This time, I’ll be discussing the idea that “Depression is a restriction on the brain’s data cap.” This is a feeling I developed during my three-year battle with severe depression. While there is no falsehood or exaggeration in that experience, unfortunately, there is no medical basis for it.
I do not possess specialized medical knowledge, so please consider this solely as my personal experience. Please consult a physician as needed.
What do I do all day?
While I was still on leave, whenever I went to the office for meetings,
“You must be bored with nothing to do, right?”
“You can binge-watch Netflix and stuff.”
“Taking walks every day must be so elegant.”
I heard comments like that a lot. They were so off the mark it surprised me, and I didn’t have the energy to argue, so I’d just say, “Yeah,” and quickly leave the room.
Right after starting my convalescence, my energy is completely depleted, so going for a walk is nothing but a pipe dream. Just staying alive is exhausting enough—walking outside would be downright reckless. That’s the image I have.
I don’t watch Netflix or YouTube either. My brain can’t process it fast enough, so even when I watch movies, I don’t understand what’s happening. The only thing I watched was TV, because I just had to stare at the screen in order to distract myself. I had no idea what show I was watching or when the segments switched.
And what struck me most was that there were no moments where I felt “idle.” The leave period was essentially like taking an extended vacation. If I were healthy, I might have had moments thinking, “I’m bored,” or “What should I do?” or “Is there anything I can do?” But even after months or years off, I never felt “idle.”
It felt like I was constantly busy all day long. My mind was always buzzing, and my body was utterly exhausted. There was no sense of “I want to do this” or “I want to do that”; it was just this feeling of being perpetually driven by something.
And then, with nothing to show for having “done anything,” the day ends in an instant, leaving only the emptiness of thinking, “I didn’t accomplish anything today either.”
Incidentally, when I asked the doctor,
“The feeling of having free time is a state where you have energy to do something but aren’t using it, so you’re searching for ways to expend that energy. If you don’t have any surplus energy, you won’t feel free time no matter how much time you have.”
That’s what it was. (※There are probably various theories.)
Brain Data Cap
I believe this phenomenon is the same as when my brain hits what smartphones call a “data cap.”
When you watch too many videos on your smartphone, you might run out of data and get throttled, making everything abnormally slow. More recently, you might be more familiar with the situation where poor signal strength causes YouTube to just keep spinning endlessly, refusing to load.
That spinning state doesn’t mean your smartphone is idle—it’s actually working hard trying to receive information. In fact, this is when your battery tends to drain faster.
Similarly, when you develop depression, your brain function deteriorates significantly, leaving your mind in a constant state of spinning. It’s always spinning, constantly expending energy in order to gain something. It’s always running at full capacity.
The brain is trying hard to process information, but it’s like there’s a data cap, so it doesn’t work well. In reality, words become hard to find. You can’t read books anymore. Forgetfulness gets worse, and your attention span drops dramatically.
Since becoming a working adult, I’ve made my living in jobs involving words—sales and customer service—and conducted numerous training sessions both inside and outside the company. Because of that, I placed great importance on words and always thought I paid extra attention to my choice of words. I never imagined that I, of all people, would ever find myself at a loss for words.
Information processing ability declines
I could tell right away that my information processing ability had declined. Even when watching TV, I couldn’t retain much of the content. After a program ended, if someone asked me immediately, “What was that show about?” I couldn’t answer.
Even though I was watching intently, never taking my eyes off the screen, not doing anything else at the same time. I was shocked that nothing stuck with me, even though I felt I was watching just as I did when I was healthy.
When I was working, I was always so busy that I did many things at once. There was a time when I would answer the company landline, look at the numbers in the ledger while talking to the caller, tap away on the calculator, fill in the results on the documents, and listen to the person talking to me from the next desk—all simultaneously.
But after developing depression, I couldn’t even do two things at once anymore. Trying to do two things simultaneously made my brain feel itchy. Like trying to force thread through a needle’s eye. Or like trying to stand sesame seeds upright on a desk.
The PC’s specs are declining
In every aspect, I could feel the data cap.
It was like trying to play PC games or open large files on a low-spec computer.
When you try to open a heavy file on a low-spec laptop, it takes forever, right? The computer works hard, spinning its fan loudly and freezing the screen to open it. Many people probably feel the urge to press the ESC key or other buttons during this. But pressing a button often just makes it take even longer.
People with depression have brains that function like computers in the same state. Their brains might be running at lower specs than the original computer. Inside the computer, files are piled up. It’s in a severely overloaded state.
Just like with a computer,
hitting the buttons on the keyboard repeatedly—
“Hurry up! Get it right! Do it properly!”—
won’t make it process any faster.
In fact, it just piles up more tasks to handle, slowing things down.
The recovery period for depression is like organizing files in their mind to free up space,
or restoring their computer’s specs to their original state.
It’s a time-consuming process.
So if you could watch over them gently, without pressing any buttons,
it might just shorten the time needed for this work.
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