Meditation and Depression: Finding Relief as a Highly Sensitive Person

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why meditation is my secret weapon against depression.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why depression can affect HSPs more deeply than others, how meditation works to release the experience of depression, and more. And how to make meditation a part of your daily routine to nip depression in the bud. This is an edition of Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

Everyone feels emotions go up and go down. This is part of the normal, part of, a normal part of being a human being. And obviously when there’s a loss of some kind, Then emotions go down, there’s a sadness, when there’s a gain, then there’s happiness. And this swing between sadness and happiness is part of, in a way, being attached to outer things and as we develop our own abilities to be independent and become clearer within ourselves.

of who we really are, then the swings of emotions can become less. But everyone has them and the question is, how do you deal with them when they start going down and you feel like you’re getting into a kind of vicious cycle with it? This is especially true for highly sensitive people because we tend to ruminate more.

We tend to notice the subtle negative meaning of situations as well as positive meanings too. But we look at everything deeply and so if something is sad, we may start to look really deeply at how sad that thing is. And it can perpetuate that vicious cycle of negativity and then a feeling of oppression.

We also, as highly sensitive people, feel things earlier. So we’ll notice, as soon as something starts shifting in the negative direction, We’ll notice that. And again, when you put attention on something, whatever you put your attention on tends to become stronger, tends to grow, and so it’s natural that we can get caught in this loop of rumination that allows depression to get stronger and stronger as we go with it.

The good thing is, as highly sensitive people, we also have an advantage. We, because we feel things earlier, we have a chance to take care of it earlier, or we can even prevent it earlier. We’re more attuned to these swings between positive and negative, these emotional experiences, and because of that, we’re more likely to do something about them.

We’re more likely to look for ways to find balance, to stay balanced, or to correct. the imbalance if it steps in. So today I want to talk a little bit about meditation as a way to help release the experience of depression. So as I said, we all kind of swing from positive to negative in different moments of our day and over time in different periods of our life.

I was feeling it this morning, just a little bit, had a little feeling of being, feeling sorry for myself. I woke up, didn’t feel like I was that fully rested. I just felt something’s off and then the little aches and pains in my body started to bug and then I just couldn’t find the energy. I didn’t feel like I was enthusiastic about starting my day.

And of course I was still just going through my routine, morning routine. But, I don’t know, something’s not there. And you could call it depression. I would say that’s probably a fair description of it. Didn’t feel like a debilitating depression. It didn’t feel like I was really down.

But it was down. It was down nonetheless. And so there’s small depressions and there’s larger depressions. And And regardless of the type or the intensity of it, one of the things that is super helpful is meditation. So what I love about meditation is that it’s a way of quieting the mind and going inward And giving yourself the deeper rest that your body and mind may be needing to throw off the stress there.

Now I’m familiar with transcendental meditation. I’ve been doing it my whole life since I was six years old and my whole has really been a mainstay of my spiritual practice throughout my entire life. So what, how it works with TM is that I silently repeat a mantra, which is a sound that naturally draws the mind inward.

It’s a sound that becomes finer and finer as you hold it in the mind. And because finer areas of the mind are more charming. Then you just naturally start sinking into this quieter parts of the mind. And when the mind is quiet, it’s more peaceful, it’s more happy. It’s hard to hold on to those little knots of stress or the reasons we feel depressed, that little sadness.

The mind just starts to let go of that as it settles into something deeper and something more enjoyable. So this breaks the cycle of rumination. What happens is, when I have a little depressive thought, or actually I should say, when I have a little depressive feeling, then my mind gets really busy starting to find the reasons for why I feel depressed.

And it will find all kinds of reasons and start building a story about why that’s true. And and so this quieting of the mind that happens in meditation breaks that cycle. And so I start actually touching a little bit of feeling good that happens inside as I settle in. And because that feels good, And I want to feel good.

I, my interest in the feeling bad starts to fall away. Like I literally trade my loyalty for the sadness for an interest in the happiness. And it just happens very naturally. It’s like a, it just feels like a melting that happens inside. And I experienced that today. I said, I was feeling a little sorry for myself, but by the end of meditation, somewhere in the last parts of the meditation, I was noticing something’s happening here.

Like that literally my chest muscles were relaxing the sad feeling in my heart was starting to melt. There was even a little bit of tears in my eyes, and I felt like something is letting go. And, I still feel like a million bucks, I still like probably could use some more sleep or something that’s out of balance in the body.

But on a core level, there’s an enthusiasm again, I feel engaged, I want to be at work, I want to be doing what I’m doing. And that comes from having touched something really sweet inside, just this sweet, quiet feeling. part of myself, it feels very it feels very happy in a way. Happy is not the right word.

It feels almost like love in a way. It’s just a quiet sweetness, I think is the best way to describe it. So it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself and keep going down that road when you start feeling that sweetness also there. And sometimes both can coexist, but my experience is that it becomes It quickly becomes the more predominant thing.

The sweetness becomes more predominant. Now, let’s compare that for a second to the work of Byron Katie, which is another way to break the cycle of a depressive kind of feeling. Now the difference is, the work of Byron Katie will say, let’s look for the thought that’s giving rise to that stressful, depressive feeling, and let’s question that thought.

And that’s a very direct way of dealing with the specifics. of what it is that I’m caught on. And when you question it, same thing happens. This kind of melting happens, this release happens, and I’m no longer stuck on the thought. And there are, many other forms of meditation that are also super effective in releasing stress.

and breaking that cycle of rumination on a depressive kind of thought. But I know TM, that’s what I’ve been doing for years, and it works really well. I love it. And it’s, my favorite thing about it is that it’s so effortless. You don’t have to you don’t have to think it through, you don’t have to reason, you don’t have to understand anything.

You just sit, start using the mantra. And here you go, just settling in quietly, and here comes this restfulness, and here comes this feeling of inner happiness that begins to develop. And what happens physiologically with TM anyway, is that it gives you really deep rest. They’ve shown it’s like twice as deep sleep.

And because of that experience of rest, stress, which is a physiological thing as well as a mental thing, that knot in the body, like I was saying, I felt it in my chest, that begins to loosen. Because when you get rest, things tend to normalize and loosening of that stress is natural. What happens if you meditate over time, then the system becomes more balanced because you’re giving extra rest in a very profound way to the body.

And it just keeps throwing off stress little by little over time. And this leaves you with a natural state of peace and contentment and more happiness. And that has been just such an even keel for me throughout my life. I still have my ups and downs. I still love to go in with the work and deal with some of the specifics.

But as an even keel, this meditation has just given me an experience of there’s a solid piece of contentment there inside of myself, regardless of the situations. And I can get back to that if I get overwhelmed pretty quickly. So finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about how to make meditation a part of your daily routine so that you can nip depression in the butt.

It’s not just. A kind of thing I use to take care of depression or sadness when it comes up, but I use it as a way of preventing. And so what I do, and this is what, if you ever learn TM it’s recommended to practice it twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, about 20 minutes each time.

And it is something that you can build into your daily routine. So you start your day with a little dip into that quietness, that little happy, quiet space, and then in the afternoon you come back again and dip into that. And then during the day you’ve got more energy, during the evening you’ve been re energized, and there’s just less of a need to look for problems, and there’s less of a need to prop yourself up and try to cope in different ways.

TM, like I say, is my favorite way and I haven’t explored a lot of other meditations because this one just works really well for me, but there are many options for you. TM is not cheap. It’s taught one on one in a structured way but it is effective. Other forms of meditation some of them can be done can be taught freely or are available in different ways.

and it’s worth exploring for sure. The key though with meditation is regular practice. Stress accumulates every day, and daily meditation will neutralize the stress as it accumulates. It’s like one of those driveways where they have the heated coils underneath the driveway, and even though it snows, it just keeps melting it as soon as it snows.

So that’s what meditation does. And then if you combine meditation with the work of Byron Katie, then really, depression doesn’t have much of a chance. In this episode, we looked at why depression can affect HSPs more deeply than others. And that’s simply because of our nature to ruminate more, our nature to look deeply at things.

And so when we put our attention on depression, or negative things, sad things, we can end up going deeply into them. But we also saw that there’s an advantage to being sensitive to emotions and that is that we can catch it earlier and we can, we probably are more interested in taking care of it on an earlier basis or even preventing it.

We also looked at how meditation works to release the experience of depression and we saw that When the mind settles down, when it becomes quiet, it starts going into an area within itself that is very charming, very enjoyable to sit in, and that is something that draws the mind. And as it’s drawn inward, it lets go of the hold that it has on the depressing thought.

We also saw that The physical rest that happens during meditation helps throw up, throw off physical stress in the body as well. And finally, we looked at how to make meditation a part of your daily routine to nip depression in the bud. And basically, it’s an ongoing practice. I’ve been practicing for nearly 50 years.

And The regularity of morning meditation and evening meditation, morning meditation, evening or afternoon meditation has just set up a cycle where I’m able to take care of stress as it arises. And that little feeling sorry for myself that I was feeling this morning has already been nipped in the bud so that it doesn’t have to grow into a big huge tree in my life.

So thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed thinking about meditation and hope you’ll enjoy actually the practice of meditation as you explore further. It can be, as I like to say, it’s like the second engine on the train for me in terms of my happiness, my peace. And that’s the first train, first or second train.

I’d say there’s two trains, one is the work of Byron Katie, the other is meditation. Okay, so thanks for listening, and have a great rest of your day.