There are days when Ashley, 30, feels like her life couldn’t be better.
The old paint job on their house.
“I get progressively more upset as I think about them,” she says.
Joy and despondency tag-team in Ashley’s life in a way that might seem contradictory.
But her experience is hardly unusual.
“Certainly, some do experience both.”
Young women may be most prone to this apparent paradox.
But they also show more symptoms of depression than do previous generations.
The trend was magnified in females, who are nearly twice as likely as males to have clinical depression.
The Mayo Clinic reports that one in five women will develop depression in her lifetime.
And that sort of obsessive stewing may lead to depressive symptoms.
It’s not unusual to moan, “I’m so depressed!”
after a bad day.
But as the American Psychiatric Association defines it, depression is a disorder with a clear-cut list of symptoms.
Happiness, meanwhile, is both an emotion and a subjective judgment about life.
Happiness and life-satisfaction questionnaires administered by psychologists ask things like “Is your life close to ideal?”
and “Do you have the important things you want?”
Or you’re free to be generally happy with your circumstances, yet your mood can be lousy.
Like many other disorders, clinical depression falls on a continuum, from mild to moderate to severe.
These fleeting blue moods can occur within a broader experience of well-being.
“It’s our natural resting place.”
She misses them and her friends who stayed home, marrying young and having babies.
Marlo, meanwhile, is still looking for a mate.
“Guys in L.A. are impossible,” she says.
Her work typically makes her troubles worthwhileit’s taken her to three Olympics.
After one breakup, she took up boxing.
“I’d get out all this anger and aggression and sadness.”
Katherine, 25, is an analyst with an energy company in her hometown of San Antonio.
It isn’t her dream job; she loves fashion and travel.
About six months into her job, she started laboring to get out of bed.
(Anxiety and depression often go together, Twenge notes.)
One day last spring, a routine work phone call set off a full-blown panic attack.
“It was uncontrollable and totally embarrassing,” she says.
“That was when I realized this isn’t normal, and I went to see a counselor.”
The counselor screened her for depression.
“It helps control the emotions that were making it hard for me to go to work.”
The counselor also offered tactics to help her manage her moods.
“So I wasn’t writing ‘Crappy city.
My life sucks.’
I was grateful for my family and all the opportunities I’ve had.”
Ironically, the very habits that help women become super successful may also lead to depression.
We have lofty goals, but we may feel disappointed if we don’t reach them.
Or we do what others expect of us.
And while perfectionism might make us good students, employees and entrepreneurs, it also correlates with depression.
“I’m a total pop in A personality,” Katherine admits.
“I don’t like to make mistakes.”
Add to that our culture of overwork.
Technology compounds the problem.
“It’s created the expectation that we are available 24/7,” Carter says.
“We’re tribal, cave people,” Carter says.
There’s a little part of your nervous system wondering where your clan is."
Rachel, who lives by herself in the Houston area, is an ob/gyn resident at 26.
So she’ll play her guitar or go for a run to keep from feeling bad.
“I feel it most when I’m not busy,” she says.
I probably should see a counselor, but I don’t have the time.
I tell myself I don’t have this diagnosis because I don’t want it."
Bad moods, though unpleasant, are not necessarily a bad thing.
Research shows that people in negative moods are better negotiators and less gullible.
They’re more aware of threats and take fewer risks.
An angry mood can boost performance in competition.
In important ways, negative feelings can contribute to our success.
One hundred percent happiness should never be the goal anyway, says Biswas-Diener.
“Sometimes the appropriate emotional response is to be guilty or jealous or angry or sad.”
Each mood is normal and serves a valuable purpose.
Guilt means you’ve violated your own moral code, while sadness means something important is missing.
“Think of your moods as a thermometer that takes the temperature of your life,” he says.
Of course, no one wants to live under a gray cloud.
Biswas-Diener suggests we aim for an 80:20 ratio of positive to negative emotions.
“A 50:50 ratio is probably not good enough.
All that emotional distress is telling you that the circumstances of your life need attention,” he says.
Rather than running from bad moods or drowning them in work busyness, listen to your feelings.
“What are they telling you?”
Doing so “starts to undercut their negative impact,” he says.
And it may lead you to think of creative solutions for the underlying problems.
Ashley, the would-be YA novelist, has begun to use this tactic when she is ambushed by negativity.
“Actually looking at it makes it easier to deal with than pushing it away,” she says.
it’s possible for you to push back against occasional sad feelings in other proven ways.
Add activities and people to your life that make you feel competent and give you pleasure, Gollan says.
Go for a hike, do volunteer work, or join a book club.
“Exercise is the second thing I recommend.
Seek social and emotional support, another tactic shown to ward off depression.
“My grandma doesn’t have Facebook, and she and I write letters all the time.
And I actually have to call her on the phone and talk to her.
I love that,” Katherine says.
If a screening suggests symptoms of depression, talk to your primary care physician, Gollan says.
“Ask if you should be referred to a psychologist or psychiatrist.
Mild depression can be tackled by behavioral approaches.
Moderate to severe might also need medication.
State-of-the-art care is really both.”
If instead your blues are garden-variety, take heart.
Put on a pot of tea and your favorite moody playlist.
Use it to make a few tweaks to your life.
Then allow the bad mood to pass like a dreary winter day, leaving clear sky in its wake.
Photo Credit: Adam Voorhes
