Am I Depressed or Just Lazy?

Sometimes, people may confuse depression with laziness. Laziness could be a symptom of being depressed but depression may not necessarily mean that you are lazy. It is important people understand what these two conditions or situations mean. Depression is a common condition but people tend to confuse it with other disorders. In the same way, some people may just be lazy but they begin to think that they are experiencing depression. That is why many people may ask the question, am I depressed or just lazy.

What is laziness?

When a person is lazy, they know that they can do something and they don’t want to do it because of the challenges or effort involved. They would therefore, choose a task, which is less demanding, or prefer not to attempt doing anything.

What is depression?

In case of depression, a person develops a bleak outlook and they begin to think that they will never do better in life. They begin to lose interest in daily activities, hobbies, and pastimes. In depression, a person may lose appetite or they increase it suddenly resulting in increased weight gain or losing their weight. They may also experience changes in sleep patterns like hypersomnia or insomnia.

When one is depressed, they feel restless and irritable. Their level of tolerance begins to go down and they could grow aggressive and violent at times. They also feel fatigued, tired, sluggish and physically drained. A person may develop feeling of worthlessness or guilty.

People who are depressed tend to engage in behaviors such as substance abuse, compulsive gambling, dangerous sports or even reckless driving. They have trouble in concentrating and making decisions. People may also have unexplained aches and pain.

What situations may be regarded as being lazy or being depressed?

You may find yourself in a situation where you no longer hold a full time job for more than say two months and currently you have no one and you are intending to find one yet. You do not have a saving in life and your driver’s license was just cancelled.

On top of that, you are growing fatter and heavy day by day and now stretch marks are beginning to appear on your body. Every time you take a shower, you worry about your shape and the marks. You don’t want to do anything about that and you are just in your early 20s.

Not only that, you haven’t started living your own life and you stay at your parents house. While you know that you are a creative person, you have not taken a step to showcase your creativity and use it to the benefit of improving your life. While there may be some few achievements, you can boast of such as a bachelor’s degree and some scripts, poetry work, or films you are working on, you don’t seem to have focus.

In the recent times, you have started hiding from other people and when you get invites to events, you don’t show up. You are hiding yourself out of sight in that stinking hot bedroom and for sure, you are cogitating in depression. You have created a loner lifestyle and only emerge during the old and unpredictable times.

This may be a typical example of a person who is struggling with depression. It is not that they are lazy but they are seeing that they cannot do better than what they are now. It would make sense if you decided to get off the butt and attend the gym to lose weight. You may want to start liking what you see in the mirror and get a job— no matter how sucking it may, just to keep your time busy.

Soon you begin to see the positive in you as you get more money and have higher standard of living. You are instilling yourself a sense of being proud. Now, you bit down the social fears you have developed and go out to meet and interact with friends. And, the ideas you have in mind, you begin to work on them and turn them into reality.

You are changing your lifestyle and seeing the world as full of possibilities. You are taking yourself from the laziness to a more productive person. You are improving yourself and taking the situation, which could result in depression out of you.

The effects of being lazy may result in depression. For example, if you are lazy, you will not work and you have no money, therefore, you are stressed and eventually become depressed. Also, if you cannot work on something till you see the end of it and you just tend to despair after a few attempts, you may feel that you cannot make it life.

The laziness may be drawing you back and soon you will be struggling with depression. You need to have a whole-hearted approach in a discovering a new you, and drawing attention to yourself to see how you can work hard, be confident, determined, courageous, outgoing, social, and able to meet challenges and confront them head-on.

Drawing the line between laziness and depression

You may think that you are depressed when you are actually not. Even for those people who you may say are happy-go-lucky, they still have occasional bouts of sadness and blues. This may occur when they are fired, have lost their loved ones, or they separated in a relationships.

Sometimes, you may feel low because of simple things such as rough night’s sleep or some crappy weather. This does mean that you are depressed. Depression does not occur so fast—it takes time to manifest. These feeling may come and go and they do happen. However, when sadness becomes the order of the day and affects you for more than two weeks often impairing your ability to work and lead other aspects of life, then you may have depression.

Depression brings changes in mood but laziness is a completely different thing. In case you are a procrastinator or feel lazy in most the times, it may not mean that you are suffering from depression. People may enjoy their life even when they are lazy but with depression, they are unable to enjoy that life.

Therefore, if you are lazy, you should not panic but begin to think about how you are going to come out of the situation. On the other hand, if you are depression, you should begin to find out the cause of depression and start dealing with it before it gets you to clinical level.