Top Depression Symptoms in Women: What You Should Do

On average, women experience depression at around twice the rate men do (Mental Health America). It’s easy to attribute a low mood to being emotional or hormonal, but something deeper may be going on. The symptoms of depression can be subtle, but if you know what to look for, you might be able to find the root issue of your struggle.

Common Depression Symptoms in Women

We’ve all heard the term depression. You might use it to describe situational sadness, such as saying, “I’m so depressed that you’re moving away.” Or you might have heard someone talk about having depression and associated it with darkness and low moods.

In the field of psychology, depression is a clinical diagnosis that can include an array of symptoms, both physical and emotional.

Here are some common emotional depression symptoms in women:

• Difficulty concentrating and remembering details
• Loss of interest in activities you would usually enjoy
• Guilt or shame
• Irritability
• Emptiness
• Anxiety
• Sadness
• Hopelessness
• Mood swings
• Feeling out of control
• Feeling tense or on edge

And here are some physical depression symptoms in women:

• Exhaustion
• Aches and pains
• Panic attacks
• Headaches
• Low energy
• Digestive issues

Sometimes, it can be tempting to downplay these symptoms or keep them to yourself but it’s important to communicate what you’re going through and reach out for help.

Depression often causes a feeling of loneliness and hopelessness, making the condition self-perpetuating. Seek to overcome your isolation by developing a strong support system. Reach out to those who care about you.

How to Fight Depression

In counseling, one of the first steps in combating depression is coming up with a toolbox of coping mechanisms to deal with your symptoms.

Step 1: Develop a support system

As discussed above, having strong social connections can make a massive difference in depression. Whether you have an organic group of friends in your life or just one or two close friends, or you join a support group, or you’re in a spiritual community, human connection is crucial for coping with depression symptoms.

Focus on connecting with people you trust, and work on letting your guard down a little. Are there feelings you’ve been internalizing that you can externalize with someone else? When you’re feeling hopeless, can you communicate that to someone? Who is available to offer you some hope and encouragement when you’re struggling?

Again, depression can be self-perpetuating. It makes even this coping mechanism challenging to achieve. You often lack energy or motivation, which makes it hard to make an effort in your relationships. Unfortunately, this will only make a depressed mood worse, and you will find yourself stuck in a negative cycle.

Step 2: Get out of the house

Whether you leave the house for work, or you work from home or stay at home, often you’ll tend to hunker down in your safe place rather than taking the risk of going out. But going out is so worth it. Even if you’re walking down your street, your mood will naturally lift.

People with depression have low levels of the naturally occurring hormone serotonin. Sunlight is one of the primary sources of serotonin. So not only will a walk increase your heart rate, which has a positive effect on your mind and body, but it also increases the feel-good chemicals circulating in your brain.

Step 3: Take care of your body

It has often been said that we are “embodied souls” – that is, our physical state affects our spiritual, mental, and emotional state more than we might realize.

Take care of yourself as a parent would take care of a child. Have set routines for sleep. Identify your significant stressors so you can set yourself up for a good night’s sleep. Exercise, even if you take a walk or do some yoga postures, to help relieve stress.

Again, when you are struggling with depression, it can be challenging to find the motivation for healthy routines. Start small and build your way up if you need to.

Step 4: Eat for nourishment

Food often serves as an unhealthy coping mechanism because it is a quick mood fix. Refined carbohydrates temporarily boost serotonin levels, but they also raise blood sugar, leading to a roller coaster effect. Eating healthy doesn’t mean you need to swing to deprivation and never indulge yourself. Try to listen to your body and choose foods that make you feel good physically for hours. Mindful eating can help in this area.

Step 5: Identify other unhealthy coping mechanisms

What other activities do you use as a quick fix for a depressed mood? Do you have destructive habits such as drinking or overspending? Sometimes seemingly harmless activities can become destructive if overused, such as spending time on social media or binge-watching Netflix.

You don’t have to get rid of all desserts, screen time, or small indulgences, but try to come up with at least one healthy activity you truly enjoy that you can do during downtime. For example, you could try journaling, and if you don’t like the traditional “Dear Diary” style, you can art journal using mixed media or watercolors. Other people enjoy exercising for a hobby, or different types of crafts or projects.

Step 6: Seek professional help

If you are experiencing symptoms of depression, please know that there is hope and help available to you. Reach out today and see that you don’t have to live like this forever.

15 Common Cognitive Distortions

So, what is one of the most important things to know about depression? It’s linked with wrong or mistaken thinking patterns. How can you begin to overcome these patterns? Well, first you have to know what they are, which means you’ll need to work on developing a heightened awareness of your internal dialogue.

You might have grown used to thinking some of these things that they’re a regular part of your life when in reality they’re completely misguided.

These faulty thinking patterns can also be called cognitive distortions. According to Psych Central, cognitive distortions are “inaccurate thoughts are usually used to reinforce negative thinking or emotions – telling ourselves things that sound rational and accurate, but only serve to keep us feeling bad about ourselves.”

Let’s talk about some of the fifteen most common cognitive distortions associated with depression as explained by Psych Central.

1. Filtering

When a person filters, they tend to hone in on the negative aspects of any situation. No matter what good there is happening, they will focus on the bad and believe that it outweighs the good.

2. Polarized (or “Black and White”) Thinking
Things are either good or bad. You’re either right or wrong. You either agree, or you don’t. There’s no middle ground, gray area, or flexibility. Polarized thinking is associated with perfectionism.

3. Overgeneralization

This cognitive distortion forms from one event or piece of evidence. Because something terrible happened, you expect it to recur repeatedly, thinking you’re stuck in a continual negative experience.

4. Jumping to Conclusions

When you jump to conclusions, you assume you know what’s going to happen in any given situation, or that your assessment is 100% correct.

Maybe you have a friend, and you think they’re upset at you for some reason. Rather than asking them about it, you fear the worst. Or maybe you expect you’re going to fail at something (a test, a race, an opportunity) and think there’s nothing you can do to change that.

5. Catastrophizing

Depression combined with an awareness of potential catastrophe can lead to a skewed perception of reality, also known as “magnifying or minimizing thinking.” What if something goes wrong? What if a disaster occurs?

Often, insignificant events become blown out of proportion, whether it’s something small you did wrong or a happy event in someone else’s life. Conversely, when something goes well for you, you might downplay it.

6. Personalization

When something goes wrong, who do you blame? Is it yourself? If someone around you is in a bad mood, do you think it’s your fault? This type of thinking is known as personalization. You assume that you cause negative feelings in other people or situations outside of your control.

7. Control Fallacies

What does it mean to have an external locus of control? It means you lack a sense of efficacy, or the ability to change your circumstances. Instead, you see yourself as a victim of fate.

If you have an internal locus of control, you might assume that you’re responsible for the other people around you, including their feelings, even if they haven’t tried to put their opinions on you.

8. The Fallacy of Fairness

We’ve all heard that life isn’t fair, but sometimes we struggle to apply this knowledge in everyday life. Depression can become a lens for seeing constant unfairness in your experience of the world. It might seem like things never work out in your favor.

9. Blaming

When you tend to blame, you’ll usually tend towards one direction or the other:

• Other people are responsible for what’s happening to me.
• I am responsible for what’s happening to other people.

Rather than identifying the individual choices we are free to make, you’ll tend to blame yourself or other people for what happened.

10. Shoulds

Everyone has their internal moral code, whether they associate with religion or not. Often, we use “should” statements indiscriminately, for issues that aren’t clearcut: “I should not be eating this. I should clean the garage.” Of course, when you don’t obey your internal “should,” you feel guilty.

You can apply the same standards to other people. “He shouldn’t have gone about it that way.” The immediate result is frustration or anger when other people don’t conform to your “shoulds.”

11. Emotional Reasoning

Emotions form a vital component of our humanity. But if we are guided solely by our feelings, we’ll make mistakes. Let’s say you feel like you are an annoying person and a bother to those around you. Feeling this way doesn’t make it real.

12. The Fallacy of Change

When you believe the fallacy of change, you think you have the capacity to make someone else different if you are convincing enough. You feel a deep need to get this person to change so you can be happy.

13. Global Labeling

We oversimplify one or two qualities into a negative global judgment. These are extreme forms of generalizing, and also known as “labeling” and “mislabeling.” Instead of describing a mistake in the context of a particular situation, people will attach an unhealthy label to themselves.

Global labeling is similar to magnifying. It’s when you take a single action or characteristic and apply a broad, unhealthy label to yourself. If you fail at a task, you think, “I’m a loser.” If you have an embarrassing moment, you think, “I’m so stupid.”

You can do the same thing to other people. If someone annoys you, you think, “He is such a jerk,” or just something more mildly negative, like, “He really has a bad personality.”

Mislabeling is something you might see in political discourse as well as everyday conversation. If a mother takes her child to daycare every day, rather than saying that, you might say she abandons her children to strangers every day.

14. Always Being Right

If you feel the need always to prove your point or convince another person that you know the truth, you might have this cognitive distortion, especially if it is more important to you to be right than to have good relationships with others.

15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy

In this final cognitive distortion, you can see a way of thinking that encourages reward-seeking for good behavior. If you do something good, you expect a reward in some form.

Seeking Help for Depression

If any of the above symptoms sound familiar to you, you might benefit from talking with a counselor. Please do not minimize your struggle. You don’t have to go through it alone.

If you have depression, you might think you can’t change it, but there are solutions and healing available. Professional help can be your first step towards that healing, helping you identify cognitive distortions and replace them with healthy coping skills for good.