Lauv (the “I like me better when I’m with you” singer) writes an essay for People about his struggles with depression and OCD.
“I had spent almost the entire month of January in bed, trapped by obsessive negative thoughts and the need to organize them. My anxiety was at an all-time high, perpetually making me feel like life was on the brink of imploding.
But in my head, I thought I just had to think my way out of it. In reality, I had fallen out of love with everything I used to care about, including the one thing that always brought me purpose: music.
I was living with a vague, haunting sense of disconnection from everyone else (almost as if a blanket had been placed between me and the world). But in my head, I just had to find the one fix (which, by the way, was an ever-changing, made-up idea I had created in my mind).
Distraught and exhausted, I decided to let my friends and family in. And that helped a lot. But after weeks of endlessly cycling conversations with my friends, family and team, I realized I was stuck.
The thing with OCD is that talking about your obsessions can feel really good — like really, really good — because that is the compulsion: the act of relief. But that relief only lasts for a moment. Then, it’s back to obsessing.”
Note how he talks about feeling “stuck.”
I just posted a new study, based on thousands of functional MRI’s, showing why people with depression and OCD get stuck in their negativity.
Basically, the part of their brain that says “move on” just doesn’t work as actively as it does in healthy brains.
You want to move on — every part of you knows you need to, you should, but you just can’t.
So what helped Lauv? Therapy and medication.
[Photo: Glenn Francis]
