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Breakup depression often feels like the end of the world. Your sweetie tells you goodbye and you head for the tissues and your copy of Love Jones. But can you imagine going through your worst breakup depression when you’re already struggling with clinical depression? Adding the emotional turmoil of a breakup to an already fragile state of depression causes some deep pits of unhappiness. And while clinical depression and breakup depression manifest in similar ways, you want to be able to distinguish between typical post-breakup sadness and something more.
Sad Thoughts Versus a Negative State of Being
Three years ago, the love of my life broke up with me; apparently he was seeing someone else while we were together. I was heartbroken, even though I’d suspected him of cheating but never asked. I was also going through a depressive episode before the breakup, so my existing state of depression increased exponentially. I took to my bed, the one we’d shared so many times, in tears. I watched Seinfeld, our favorite TV show, in tears. I walked around the apartment feeling emotionally devastated and empty, like a worthless dishrag. In truth, I’d been struggling with all of those feelings during my depression; the breakup only intensified my current state.
When you go through a breakup you can question yourself, your attractiveness, your behavior. Those aspects of your being are also challenged within a depressive episode. Instead of thinking, “Why didn’t he love me?” my depressed brain upped the ante to, “Nobody will ever love me again”. “I must have done something wrong to make him leave me” became “I always do the wrong thing.” During my breakup depression, my clinical depression made the typical thoughts more negative and, thus, more damaging.
Apathy Versus Lethargy
When my relationship ended, I spent a fair amount of time in front of the TV with a carton of ice cream. I know, I was enacting the stereotypical behavior of a woman who’d just been dumped. But ice cream is soothing, and it doesn’t require much energy to eat, and so that was my go-to comfort food during my depression and after my breakup. But eating isn’t the only depressive symptom I felt. My energy and motivation became abysmal. I didn’t change out of my night clothes, I slept all of the time and didn’t want to leave the house. I’d experienced those symptoms when my clinical depression was most severe, and the breakup renewed my lethargic behaviors.
Physical pain is another symptom I experienced after my breakup. Not just the tightness in my chest accompanying my heartbreak, but also muscle aches, pains, and headaches. Sometimes these pains were caused by staying in bed, but other times they appeared without reason. Body pains are a well-known symptom of clinical depression and, like the emotional symptoms, they were brought about by my breakup.
Choosing My Mood
After the requisite few weeks of crying at love songs and eating ice cream out of the container, I’d come out of the physical manifestations of my breakup. However the negative thoughts about the breakup remained, along with the others I grappled with in my long-term depression. In order to reprogram the negative thoughts into positive thoughts and lift my mood, I worked to put more rational thoughts in their place. If I worried about never finding love again, I started thinking “I am loveable; I have people in my life who love me” or “My ex is only one person; there are so many men I’ve never met who could love me.” Putting a more rational spin on my negative thoughts helped reduce their frequency, and their impact on my mood.
Shaking off my breakup depression also helped me do other things to abate my clinical depression. Once my mood improved through positive thinking I started taking better care of myself. Instead of depression junk food I ate fruits and vegetables. I felt good enough to put on clothes instead of wearing my pajamas and bathrobe all day. My tears didn’t disappear, but they lessened since I no longer spent my days laying in bed, caught up in a negative train of thought about my ex-boyfriend. Simply put, I had to choose to think differently about my romantic future in order to start taking steps toward manifesting it.
Tracey Lloyd lives in Harlem, where she fights her cat for access to the keyboard. You can find more of her experiences living with bipolar disorder on her personal blog, My Polar Opposite.
