Losing Your Sense of Urgency to Depression

Despite deadlines looming, barely any food in the fridge, medication dwindling, your depression brain wants to put everything off. Everything can wait. And even when the supplies do finally run out, it’s a mammoth effort to get up and out to re-stock.

You reschedule tasks for the next day, and the next day; moving through each one at a snail’s pace that you can’t change. It’s like slogging through mud every day with a tired resignation that this is how it is until the depression begins to lift a little.

Nothing feels worth it.

By the time you go to bed you’ve got a list of the things you didn’t manage to get done that day, you feel a glimmer of hope that sleep might restore you enough to tackle more tomorrow than you did today. However, by the morning you can’t muster the will to fight the exhaustion to get out of bed when you planned. Already you’re behind schedule, but you’re so tired that you can hardly bring yourself to care. It sounds like laziness. It most definitely isn’t.

Nothing feels like it needs doing enough to warrant fighting so hard to do a simple task like getting out of bed. By the time your energy reserves have enough in them to get you up, you feel a vague sense of guilt and a growing sense of failure. What’s the point in beginning the slog now? But you start it anyway, with the same pace as yesterday.

A Sense of Urgency vs. Having To

A sense of urgency drives you to do things in a timely manner, perhaps even early, but with this absent your life is divided into what has to be done and what doesn’t.

Everything is left until the last moment conceivable, and if it isn’t essential it might get missed or scrubbed off the list. At the time it is impossible to do any more than you are doing, but you know that regret may lie in wait. Despite the limitations your illness puts on you, you get lost in what you should have done, what you could have done…

A sense of urgency isn’t just motivation, but motivation do something with enough time to do it well, to make improvements. Without it you operate on a level of just getting things done. This becomes your goal, anything beyond that seems beyond your remit because your pace is dictated by all the sludge you plod through, day after day.

When It Starts to Come Back

Plans multiply in your head and it’s so tempting to set scores of goals once you feel a little of the sense of urgency return. Yet, you can find yourself falling into the trap of thinking you can fix everything in a short space of time.

You have to let go of the days when you marched through mud to achieve the minimum and celebrate what you achieve each day—not dwell on the things you didn’t manage.

I tried an experiment with ‘done lists’ to help me do this, you can read the story in the link below.

Lists have become very helpful in my life. With regards to a sense of urgency, they help to manage expectations. For example, I can see if I’m overreaching with my goals if my list of tasks is huge, but my time is short. Somehow putting things down on paper helps me to see my plan more clearly.

Last Words

In my experience, my sense of urgency has never quite returned to my pre-depression diagnosis days.

Some days I am still completely lacking in motivation and can wildly frustrate my partner with my lack of urgency to complete anything on a normal human timescale.

Other days I get through more, but I still struggle with completing things in the pattern of a normal day, i.e. normal mealtimes, regular time for getting up, regular work schedule.

There is no drive behind me like there once was, urging me to do things to a deadline. My body now seems to live with a default ‘it can wait’ mode. Who knows if this will ever change, I hope so.