino tonight, but I was just like, I don't know, this weather's kind of iffy, right? I'm not even going to take that chance, or you never know. So tonight's episode is going to be about, it's a touchy topic of sports.

I guess you can say, I guess we'll call it depression and Christmas blues. I don't know if you guys have heard the news today about Ellen DeGeneres' boss, DJ Twitch, Steven Twitch's boss, her DJ, was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel. Nobody's seen this coming. Apparently it was suicide.

No one has seen this coming, right? Now, you know, he, okay, I've never really watched the show, but I've heard of him, I believe, before at some point. And based on some of the pictures and videos that they've been shown of this guy, this guy just seemed happy. You know what I mean?

He seemed like he had it all. He was on a good show. Now, for those who don't know, Ellen did end her show sometime earlier this year, not too long ago. And I don't want to say that was a contributing factor because, I mean, I'm pretty sure he had his hands in other ventures and stuff like that to supplement his work and his income, but nobody really knows.

And see, that's the thing about someone who's depressed, right? Now, a lot of people, depression nowadays is really, really touchy. You know, some people would be like, man, you know, I feel depressed. I feel sad.

And of course, most people would be like, oh man, you know, just buck up. You know, it'll be all right, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Let's go to the textbook definition of depression, right?

Let's see how it is, how it's categorized. Let's see. And there's so many levels of depression. Like, it's crazy.

And it's kind of hard to, in some cases, diagnose somebody who's really depressed because, I mean, I'm not a subject matter expert. I'm not a physician. I'm not a doctor, psychologist, in any degree. But in my instance, if somebody's said they're depressed, I'm going to take it serious because I'm not, I can't clinically diagnose you, right?

I just have to go off the fact that you feel depressed and you feel sad and there's some changes you've been going through. They have to take it for what it is, right? So let's see. I need a textbook answer as to what is depression.

It's just so many different, so many different answers to this. As depression is considered a mood, right? As it's defined here, depression is a mental state of low mood and aversion to activity, which affects about 280 million people of all ages. Now, this is all ages, right?

Like, even you got to listen to your kids, man, and look at their behaviors and stuff like that. You understand what I'm saying? Like, it's pretty, it's pretty serious, right? It's classified medically as a mental and behavioral disorder.

They experience depression affect a person's life, behavior, motivation, feelings, and a sense of well-being. The core symptom of depression is said to be anhedonia, which refers to loss of interest or loss of feeling or pleasure in certain activities, which is one of those things that, you know, it's one of those things that's first seen, right? Now, let's say, you know, you have a friend. This person, he or she is just happy-go-lucky.

They go out. They're all about life. They take life by the horns and they just have fun, right? And all of a sudden, you know, a couple of weeks and then it becomes prolonged and you're like, okay, what's wrong, man?

You know, what can I do? What's going on? Talk to me, blah, blah, blah, right? The problem with depression and people with depression is that it's a mask, right?

Now, this guy, DJ Switch, right? Again, behind that smile was something wrong under the mask, right? Sometimes you can't tell what somebody's going through. A lot of people tend to smile and laugh their day, you know, to keep the pain.

They laugh and smile to suppress the pain, right, of what's going on with them. Now, I'm not saying everybody who's laughing and smiling is depressed, but it's a chance that one out of 10 people may be depressed because it's 280 million people worldwide. I mean, there's a chance that somebody who's smiling and laughing may have something going on. I mean, like, you work with people, you don't know what's really going on when they leave the office or they leave the job.

You really don't know. You know what I mean? You just see them as, hey, they're your associates, you work with them, and you're good to go, right? Now, around this time of the year, the holidays, right?

You hear the holiday blues, the Christmas blues, whatever the case. A lot of that, you know, the anxiety stuff, depression definitely kind of falls in with this. I remember when I was in Alaska, they had an acronym called S.A.D., Seasonal Acute Depression. I was stationed in Alaska from 2014 to 2017, and one thing about the winters, yes, they're very long, right?

Summers are very short. Winters are long, and that whole almost 24 hours of darkness and daylight is for real. Like, I'm not even joking. I was in the Anchorage area.

And further up north, it's way more extreme, but nonetheless, it's definitely noticeable. And the thing about the wintertime was that it was long. It was cold nights, very cold days, barely maybe four hours of daylight, if that, right? And if you were not, if you were that type of person that came from somewhere sunny, when you got around that time, you got pretty bummed out.

And of course, there were remedies to that. They had these things called happy lights. They were basically lamps, right? Because there's lack of sunlight, the lights give you a sense of daytime, right?

I adapted to it very well, but for some people, they didn't. I remember when I got up there, the Christmas prior, I guess 2013, a soldier killed himself up there, right? I think it was like Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, I kid you not. It was a very isolated place, right?

And I'll be honest with you, you know, a lot of people have a hard time up there. But going back to the holidays and whatnot, right? It's just a lot. Some people are just depressed of the mood.

You know, maybe they can't see their family. Money's very tight. You know what I mean? It's a very stressful time.

It really will test your mental health, the holidays, right? So, you know, a lot of people, they're just kind of going through it, right? And, you know, you give people affirmations and stuff like that, you know, talk to people. But for some people, it's hard.

It's very hard to deal with around this time of year, right? And a lot of people do take their lives around this time of year. I mean, the two most noticeable suicides was Jason David Frank. Of course, you know, as Tommy, the Green Ranger, White Ranger from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

That one took, blew my mind. This was like somewhere a little bit before the holidays, around the time. He took his own life through suicide. Again, he was one of those faces and figures that you look at him, he's got everything going for him, you know, he's got a legacy, and you would never see it coming.

That's just the thing about someone in that mode, is that you just don't see it coming until it's too late, right? And that took me by surprise. I think one of the most shocking vows of depression that led to suicide, I think, was Robin Williams. If you've ever followed Robin Williams' career, the man was a comical genius, countless movies, Mrs.

Valfire, Jumanji, you name it, Flubber, and the man took his life. Nobody's seen it coming because, again, like, it is an internal thing. It's easy to mask your pain, right? For some people, it's a little harder, but for some people, it's easy to mask.

It's easy to just put a smile and kind of divert that sign that something's wrong, right? Because you don't want everybody else, I guess what it is, you don't want everybody else around you to feel sad for you, right? You don't want that. You want people to be happy around you, but at the same time, you are burning up.

You're dying on the inside, literally dying on the inside, right? It's tearing you up. But there are different levels to depression and stuff. So I'm looking at some of these things up.

One of the influences for what I'm reading is life events, of course, right? We're talking bereavement, neglect, mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, childhood, physical sexual abuse. These things would scar people for a very long time to where, in some cases, people grow up and they never can find a solution to this, to how to overcome it, and they end up taking their own lives. And, you know, it's quite sad, especially when you're a child, I guess, you know, a lot of people don't tend to believe you about all the things that's going on with you, right?

And then, you know, you know, the mental abuse, right? You know, believe it or not, that can lead somebody into a state about depression is the mental, constant mental abuse. Just imagine somebody always putting you down, cursing at you, telling you you're nothing, you're less than human. You understand what I'm saying?

That can really, really mess someone up and neglect. These are things that, like, can cause children to be depressed and then create a whole bunch of other problems with the kids, right? And then I also listed also one fact about the pandemic, right? The COVID-19 pandemic created, has boosted probably mental health issues 10 to 1.

So, you know, remember during COVID, everybody was locked down. You couldn't go outside. You couldn't get any sunlight. You couldn't get any fresh air.

You had to wear a mask everywhere. You were distant from family because the family, it was a time and not a good one. It says here, the global pandemic of COVID-19 has negatively impacted among, upon many individuals, mental health causing depression surge, reaching devastating heights. A study conducted by the University of Surrey in autumn of 2019 with the impact of COVID-19 among young people's mental health.

Now, I've heard of that, that a lot of people are just like, well, you know, when kids, what do they got to be depressed about? You understand? They get everything handed to them. Not all kids get everything handed to them, right?

And you believe it or not, it took me a minute to think of how kids can be stressed. But I mean, if you take what kids have to deal with in the 1950s versus what they have to deal with now, you can probably get a better scope of why these kids nowadays are just, they're different. You understand what I'm saying? There's a lot more stress and anxiety that goes along with growing up nowadays.

So yeah, it just, during the lockdown, you just couldn't like, you know, you couldn't do anything. Like, you were just sitting in this house and you're just like, man. Now, of course, you know, everybody wants to sit home and relax, but just imagine you're locked up in the house for like months, right? With little to any social interaction on the outside, right?

And if any, it's very limited. You understand what I'm saying? That can mess you up quite a big deal. And the theory behind surge in crime in a lot of places is, this is just a theory, what I've been hearing, is because now people have to readjust to being outside again, and it's different than before they were locked down and not being able to do the things that they'd done before.

And it's just, I don't know, I think there is somewhat of a connection to that. You understand what I'm saying? But no doubt that the pandemic definitely created a lot of more depressed people, I guess you could say, right? Yeah, it's just crazy.

Let's see. I'm looking up some things here. Now, of course, things to know, like leading cause, right? Now, nobody really knows what causes depression, like the root cause.

You know, a lot of people say it could be because of a chemical imbalance. According to this, it says, research suggests that depression doesn't spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals. Rather, there are many possible causes of depression, including faulty mood regulation by brain, genetic vulnerability, and stressful life events. Now, the brain is a wonderful, fantastic thing.

We really don't know what's going on in there. Rest assured, though, I will definitely say stressful life events. Definitely, because you can actually see it happening. You can't see what's happening inside the brain, right?

But you can see what causes a person to go into a point of depression. Like, I don't know, you have a buddy who lost both his parents in a car accident or whatever. You can see the declining mental health and how they struggle with that event after the fact. You can actually see that, but you can't really see all the chemical and scientific things going on inside your brain.

Not saying that these theories are bullshit. They are theories, and they're just based on studies. They are things happening in our brains that throws us off. You ever heard about chemical imbalance, right?

That kind of thing. Also, here, it says, people ask this question, like, what are the four main causes of depression, right? Again, life events is definitely one of them, right? It says here, stressful events.

Most people take time to come to terms with stressful events such as bereavement or relationship breakdown. Let me see, am I reading the right list here? Yeah, personality, family history, giving birth, loneliness, alcohol, drugs, and illness. Key symptoms of depression, it says here, depression has a range of different symptoms, and it can affect everybody differently.

The symptoms include feeling very tearful, feeling hopelessness and sadness, and losing interest in things you enjoyed before. It's also common for people with depression that have symptoms of anxiety. Now, these little bouts, you get little bouts of these things every day or here and there, but how can you tell you're really depressed, right? Now, you can say you're depressed, and I'm not taking that away from somebody who says on the day that they're depressed, right?

But you may not be depressed clinically, but you feel like, I don't know, it's kind of hard to explain, but I'm going to try to break it down the best way possible. Now, those things I've just said, right? Feeling very tearful, hopelessness, sadness, losing interest in things and everything that you normally would have interest in, right? Now, let's just say you are becoming more withdrawn, you know, you're not doing the things you normally would do.

Then you're just like, man, maybe I'm just tired, or just I don't know what's wrong, or I don't know, maybe I'm depressed, right? Now, of course, you're saying you're depressed, not saying you're not, you know, but that's when you can go, if you feel these bouts, you can go talk to someone on a professional level, like a therapist, or you can just talk to a close friend and associate, see what they say, right? But nonetheless, you know, you have to seek help somewhere, or at least talk to someone, that's, that is basically the starting point on trying to fix the problem. So what the list here is, what are the five symptoms of major depression?

Like I said, depression, apparently it comes in levels, right? From the smallest to the extreme of things, right? But the five signs of major depression is feeling of sadness, tearfulness, emptiness, or hopelessness, right? That's number one.

Again, like, for example, the holiday season, right? It makes a lot of people sad, right? Well, the holiday is supposed to bring joy, right? But again, it brings a lot of stressors into the play.

And especially, you know, you can imagine being on lockdown during the holidays of 20 and 21, the years of 2020 and 2021. It's a lot. It's just emptiness. You know, you think even now, like, you know, you get into these, these parts of these symptoms and you're just like, hmm, you know, I feel sad.

I feel hopeless. Like what, you know, and of course, like you have to question, why do you feel so hopeless? What do you feel sad? What's making you sad, right?

Also here, number two, angry outbursts, irritability or frustration, even over small matters. I'll be honest with you, myself, I get frustrated even over the smallest things. I make the smallest things a big deal, right? Now me, myself, I wouldn't say that I'm depressed, no.

But like, you have to take into account, like we go through a little of these, like these things I'm saying here, we get a little bout of these every day. That doesn't mean we're depressed. It's just those little things like, you know, you feel a little sad. It's when it becomes consecutive.

It becomes more chronic, a day-to-day thing. Like that's when it starts to be perceived as a problem. Just know that every day, a little bit of what I'm reading on this list, we do a little bit of it here and there. We have moods, right?

We have mood swings, mood changes. Sometimes we don't want to do something. Sometimes we want to do something or whenever we feel like it, we want to do it, right? Also, number three, loss of interest or pleasure in most are all normal activities such as sex, hobbies, or sports.

Now, let's say you're laying down with your significant other. Okay, honey, I don't feel like doing anything tonight. I just want to go to sleep. I'm too tired, right?

I mean, that's just maybe they're tired, right? Maybe they don't fight having sex. Maybe they just want to go to bed. It's been a long day, right?

Or, you know, losing interest in sports, right? Maybe you're just tired of playing baseball. You're just tired of watching sports. Again, we have these little bouts of things.

That doesn't necessarily make us depressed, but again, it just has to be, I guess, in a sense, it has to be sudden and it has to be in a way that's a decline, I guess, right? It starts, things start breaking down more and more that just kind of just says otherwise. And then sleep disturbances, including insomnia or sleeping too much. Now, with me, remember I said I tend to stress over little things, right?

And I do lose sleep. I don't know. know let's expect when i wake up in the morning to go to work and stuff like that or you know i have a bout of anxiety i'll be honest with you i have a bout of anxiety and i tend to overthink a lot of things i'm one of those people i follow murphy's law on a day-to-day but i'm overcoming it because what i do is i sit down and take a second to think about what am i really getting angry over or what i'll do before i have some sort of outbursts i would just pause for a second take a deep breath and then just say hey you know what this should be on my control there's no sense of getting another gray hair on my head over some small matter because i tend to make small matters very big right and there's no need for that because when you make small matters big can you imagine what how you're gonna handle when big matters start as big and then become bigger you know what i mean so and then you know i'm looking at um some more things that are listed here um oh this is yeah so like what happens inside your body right when you are in a bout of depression right um it says your physical symptoms are common in major depression and may lead to chronic pain and complicated treatment systems associated with depression joint pain limb pain back pain gastrointestinal problems fatigue psychomortar activities changes appetite changes yeah i mean because you know what again you start losing interest in a lot of things you may even start losing interest in eating like you might not want to go out to eat you might not even want to like make anything to eat or just like whatever right you just don't eat you know you have a heart and when you do try to eat because you're so depressed it's hard to eat it's hard to digest things right again it's it's something that i think people don't talk about very much or are afraid to talk about right because i mean right now mental health is one of the biggest biggest hurdles that we are trying to um overcome in this country right now especially post-pandemic right i mean you go to new york city right go to new york city or any major city but new york city in general we have a lot of mental health cases in the subways just roaming the streets i mean the crime in new york city in the subways is ridiculous right and what you have what's called out there edp right edp is an emotionally disturbed person that usually comes up on the net with the police chatter all the time like you get random people that just push people on the tracks like people on the face try to write it's crazy madness and what the city is trying to do they try to come up with so many solutions one solution that they're trying to come up with for people who are in the state is that they're trying to have a unit to where they just pull people homeless people off the street just like that like hey you come with me and they'll take them to a near shelter no they take them to um i think what is they have the emts whatever come and get them and bring them to a hospital for some sort of treatment now the problem with that is is that what they're arguing is that a move like that would end up overcrowding possible beds for people who may actually need them in emergencies listen i hear it all the time the wealthy has money they can donate money build houses all that stuff that's not their job to do right now i don't know what real solution you have for people in that state but i'm pretty sure hopefully one day we'll work on a solution right but for those who are feeling a certain way feeling a little blue feeling down i mean my advice to you and again i'm not a subject matter expert i'm not a psychologist i need to make this very clear okay me i'm always willing to listen to people for some reason i have i feel like almost like i'm meant to be on this planet to help people because i get people who just tell me all their problems and you know what i do i actually fucking listen to their problems because i know if i'm in that state i want somebody to listen to me so yeah you're doing right i'm gonna take a second out of my day to go listen to somebody in their problems and people confide in me like like i'm a vault and i said you know what i keep what they tell me lock and key i'm not a therapist but people come up to me and talk to me like i am but what i'm saying in short is that talk to somebody right just just talk to somebody get your feelings out there talk to somebody who you can trust though because i tell you what people who are in that mode of depression or any about people will take advantage of that and use that against you right be like oh man you know i spoke to this person he feels a certain way she feels a certain way she doesn't you know talk to somebody who you can trust and confide with and that they're not going to run and you know run with your story and make it into something that's going to be um against you right and when you do pick somebody just hopefully they have your back right and they just do the right thing by you um it's hard during holidays i mean we all push through it and you know it's just what happens it's what we have to do i'm gonna look up real quick um ways to fight depression right uh let's see ways to fight depression without medication right now of course you have people who are under the you know depressed they are prescribed medication in some cases people say it does worse right but i'm gonna look up um ways to stop depression of course according to this list here right this is according to web md they have 11 natural depression treatments i read seven of them right um one is to exercise it temporarily boosts feel-good chemicals called endorphins i will say this is true um because there's about where i feel like i'm just down i'm tired i don't feel motivated and lately what i've been doing is running two miles a day on my own i get up this morning i got up i went for a run and then it gets your mind going like you feel like you could tackle the day you know and like i said it works for me i can't say it works for everybody else um get enough sleep i'm gonna tell you right now my fifth watch tells me i get about four to five hours of sleep i don't get enough but getting enough sleep helps your brain rest it helps your body recover from the previous day stressors of life right and then challenge negative thoughts which i've been doing a lot lately um because i have nothing but negative thoughts like i said murphy's law i always think of you know i'm a pessimist i guess you could say right at least my wife says the same thing um challenging negative thoughts like how do you take a negative spin into a positive right i mean listen you can be an optimist doesn't mean everything's gonna go your way but if you think something some way of some sort of optimism you know gives you some sort of hope um checking with your doctor before using supplements because again not all supplements are good for you and if you are taking other supplements for other things it could counteract and could cause some sort of problems down the road um doing something new i'm a creature of habit i can do the same shit all the time but i'm slowly moving into the habit of trying something new doing something new um i'm not getting any younger i'm gonna be 38 in a month so i might as well try something new and of course avoid alcohol and other drugs i don't do drugs let's make that i want to make it perfectly clear and alcohol wine and if i haven't had a good wine in a minute i'll be honest with you but um wine to me um like i don't know if i had a long day at work i'll come in have a wine with my wife or whatever and just it sets me down perfectly now i'm not alcoholic now if i have any wine during uh after work it's maybe one or two glasses but honestly i haven't had a wine in at least about almost two weeks i don't know maybe i don't need it maybe i'm now feeling my endorphins are kicking in where i can just feel good all i got to work out i guess right um all right so i'm gonna read one more thing here um let's see what the hell this says oh is it okay not to treat depression i know that's that no you need to treat it it says untreated clinical depression is a serious problem untreated depression increases the chance of risky behavior such a drug and alcohol addiction it can ruin a relationship problems at work and it makes it difficult to overcome the illness seek help seek help seek help all right like i said the person that's the person with the biggest smile in the room probably might be the most depressed uh depressed person in that room and we've seen that just today with dj twitch if you look at every picture of that man that man's always smiling but again a smile is nothing more than a mask not saying everybody's smiling is unhappy but you need to pay attention to the people around you don't always have your face on the phone you know just pay attention to your surroundings and the people around you that's all i got um so we're done with this episode um tune in tomorrow for another episode um let's get into this weekend we got almost about a week to christmas so you know just be happy be jolly you know we'll get through it every year we go through it and you know again seriously look up some suicide hotlines the fresh uh mental health hotlines just like look up some things just talk to somebody right just don't let it just go just talk to somebody all right thanks for listening to daily my name host austin and we'll do this again tomorrow evening have a great night and ciao we'll do this again tomorrow