Now and then, there’s some task you just have to do. You really don’t want to, you’d rather put it off until later — but you’re an adult, and you know it’s important. So you suck it up, and you get it done. Maybe it’s doing some D.I.Y. around the house, maybe it’s going to the dentist, doing your taxes, whatever it is — you really don’t want to do it but you make yourself do it anyway, since as a functioning adult you have the capacity for self discipline to do those things you don’t like. Chances are you feel good about it afterwards though, glad to finally have it off your shoulders — but you still wouldn’t chose to do it again for that ‘reward’.

If you’re unlucky, you’ve probably had a few of those kinds of things in quick succession. If you have, you’ll know that each time it becomes more and more difficult to summon that mental fortitude to get up and do it. Rarely do we exhaust ourselves so much that it becomes impossible to do, but exercising self discipline requires effort and causes an amount of stress. Our capacity for it is a finite resource that can be depleted, and must be managed carefully.

Imagine if each morning, you felt the way about getting up the way you did about that difficult task. This is different from just not wanting to get up — you want to get up, you know you need to get up, but it feels like a huge amount of effort. If it’s now and then you could handle it, but instead it’s every single morning.

And then imagine that every little trivial but necessary thing you had to do throughout the day felt like this. Brushing your teeth, preparing food, going to work — all a huge amount of work. You might assume that you’re just fatigued, tired, or having an off week — but that constant feeling of not being able to do anything is exactly what depression is. And for a while you can fight it through sheer force of will and that same self discipline, but it will take it’s toll on you if you’re not careful.

Depression isn’t necessarily an emotion, it’s a state of being. A perpetual mental fatigue that robs you of the most basic motivation required to function. It’s no sooner something you can simply snap out of as you can snap out of being physically fatigued after a run. Maybe you can summon up some extra strength from somewhere to go a little longer but you’re stretching and over-exerting yourself to do so. And just as you might make sure you don’t over do it physically, you need to also be mindful that you don’t over do it mentally. If possible it’s better to avoid falling into a hole than to have to dig yourself out after the fact. This of course doesn’t help if a hole suddenly appears underneath you with no warning, but understanding why that hole is there is a big part of understanding what to do about it.

So take a moment to think about why you’re feeling the way you do. Maybe you are just tired or having an odd week, but maybe you are showing the signs of depression — sometimes there’s a definite cause that you can point to and take action on, but not always. Clinical depression is something that requires real medical intervention, it is not a failing of character.