What Depression Is Like

(Too Much Sudoku)

I was thinking to myself about the difficulties I have explaining depression to people, when I thought of a relatively good metaphor for it.

Bear with me.

Sudoku

For anyone unaware, Sudoku is a puzzle where one tries to fill in a 9x9 grid of numbers according to certain rules:

Each row, column, and 3x3 square must have the numbers 1-9 in them, without repeating any numbers. Black numbers are given, red numbers start as blank squares and must be solved by the puzzler.

It’s a common form of brain teaser, much like a crossword puzzle or logic puzzle. Some Sudoku puzzles are difficult and some are easy; for our purposes we’ll think about ones that are relatively easy.

Brain App

Imagine, for a moment, that someone hacked your brain, and installed an app in it (don’t worry about the how). What this app does is force you to - whenever you want to do something - solve a mild Sudoku puzzle first. Not a hard one, it’s not difficult, just annoying. Want to get out of bed? Solve a Sudoku puzzle. Want to start work in the morning? Solve a Sudoku puzzle.

Want to get dressed, workout, eat, talk to someone, etc.?

First you’ve got to solve the puzzle.

At first it’s irritating, but you adapt. You figure out shortcuts for solving Sudoku puzzles. It’s brainpower you’re not expending on anything useful, but you get by.

This is the base case, the core of the metaphor.

Now we expand it.

There are two dimensions along which this nefarious app gets more annoying as time goes on:

1. It decreases the granularity of the actions to which it applies. In other words, where before you had to solve a Sudoku puzzle to go to work, now you’ve got to solve a puzzle to get dressed, a puzzle to get in the car, a puzzle to drive, and a puzzle to actually get started working. Before all of those counted as a single action - ‘go to work’ - now they’re counted separately, as discrete steps, and each requires a puzzle.

2. It increases the number of puzzles you have to solve to do anything. At first it’s just one Sudoku puzzle; eventually, it’s two, then three, and so on. Having to solve a single Sudoku puzzle whenever you want to do anything is annoying; having to solve five is downright irritating.

So what happens to you - what does your life look like - with this app running in your head?

Dimension 1

As the depression gets worse, the granularity of the actions requiring Sudoku solves gets smaller.

What does this look like?

At first you go through your normal morning routine, except that upon waking up, you need to solve the Sudoku puzzle to get started.

Then you have to do a Sudoku puzzle to get out of bed, another to make coffee, another to get dressed, another to shower, and so on.

Then you have to do a Sudoku puzzle to open your eyes, another to sit up, another to swing your legs around and another to actually stand up.

Finally, each individual muscle contraction comes with its own Sudoku puzzle. Want to sit up? That single action is composed of many pieces: your arms shift to support your weight, your stomach contracts to pull you up, your leg muscles tighten to keep your lower body in place. All of those now require their own puzzles.

Each puzzle, on its own, isn’t particularly difficult. But they do take some nonzero amount of effort, and when you add that required effort to every single thing you do, suddenly you find yourself doing a lot less. ‘Getting out of bed’ is now a complicated, multi-step operation that takes way more work than it used to.

Solving all these puzzles takes time, too, so you’re slower than you used to be at everything. Activities or jobs that you used to breeze through in seconds can stretch into minutes. Parts of your routine that never left you tired now leave you feeling like your brain has been lifting weights the whole time.

Dimension 2

Another way to think about how depression gets worse is that this app running in your head starts demanding you solve more and more Sudoku puzzles before doing anything.

At first you only have to solve a single puzzle to do your morning routine, get your work done, or go hand out with friends.

Then it’s two. Three. Five. Ten.

Fifty.

Just imagine what your life might be like - how you might feel - if you had to solve fifty mild Sudoku puzzles before doing anything.

Just the thought of having to solve them all is exhausting. And it’s not because they’re difficult, but rather because they’re boring. You don’t get anything out of solving them; they’re just a chore you have to complete before you’re allowed to get on with your life. Even if you enjoy doing such puzzles, having to do hundreds per day would quickly sap any pleasure you get. You’re not challenged or engaged, because the puzzle difficulty never changes. You’re not learning anything or growing.

You’re just going through the motions, over and over again.

How many activities could you manage per day, if the prerequisite for each of them was fifty Sudoku puzzles?

Indirect Consequences

Now envision the indirect consequences of this state of affairs. Because it’s not just that whatever you want to do now is blocked by the slog of puzzling, it’s every activity in the future.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow you’ll experience the same boredom, the same lack of reward or challenge, the same difficulty getting anything accomplished, so…what’s the point in trying today?

Over time you’d grow apathetic, because you can only take so much disappointment before it burns you out.

You’d stay in bed all day doing nothing, because what’s the point of doing anything else? And eventually hunger or other bodily needs might drive you to do the fifty puzzles so you can eat or relieve yourself, but that’s about the extent to which you’d be willing to do anything.

You’d stop showering, stop going out, stop talking to your friends, stop…living.

Which…is pretty much what depression looks like.

Conclusion

It’s incredibly difficult to translate qualia between minds - to give others a genuine understanding of what one feels internally. This is true for emotions, for pain, for beauty, for taste…and it’s also true for mental illness.

I don’t know what it’s like to be bipolar or schizophrenic or psychotic, but I do have quite a bit of experience at this point with depression. I hope that this metaphor can help you express yourself better to others, if you’ve been depressed. If you’re not I hope it’ll help you empathize better with those who are.

It’s a difficult topic to talk about. Maybe this helps.