Functional depression is a state that I have come to accept is just how it is for the time being. Trying to put on a time limit on when I will feel like me again has been damaging to say the least.
For the last 10 years, I’ve made exercise and healthy living my life, leaving a nice safe marketing career to coach climbing before qualifying as a S&C Coach and Manual Sports Therapist. I am at the start of a bright and exciting career, building my freelance clinic and spending my days ‘living the dream’.
It is not a secret that depression and anxiety have crept into my life in many forms over the years; post-natal depression, a traumatic childhood, addictive behaviours (all the ACES, yay me). Weightlifting and climbing became a sort of therapy for me, so when healthcare professionals talk about how exercise and social hobbies can counter depressive symptoms, I GET IT. I don’t need to read the multitude of quality scientific papers to convince me. I lived it. I was there. I went from sedentary, overweight teenage mother, to boss of the deadlifts, I would wake up at 9am for yoga on Sundays, I would squeeze a climb in at 6am before work, go play in the outside gym in my lunchbreaks. I had never felt more energetic, slept better, ate better.
Then life came at me, bereavements, resurfacing of childhood trauma, my kid moving away for uni, covid and health issues. One day, suddenly I had to start forcing myself to ‘have fun’ in the gyms, at the walls. It became such an effort to just show up, I didn’t notice but over the course of 2025 nothing was fun anymore. Nothing excited me.
We all struggle with motivation but this is something different – finding myself forcing myself to go to the gym normally resulted in some kind of post-exercise endorphins and a realisation that this isn’t so bad after all. But not this time, this time, I resented participating in activities that used to bring me joy, desperately seeking the dopamine hit I used to get.
But what to do when you are an exercise professional that can no longer exercise? How do you look after other people when you have lost the ability to care for yourself? When I try to explain this to people who know me – they do not get it. I spent too many years pretending I was fine, and I became a master of masking. Behind my smile, are years of being taken advantage of, years of having to look after myself, years of just sucking things up for a quiet life.
Hence the term FUNCTIONAL DEPRESSION. For all intents and purposes I look like a perfectly functioning human. I smile with my whole face, I am forcing myself to do just enough physical activity I still look like someone that takes care of themselves. But most mornings, I wake up sad or anxious before even having the time to acknowledge waking up. I do not understand what possible evolutionary purpose or use there is to waking up in cold sweats with a twisted stomach of dreadful feelings. Not even properly awake and playing through doom scenarios, of things that happened and things that may never happen. I wonder if it is a side affect of being in survival mode for so long? Like a switch is permanently switched for my own protection. Perhaps my soul cannot handle being let down again, it was one thing to be neglected by the family that said they loved me – but letting myself down?
Safer to just exist with the lowest of expectations. Try to exercise once or twice a week, brush my teeth once a day, try to drink a glass of water a day, try to keep the house tidy, try to see a friend a week, try to show up for work. That is my self-care at the moment.
It feels like taking your car to a mechanic to repair it, but the mechanics car is broken; it makes you feel like an imposter. But on the bright side, it gives me a certain empathy with my patients. I get it, I wont be patronising you and encouraging you to do something that I wouldn’t recommend to myself.
I have spent all of 2025 (2021-2025) pretending to be a human, in the hope that if I faked it I would make it through. When I realised that the way I talk to patients is so significantly kinder than the way I talk to myself I realised I needed an intervention. So all you can manage is a walk around the block, or once phone call, or 10 mins of climbing – that’s great. Well done, keep moving, one step at a time, and eventually you’ll look back and realise that despite the fog of depression you have grown, you have moved. As a wise woman once told me, telling yourself you’re lazy is disrespectful to your growth – if you were really lazy you would be enjoying yourself.
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