Concentration Affects Depression

The implications of the aforementioned have further impact. If you are stressed, this also appears to put a strain on the SAS. It seems that the SAS gets tired when trying to deal with (possibly trying to suppress) all the stressful thoughts that are going through our minds. This has massive implications. And I believe this is particularly pertinent to issues surrounding depression and why that this is why depressed individuals struggle so much to motivate themselves to do basic tasks.

The problem is that some depressed individuals get so stressed that their SAS just caves in. So a depressed individual might begin to try to do some studying but find that not a word of what they are studying is actually going in! Have you ever read a page of a book and at the end of the page thought to yourself ‘I didn’t take a word of that page in. I don’t know a single thing that happened on that last page.’ Well what happened is your SAS was probably tired or pre-occupied thinking about something else. Now reading is an automatic process, so your brain read the letters and words, ie. ‘spoke them’ phonetically in your mind (as though a tape were being played in the background), but because your SAS was otherwise engaged, you didn’t actually consciously process the words you were hearing (ie. You didn’t consciously think about the words you were hearing). It was as though you were hearing a song played in the background, which you weren’t really listening to.

Often when a depressed individual attempts a task, her SAS is so preoccupied with her life-stress that she is trying to cope with, that there is no capacity left to deal with the task at hand. A depressed individual may even stare at items in front of her and not really be able to engage with the item.

I once spoke to a depressed individual who obtained a job at a clothes sorting factory. She would be given a large bin/trolley filled with second hand clothes. A number of ‘shoots’ were situated in front of her, each having a label over it with a heading such as ‘polyester shirts’ or ‘cotton jumpers’. Her job was to take each item of clothing from the trolley and decide which shoot it was supposed to be thrown in. Then she was supposed to throw it into the appropriate shoot. Unfortunately, she very quickly found that she was staring at items of clothing and her mind was completely blank. She didn’t have enough SAS resources left, due to her extreme levels of depression, to be able to consciously engage and decide what each item of clothing was. The lady working next to her would work through twenty bins per day. After three days the depressed lady was only managing one and a half trolleys a day, and was asked to leave.

I believe that the tiring of the SAS has major implications for the depressed individual. Of course it’s a vicious circle, but the depressed individual has become fully aware that he is not able to cope with most basic tasks due to the collapsing of his SAS. Since the individual is fully aware of this, if he is asked to perform a task or if he attempts to perform a task, he becomes overwhelmingly distressed, since he is fully aware that his SAS is incapable of supporting him in relation to the task. He typically becomes so overwhelmingly distressed with this prospect that his SAS completely caves in under the pressure of the situation!! This is one of the reasons why self-efficacy is an important starting point for depressed individuals, and why support is much needed. If the depressed individual is supported through attempting very basic tasks, and begins to get hope that she might be able to achieve these ‘small victories’, then this ‘hope’ can help to reduce the stress placed on the SAS. Once small victories are achieved then the individual may have a little more hope when approaching slightly more taxing tasks, and each victory will hopefully increase the individual’s self-efficacy (self-belief) and thereby reduce the stress load placed on the SAS and thereby help to facilitate further development.