Depression Linked to the Brain’s Inability to Adapt

Throughout life, our brains change along with us. Imagine yourself as a baby, a blank slate bereft of life experiences. At this point, you had about 100 billion neurons — the cells in your brain. When you were in the womb, your brain cells grew at 250,000 per minute!

Scientists believe that neurons decrease over time as we age. As you grow older, only the most essential neurons and neural connections remain, and the brain rid of nonessential neural connections — synaptic pruning. Synaptic pruning is a process akin to pruning or cutting away dead or unruly branches on a tree, but with connections between brain cells. As scientists learn more about the brain’s function, it’s apparent that our brains can still improve even past this pruning process.

Studies show even adults can grow new brain cells. Every time we learn something new, challenge ourselves, go to therapy, or practice mindfulness, we can make new connections between our brain cells. Our brains learn to react to ourselves and our environments differently — a process called neuroplasticity.

“Neuroplasticity — capacity of neurons and neural networks in the brain to change their connections and behaviour in response to new information, sensory stimulation, development, damage, or dysfunction.”— Britannica

Amazingly, we can boost our brainpower. Knowledge is power, and since the beginning of time, we’ve been able to make ourselves smarter and better thinkers.

With all of this brainpower, why do we still develop mental health concerns like depression or anxiety? Or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Dementia? Scientists have yet to know everything about the brain, but one thing is apparent; some brain diseases are linked to a lack of cognitive flexibility and neuroplasticity.

I’ve worked with many people who were depressed. Depression made it hard to get out of bed, groom themselves, go to work, have sex, feel positive emotions, or have relationships. I’ve watched depression suck away the soul of a person and almost claim another person’s life. With rates of suicide increasing, understanding depression and its causes may help decrease stigma and understand the neuroscience of depression.

In recent years, we’ve gotten a better understanding of depression and how it impacts the brain. New research shows that one of the factors influencing depression is a lack of neuroplasticity or cognitive flexibility. Cognitive inflexibility shows up in many ways:

Rumination — or overthinking:

Have you ever found yourself thinking about or replaying a situation over and over again in your head? Rumination is like playing a broken record or having the same track on replay.

People who ruminate may have decreased flexibility in their thinking and perception.

Therefore, their brains repeat the same situations or thoughts. Unfortunately, our brains get good at ruminating, and those neural connections (mentioned earlier) become strong. Kind of like if you work out a muscle group, it may become stronger than others. So, when a person engages in rumination repeatedly, the brain learns to handle stressful situations by overthinking from year to year. The brain becomes inflexible and rigid, often making a person feel more stressed out or depressed in the process.

Biased attention — Paying more attention to negativity:

A person with depression may pay more attention to sad, stressful, or negative aspects of their life.

Paying attention to negativity isn’t necessarily a conscious process.

It’s the brain’s survival mechanism, a way to watch out for a threat to ensure safety. As a result, the brain gets good at noticing painful experiences and pays more attention to negativity. With this perspective, people with depression see daily life as a struggle. Thoughts that life will never get better may pop up. Then comes hopelessness. The experience of positive emotions, like happiness or fulfillment, becomes difficult to feel. This negative cycle of negativity is the brain’s way of reacting to stress. It’s hard to break out of this cycle because related neural connections become strong over time, and neuroplasticity decreases.

Biased memory — Not being able to “shake off” negative memories:

When going through a hard time, like a breakup, grieving loss, or being fired from a job, our brains work to process — or understand — what happened. When a stressful event occurs, a depressed person is more likely to have trouble focusing on other life experiences. Because depression is related to increased attention to negativity, it becomes hard to disengage. Therefore, negative memories are more likely to come up and stick in our brains.

A person experiencing depression is more likely to remember negative over positive parts of life.

Biased memory is related to increased emotion experiences in the amygdala — the emotion center of our brain. These emotions are often negative or distressing, further perpetuating this negativity cycle. Studies show that because of memory’s link to the amygdala, the brain processes negative experiences faster. Even after the difficult situation occurs, the brain's emotional center is still activated, showing the pervasiveness of biased memory on our emotions.

Negative view of self:

A depressed person often has a pessimistic view of life, especially about how they view themselves. The depressed brain’s tendency to focus on negativity makes it almost impossible to view oneself positively. A hopeless and pessimistic outlook on life affects how they interpret, perceive, and pay attention to experiences.

Over time, depression may lead a person to think they’re defective.

This negative self-view is pervasive and highlights the lack of flexibility or neuroplasticity in the brain of a depressed person. By believing that they are defective and forever broken, the rigid view of themselves is made stronger. The neural connections related to this way of thinking also become more robust, and over time, it becomes harder to have cognitive flexibility.

How to have cognitive flexibility:

1. Become aware of negative thoughts — If you’re not aware, you can’t make change.

In previous articles, I’ve written about how our thoughts impact our mood. Often, negative self-talk or negative thoughts about the world can worsen depression. Because these thoughts are often automatic, it’s hard to notice them sometimes. To impact depression, first, it’s essential to know your depression to understand it. You can first do this by being aware of negative thoughts and related feelings. Be mindful of negative thoughts about yourself like, “I suck,” “I’m worthless,” or negative thoughts about your situation, “Things will never get better,” or “Everything is always bad.”

We have thousands of thoughts per day, some of which happen outside of our conscious awareness. By bringing depressive thoughts into your awareness, you can use skills to increase cognitive flexibility.

2. Make new brain cell connections by practicing mindfulness

To become aware of thoughts, you can practice mindfulness — or focusing on the present and being aware of body and mind. Mindfulness, the practice of paying attention to internal processes and redirecting attention over and over again, can rewire your brain. Mindfulness also decreases rumination by altering attention processes, stopping the negativity cycle that depression fuels. The most shocking impact of mindfulness is its ability to make our brains more likely to create new neural connections between brain cells — neuroplasticity or cognitive flexibility.

Mindfulness practices are literally at your fingertips. Many people use mental health apps to access mindfulness practices whenever they want, with mindfulness app options for kids, too! Apps like Headspace, Calm, Insight Timer, MyLife(with free options) are great places to start or maintain daily mindfulness practices. The more you’re aware of depression-related thoughts created by neural connections, you’ll begin to know when you can practice cognitive flexibility.

3. Cognitive restructuring — Breaking bad “thought habits.”

Before, I mentioned the brain’s tendency to ruminate or have biased memory and attention processes when depressed. We have the power and ability to change what we attend to (such as with mindfulness) and how we perceive or think about situations. In therapy, some providers use cognitive restructuring to challenge unhelpful thoughts to increase cognitive flexibility. During this process, the brain learns to pay attention to thoughts, create new connections between brain cells, and have fewer negative emotions associated with thoughts. You can try this at home to access more rational thinking patterns that can be blocked by depressive cognitions.

You can see how a negative or dysfunctional thought can lead to furthering depressed mood and hopelessness in both examples. By thinking about the situation in a helpful way, the brain adapts and learns to relate to the same situation differently.

Think about your stressful situations.

Is there a situation or adverse event that keeps you feeling down? Once you notice that you’re thinking negatively or in an unhelpful way, there are ways to challenge these thoughts to consider other possibilities. Here are some questions or statements to ask yourself:

By asking yourself these questions, your brain starts to process, think about other possibilities, and make new neural connections. Cognitive restructuring takes time and practice. You may have been thinking in a certain way for decades. Over time, your brain’s neural connections have become strong.

It will take a conscious effort to think differently and make new neural connections. It’s like building up a new muscle group, like biceps, after only having leg day for years.

If you want to get down to the root of your thoughts and feelings, you can practice this with a therapist to get good at breaking thought habits.

Depression is pervasive and so tricky to manage. But, by becoming aware of yourself and challenging unhelpful thought habits, you can learn how to pull yourself out of a downward depression spiral; like with any skill, creating cognitive flexibility takes practice. By reading this article, you’ve already taken the first step at becoming aware of depression and cognitive flexibility.