The sharpshooter fallacy is a tendency to pay attention to hits and ignore misses.
There’s not an inverse for overcounting misses. The shame of that is there’s no quick vernacular for explaining frequency when it comes to symptoms of depression.
Depression strikes all age groups, though it is slightly more common to pop up in young adulthood.
The following will help you identify depression symptoms and how often you see them indicates a problem.
Obvious Symptoms of Depression
Depression acts like a lot of other physical illnesses, it features obvious symptoms and more subtle ones.
Remember that depression is defined as feeling any of the following with a preceding incident.
With obvious symptoms, if you feel them more than a day or two in a row, it’s a good idea to look for some outside help.
Hopelessness
Have you ever felt like there is no end to the descent? That there is no floor and all you’re really doing is falling forever?
The icy grip of hopelessness tends to come and go but it often stays longer than it should and leave only to make you aware you’re still feeling it.
Insomnia
While insomnia exasperates other depression symptoms it is, itself, a symptom. Difficulty in sleeping is a difficulty in the brain shutting down to allow you to rest.
Insomnia also leads to excessive sleeping periods. This double-whammy on your energy makes functioning difficult.
Suicidal Ideation
The starkest symptom of depression is suicidal thoughts. Not only is this the most dangerous symptom, but it is also the most frightening.
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Subtle Symptoms of Depression
These symptoms tend to act more like background noise, making life feel overall more difficult but not raising the kinds of red flags of the obvious symptoms.
Lack of Interest
It’s natural to move on from one project o interest to another. You can only watch the same show so many times before you want something new.
If you find yourself unable to become interested in anything, new or old, that’s a sign depression is sneaking up.
Dietary Changes
Like insomnia, changes to your diet both cause and are caused by depression. Over and undereating stress the body.
If you find your diet changing, start a food journal. This provides you with something objective to check and chart.
Numb Feelings
The most insidious symptom of depression is a general feeling of being numb. Things that should affect you don’t and you can’t seem to even summon the ability to care that you don’t care.
Numb feelings become difficult to track when you experience insomnia and food-related issues.
Get Help
The problem with the majority of the symptoms of depression is that they feed into each other. It is easy to simply dismiss a bad day or a bad mood until you can’t remember the last time you had a good one.
Reach out to other people in your life for help in charting your symptoms. If you can’t seem to find the energy to do so, that’s avoidance, which is also a symptom to look out for.
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