Depression feels different depending on who you are. One of the main ways depression appears in daily life is as a sense of hopelessness.Many of us have the preconception that being depressed means you feel low, consumed in a black cloud of sadness. This can be true for some people, but you might instead feel flat all the time, lacking the energy to do the things you want to do.As a result, if you aren’t feeling intensely sad, you could be less likely to recognize your feelings as depression and to seek out treatment.What does depression feel like physically? When your depression is characterized by perpetual flatness, you can feel drained of energy. Depression can be so draining, in fact, that you might feel unable to move and wonder if you’re physically ill.For people who have a more agitated kind of depression, the physical symptoms are different. With agitated depression, you feel very anxious. You might be very active because you believe you need to actively fix all the things that seem wrong in your life.There are other physical symptoms of depression, such as difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite, or loss of sexual desire.What can depression feel like in your relationships? You might feel like you don’t have energy for your partner or friends. If your depression makes you irritable, you could have a hard time recognizing what’s good in your relationships.People who are depressed usually blame themselves for their depression. They believe something is wrong with them, and that’s why they’re depressed. If you feel this way, you might isolate yourself from those who care about you out of a fear of being misunderstood and judged negatively.We can all feel irritable and upset with the people we’re close to from time to time, but if you feel critical of your partner most of the time, or if feelings of irritability and detachment seem to affect many areas of your life, you may be experiencing depression. In this case, it would make sense to talk to a therapist.What does being treated for depression feel like? The course your treatment will take depends how you experience depression. Often people want to address a specific feeling, like flatness or a lack of motivation. In therapy, we would try to figure out how long those feelings have persisted. What elements in your life might be contributing to your negative feelings and how can we address those elements?Sometimes depression is rooted in your current situation. You may have lost a job or a significant person in your life. Other times, your feelings go back to events or relationships from childhood. Depressed feelings can sometimes go unrecognized throughout adulthood, until some crisis brings those feelings to your attention.With many forms of depression, there is also a biochemical component. If there seems to be a biochemical factor in your depression, I would refer you for an evaluation for medication. Most studies show that for depression with a biochemical component, therapy and medication work better together than either does separately.In therapy, do you help people rethink how they’re processing things? Self-blame is a huge part of the experience of depression. One thing I always try to do with the people I see is to help you recognize that the way you’re feeling actually makes sense. If you had an abusive parent, you’re going to feel that there’s something wrong with you. If you had a neglectful parent, you’re going to feel that you don’t matter to other people. As counter-intuitive as it might sound, the first step to feeling better is often recognizing that your feelings make sense, that you’re not “crazy” for having them.Then, the more you start to see how you came to have these feelings, the more you start to see that you could actually feel differently. When you start to see that not everyone in the world will respond to you the way the people who criticized or neglected you did, you start to experience new possibilities, and a new sense of hopefulness.What else should people know about depression? If you’ve been feeling low for a significant amount of time, and all your efforts to pull yourself out of it haven’t worked, it’s worth at least talking to a therapist to figure out whether you’re struggling with depression. It’s very hard to struggle with depression on your own. With the help of a therapist, you can recover a sense of hope and possibility.Click to learn more about depression therapy and treatment with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.