“I’m done,” I announced, as I closed my laptop and curled into a ball in the corner of the couch. My husband put his hand on mine knowingly, not saying a word. Despite the sadness that swelled in my belly, I felt at peace. It had taken six months to accept that I was in way over my head — that I had set an unattainable goal, starting and growing a business that required more resources than I could afford, and needed to let go. But it wasn’t a therapeutic talk or a drained bank account that brought me to a place where I could finally disengage.
It was depression.
The “never give up” mentality was drilled into my head early in life. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs and abandoning ship isn’t an easy option. When I’m not feeling blue, I push myself — even when a little voice inside says, “Give up, woman. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel.” During periods of depression, which I was diagnosed with 20 years ago and appears on and off for me (and can come out of nowhere), I find it much easier to let go of things that are weighing me down, particularly goals that are simply out of reach, and move on. But I’ve never understood why. I thought there was something wrong with me. Was it undiagnosed ADHD? A way to satisfy an incurable need for accomplishment? Acceptance of defeat?
Turns out, for someone with depression, letting go is often easy and completely normal. In fact, it can be a big psychological win. A pioneering new study from researchers in Germany suggests that letting go of unattainable goals may be an adaptive perk of depression. This is a sharp turn away from the mainstream notion of perseverance and the “never give up” mindset I learned as a child.
“Depression is adaptive because it sensitizes a person to detect possible limits of personal agency and influence, and thus helps them to realize and accept that successful pursuit of a goal, a task, or an incentive might not be feasible,” Professor Klaus Rothermund, who led the study, tells The Post. “This somewhat ‘pessimistic’ attitude is adaptive whenever important personal goals are blocked, preventing scarce resources being spent in vain attempts.”
In their study, Jena University psychologists gave 40 patients with clinical depression and 38 non-depressed participants the simple task of solving anagrams or words in which the letters are in the wrong order. The anagrams had to be figured out within a set timeframe; yet, unknown to the participants, some of the anagrams were unsolvable. Patients with depression spent less time in total on the unsolvable anagrams than the control group, according to the findings, indicating they had less difficulty in detecting and accepting that it was impossible for them to solve these tasks.
Both groups spent equal amounts of time on solvable anagrams, suggesting that depressed people had no general deficit in committing themselves to manageable tasks.
“Any negative or uncomfortable emotion or set of emotional systems can certainly be regarded as something of a compass,” said Alena Gerst, a mind-body-focused psychotherapist based in New York City.
Previous studies have demonstrated that clinging to unattainable goals is linked to the onset of depression. Depression, in this study, appears to guide a person to a quicker resolution and exit from a futile activity. This is not a psychological dead end, but an opportunity.
“The one who gives up wins,” said the study’s lead author, Katharina Koppe, “even if that sounds paradoxical at first.” The person able to let go can move on, whereas someone still clinging to an unattainable goal is stuck in limbo. From personal experience, there is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that is relieved when you consciously, or not so consciously, make the decision to disengage.
“The general lack of motivation that is typical of many patients with depression apparently gives rise to a greater ability to abandon goals, and one could use this in therapy,” Rothermund said in a university press release. For example, exploration of previously unattained or currently blocked goals and the disengagement from these goals could be included as an essential focus in treating clinical depression.
Koppe believes depression can make us stop and question the life we have lived, which can be constructive.
“Desisting from perceiving depression as an obstacle to our well-being, we could actually conceive the crisis as a chance to improve our way of living,” she said. “Instead of stigmatizing depression as a personal failure or weakness or perceiving it as an unfortunate stroke of fate, we could try to see the constructive aspects in it. It therefore holds the opportunity to reorient and start anew.”
So how does a person recognize when a real-world goal is impossible versus difficult, especially if they have depression? “This is one of the most fundamental and most difficult questions of human life — not just for depressed people,” Rothermund explained. “Especially when it comes to important, challenging and long-term goals, there is often no safe and secure way to know in advance whether one will finally be able to reach a particular goal or not.”
Depression can be a means to save us from the danger of overcommitting ourselves to unattainable goals, but, as Rothermund is quick to point out, depression is not a well-balanced attitude towards life and goal pursuit in general.
“We definitely do not want to advocate depression as a superior form of attitude towards life. To the contrary, depression is a psychopathological syndrome, it comes with extremely adverse consequences [including] loss of self-worth, suicidal ideation, anhedonia [inability to feel pleasure], extremely negative affectivity, and it requires treatment.”
As for additional research, Koppe says the team would like to examine if the disengagement effect in the domain of simple cognitive tasks (anagrams) generalizes to other domains of functioning and to more complex tasks or goals. “We should note that generalizing from anagrams to real-life goals (e.g., becoming a doctor, having a family) is a huge step, and any implications drawn on this issue rest on the assumption that the ease of disengagement is influenced by a general mechanism that applies to all kinds of goals. Clearly, more research is needed to substantiate this claim,” she said.
Depression may not be our friend, but now there’s proof there could be at least one positive benefit. The current study, “Let It Go: Depression Facilitates Disengagement from Unattainable Goals,” was published in February 2017 in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.
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