What does depression feel like?

Anxiety is, in one word, insidious. It's something that you don't realize is actually a problem until you've been suffering from it for quite a while. It commonly leads to physical symptoms such as muscle tension, headaches, sleeping problems, and nausea, and many people will first assume that these symptoms have a physical cause rather than a mental one. Anxiety makes it difficult to focus, and it makes you excessively worry about even the stupidest of things, and no matter how much you want to, you can't stop. I don't have depression myself, but I have a friend who does. She's constantly struggling to complete assignments on time due to a lack of motivation. Her sleeping schedule is horrendous, and she often forgets/doesn't care enough to eat -- she started regularly meeting friends for lunch so that she could ensure that she'd at least eat one meal a day. Other common symptoms of depression are a loss of interest in formerly pleasurable activities (anhedonia) and a general lack of energy.

At one moment, your depression is telling you that you don't care what happens. Then the next moment, your anxiety is screaming and clawing at you to do something. Having depression and anxiety is a constant war inside of yourself. Though, there are no winners.

It is not a nice thing to experience and upsets people and their lives talking to people can help alot

It makes it more difficult to lead a normal life, you feel very conflicted and sometimes you feel tired and just need to sleep and sometimes it just keeps you awake all night!

It's like... you're in a trapped box that only you can see, no one understands it and you try your best to get over it but you always end up in the box again. It's like you are chained up to this box.

I saw something online a while ago. "Depression is not caring about everything, anxiety is caring too much about everything". When you have both, it can be similar to cognitive dissonance, where your mind has conflicting beliefs. Your behaviour can seem odd, and can sometimes actually frustrate yourself and others. You might say one thing and mean something completely different. And it applies to everything, not just when talking about mental health.

Having depression and anxiety is like feeling like the world has the best things and it wants to keep them away from you, its like you know you deserve the best but you don't have it and like you're never gonna have it. But if you try harder than anyone else, you're already better than everything.

A prison with no where to go which gives constant mental torture to keep you on your toes. Not once can you let your guard down.

Depression feels like there is nothing good in the world. It is a complete empty and hopeless feeling. It is hard to be positive and envision anything good with major depression weighing on you. Anxiety is the feeling of being very nervous for no apparent reason. You feel very uneasy and uncomfortable. It sometimes makes it hard to sleep or hard to be around other people.

Depression and anxiety make you feel hopeless, not good enough, scared and feeling like it will never go away. It's an awful feeling and that's why I have such compassion towards people who suffer from it because me, myself suffer with it daily.