Depression in the Nervous System

Therapy in a Nutshell

Therapy in a Nutshell -Emma McAdam

Mental Health, Education, Health & Fitness:mental Health, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn the skills to Regulate your Emotions, join the membership: https://courses.therapyinanutshell.com/membership Depression isn’t just in your mind—it’s in your nervous system. In this video, we take a somatic and polyvagal-informed approach to understanding depression as a state of nervous system dysregulation. Learn how shutdown, freeze, and dorsal vagal states keep you stuck and how somatic therapy can help you shift into safety, connection, and regulation. Using insights from polyvagal theory, we’ll explore how the vagus nerve influences mood, energy, and emotions. Discover body-based techniques to move out of chronic exhaustion, numbness, and despair. Whether you struggle with low motivation, fatigue, or emotional overwhelm, these nervous system regulation tools can help you heal from the inside out! Looking for affordable online counseling? My sponsor, BetterHelp, connects you to a licensed professional from the comfort of your own home. Try it now for 10% off your first month: https://betterhelp.com/therapyinanutshell Learn more in one of my in-depth mental health courses: https://courses.therapyinanutshell.com Support my mission on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/therapyinanutshell Sign up for my newsletter: https://www.therapyinanutshell.com Check out my favorite self-help books: https://kit.co/TherapyinaNutshell/best-self-help-books Therapy in a Nutshell and the information provided by Emma McAdam are solely intended for informational and entertainment purposes and are not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment regarding medical or mental health conditions. Although Emma McAdam is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the views expressed on this site or any related content should not be taken for medical or psychiatric advice. Always consult your physician before making any decisions related to your physical or mental health. In therapy I use a combination of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Systems Theory, positive psychology, and a bio-psycho-social approach to treating mental illness and other challenges we all face in life. The ideas from my videos are frequently adapted from multiple sources. Many of them come from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, especially the work of Steven Hayes, Jason Luoma, and Russ Harris. The sections on stress and the mind-body connection derive from the work of Stephen Porges (the Polyvagal theory), Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing) Francine Shapiro (EMDR), and Bessel Van Der Kolk. I also rely heavily on the work of the Arbinger Institute for my overall understanding of our ability to choose our life's direction. And deeper than all of that, the Gospel of Jesus Christ orients my personal worldview and sense of security, peace, hope, and love https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/believe If you are in crisis, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org or 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or your local emergency services. Copyright Therapy in a Nutshell, LLC

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to another episode of the Therapy in a nutshell podcast. I'm Emma McAdam and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.
0:09.0	And this podcast is all about taking the life-changing, but usually kind of complicated topics of therapy and boiling them down into simple, easy-to-understand concepts that you can use in your daily life. If you find today's
0:21.7	episode is helpful to you, please pass it on to someone else who could benefit from it as well.
0:25.9	Each podcast episode comes from a corresponding video you can find on the Therapy in a Nutshell
0:30.3	YouTube channel. Also, these podcasts are educational and don't replace the advice or direction
0:35.1	you may be receiving from a therapist or other health professionals.
0:38.3	Now please, enjoy the episode.
0:40.3	Have you ever felt like everything is exhausting?
0:43.3	Or you feel numb inside, like you can't really feel anything.
0:47.3	Good stuff happens and you feel zilch.
0:49.3	Like food doesn't taste good anymore.
0:52.3	Maybe you have no motivation. Or you feel like just curling up into a ball, never moving again.
0:58.5	You don't want to be around anyone and you just shut down. Or maybe everything seems fine in life, like you have a good job, good friends, but you just can't feel any joy in it.
1:07.5	Now some might describe this as depression, but there's another way to look at it.
1:11.2	From a nervous system perspective, this is called hypoarousal, the dorsal vagal response, or the shutdown state.
1:17.4	And it's closely related to trauma, especially childhood trauma. In this video, we're going to explore how our nervous system's response to fear, adversity, or trauma can get stuck in our body and trigger depression.
1:29.3	And the good news is that this understanding opens up some great treatment options for both trauma and depression.
1:38.3	Now, real quick, we have to talk about what causes depression.
1:41.3	In the past, there's been an overly simplified view of depression, that it was laziness or a simple chemical imbalance. So the theory of
1:50.4	low serotonin, for example, that's been disproven. But the truth is that depression is
1:55.2	probably many different diseases with various underlying problems, and then the symptoms
2:00.7	show up as depression.
	...

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